Indian Epigraphy c16.s4.2

c16.s4.2

An inscription² of Aśoka mentions a locality called Lumbinīgrāma, a name ending in the word *grāma*, ‘a village’. The names of hundreds of villages mentioned in later inscriptions have the same ending. Often the name of a village or its part ended in words like *padra* or *padraka*, *palli*, *pāṭaka*, etc., which are recognised in Sanskrit lexicons in the sense of a village or a part of it. The name-ending *pāṭaka* is also found in the modified form of *vāṭaka* even in early inscriptions, while, in medieval records, we have its various modified forms like vāḍa, vāḍā, paḍā, pāḍā, etc., as the word was adopted in the different regional languages. Similar local modification also characterises the words suffixed to the names of localities. In the southern regions of India, ūr, a Dravidian word for ‘village’, was often suffixed to the names of localities.¹ Various other explanatory words were likewise suffixed to the names of villages in all parts of the country. Thus the words sthāna, sthala, sthalī, etc., are sometimes found at the end of names of places having a deva-sthāna or shrine of a deity, and the word tīrtha is found suffixed to the names of holy places.² Rent-free villages in the possession of gods and Brāhmaṇas had often names ending in the word śāsana especially in the Bengal-Orissa region. In the Tamil-speaking area, the names of such villages under Brāhmaṇas, generally called agrahāra, often ended in the expression caturvedimaṅgalam. In many cases, the names of cities and townships ended in words meaning a village. But very often the names of such localities had suffixes like nagara, pura, purī, paṭṭana, etc., meaning a city or town. The towns and villages were often named after persons or gods.