356

THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.

or on to their backs. These Brahman's Sāsans are scattered all over the country and are de tected at once by the large comfortable home steads, the groves of cocoa-palms and fruit

trees and the generally superior style of cultiva

[Dec. 6, 1872.

lar and interesting. Potesar Bhat obtained possession and he and his descendants held the estate for some generations. In the reign of the bigoted Fmperor Aurangzeb, however, Sar

tion. The cocoa-palm flourishes well in Orissa, but is not grown except by Brahmans owing to

besar Bhat, the then proprietor, was ousted by the Rāja of Moharbhanj whose territories ad joined the grant. The Bhat applied to the

the popular superstition that if a man of another caste plants them, he or his children will die in

drove away the hāja's troops.

a year and a day.

the land however to the Brahman, he demanded

“e 5 anka.” The letter which I read e º this'

was read by the Bhuyāns as a 2 which it only very distantly resembles. “Mesha”—the sign Aries, and technical name

for the month Baisakh (see my note at p. 64 Indian Antiquary.) “ Dil ()am” and

“bā1408ti.”

This is the

Oriya fashion of writing figures, the name of the

Subah of Bengal who sent a small force and

Before restoring

payment of the expenses of the expedition. The Brahman in vain represented that having been dispossessed of his land, he was unable to pay; the Subah refused restitution.

Sarbesar then

journeyed all the way to Agra where he laid his case before the Emperor. Aurangzeb was no lover of the Brahmans and paid very little atten tion to him, and at last to get rid of him taunt

article is divided in two and the numbers writ

ingly told him he should have his land back and

ten in between, the above forms stand for 10

be let off paying the costs of the expedition if

diam, and 1408 báti respectively. Thus they

he would turn Musulman.

would write 10 rupees, talonka = 10 tanka ; 5 maunds would be majna, 30 years bağ0tsara,

sisted for a long time, but finding that the Em peror was deaf to remonstrances, he eventually

and so on.

consented, embraced Islam and returned to Orissa with an order for his restitution to his

“Chatidasa ashtottara” here again the en graver has omitted the letter the should have written “Chaida sata”—fourteen hundred.

As

The Brahman re

estates. Since that time the family has been Muhammadan, and the present head of it, Ghulam

the grant is in Oriya and not in Sanskrit per

Mustafa Khan, and his brothers are men with

haps he meant the sa to do duty for sail, as the

quite a Mughul type of countenance, probably

short vowel is pronounced o, and Oriyas often carelessly write so, no for sau, nau. The grant of so vast a tract of country to a single Brah

derived from frequent intermarriages with Mu

man (1408 batis = 28,160 acres) seems to sup

port the native tradition that Garhpadā and the

adjacent country was at that time uninhabited, or at least only sparsely peopled, and this idea is further countenanced by the fact that the

king gives his own name to the grant, calling it “Purushottampur Sāsan.”

The reverse contains merely the usual San

skrit formula observed in all such grants. The subsequent history of the Säsan is singu

ghul and Pathan ladies.

The archaic form of the letters in this grant renders it very valuable as showing the gradual development of the modern Oriya alphabet from a southern variety of the Kutila type. I would call attention to the two forms of the

T, also to the double s, and the H ; The appended $ and S are also very antiquated and singular, shewing especially the absence of all distinction between the long and short S. and the gradual growth of the now somewhat abnormal RT.

ON THE DERIVATION OF SOME PECULIAR GAURIAN VERBS. By Rev. A. F. RUDOLF HOERNLE, D. Ph. TÜBİNGEN, PROF. SANSK. JAYNARAYAN'S COLLEGE, BENARES. By the term Gaurian I understand the San skritic vernaculars of North India.

The Gaurian languages possess a class of

language, but have formed by a process peculiar to themselves. All Sanskrit and Prākrit verbs can be divided -

verbs which, though, as a rule, easily traceable to a Prākrit or Sanskrit origin, they have not

into their component parts, viz., the conjuga

received

‘kathayati' consists of the affix ti of the 3rd

from either the

one

or

the other

tional affir, the (verbal) base, and the root; e.g.,