Phirangipuram pillar inscription of Peda Komati Vema (1410)

The pillar

The inscription “is engraved on three sides of a stone pillar planted in front of the temple of Virabhadra-svamin”.¹ The temple is “in the village of Phirangipuram in the Sattenapalli taluka of the Guntur District”.¹ J. Ramayya first copied it in April 1897.¹ He edited it in 1912 from an estampage (ink copy).¹ Its letters “are cut deep and the inscription is in an excellent state of preservation”.¹

The characters are like those of the Tottaramudi plates of Kataya Vema.¹² But here the aspirated letters are marked with a stroke at the bottom.¹² The Telugu verses use the full circle for the half-anusvara (a nasal sign), and Ramayya discussed this feature at length.¹²

Contents

The inscription is all in verse, partly Sanskrit and partly Telugu.² Two of its verses also appear in the Sringaradipika, which is ascribed to Komati Vema.² Its thirteenth verse is taken, with small changes, from the Madras Museum plates of Vema.²

It opens with praise of Vishnu’s boar incarnation, the sun and moon, and Vinayaka.² It then praises king Vema, “a seventh emperor, as it were, and an eleventh incarnation of Vishnu”.² Vema built the flight of steps from the Patalaganga to the top of Srisailam.²

Vema’s elder brother Macha had three sons, Reddivota, Komatindra and Naga.² The record says that “Ped[d]a-Komati begot a son named Vema as great as Karna in charities”.² The queen of this king, Suramamba, dedicated a tank called Santana-payonidhi.² She did this on the second day of the dark half of Phalguna, in the year Virodhi, Saka 1331 (Saka is an Indian way of counting years).²

Three Telugu verses describe the tank.³ Its waters were “as purifying as those of Ganga, Yamuna, and all other sacred rivers”.³ The verses say that Suramamba was the daughter of king Ganna of Dhanyavati (Dharanikota).³

Date and author

L. D. Swamikannu Pillai worked out the date for Ramayya as February 1410.³ The last Sanskrit verse says that this “pure dharmasasana was composed by Srinatha”.² (A dharmasasana is a charitable edict.) Srinatha was the king’s vidyadhikarin (officer of learning).²

Ramayya wrote that “special interest attaches to this inscription as well as to the two following ones from the fact that they were composed by the great Telugu poet Srinatha”.³

The tank and the Aminabad inscription

There is a Telugu verse inscription of 1415 on a small hill at Aminabad, about two miles away.⁴⁵ It was also composed by Srinatha.⁴⁵ It records that Racha Vema, son of Vema, dug a channel to feed a tank that his mother Suramba had dug.⁴⁵ Ramayya calls the tank in this record Santana-sagara.⁴ Rangacharya’s list gives its name as Santana-varidhi.⁵ Ramayya noted that the two inscriptions are about two miles apart, and concluded that they “no doubt, refer to the same tank”.⁴

Ramayya used the two inscriptions together to show that Racha Vema, the last king of Kondavidu, was Peda Komati Vema’s son and not his brother.⁴⁵ See Peda Komati Vema, Srinatha and Phirangipuram.

Footnotes

1. J. Ramayya, Three Inscriptions of the Reddis of Kondavidu, Epigraphia Indica XI (1911–12), p. 313 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

2. Ramayya, Three Inscriptions of the Reddis of Kondavidu (1911–12), p. 314 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵

3. Ramayya, Three Inscriptions of the Reddis of Kondavidu (1911–12), p. 315 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

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

5. V. Rangacharya, A Topographical List of the Inscriptions of the Madras Presidency, Vol. II (1919), p. 835, Guntur No. 766 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵