Indian Epigraphy c11.t8.2

c11.t8.2

The notification of a grant is often followed by an exhortation or admonition which was addressed by the donor to the future kings of the land whether of his own or of any other royal house, to the contemporary rulers and those who might replace him or his descendants and to his own officials, dependants and subjects including the villagers of the area where the gift land was located. It was requested that the addressees should respect the grant made by the donor. The residents of a gift village were then generally advised to pay all their dues in cash and kind regularly to the donee and to obey him. The appeal for the preservation of the grant was sometimes accompanied by passages in prose and verse referring to the transitory nature of wealth and worldly existence, to the permanent character of meritorious deeds like the gift of land, to the merit accruing to the grant of land and to the maintenance of such a grant, and to the suffering that would befall the confiscators or violators of it. Some benedictory and imprecatory verses are usually quoted in this context often as the sayings of the sages or of a particular sage or as occurring in one of the religious texts.² The number of such stanzas may be as small as one³ and as high as more than a score.¹ A commonplace among these is a saying to the effect that the maintainer of a grant derives as much merit as the donor. The grants in the South Indian languages often end in a passage like the following: ‘the kings ruling over the area should protect this righteous deed; those who do not do so will incur the sin of slaughtering a thousand cows at Vārāṇasi (i. e. Vārāṇasī).’²