206 A Donative Inscription of the Tenth Century. [No. 3, 
fi 1 35^t ^}«T- 
af-^icr z- Tt^wKRlTOiJr ^xiwt feftr 
tstc ^Tflxrjrcn^ ^m^rcrsnps^T^ ^i^witT- 
*n*r. Tjf^Tf^ff^^xreifN ^mrafir ) 
xn ^ father xmi ^T^T^gnftKi^rer: xnfeiT fefa 
^JIT^T^I «WT^T cfSTlTTC^t fcfil 1'NI 
*r*nxrc!T m jnfiTr cf^rx nf^rfxjwrJ inevRiff *nh^r ?mi 
* On the tablet the vowel is long. A couple of mistakes below, equally 
unimportant, have been corrected silently ; and o has been exchanged for 
t The ditch of Chikhillika is qualified by a term which, in an unpublished in- 
scription from Gwalior, stands, in the feminine, as satlca , before vdsanika and 
before vithi . Was satlca a mediaevalism for sat ? The common Sanskrit of a 
thousand years ago was not a little singular. 
AJcshapammikdy paliJca , uvataka, and sava are met with in the same record. 
The second, now pall, or pari , is a large ladle. Uvataka may have denoted a 
particular cess. Sava , deprived of its final vowel, is one of the forms, still current, 
of a word meaning, among other things, a dry-grocer. It is usually supposed — but 
it is not clear why — to be a corruption oisadhu. Can it be that a proper name has 
herein become the appellation of a class ? A trader named Sadhu is eulogized in 
the Satyd-nardyanalcathd , a book of universal prevalence in this part of India. 
I extract the thirty-first stanza of its second chapter : 
irrat ^i^vfTfrrrra l 
®rri^°f ■^ tV'S ii 
Every blind beggar is now known as Surdas ; and every one-eyed man, iu these 
parts, as Holkar, from the monoculous Maratha chieftain of that name. 
I A blunder for ; and it is repeated a little further on. Several other, 
even grosser, errors, evincing that Vakpatiraja’s conveyancer was but an indif- 
ferent clerk, will be noticed by the observant reader. 
Tho fastidious respect for the laws of Panini which is illustrated by the 
following couplet, taken from the SaraswaU-tcanthabharana, had no doubt be- 
come obsolete long before the tenth century. If oral tradition be trustworthy, 
the interlocutors in the stanza were a king and a poor Brahman who was car- 
rying home a huge fagot. . 
vfwOKTsfim *Uqf?T H I 
C\ ^ ^ 
•f cPST *fT«T<T *sS*iT Y«IT 3T«lf<T II 
“ Your shoulder must pain you, weighed down with so heavy a load.’ ‘ Hot 
so much as Your Majesty’s bddhaii does.’ ” 
JBddhate would have suited the critical pauper better. But he came into the 
world too soon to profit by the example of Sheridan when correcting the obleege 
of “ the first gentleman in Europe.” 
A couple of specimens of particularly vicious Sanskrit are subjoined as a novelty. 
They were taken down as dictated by an intelligent Pandit who thoroughly appre- 
ciated their badness. That they are strictly metrical is no argument of their 
being the composition of a clever wag ; for to Hindus in general prosody seems 
to come by nature. And, again, their syntax could be obviously mended, hero 
and there, without prejudice to longs and shorts. It is most probable that they 
are the sober effusions of aspiring ignoranco. 
