Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c21.s3.5

c21.s3.5

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.