155 
1887.] R. Mitra -—Donative Inscription of Vidyadhara Bhanja. 
being palimpsests. At first I was disposed to think that the tracings were 
the first outlines made for the guidance of the engraver ; but I find this 
idea is not tenable, inasmuch as the tracings appear sometimes below and 
sometimes above the regular lines of the engraving, and not engraved 
over, as they should have been, had they been the first outlines. The 
finished record is deeply engraved, and, except in a few places, the let¬ 
ters are in a fair state of preservation. 
The letters of the record are of the Kutila type merging into the 
modern Devanagari form. The vowel i retains the old three-dotted 
form ; the e is indicated at times by a slight curve at the hind part of 
the top line, and at other times by a curved line behind, as is usual now 
in Bengali writings. The letters l and n are alike in shape, being 
differentiated only by the omission of the top line, as was the case in 
the Bengali of the last three centuries. The j is also of the form of that 
letter in Bengali. But the t, d and bh are of pure Kutila type. 
The language is pure Sanskrit, though, as is usual in records of 
this description, it is disfigured here and there by errors of spelling ; 
slips of grammar are also not wanting. I have pointed out the more 
prominent of these errors in parentheses. On the whole the record 
does not in this respect differ from its congeners found in other parts 
of India. In the neglect of punctuation the record beats the attorneys 
of England. 
The most remarkable feature of the record is, however, the absence 
from it of the prosy details which characterize ancient Indian grants, as 
also the title-deeds got up by English conveyancers. We altogether miss 
the “to have and to hold and to possess ” so familiar to us in modern 
English deeds of sale or gift. In mediaeval Sanskrit deeds, the field pro¬ 
duce, the forest produce, the produce of water, with all that is under the 
ground or above it, are carefully noted, also exemptions from Government 
demands; but nothing is said of them here ; even the important item of 
the boundary of the land given is not mentioned. 
The subject of the gift was a village named Tundurava, in the dis¬ 
trict of Vimalabhanja, but I have failed to trace it in our maps. Judging 
from the word Bhanja , which occurs both in the name of the district and 
also as a surname of the donor’s family, I am disposed to think that we 
must look for the locale somewhere in the present tributary state of 
Mayurabhanja, in the north-west of Orissa. But the evidence is too 
slender to be of much value in this respect, particularly when it is borne 
in mind that the word Bhanja was borne as a surname not only by the 
Rajas of Mayurabhanja, but also by a family of Rajas in Gumsur, as also 
by the Rajas of Keunjhar. The last, however, were scions of the Mayura¬ 
bhanja dynasty, whose initial date was not older than two hundred years 
