Dear Colleagues,
if any of you has access to the Rajasthani journal Varda (वरदा),
published from Bissau (बिसाऊ), I would be very grateful if you
could photograph or scan two pages for me. The reference is Volume
5 Number 3, pages 2-3. I do not know what year this volume was
published in. The article is by R. C. Agrawal, and it concerns the
Nagari (नगरी, not नागरी) Inscription of Kṛta Era 481.
I would also be interested in any additional information that you
might have on the contents and whereabouts of this inscription. I
have done some checking, but have not managed to turn up anything
much. For your information and to prevent anyone from repeating
parts of my search, I summarise this below.
The inscription was discovered by D. R. Bhandarkar in 1915-16,
near the Mahādeva temple ruins in Nagari (near Chittorgarh).
Bhandarkar reported this in Progress Report of the Archaeological
Survey of India, Western Circle, for the year ending 31st March
1916, p56 and in his The Archaeological Remains and Excavations at
Nagari (MASI 4, 1920, pp120-122), citing and discussing the part
of the inscription that contains the date. He also discussed this
in his paper on the Vikrama Era in Commemorative essays presented
to Sir Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar (Puna, BORI, 1917, pp. 192-194)
and in his introduction to the revised Corpus Inscriptionum
Indicarum volume III. He apparently never got around to editing
the inscription, but R. C. Agrawal in Varda (my request above)
published a transcript of a longer part, or possibly the whole
inscription. I found out about this from a recent book on Art and
Artists of Rajasthan,
https://books.google.com/books?id=kmcLLEBmPHwC,
which quotes a large chunk on p9 note 10.
The original stone was delivered to the Rajputana Museum of Ajmer,
as reported by G. H. Ojha in the Annual Report on the Working of
the Rajputana Museum, Ajmer, for the year ending 31st March 1916
(p2, p5), and that is the last I know of its whereabouts. There is
even a website,
https://www.rajasthandirect.com/tourism/museums/ajmer-government-museum
claiming that a "Baghri inscription" of Vikram Samvat 481 is in
the Ajmer museum. However, it does not appear to be there under
any name. I visited the museum earlier this month. I have not seen
their store, but the superintendent Neeraj Kumar Tripathi said all
their inscriptions were on exhibit (and they do indeed have an
impressive epigraph collection). He has also enquired on my behalf
whether it may be in Chittorgarh, where the museum is currently
closed for renovation, but the reply was negative. He suggested
that it may have been moved to the Government Museum of Udaipur.
However, that is quite certainly a false trail too. I have browsed
through the storeroom in Udaipur Museum, and in addition skimmed
through their acquisitions register and consulted both the current
superintendent Vinit Godhal and the recently retired
superintendent Mubarak Husain - but there is no trace of the
Nagari inscription.
I am thus at an impasse, and I believe one of the following
possibilities is likely to be true: 1. the inscription has been
mislaid and is now lost for good; or 2. it is, after all,
gathering dust in some storeroom in Ajmer, unbeknownst to the
museum's superintendent.
My heartfelt thanks to anyone who can help me on either count,
Daniel