Kalamalla inscription of Erikal Muturaju Dhananjaya

Where it was found

The inscription is cut on two faces of a broken pillar in the courtyard of the Chennakesava temple at Kalamalla.¹ Kalamalla was then in the Kamalapuram taluk of Kadapa (then Cuddapah) district.¹ The inscription is badly damaged, and several lines are completely worn away and lost.¹

The epigraphy office at Madras made a copy of it in 1904. H. Krishna Sastri first drew attention to it in 1912, in his edition of the Malepadu plates.² He described it as a record of “a certain D[h]anaṁjeyuṇḍu who was ruling Rēnāṇḍu”.²

It was printed without translation as No. 607 in South Indian Inscriptions X (1948).³ The editors of that volume could make nothing of it beyond the names Dhananjaya and Renandu.³

K. A. Nilakanta Sastri and M. Venkataramayya produced the first full edition, with text and discussion.⁴ It was published in Epigraphia Indica XXVII (1956), from estampages (ink copies) supplied by the Government Epigraphist’s office.⁴

Script and language

The letters are bold, and the editors described them as the early Telugu-Kannada script.⁴ This was the form used by the Chalukyas of Badami, and the common ancestor of the Telugu and Kannada alphabets.⁴ They compared its letter forms with the Biragunda stone inscription of the Western Ganga king Avinita, of the last quarter of the 6th century.¹ They assigned the Kalamalla inscription to the same period, about 575 CE.¹

The language is Telugu throughout.¹ The editors counted it among the earliest records then known to be written entirely in Telugu.¹ Earlier Pallava inscriptions contain Telugu words, but in their view this was the first complete Telugu inscription yet found.¹ They added that by this date Telugu had already started to grow apart from Kannada as a language, even though the two still shared one script.¹

Content

The surviving text has 17 lines, and four of them (lines 11–14) are wholly lost.⁵ So far as it can be read, it seems to record a gift to (or by) a man called Revanakalu of Chirumburu, made while Erikal-Muturaju Dhananjaya was ruling Renandu.¹ The editors identified Chirumburu with Chilamakuru, a few miles east-south-east of Kalamalla.⁵

Renandu was the core territory of the Telugu Cholas.⁵ It was roughly the country between two tributaries of the Penner, the Chitravati and the Cheyyeru.⁵ It covered most of Kadapa district and parts of Kolar and Chittoor.⁵

The king and his title

The editors identified the king with Dhananjaya, named in the Malepadu plates of Punyakumara as the father of Chola-Maharaja Mahendravikrama.¹⁶ In that family tree he is the third of three brothers.¹⁶

Krishna Sastri had already suggested in 1912 that the Kalamalla king was “not unlikely” to be this Dhananjayavarman.²⁷ He judged from the letters that the record belonged roughly to the same period as the Malepadu plates.²⁷ He placed those plates near the end of the 8th century.²⁷

Erikal or Erigal, the editors argued, was a place name.⁸ They identified it with Nidugal in Tumkur district, which they thought an early seat of the Chola family.⁸

They took Muturaju to be a rank rather than a personal or dynastic name.⁶ In their reading it was a dignity held by a senior prince other than the reigning king and the heir-apparent (yuvaraja).⁶ Through such offices, they suggested, princes of the family governed separate parts of the kingdom.⁶

Date and its basis

The record bears no date. The figure of about 575 rests on two arguments:¹⁹

• the comparison of letter forms with Avinita’s inscription¹⁹
• a reconstruction of the family tree at about 25 years a generation, anchored on Telugu Chola princes who bear the names of their Pallava contemporaries¹⁹

The editors note that none of the Telugu Chola inscriptions they studied is dated in any era, so these dates are estimates.⁹

Significance

The Kalamalla pillar matters chiefly for the history of the language.¹ It shows Telugu being used for the whole of a public record in the Rayalaseema country in the late 6th century.¹ This was long before Telugu verse appears in Eastern Chalukya inscriptions such as the Addanki record of the 9th century.¹

A companion inscription at Erragudipadu, also in Kamalapuram taluk, is written in almost identical letters.⁵ The same editors dated it to the last quarter of the 6th century or slightly later.⁵

Editions

• South Indian Inscriptions X (1948), No. 607 (text only)³
• K. A. Nilakanta Sastri and M. Venkataramayya, “Telugu Chola Records from Anantapur and Cuddapah”, Epigraphia Indica XXVII, No. 42 A, pp. 221–225 (text, discussion)¹

Footnotes

1. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri and M. Venkataramayya, “Telugu Chola Records from Anantapur and Cuddapah”, Epigraphia Indica XXVII (1956), p. 221 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹

2. H. Krishna Sastri, “Malepadu Plates of Punyakumara; the Fifth Year”, Epigraphia Indica XI (1912), p. 341 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. J. Ramayya Pantulu (ed.), South Indian Inscriptions X (1948), No. 607, PDF p. 340 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Nilakanta Sastri and Venkataramayya, “Telugu Chola Records”, Epigraphia Indica XXVII (1956), p. 220 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Nilakanta Sastri and Venkataramayya, “Telugu Chola Records”, Epigraphia Indica XXVII (1956), p. 225 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

6. Nilakanta Sastri and Venkataramayya, “Telugu Chola Records”, Epigraphia Indica XXVII (1956), pp. 223–224 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

7. Krishna Sastri, “Malepadu Plates” (1912), p. 344 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Nilakanta Sastri and Venkataramayya, “Telugu Chola Records”, Epigraphia Indica XXVII (1956), p. 222 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩²

9. Nilakanta Sastri and Venkataramayya, “Telugu Chola Records”, Epigraphia Indica XXVII (1956), pp. 250–251 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴