Nadupuru grant of Anavema

By this copper-plate grant of Saka 1296 (Saka is an Indian way of counting years), the Reddi king Anna-Vema of Kondavidu gave the village of Nadupuru to twenty Brahmans.¹² He made the gift for the spiritual benefit of his sister Vemasani, and the village was renamed Vemapura after her.² The grant is the source for Vemasani’s marriage to Nallanunka.²

The plates

The original belonged to Sir Walter Elliot.¹ E. Hultzsch edited it in 1895 from two sets of impressions made for Elliot and passed on by J. F. Fleet.¹ Fleet’s note on the cover described “three copper plates … in fair order if cleaned”.¹ They had raised edges and a cut ring bearing a kneeling bull.¹ They were marked “21” in white paint but with “no label to say where they come from”.¹

The alphabet is Telugu.¹ The text has these parts, in order:¹

• nineteen Sanskrit verses¹
• a list of the twenty donees, in Sanskrit prose¹
• the boundaries of the granted village, in Telugu prose¹
• five verses that curse anyone who breaks the grant¹
• a short closing sentence in Telugu¹

Contents

Like the Vanapalli plates, it records a grant by Anna-Vema of “Kondaviti”, that is, Kondavidu.¹ It gives the same family line.¹ Prola’s son was Vema, who built a flight of steps at Srisailam.¹ Vema’s two sons, Anna-Vota and Anna-Vema, ruled after him, one after the other.¹

Anavema bore the surname Vasantaraya, from his part in the spring festival.¹ He also bore the surname Pallava-Trinetra, a name borrowed from a mythical king of the Telugu country.¹

His sister Vemasani is stated to have been the queen of a certain Nallanunka.² For her spiritual benefit, Anavema gave the village of Nadupuru to twenty Brahmans, and the village was renamed Vemapura after her.²

The grant was made in the temple of Vijayesvara, on the bank of the Gautami (the Godavari).² The village lay on the eastern bank of the Godavari, in a district called Konasthala.²

Date and place

The date is the day of a lunar eclipse, on the full moon of Karttika in Saka 1296.² S. B. Dikshit told Hultzsch that there was no lunar eclipse in Karttika in 1373 or 1374, so the date is irregular.²

Hultzsch identified the temple of Vijayesvara with the village of Vijayesvaram, near the west end of the Godavari anicut (dam).² He took Konasthala to be the Konamandala of earlier inscriptions and the Konasima, “a local name of the Godavari delta”.² He could not place Nadupuru itself, and for that reason V. Rangacharya listed the grant at the head of the Godavari district.²³

Importance

The grant is the source for the marriage of Prolaya Vema’s daughter Vemasani to Nallanunka.² Read with the Vanapalli plates, it gave Hultzsch the first short family tree of the Kondavidu Reddis drawn from their own records.² Hultzsch also noted a Telugu inscription of Saka 1299 at Palivela, in the Amalapuram taluk.² This inscription records a gift of land by a servant of Ana-Vemaya-Reddi.² See the Reddis of Kondavidu.

Footnotes

1. E. Hultzsch, Nadupuru Grant of Anna-Vema, Saka-Samvat 1296, Epigraphia Indica III (1894–95), p. 286 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹

2. Hultzsch, Nadupuru Grant of Anna-Vema (1894–95), p. 287 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶

3. V. Rangacharya, A Topographical List of the Inscriptions of the Madras Presidency, Vol. II (1919), pp. 711–712, Godavari No. 5 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩