Vilavatti grant of Simhavarman

The Vilavatti grant is a copper-plate grant of the Pallava king Simhavarman, son of the crown prince Vishnugopa.¹ Its editor, C. R. Krishnamacharlu, compared it with the king’s grants already known from Mangalur, Pikira and Omgodu.²³ He found its main interest in its list of the taxes that the king gave up in the village.¹

Discovery and description

Satyavelu Rami Reddi found the plates about 1928 at Vavveru.⁴ He was digging old village earth about eight feet below the surface.⁴ Vavveru is a mile and a half west of Buchireddipalem in the Kovur taluk of the Nellore district.⁴ Some earthen pots found with the plates were broken and thrown away.⁴

The plates passed through the hands of B. Gopala Reddi and K. Ramakoteswara Rao to Krishnamacharlu.⁴ He examined them in 1933 and later bought them for the Madras Museum.⁴

There are five plates on a ring whose ends are soldered into a round seal.⁴² The seal shows a couchant (lying) bull with a large hump.⁴² Above the bull is something described as an anchor, or, as Krishnamacharlu had suggested, a boat.⁴² He compared a Pallava coin with a bull on one side and a two-masted ship on the other.⁴²

P. B. Desai noted that this was the first Pallava seal on which the bull can be recognised beyond doubt.⁵ Unlike the king’s other grants, the plates are not numbered.² The grant opens with svasti instead of jitam bhagavata.²

Language

The language is Sanskrit.² Krishnamacharlu noted that the name Vilavatti is written with the Tamil letter l.² He took this, with the word vatta for a group of villages, as a sign of Tamil influence on the writer.² Yet the grant belonged to the Telugu country.²

Content

The grant was issued from Vijaya-Paddukkara by the Maharaja Simhavarman, son of the crown prince Vishnugopa.¹ He was the grandson of Skandavarman and great-grandson of Viravarman, of the Bharadvaja gotra (clan) and the Pallava family.¹

The grant gives the village of Vilavatti in Mundarashtra, with its hamlet and the taxes due from it to the king.¹ The receiver was the Brahman Vishnusarman of the Gautama gotra, a Chhandoga (singer of the Sama Veda).¹ It is dated on the fifth day of the bright fortnight of Sravana in the tenth year of the reign.¹

The taxes given up

The king’s order lists the dues given up:¹

• those payable by metal-workers and leather-workers¹
• those of shop-keeping cloth-dealers, rope-dancers or jugglers, and shops¹
• those of Ajivika ascetics, outcastes, mask-actors, water-diviners and weavers¹
• the taxes on gambling, marriages and barbers¹
• the dues of artisans¹

Krishnamacharlu compared the eighteen kinds of exemptions mentioned but not listed in the Uruvupalli grant.¹ His editor offered other readings of several of these terms.¹ The king gave the order by word of mouth, and his private secretary (rahasyadhikrita) wrote it down.¹

The places

Krishnamacharlu identified Mundarashtra with the Munda-nadu of later Nellore inscriptions.⁶ This lay in the Kovur taluk and the south of the Kandukur taluk.⁶ He thought Vilavatti might be Vavveru itself or, more probably, Vidavaluru, about 1½ miles east of it.⁶ He identified Paddukkara with Padugupadu, near Kovur, about nine miles south of Vavveru, north of the Penner.⁶

Date

Krishnamacharlu accepted 436 as the first year of Simhavarman, from the Jain work Lokavibhaga.⁶ So he dated the grant to 446.⁶ He also proposed a solution to the “Simhavarman problem” of the Uruvupalli grant.³⁷ In his view the grant first made by Vishnugopa was formally issued by his son Simhavarman in his eleventh year.³⁷ D. C. Sircar listed this grant with the other Sanskrit charters of the early Pallavas when he edited the Vunna Guravayapalem plates.⁸

Footnotes

1. Krishnamacharlu, “Vilavatti Grant” (1938), p. 298 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶

2. Krishnamacharlu, “Vilavatti Grant” (1938), p. 297 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

3. Krishnamacharlu, “Vilavatti Grant” (1938), p. 299 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. C. R. Krishnamacharlu, “Vilavatti Grant of Pallava Simhavarman”, Epigraphia Indica XXIV (1937–38), p. 296 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

5. P. B. Desai, “Reyuru Grant of Pallava Narasimhavarman; Year 12”, Epigraphia Indica XXIX (1951–52), p. 90 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

6. Krishnamacharlu, “Vilavatti Grant” (1938), p. 301 and note (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

7. Krishnamacharlu, “Vilavatti Grant” (1938), p. 300 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²

8. D. C. Sircar and P. Seshadri Sastri, “Vunna Guravayapalem Plates of Paramesvaravarman I, Year 19”, Epigraphia Indica XXXII (1957–58), p. 92, note (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩