Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c10.s3.t3.17

c10.s3.t3.17

Even when a date cannot be verified by the usual methods, further circumstances must be taken into consideration before dismissing it as "irregular." Kielhorn, for example,⁶² notes numerous instances in which the date of an inscription cannot be verified for the year given, but does work out for the preceding or following year, or sometimes for the preceding or following year but one. Such cases are so common that they probably do not indicate forged or erroneous dates but rather some kind of consistent calendrical irregularity or dislocation, perhaps resulting from confusion between expired and current reckonings (cf. Sewell, *Indian Calendar*, 40 n. 2). Such cases, and related problems of seemingly irregular dates, have been treated at length by Venkatasubbiah in *Some Śaka Dates in Inscriptions* (esp. 31–48 and 95–6), who suspects that they are connected with various complications involving the calculation by different systems of the year of the sixty-year cycle of Jupiter (2–19; 96). Venkatasubbiah shows that a given Indian date may theoretically have as many as twenty-eight possible Western equivalents (72), all of which must be duly considered and tested before a date is condemned as “irregular,” and he is highly critical of arbitrary emendations by scholars of dates which “seem to them to be irregular” (viii), warning that “one has to be very circumspect in pronouncing any given date to be irregular” (93).