Madras Museum plates of Vema (1345)

What it is

This is the copper-plate charter in which Vema, the founder of the Reddi kingdom, gave a village to a group of Brahmans in 1345. Later records know him as Prolaya Vema. J. Ramayya edited the charter in 1906, and he called it “the earliest inscription of the Reddi dynasty as yet discovered”.¹ It was then in the Madras Museum.²

The plates

The inscription is engraved on five copper plates.² All are engraved on both sides except the first, which has writing on one side only.² The ring and seal are missing.² Ramayya wrote: “The letters are bold and legible. The characters are of the old Telugu type. The language is Sanskrit, except the portion describing the boundaries of the village of Atukuru, which is in Telugu.”²

Contents

The text opens with an invocation of the boar incarnation of Vishnu, from whose feet the fourth caste was born.² In that caste, it says, was born Vemaya, “the founder of a family”.² His son was Komati Prola.² Prola’s wife Annemamba bore five sons, Macha, Vema, Doddaya, Annaya and Mallaya, and the text says that “of these Vema ruled the earth”.²

Vema is compared to a torrent uprooting rebellious kings, and to the wind scattering the cotton of the hill chiefs.² He is also compared to Agastya, the sage who drank the ocean, before the Muslims.² He bore the title Rayachekoluganda.²

The grant says that “King Vema restored all the agraharas of Brahmanas”.² These agraharas (villages granted to Brahmans) “had been taken away by the wicked Mlechchha kings from (the time of) king Vira-Rudra of the Kakati-vamsa”.² Ramayya noted that this was then the only inscription known to refer to the Muslim conquest of Warangal.³

Vema is called Sri-Pallava-Trinetra.² He is also called “a bee on the lotus-flowers which were the feet of the preceptor named Ghoderaya-Ganga”.²

His capital “was the city of Addanki in the country of Pungi”.¹ This country “extended from the eastern slopes of Srigiri to the eastern sea on both sides of the river Kundi”.¹ At an eclipse of the moon on the full-moon day of Chaitra in Saka 1267 (Saka is an Indian way of counting years), he gave the village of Atukuru on the Krishna to several Brahmans.¹ He made the gift in the presence of the god of a Siva temple, and he renamed the village Vemapuram.¹

A list of the donees and a long account of the village boundaries follow.¹ The inscription ends with imprecatory verses (curses on anyone who harms the gift) and the signature Sri-Pallava-Trinetra.¹ See Addanki.

Date and places

F. Kielhorn reckoned the date as Friday, 18 March 1345.¹ On that day there was “a total eclipse of the moon … and therefore visible in India”.¹ Ramayya identified Atukuru with Gani-Atukuru, west of Vijayawada (then Bezwada).¹ He identified Addanki with the town of that name in the Ongole taluk, and the Kundi with the Gundlakamma.¹

Ramayya knew of another inscription of Vema at Amaravati of the same Saka year, in the month of Karttika.¹ Rangacharya listed the plates under the Bandar taluk of the Krishna (then Kistna) district.⁴ Robert Sewell connected the restoration of the agraharas with a league of Hindu rulers formed against the Muslims about 1344.⁵

Importance

Ramayya used the grant and the Harivamsa of Errapragada to correct the published family trees of the Reddis.¹ These had all begun with Komati Prola.¹ The grant gave the name of Prola’s father, Vema, “after whom his illustrious grandson was named”.¹

One of its verses was reused, slightly changed, as the thirteenth verse of the Phirangipuram inscription of 1410.⁶ See the Puvvada grant of 1346 and the Phirangipuram inscription.

Footnotes

1. Ramayya, Madras Museum Plates of Vema (1905–06), p. 10 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵

2. J. Ramayya, Madras Museum Plates of Vema, A.D. 1345, Epigraphia Indica VIII (1905–06), p. 9 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶

3. Ramayya, Madras Museum Plates of Vema (1905–06), p. 11 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

4. V. Rangacharya, A Topographical List of the Inscriptions of the Madras Presidency, Vol. II (1919), p. 879, Kistna No. 11 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

5. Robert Sewell, The Historical Inscriptions of Southern India (1932), p. 189 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

6. J. Ramayya, Three Inscriptions of the Reddis of Kondavidu, Epigraphia Indica XI (1911–12), p. 314 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩