Kalamalla

Location

Kalamalla lies in what was the Kamalapuram taluk of Kadapa (then Cuddapah) district.¹ Its best-known inscription names a place called Chirumburu.² The editors of the inscription identified Chirumburu with modern Chilamakuru, a few miles east-south-east of Kalamalla.²

The village falls within the old territory of Renandu.² The editors describe Renandu as roughly the land between the Chitravati and Cheyyeru, two tributaries of the Penner.² It covered most of Kadapa district and parts of Kolar and Chittoor.² The Cuddapah gazetteer of 1915 places the Telugu Cholas of this region in the black-cotton country along the Penner.³

The Chennakesava temple inscriptions

Two inscriptions in the Chennakesava temple courtyard were printed as Nos. 607 and 608 in South Indian Inscriptions X (1948). No. 607 is on two faces of a broken pillar. No. 608 is on a slab by the east wall of the Anjaneya shrine in the same temple.⁴⁵ It seems to concern a Brahmin of the Bharadvaja gotra (clan).⁴⁵

That volume printed both without translation.⁴ It noted that No. 607 was too damaged to make sense of, apart from the names Dhananjaya and Renandu.⁴

K. A. Nilakanta Sastri and M. Venkataramayya later edited No. 607 as the inscription of Erikal-Muturaju Dhananjaya.¹ They dated it to about 575 CE by the style of its letters.¹ They counted it among the earliest records then known to be written entirely in Telugu.¹ It seems to record a gift to or by Revanakalu of Chirumburu while Dhananjaya ruled Renandu.¹

Neighbouring records

Kalamalla is one of a cluster of early Telugu Chola sites in the same taluk. A stone beside the Chennakesava temple at Erragudipadu, also in Kamalapuram taluk, bears an inscription of an Erikal-Mutturaju.² Its letters are almost the same as those at Kalamalla.² Chilamakuru has a record of a later Telugu Chola king, Vikramaditya II.⁶

Significance

Kalamalla’s broken pillar is one of the earliest known witnesses to Telugu as a written language in its own right.¹ Earlier Pallava inscriptions contain Telugu words.¹ But its editors stressed that this was the first complete inscription in Telugu then known.¹

Footnotes

1. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri and M. Venkataramayya, “Telugu Chola Records from Anantapur and Cuddapah”, Epigraphia Indica XXVII (1956), p. 221 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

2. Nilakanta Sastri and Venkataramayya, “Telugu Chola Records”, Epigraphia Indica XXVII (1956), p. 225 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

3. C. F. Brackenbury, Madras District Gazetteers: Cuddapah (1915), p. 27 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

4. J. Ramayya Pantulu (ed.), South Indian Inscriptions X (1948), No. 607, PDF p. 340 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. South Indian Inscriptions X (1948), No. 608, p. 334 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²

6. Nilakanta Sastri and Venkataramayya, “Telugu Chola Records”, Epigraphia Indica XXVII (1956), p. 249 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩