Nandamapundi grant of Rajaraja Narendra

Discovery and present location

E. Hultzsch received the plates from the Collector of Godavari district, and by 1897 they were in the Madras Museum.¹ F. Kielhorn edited them from Hultzsch’s impressions.¹ He wrote that “there is no information as to where or by whom they were discovered”.¹

The village granted, Nandamapundi, lay in a district called Rendērulu-naḍimi-vishaya, “the district between the two rivers”.² Hultzsch told Kielhorn that this was the Telugu name of the Sindhuyugmantara-desa mentioned in another Pithapuram inscription.² Kielhorn could not identify the other places named.²

Physical description

A copper-plate grant is a charter cut on copper sheets, usually recording a gift of land, and the donee kept it as a title deed. This one has five plates, each a little over 10 inches broad and about 5 inches high.¹ The first and last are written on one side only.¹ Their raised rims have kept the writing well preserved.¹

The ring holding the plates had already been cut when the grant arrived.³ Its round seal shows a boar, the sun and crescent moon, chauris (fly-whisks), a conch, a drum, an elephant-goad, a flower and a throne.³ It bears the legend Sri-Tribhuvanankusa in Telugu letters.³

The writing shows two stages of the same southern script.³ Up to line 50 the letters are like those of the copper plates of Amma II.³ The rest matches the Korumelli plates of Rajaraja I, written by Gandacharya, the scribe named in this grant.³ The earlier letters on the third plate had been beaten in and recut.³ Kielhorn concluded that the first three plates “originally formed part of a somewhat earlier grant” and were reused.³

Language and content

The language is Sanskrit, except for the boundary description in lines 80–88, which is in Telugu.³ The Sanskrit part has 28 verses.³ Its family history of the kings follows the Korumelli plates and the Chellur plates.⁴

The grant says that Rajaraja-Vishnuvardhana was the son of the previous king Vimaladitya and of Kundavadevi, a princess of the Chola family.⁴ It also gives his coronation, on a day Kielhorn equated with 16 August 1022.⁴

The king is called a devout worshipper of Maheshvara (Shiva).⁴² He speaks to the cultivators of the district.⁴² On the occasion of a lunar eclipse he gives Nandamapundi, free of all taxes, as an agrahara (a village held by a Brahmin).⁴²

The donee was Narayana, a descendant of the minister Akalankasankana.⁴ Narayana was known as Kavirajasekhara for his skill in verse in “the Samskrita, Karnata, Prakrita, Paisachika and Andhra languages”.⁴ The Telugu boundary clause traces the village limits by tanks, palmyra, tamarind and banyan trees, and the meeting points of fields with neighbouring villages.²

Date

The grant is dated in the king’s 32nd regnal year (years counted from his coronation, not in a continuous era).² Kielhorn took the 32nd year to run from about 16 August 1053 to 16 August 1054.² Only one lunar eclipse fell in that window, and in fact between June 1053 and April 1055.² It fell on Sunday 28 November 1053, so that is in all probability the day of the gift.²

The question of Nannaya

The closing lines name the officer who carried out the order (the Katakadhiraja), the writer Gandacharya and “the author of the verses”, Nanniyabhatta.² In an editorial footnote, Hultzsch made a suggestion about this person.⁵ He wrote that he “is perhaps identical with Nannayabhatta, the first Telugu translator of the Mahabharata, whose patron was Rajaraja of Rajyamahendri”.⁵ The Godavari gazetteer also places the Telugu Mahabharata in Rajaraja’s reign, when the capital was at Rajahmundry.⁶

Two cautions apply. First, Kielhorn noted that, because the first three plates come from an older grant, the statement about the author “probably” cannot refer to the verses in lines 1–49.³ Several verses also repeat or copy verses of the Korumelli plates.³ He thought the poets credited in both grants “very probably composed only some of the verses that are assigned to them”.³

The second caution concerns Sewell’s chronology.⁷ It describes the grant as a gift of a village “to the poet Nannaya Bhatta”.⁷ In Kielhorn’s edition, however, the donee is Narayana and Nanniyabhatta is only the composer.⁷⁴

Significance

The grant is a firmly dated document of Rajaraja Narendra’s reign, the period to which Telugu tradition assigns the Mahabharata of Nannaya. It may preserve Nannaya’s Sanskrit verse.⁴⁵ It praises a poet of the same time for writing in five languages, Telugu (Andhra) among them.⁴⁵

K. V. Lakshmana Rao wrote in 1928 that Nannaya’s Mahabharata was the oldest surviving Telugu work at that time.⁸ He described its author as poet laureate at Rajaraja I’s court at Rajahmundry.⁸ He noted that many Telugu scholars had therefore believed Telugu poetry began no earlier than the 11th century.⁸ Inscriptions such as Addanki’s later overturned that view (see Addanki inscription of Pandaranga).⁸

Edition

F. Kielhorn, “Nandamapundi Grant of Rajaraja I, Dated in His Thirty-Second Year [A.D. 1053]”, Epigraphia Indica IV, No. 43, pp. 300–309, with text and abstract translation.¹

F. Kielhorn, “Nandamapundi Grant of Rajaraja I”, Epigraphia Indica IV (1897), p. 300 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Kielhorn, “Nandamapundi Grant”, Epigraphia Indica IV (1897), p. 303 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²
Kielhorn, “Nandamapundi Grant”, Epigraphia Indica IV (1897), p. 301 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³
Kielhorn, “Nandamapundi Grant”, Epigraphia Indica IV (1897), p. 302 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹
E. Hultzsch, editorial note in Kielhorn, “Nandamapundi Grant”, Epigraphia Indica IV (1897), p. 303 n. 3 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
F. R. Hemingway, Madras District Gazetteers: Godavari (1907), p. 21 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩
Robert Sewell, The Historical Inscriptions of Southern India (1932), p. 74 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³
K. V. Lakshmana Rao, “The Addanki Stone Inscription of Pandaranga”, Epigraphia Indica XIX (1928), p. 273 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴