The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c16.121

v2.c16.121

Having in the first line announced the main object of the inscription, namely, to record the fact of the hill having been excavated by Aira, the writer next proceeds to give a history of that person. This he commences in the second line., The letters in the line are, on the whole, well preserved, but the words they form appear disjointed, owing to the omission of casemarks and prepositions, and the construction is throughout involved. The sentence does not terminate until about the middle of the third line. The first word of the sentence is *pandarasa-vasāni*, ‘fifteen years’. In the objective case, it will mean ‘for fifteen years’ or ‘all through fifteen years’, for a rule in Sanskrit says that words implying time, place, or road in the objective may imply pervasion (*vyāpti*). The second word is *siri-kaḍāra-sariravati*, formed of *siri* for *śrī*, ‘handsoms’, *kaḍāra*, ‘tawny’, or ‘red’, i.e. beauteous, *sarira*, ‘body’, and *vatā* from *vat*, ‘to possess with the mark of the singular instrumental case *ā*; the meaning of the whole being “by him who possessed a handsome tawny body”. The epithet *kaḍāra*, tawny, or red, may appear to Europeans as awkward, but seeing that in the modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars, boys are generally described as “red” by way of praise, and the word *lāla*, “red” is a common term of endearment, forming the component of a whole host of proper names, and Bengali women invariably use the word *rāngā*, “red”, when praising child, I do not think I have failed to take it in the sense in which the composer of the record has employed it. If I could accept it to be a corruption of *kandara*, ‘a cave’, I could render the phrase ‘asylum of beauty’; but according to Mr. Childer’s *Pali Dictionary*, the Sanskrit *kandara*, becomes in Pali *kandaro* and not *kadaro*, and so it cannot be adopted. The next words are *kiḍitā*, ‘having played’, Sanskrit *krīḍita*; *kumāra kiḍikā*, ‘juvenile games’, and these bring the first clause of the sentence to a close. The meaning of the clause will be “for fifteen years all juvenile games having been played by him who had a handsome red body”.