2 E. V. Westmacott — A Copperplate grant hj LaksJtman Sen. [Xo. 1, 



had an opportunity of examining, but differences are perceptible, the later 

 plate tending more to the modern Bengali. Both are of a type rather Bengali 

 than Devanagari, and of a type which has advanced nearer to the Bengali tban 

 the Amgachhi plate of the Pals,* or the inscription in the pillar in the Di- 

 najpur Rajbari.t The ?; in both Sen plates is the Bengali one, while in the 

 A'mgachhi and Rajbari inscriptions it is the Devanagari. 35\ «r, 7T, T-, *%, ff ; % 

 "3", and most of the letters are identical in both Sen plates, and more Benga- 

 li than Devanagari ; \, xf, ^, "331, are the same, and at first sight remote 

 from either Bengali or Devanagari ; tf, and ^J are undistinguishable in both 

 plates, being nearer the Devanagari form than the Bengali, which appears 

 first in the Buddha Gaya inscription,* engraved after the death of Lakshman 

 Sen. The letters in which Lakshman Sen's plate appear nearer Bengali than, 

 the A'mgachhi plate of Vigraha Pal, are «T, **, vr, 'Sj;, ?:, and those in which 

 Keshab Sen's plate seem to show a further step in the same direction, are 

 t^, vr, 31, ^r, and the composite form of ^\ 



The only inscriptions relative to the Sen kings quoted by Professor Lassen § 

 are the-Keshab Sen plate and the Buddha Gaya inscription above mentioned. 

 In the former the Professor makes a mistake between the names of Madhab 

 and Keshab Sen. The grant is made by Keshab Sen, son of Lakshman 

 Sen, and, wherever the name of the grantor occurs, there are marks which 

 Mr. Prinsep considered the signs of the erasure of another name. As the 

 father's name remains unaltered, the name for which that of Keshab Sen 

 was substituted, must be that of a brother, and, from the list of Sen kings 

 given in the Ain i Akbari by Abul Fazl, Mr. Prinsep suggests that of 

 Madhab Sen, which has the same prosodiacal value as Keshab. 



I have, however, met with a notice of another copper plate, containing 

 a grant by Lakshman Sen, which does not appear to be generally known. 

 A transcript is given at page 371, Part II, of a Bengali work, entitled 

 " A discourse on the Bengali Language and Literature" by Bamgati Nya- 

 ratna (Hooghly, Samvat 1930). The transcriber wrote, he says, not from 

 the original plate, but from a copy in the Bengali character sent him by 

 Babu Hari Das Datt, zamindar of Mojilpur, and he admits that Holo- 

 dhor Churamoni, who tried to translate it, could not read every letter of 

 it, but supplied the gaps conjecturally. Comparing his transcript with my 

 plate, I find that the discrepancies are so slight, that I attribute them to mis- 

 takes made either by the transcriber, or by one of the engravers of the ori- 

 ginal plate, and I find that the grants are, with variations of little more 

 than single letters, word for word the same down to the word bhuHyantah 



* As. Ees., ix, 440. 



t Ind. Ant., i, 126. 



% Page 657, Vol. v, Journal, As. Soc. Bengal. 



§ Page 746, Vol. iii, Indische Altertlnmiskuiide. 



