The ancient and the digital

Karnataka’s historical heritage and Kannada’s transformation from a spoken language into a literary one is entering a digital age. The inscriptions of the Kadamba dynasty — the first known rulers to use Kannada in official records — have long remained on the stones of temples, prone to weathering and neglect. But a digital intervention is bringing these invaluable relics to life, making them accessible at our fingertips. 

Udaya Kumar P L, honorary project director of the Bengaluru Inscriptions Digital Conservation Project, with a four-member team from The Mythic Society, has made available 145 high-resolution 3D images of inscriptions attributed to the Early Kadamba dynasty (4th-6th century CE) in public domain.

Many of these inscriptions, etched on the stones of various temples are subject to wear-and-tear caused by natural flaking of the stones over time. The villages include Banavasi, Chandravalli, Gudnapura, Halmidi, Kavadi, Malavalli and Soraba.

“This is one of few digitisation efforts spanning massive geographies. While earlier documentation from about 100 years ago gave us a faint understanding of what has been written by the Kadambas, a lot of it is lost, making reinterpretations of history daunting,” says Udaya Kumar. 

The digitised inscriptions are now available on Wikimedia Commons and Akshara Bhandara, a digital repository featuring tools to access ancient Kannada scripts online.

The Mythic Society had organised a seminar titled “Early Kadambas and their Times” last month, followed by a public viewing of the same on enlarged screens. 

“One of the primary goals of the project was to ensure that the inscriptions remain available even if the original stones deteriorate,” Kumar says. 

The Akshara Bhandara takes preservation a step further by transcribing each inscription character by character.

“So far over 4,000 characters have been digitised. Now anyone can read, learn from them and verify them using the metadata available on Akshara Bhandara,” he adds.

Racing against time

The majority of the inscriptions are engraved on tall pillars in Kadamba temples. While documenting an inscription in Soraba, for instance, Kumar and his team carried a 16-foot ladder in the car from Bengaluru to Soraba, where they stayed for about 10 days.

“Soraba has not been a great place for internet connectivity or power supply. So we also carried our own UPS and made additional arrangements for internet connectivity,” he says. 

Two hours of scanning on the ground takes at least 20 odd hours of decoding, including cutting the characters from the image, reading and uploading them online. 

Starting at 6 am for about 10 days, the team would work till late evening and upload the scanned inscriptions amounting to 50 to 100 GB late at night. Kumar says the four-member team has completed work worth six person-months, including over 1,000 km worth of travel, spanning 15 historic sites. Many villagers and locals assisted the team in this process.

Sanskritisation as a trend

The early trends in Kannada writing indicate a tendency to translate Kannada place names into Sanskrit — a language of the so-called elite. 

“Many places within Karnataka, which are locally known by Kannada names were translated into languages from northern India, initially Prakrit and later Sanskrit, despite them being written in Brahmi script,” says Shrinivas V Padigar, former professor of Ancient Indian History and Epigraphy, Karnatak University. Padigar is now Director, Academic and Research, at The Mythic Society.

For instance, in Ashokan inscriptions, there is a reference to a place called ‘Suvarna giri’, meaning ‘golden hill’, while there was, in reality, a place called Sonagutti or Pongutti — a Kannada original mentioned in later inscriptions.

The epigraphist believes that the Sanskritisation of early Kannada place names is an attempt to standardise spoken Kannada into a literary language. 

Kadamba inscriptions too show this trend. “Inscriptions during the reign of Aja Varma mention a place called ‘Nadi madhya desha’ which could have been a Sanskrit equivalent of ‘Ede tore naadu’, which is mentioned in inscriptions that were engraved on stones much later. This is an indication of early Kannada’s evolution into a written language,” he adds. 

Padigar points to the recent finding of a similar trend observed in inscriptions granted by Priya Vrata Varma, where a region called ‘Mukunda’ is mentioned as ‘Triparvata’ – a Sanskrit equivalent of the Kannada word Mukunda, which means three hillocks. 

While the Sanskritisation of Kannada words may indicate the Brahmanical presence in early inscriptions, Padigar speculates that Halmidi — the earliest known Kannada inscription of the Kadamba dynasty — could be non-Brahmanical. 

“Halmidi mentions an honour called balgalchu. ‘Bal’ means sword and ‘galchu’ means to wash. This refers to a warrior who washes his sword after a war,” he says, implying that the early Kannada inscriptions indicate a shift in caste dynamics of the time. 

He explained another similar instance where a grant was given to flower suppliers of a temple near Badami to tell the tale of a fief called Vija Arasa, deliberately written in Kannada. 

Inscriptions lost and found 

In Udaya Kumar and his team’s exploration, there was a mystery surrounding the famous Mrigesha Varma inscription of Banavasi. It was missing. None of the locals or the officials could locate it, forcing the team to return without scanning the inscription known for its calligraphy-style writing. “The inscription, which was excavated in the 1970s, has not been seen by anybody for over 25 years now,” says Kumar.

However, after a three-day seminar at The Mythic Society last month, a history enthusiast from Banavasi managed to locate the inscription along with his friends. They later learnt that earlier historians buried it after studying it, as they did not have the equipment to preserve it. 

In the next phase of their venture, the team hopes to study and digitise those inscriptions which have been “missing,” including the Mrigesha Varma inscriptions.

The team and a few locals scan an inscription in Malavalli in Shivamogga district (top right)

An inscription on a copper plate dating back to the early 5th century.