369 
1874.] Rajendralala Mitra— On a Slcanda Gupta Inscription. 
inscription is wrong, and no argument therefore can be based on those 
erroneous renderings. Prinsep’s pandit misled him by putting in the 
Nagari transcript a visarga after s'ante, whereby it was converted into the 
genitive singular of the noun s' anti, 1 peace’ or ‘ extinction,’ and it was ac¬ 
cordingly interpreted as qualifying the noun Skanda Gupta, which was also 
in the genitive case. The visarga, however, does not occur in the facsimile 
published by Prinsep, and therefore it should be at once rejected. Had it 
existed in the original, it should still have been rejected, for s' anti is itself a 
noun, and cannot possibly be used as an adjective for another noun. Mr. 
Hall was the first to notice this mistake, and he correctly pointed out 
that the word as used in the text was in “ the seventh case of a past parti¬ 
ciple.”* 4 The late Dr. Bhau Daji did the same a few years after, the former 
rendering it by “being quiescent,” the latter “ peaceful.”f Both were, 
however, mistaken in accepting the word as qualifying the term rdjye , as 
also in the meanings they assigned to it. Mr. Hall subsequently rejected 
his first version, and accepted the word to mean “ being extinct,” but he still 
insisted on applying it to raj ye, and the result therefore continued as unsa¬ 
tisfactory as before. The word stands just before varslie, and by the ordi¬ 
nary rule of Sanskrit construction it should be interpreted along with that 
which is proximate to it, and not taken over to rdjye, which is removed from 
it by the intervention of several other words in a different case. Doubtless 
the exigencies of metre often lead to the reversion of the natural order or 
connexion cf words in a sentence, but where both a distant and a near con¬ 
nexion are possible, the most appropriate course is to adopt that which is 
most natural, unless the context shows this to be inadmissible. This is 
the course which Sanskrit exegesists usually follow, and I see no reason to 
depart from it in explaining the stanza under notice. In it the words s ante, 
varslie, trins'addas' aikottara-s' atatame, jaiskthyamasi and prapanne stand in 
regular succession, and I have no hesitation in taking them to be intimately 
connected in sense. The meaning they together yield is “ the year one 
hundred and forty-one having been over, and the month of Jaislithya 
having arrived,” or “ on the close of the year one hundred and forty-one, the 
month of Jaishthya having arrived,” and this instead of being opposed to the 
context offers a much more natural and consistent sense than the version 
given by Mr. Hall. 
To Europeans it might appear strange that the passed year should 
be named in the record, and not the current one to which the month 
specified belonged. But there is no inconsistency in this. In Ben¬ 
gal the usual practice to this day is to write in horoscopes the past year, 
and not the current one : thus were a child to be born at this moment (ten 
* Journal, American Oriental Society, VI., p. 530. 
f Journal, Bombay As. Soc., VIII., p. 241. 
