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by the changes in the course of its rivers, particularly the Kosi, since Buchanan's time, that many of the places mentioned by him cannot be traced in the modern issue of standard survey sheets of the district. For instance, the town of Nathpur, where the Report itself was written in 1811, has completely disappeared, having been swept away by the Kosi in 1875. It has therefore been considered necessary to await receipt of the new map which has been prepared in England by skilled photographers and cartographers. A copy which has just been received is exhibited at this meeting as specimen of our intentions. It is a collotype reproduction of a photograph of the manuscript map in the India Office Library, enlarged to a scale sufficient to permit conveniently the substitution of nearly all Buchanan's place-names for the figures by which he himself had to indicate them, and subsequently again reduced by photography to a scale slightly smaller than Buchanan's own. The number of place-names indicated in the original map is so great that no fewer than 67 have still to be shown by marginal references. The scale is reduced more than was originally intended, but this is due to the fact that at the time of the survey Purnea included a strip along the Kosi extending almost to the border of Murshedabad, and nearly fifty miles south of its present boundary; and the methods employed are a guarantee that the reproduction is strictly accurate in every detail.

Our thanks are again due to Mr. Oldham, not only for the trouble and care with which he has supervised the preparation of this map, but also for his expert assistance in supplying other material required for the new volumes. During the year we have received full information regarding the Statistical Tables relating to Purnea, as well as Miss Anstey's copy of the missing portion of the Patna-Gaya Report. After the completion of the Purnea volume, which should be ready by the end of this year, it is hoped that the rest can be issued at shorter intervals, though this may have to depend to some extent on the reception accorded to the first volume.

II-Notes from the Madala Panji—[Mu

hammadan Conquest of Orissa]

By Rai Bahadur Ramaprasad Chanda, B.A., F. A. S. B.

THE word madala means drum, and the palm-leaf records of the Temple of Jagannath are so called because they are tied together in the form of big round bundles resembling the Indian drum. Every such madalā or drum-shaped bundle consists of several different pāñjis or manuscripts. These pāñjis differ from the ordinary palm-leaf puthis or manuscripts in arrangement and size. An ordinary palm-leaf manuscript consists of separate leaves held together by a string that passes through a hole in the middle of each leaf, but the pāñji of the Madala Panji consists of a number of pairs of palm leaves that are not completely separated from each other. These pairs of leaves are tied at one end by a string.

The Madalā Pāñjis include all classes of records relating to the Temple of Jagannath, such as inventories of articles in the stores, duties of different classes of temple servants, routine of ceremonies, copies of orders of the Gajapati Maharajas of Orissa who are the hereditary trustees of the Temple, and the annals of these Maharajas. This last section of the Mādalā Pāñji was first brought to the notice of the students of history by A. Stirling in his "An Account, Geographical, Statistical and Historical of Orissa Proper, or Cuttack", published in the Asiatic Researches, Vol. XV, 1825. Stirling thus describes the annals:

"The chapter of the Mandala Panji or Records preserved in the temple of Jagannath, called the Raj Charitra or 'Annals of the Kings' in the Uria

language, which records are stated to have been commenced upon more than six centuries back, and to have since been regularly kept up." Pp.

94-95.

Stirling embodied a summary of the annals in the historical section of his essay. A more detailed summary in Bengali verse was published by Bhabani Charan Bandyopadhyaya in bis Purushottama Chandrika in the Saka year 1766 (A.D. 1844). Hunter based bis account of the Kings of Orissa on Bhabani Charan's work. Monmohun Chakravarti in his Notes on the Language and Literature of Orissa1 and other papers has made considerable use of the original manuscripts.

But as the text of the anuals included in the Mādalā Pāñji (henceforward named as the l'uri annals) has not yet been published, in October last (1926) I went to Puri to secure the original manuscripts. The Mādalā Pāñjis are preserved by two officers of the Temple of Jagannath, the Deul Karan or the clerk of the temple, and the Tadhan Karan, or the keeper of the jewellery of the temple. Under the instruction of Raja Rama Chandra Deva of Puri, Babu Gauranga Charan Samanta Roy, the present Deul Karan, lent me two manuscripts (marked A and B), and Babu Shyam Sundar Patnayak, the present Tadhau Karan, lent me three manuscripts (marked C, D and E). These manuscripts are written or rather scratched on palm leaves in an archaic form of Oriya character and the language is colloquial Oriya. With my pupil, Babu Paramananda Acharya, B.Sc., I am now engaged in collating the manuscripts. These notes are intended to serve. as a preliminary report on them.

4. This manuscript consists in all of 25 pairs of palm leaves. The first 22 pairs form a unit. It is entitled

Rajāmānanka rāya bhoga kāla

"The annals (lit. reigns) of kings."

It begins with a list of kings of the Satya Yuga and ends with the 8th Anka (A.D. 1742) of Rājā Virakesari Deva. The

1 J,A.S.B., Vol, LXVII, Part 1898, pp. 376-379.

last three pairs of leaves are later additions. Of these the first two pairs [A (2)] form a separate unit and give a list of the Rajas of Khurda with their ańka years and the corresponding years of the Amali era, up to the 5th anka of Virakesari Deva II corresponding with the year 1262 (A.D. 1857). The third pair [A(3)] is a separate unit and contains the list of the kings of the Kali Yuga beginning with Yudhishthira and ending with Nanguḍā Narasingha Deva,

B. This manuscript consists of 15 pairs of leaves that form one single unit. It contains the annals from the beginning of the Kali Yuga to the 5th Anka of Maharaja Ramachandra Deva IlI corresponding with the Saka year 1743 (A.D. 1820-21).

It is entitled

Rajāwānanka rāyya-bhoga

C. This manuscript consists of 23 pairs of leaves, most of which are worm-eaten. The first 17 pairs form one single unit. It is entitled-

Kaliyuga rajāmānanka bhoga kalā

"Annals of the kings of Kaliyuga.'

It begins with Yudhisthira and ends with the reign of Chakra Pratapa Deva, son of Govinda Vidyadhara.

6 pairs of leaves [C(2)] contain not only the list of kings of Orissa but also that of the Patsas (Muhammadan kinge).

D. This manuscript consists in all of 23 pairs of leaves including no less than 15 different units that are referred to as D(1), D(2), D(3), etc. Ten of these units have each a single pair of leaves and contain either lists of kings or short résumés. The longest unit, D(10), has 11 pairs of leaves and gives the history from the beginning of time (Yuga) to the reign of Ramachandra Deva II. Another unit, D(14), has 5 pairs of leaves and gives the history from the beginning of the Kaliyuga to the reign of Telinga Mukunda Deva.

E. The first pair of leaves in this manuscript gives the anka years with the equivalent Śaka years of kings beginning with Pratapa Rudra who began reign in Sakāvda 1418

(A.D. 1196) and ending with the 7th aňka of Gopinatha Deva of Khurda corresponding to Śakāvda 1644 (A.D. 1722).1

The anka years of the Orissan kings denote their regnal years omitting the 1st, 6th, 16th, 20th, 26th, 30th, 36th, etc. years so that anka 2 means the 1st regnal year, anka 7 the 5th regnal year, and so on.

From the language of the concluding portion of manuscript B it appears that it was completed in the 5th anka of Ramachandra Deva III. The other versions of the annals, A(1), C(1), D(10) and D (14) appear to be earlier compilations, though they may not be as old as the reign of the kings with whose history they conclude. One legend narrated in all these versions enables us to determine the time when the compilation of these annals was initiated. It is said that in the beginning of the Kaliyuga 18 kings of the Somavamsa or the lunar dynasty beginning with Yudhishthira ruled for 3,781 years. In the reign of Sobhana Deva, the 17th king of this dynasty, Raktabāhu, the Amir (amurā) of the Mughal Padshah (Patisha) of Delhi, invaded Orissa and ravaged the kingdom. According to one manuscript, C, Raktabāhu, the Mughal from Delhi, came across the sea in a ship (jāhāja). Sobhana Deva fled to the Jhaḍakhanda where he was succeeded by Chandrakara Deva. The Mughals held the kingdom for 35 years. Yajāti Kesari then seized the kingdom and is said to have reigned for 52 years up to Sakāvda 448 (A.D. 526). Stirling and Bhavani Charan call this Raktabāhu a Yavana, but the latter refers, to a Mughal invasion in the reign of Nirmala Deva, the grandfather of Sobhana Deva. I have not yet been able to trace the manuscript of the Rajacharitra used by Stirling. As stated above, none of the manuscripts I have hitherto examined are so called. As in all these and in the one used by Bhabani Charan, the foreigners who invaded Orissa in the fifth century A.D. are called Mughals, it may be safel concluded that the

1 Since the above was sent to the press we have discovered an old copy of the annals in a regular palm leaf Oriya manuscript in the collection of Kumar Sarat Kumar Ray of Dighapatiya. It is referred to below as F.

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