OB03165

Aluth Nuwara Dedimunda Devalaya, near Mawanella

This inscription is engraved on one side of a stone slab, which stands at the foot of the flight of steps leading to the main shrine of the dēvāle at Alutnuvara. The slab is situated to the left of the steps as one ascends. Another inscribed slab stands on the other side of the steps and is engraved with two inscriptions (IN03205 and IN03206). The slabs were discovered in the late nineteenth century and their inscriptions were first published by H. C. P. Bell in 1892 (Report on the Kegalla District of the Province of Sabaragamuwa, pp. 80–81).

The present inscription has been almost completely obliterated and only a few lines at the end remain legible. In these surviving lines, we can recognise the words of an imprecation, usually found in medieval Sinhalese records, against persons who cause obstruction to the maintenance of endowments made to religious institutions. Hence we may infer that the subject-matter of the inscription was a grant of land to a religious establishment. The document is attested by an officer named Sanhas Sivatta Nāyanāru, according to the order delivered, presumably by the king, when the latter was staying at the rest-house in a village of which the name is not fully preserved. Sanhas Sivatta Nāyanāru figures as the attestor of other documents issued in the reign of Senāsammata Vikramabāhu (see H. W. Codrington, ‘Some Documents of Vikramabāhu of Kandy’, Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 32 [1931]: 64–75). We may therefore conclude that the present record was also one of that monarch – a conclusion to which the palaeographic evidence presents no objection. Senāsammata Vikramabāhu was in fact an independent ruler of the Hill Country who flourished in the latter half of the fifteenth century, his reign beginning in 1474 or 1475 at the latest.