Vol. VII, No. 8.] The Ghagrahati (Kotwalipara) Grant. 493 
[N.S.] 
that a document executed in this outlying region should show 
older styles of writing than would be found in contemporane- 
ous inscriptions at Bodh Gaya and Ganjam with which he 
compares this grant. An interesting illustration of this diver- 
gence is found in grant C In the body of that deed the letter 
s is always written in its eastern form but on the Government 
seal attached thereto it has the western form. The western 
variety therefore had been introduced at head-quarters while 
the eastern variety was in general use among the people. 
I will now consider the remarks which Babu R. D. Banerji 
makes regarding various letters in proof of his conclusion 
stated above. 
The first letter he discusses is h (p. 430). When uncom- 
pounded / is always (except in one instance) written here in 
early western Gupta form shown by Biihler in his Indische 
Brahmi alphabet : see his Table III. The one exception is in 
sahasrani (ll. 20-21), which Babu R. D. Banerji has o 
nd is found in this Faridpur district 
even earlier, for it occurs in grant A which belongs to about 
, and both occur in line 4 and again in 
. 8. There hm appears in the eastern form (I. 8). In grant 
B, the date of which is 567 at the latest, only the western form 
is used throughout, even in hm (ll. 9 and 20). But in grant 
C, which is some 20 years later, the eastern form is used 
throughout and the western form does not appear at all 
in the portions that are legible. Those grants show clearly 
that the two forms were in use side 
is in full agreement with the other grants, and is no indication 
of falsity but rather a local characteristic of genuineness, 
