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Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c21.s3: 2.3 Krishna Sastri's readings

Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c21.s3

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2.3 Krishna Sastri's readings

c21.s3.1

Krishna Sastri made the next attempt to read the cave inscription at Sittannavasal,⁶ but admitted that he was not able to suggest any possible interpretation of the inscription.⁷ However, his tentative reading illustrates another characteristic of the Tamil cave inscriptions, namely, that even where the writing is bold, clear and exceptionally well-preserved as in this case, the text is almost wholly unintelligible. We know now that Krishna Sastri could not have succeeded in reading the inscription as the clues to a correct understanding of the script were yet to be discovered. However, Krishna Sastri had already started moving away from Venkayya's position and, adopting a more cautious approach, declared that the language of the cave inscriptions was "neither Pāli nor Dravidian".⁸

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⁶ *ARE 388A / 1914* = No. *49*.

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⁷ *ARE 1914-15*: paragraph 2. See section 1.3.2 and Commentary (No. *49*) for interpretation of this inscription.

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⁸ *ARE 1909-10*: paragraph 5.

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Krishna Sastri lamented that even though the Brāhmī cave inscriptions were brought to the notice of scholars and were also submitted to some for critical study, they still remained "uninterpreted" and that scholars "have not paid to these ancient records the attention they deserve".⁹ Probably in desperation, he suggested to Ramaprasad Chanda, described as a brilliant scholar in ethnology "to take up these curious Brāhmī documents of Southern India for study and make an attempt, however slight it may be, to interpret them".¹ He took Chanda on a tour of the caves and supplied him with transcriptions and estampages of the inscriptions. However, his hope that Chanda was "shortly going to publish a monograph on these inscriptions which is expected to throw some fresh light on these hitherto obscure documents" remained unfulfilled.² Nothing more was heard of the project which was in any case doomed from the start, as Chanda, a scholar from Bengal and presumably unfamiliar with Dravidian, was not the best choice for the job.

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⁹ *ARE 1917-18*: paragraph 8. At least part of the blame for this unhappy situation lay with the Government Epigraphist who published photographs of the estampages in such small size as to be virtually unreadable. *ARE 1911-12* has one Plate with 12 inscriptions and *ARE 1917-18* has another with 22 inscriptions!

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¹ *ARE 1917-18*: paragraph 8.

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² Ibid. paragraph 10.

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The first major study of the cave inscriptions is the paper presented by Krishna Sastri at the First Oriental Conference held in Poona (Pune).³ The paper includes his readings of 31 inscriptions⁴ from 11 sites. He did not translate or interpret the texts and confined himself to commenting on some of the words he could read in the inscriptions. Notwithstanding this serious limitation, Krishna Sastri's paper represents important, even if tentative, advances in understanding the script and the language of the cave inscriptions.

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³ H. Krishna Sastri 1919: pp. 327-348 (= HKS).

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⁴ 32 inscriptions according to the numbering in the present Corpus.

2.3.1 Script:

c21.s3.t1.1

Krishna Sastri noted for the first time the "purely southern characteristic" of the palaeography of the cave inscriptions comparing them with those of the Brāhmī inscriptions of Ceylon (Sri Lanka).⁵ The comparison was fruitful as it enabled him to identify the occurrence of the Dravidian *ḻ* in the Tamil cave inscriptions based on the earlier discovery of this character by Parker in the Brāhmī inscriptions of Sri Lanka.⁶ From the same source, he also identified *ī* which occurs earlier in the Tamil cave inscriptions when compared with the Brāhmī inscriptions elsewhere in the country.⁷ This was a valuable contribution by Krishna Sastri to the study of the Tamil-Brāhmī script. He also noticed the occurrence of three other unusual characters in the script which, however, he could not identify.⁸ Later, Subrahmanya Aiyer correctly identified them as the special Tamil characters for *l*, *r* and *ṉ*.⁹

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⁵ H. Krishna Sastri 1919: pp. 331-332, 347-348.

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⁶ Ibid. p. 334, n.4; pp. 347-348. H.W. Parker 1909: Nos. 26 & 27 at p. 429; No. 38 at p. 431.

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⁷ H. Krishna Sastri 1919: p. 348.

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⁸ Ibid.

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⁹ See section 2.4.2.

2.3.2 Orthography:

c21.s3.t2.1

Krishna Sastri was the first to compare the Tamil cave inscriptions with the Bhattiprolu casket inscriptions of Andhra.¹⁰ However, he did not correctly apply the rules of the Bhattiprolu orthography discovered earlier by Bühler.¹¹ He assumed that a character in the cave inscriptions, which resembled *nā* of the casket inscriptions, was of the "Bhattiprolu type".¹ This led him to the implausible conclusion that "the numerous words ending in *nā* in all the inscriptions may be taken to be the genitive plurals ending in *-nāṃ*",² resulting in a gross exaggeration of the "Prakrit element" in the cave inscriptions. Actually, the Bhattiprolu *nā* (or, more generally, the *-ā* medial sign of Bhattiprolu) never occurs in the Tamil-Brāhmī script. It was left to Subrahmanya Aiyer to correct the reading of *nā* to *ṉ* (the alveolar nasal which occurs only in the Tamil-Brāhmī script).³

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¹⁰ H. Krishna Sastri 1919: p. 347. See also section 5.6.3 on the Bhattiprolu casket inscriptions.

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¹¹ See section 6.6 for discussion on the orthography of the Bhattiprolu inscriptions.

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¹ H. Krishna Sastri 1919: p. 337, n.11 and p. 348.

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² H. Krishna Sastri 1919: p. 347.

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³ See section 2.4.2.

c21.s3.t2.7

Krishna Sastri was again the first to guess correctly (though rather intuitively from his knowledge of Tamil epigraphy) that at least some of the consonants in the cave inscriptions have to be treated as basic.⁴ Actually, this is one of the main features of the Bhattiprolu orthography and it applies almost without exception to all the unmarked consonants in the early cave inscriptions.

c21.s3.t2.8

⁴ H. Krishna Sastri 1919: p. 347.

2.3.3 Language:

c21.s3.t3.1

Krishna Sastri was the first to recognise the presence of the "Dravidian element" in the cave inscriptions. He could, however, notice only four or five words "apparently in Tamil" (e.g., *ūr*, *nāṭu*) and the "superfluous *y* after words ending in medial *-ai*" as part of the Dravidian element.⁵ On the other hand, the Prakrit element was, according him, " more or less clearly expressed" in the inscriptions.⁶

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⁵ Ibid. p. 346.

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⁶ Ibid. p. 347. For our present understanding of the true proportions of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan elements in the cave inscriptions, see sections 3.1.5.

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Apart from his failure to understand the orthographic peculiarities of the inscriptions and to identify the special Tamil characters for *ḷ*, *ṟ* and *ṉ*, Krishna Sastri's readings have also been affected by his reliance on the unsatisfactory estampages of weather-worn inscriptions.⁷

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⁷ There is internal evidence in his 1919 paper indicating his reliance on estampages and not on direct reading from the stone. His mixing up the estampages at Mangulam has already been referred to in section 1.2.1(ii). The sequence of his readings at Kongarpuliyankulam and Mettuppatti is also at variance with the order *in situ* (See Nos. *12* & *13* and *28* & *29*.) Direct reading from the stone would have produced more accurate texts in other cases also.