Veligalani grant of Kapilesvara (1458)

The Gajapati king Kapilendra (Kapilesvara) gave the village of Veligalani to 120 Brahmins by this copper-plate charter.¹ The grant is dated in Saka 1380 (Saka is an Indian way of counting years), which its editors equated with 27 April 1458.¹ It is the only known copper-plate charter of Kapilendra himself.²

The plates

D. C. Sircar and K. H. V. Sarma edited the grant in Epigraphia Indica XXXIII.³ They worked from an incomplete set of ten plates.³ They had come about a quarter of a century earlier from an advocate of Bapatla in the Guntur district, who had them from a client.³ The first plate of the set is lost, and the place where the plates were first found is unknown.³

The plates measure about 14 inches by 7 and have raised rims.³ Together they weigh 1367 tolas, and the ring and any seal are lost.³ A faulty edition, without pictures, had appeared earlier in the Journal of the Bombay Historical Society.³

The record is a palimpsest (a text written over an older one).³ It was engraved over an earlier charter, also of Kapilesvara.³ The older text was beaten out, except for its closing Sanskrit verses and some names of donees.³ The plates keep the numbers of their places in the older document.³

On the back of the last plate are these drawings:³

• a dagger, which served as the king’s signature on Suryavamsi Gajapati charters³
• a standing elephant, the emblem of the Gajapatis³
• the sun, the moon and a lotus³

The editors published photographs of the plates.⁴

Date and grant

The grant is dated on the full moon of Vaisakha in Saka 1380, the year Bahudhanya.¹ The Oriya part adds that the day was a Thursday, and the editors equated the date with 27 April 1458.¹

The Sanskrit section began on the lost first plate, so its beginning is missing.¹ It praises Kapilendra’s strength in war.¹ It says that the noise of his war-drums made Hampa tremble and pressed Dhara hard.¹ The noise put the horses of Kalubariga (Gulbarga) to flight and filled Dhilli (Delhi) with savage women.¹

The section then records that the king, while camping on the bank of the Godavari, gave the village of Veligalani, in a district named in the grant, to 120 Brahmins.¹ He named the village after himself and his parents.¹ The section also refers to a place called Vijayapratapa-Kapilendra-mahasasana, east of the joined streams of the Krishna and Venna.¹

The Telugu section lists the 120 donees, each with an equal share, in six groups of twenty.¹² The groups are the northern and southern halves of Jagesvarapura, Vellamambapura and Kapilesvarapura.¹² These were the three parts of the village, and they were named after the king’s father, his mother and himself.¹²

Many of the donees’ family names come from villages such as Vijayawada (then Bezwada), Addada, Kondapalli, Lolla and Rajukonda.⁵ Others come from branches of learning, and the editors noted that most of these family names are still in use in Andhra.⁵

The Oriya section summarises the grant, and it is the first to give Kapilesvara the titles Gajapati, Gaudesvara and Navakoti-Karnata-Kalavaragesvara.² The titles refer to his claims over Bengal, Vijayanagara and the Bahmani sultans.² His successors and later rulers of Orissa kept these titles.²

R. D. Banerji, writing before the grant was known, explained the last title as the claim to be “the master of ninety millions of people of Karnata”.⁶

Place

Among the boundary villages, the editors identified Penamakuru, Kanumuru (near the present Kapilesvarapuram) and Mullapudi.⁷ They placed all of them in the Krishna district.⁷ The other names could not be traced.⁷ See the Gajapatis.

Kapilendra’s family and wars

The grant is the only known copper-plate charter of Kapilendra himself.² Sircar read it together with the grants of Raghudeva, and from them he learnt the name of the king’s father, Jagesvara.² The king’s mother was Vellamamba in Telugu, or Velama in Oriya.² Sircar suggested that she may have come from the Telugu country.²

The editors used the grant to work out the story of Kapilendra’s southern wars.⁸ In their account, he did these things:⁸

• he subdued the chiefs of Nandapur and Viraghattam⁸
• he took the Reddi kingdom of Rajahmundry between 1444 and 1448⁸
• with the help of the Rajahmundry Reddis, he took Kondavidu and the other forts of the south⁸

He then placed his nephew Raghudeva at Rajahmundry and his kinsman Ganadeva at Kondavidu.⁸ He put his son Hamvira over the Telugu and Tamil conquests.⁸

The editors also linked the boast about the war-drums with a joint attack on Vijayanagara by the Gajapati and the Bahmani sultan.⁹ This attack came after the death of Devaraya II.⁹ They also linked it with the war against Humayun Shah at Devarakonda.⁹ See Kapilendra, the Raghudeva grants and the Kondavidu plates of Ganadeva.

Footnotes

1. Sircar and Sarma, “Veligalani Grant of Kapilesvara”, Epigraphia Indica XXXIII (1959–60), p. 277 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴

2. Sircar and Sarma, “Veligalani Grant of Kapilesvara”, Epigraphia Indica XXXIII (1959–60), p. 278 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

3. D. C. Sircar and K. H. V. Sarma, “Veligalani Grant of Kapilesvara, Saka 1380”, Epigraphia Indica XXXIII (1959–60), p. 275 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵

4. Sircar and Sarma, “Veligalani Grant of Kapilesvara”, Epigraphia Indica XXXIII (1959–60), plates between pp. 286 and 287 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩

5. Sircar and Sarma, “Veligalani Grant of Kapilesvara”, Epigraphia Indica XXXIII (1959–60), p. 281 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩²

6. R. D. Banerji, History of Orissa from the Earliest Times to the British Period, Vol. I (1930), p. 302 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

7. Sircar and Sarma, “Veligalani Grant of Kapilesvara”, Epigraphia Indica XXXIII (1959–60), p. 285 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Sircar and Sarma, “Veligalani Grant of Kapilesvara”, Epigraphia Indica XXXIII (1959–60), p. 279 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

9. Sircar and Sarma, “Veligalani Grant of Kapilesvara”, Epigraphia Indica XXXIII (1959–60), p. 280 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³