276 
F. S. Growse —The town of Bulandshahr. 
[No. 8, 
It may thus be concluded that the town of Baran at the commence¬ 
ment of the Christian era was a place of some wealth and importance; 
while the discovery of the antiquities above described clearly establishes 
the interesting fact that a little later, from about 400 to 800 A. D., there 
was a Buddhist community outside the Fort walls, occupying the site now 
known as the Moti Bagh. The only ancient inscriptions that have been 
found in the district are distinctly Brahmanical. The oldest is dated in 
the reign of Skanda Gupta, in the year 146, which—if the Saka era is 
intended—would correspond with 224 A. D. But this dynasty had an 
era of its own, which seems more likely to have been the one used, and 
an element of considerable uncertainty is thus introduced. For the com¬ 
mencement of the Gupta era is a very vexata qiuestio among archaeologists, 
being put by some so late as 319 A. D., by others at 190, and now by 
Gen. Cunningham at 167. A complete transcript and translation of the 
inscription, by Dr. Rajendralala Mitra, C. I. E. are given in Yol. XLIII 
of this Journal. It is not in itself of great importance, being simply a 
provision on the part of a Brahman, named Deva-vishnu, for the mainte¬ 
nance of an oil lamp, to burn in a temple of the Sun at Indra-pura. The 
copper-plate on which it is engraved was dug up at Indor, an artificial 
mound of great elevation and extent, a little off the high road from 
Anupshahr to Aligarh, opposite the eighth mile-stone from the former 
town. As I have shewn at length in my “ Mathura,” by an application 
of the rules laid down by the Prakrit grammarian Vararuchi, the Sanskrit 
Indra-pura, in the natural course of phonetic decay, must become Indor 
in the modern vernacular. 
The next inscribed memorial is some centuries later in date, but from 
exposure to rough usage is in a far less perfect state of preservation and 
is for the most part illegible. It is an oblong block of stone, measuring 
29 inches by 10 by 10, which I brought into the station from a well 
adjoining the tomb of Khwaja Lai Barani, which lies across the Kalindi, 
about half a mile to the east of the town of Bulandshahr. There are two 
inscriptions, one opposite the other, in characters of different size, but of 
the same period, probably about 1200 A. D. Both are records of grants 
for religious purposes, and the stone must have been intended for deposit 
among the archives of the temple for which the endowments were pro¬ 
vided. But it can never have been actually set up, as it is difficult to 
imagine a position in which both sides could be conveniently read; it is 
also evident that preparations had been made for splitting it up into two 
separate slabs of equal thickness. One of the two inscriptions opens with 
an invocation of Krishna, in the words Om Namo Bhagavate Vdsudcvdya. 
The stone has been sent to Dr. Mitra for inspection, and eventually for 
deposit in the Indian Museum. 
