IN03211 Sagama Rock Inscription of Bhuvanaikabāhu V

This inscription is engraved on a rock situated in a stretch of paddy-fields in the village of Nugaliyadda in Pāta Hēvāhäṭa, Kandy District, and about a quarter of a mile to the south of the well-known Sagama temple, a shrine dating from Kandyan times. The record was first published by H. C. P. Bell in the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 22 (1910), pp. 364–365. It is dated in the ninth year of Bhuvanaikabāhu. On the basis of the palaeography, which dates the inscription to the fourteenth century, this king could be either Bhuvanaikabāhu IV or V. However, as the document registers a grand by the Minister Aḷakeśvara, a dignitary who did not come into prominence until after Bhuvanaikabāhu IV’s death, it is clear that the king in question must be the later monarch. Bhuvanaikabāhu V’s reign began in 1371–1372 A.D., hence the present inscription can be dated to 1380–1381 A.D. The language of the record, which is Sinhalese with some Sanskrit tatsama forms, is very ornate in style, the author having used simile, metaphors and, at one point, the highly artificial figure of speech called the śleṣa (double entendre). The inscription registers a donation of lands in the village of Saputala in Sagama by the two brothers Aḷakeśvara and Devamantrīśvara to the god Nātha of Senkaḍagala and the god of the Nā tree of unspecified location, in gratitude to these deities for having crowned with success the efforts of the two dignitaries to place the affairs of the Church and the State in a stable condition. The village of Saputala, where the lands granted were situated, is modern Haputalē, which adjoins to the north and west the stretch of paddy fields where the record was found. The donors, Aḷakeśvara and Devamantrīśvara, are described in terms indicating that they were second in importance only to the king. They can be identified with the two brothers Aḷakeśvara or Aḷagakkonāra and Dev-himi, who are eulogised in very high terms in the Mayūra-sandeśa, a Sinhalese poem composed in the reign of Bhuvanaikabāhu V. H. C. P. Bell identified the Aḷakeśvara of the present inscription with Vīra Aḷakeśvara, who wielded power on two occasions in the troubled period prior to the accession of Parākramabāhu VI (as recorded in an oft-quoted passage in the Saddharmaratnākara). However, Senarath Paranavitana offered an alternative interpretation, arguing that the Aḷakeśvara mentioned here was in fact Vīra Aḷakeśvara’s uncle, a minister who rose to fame in the reign of Vikramabāhu III and, under the title of prabhurāja, became the virtual dictator of the Sinhalese country.