Indian Copper-Plate Grants: Inscriptions or Documents?

Chartes indiennes sur plaque de cuivre: Inscriptions ou archives ?

Emmanuel Francis (1)

1 CEIAS - Centre d'Études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud

Indian copper-plate grants, initially issued by ruling kings from the third century CE onwards and increasingly by private individuals as time passed, are very specific documents, as they are kept by the grant beneficiaries as title-deeds. They are usually treated as inscriptions due to them being made of such hard material. However if the main character of an inscription is its being publicly displayed, copper-plate grants are not inscriptions, as they were often found buried for safety's sake. Based on South Indian materials, it is argued here that Indian copper-plate grants are neither inscriptions (i.e. publicly displayed writings on temple walls, steles, rocks, etc.) nor documents or archival records (i.e. private or state records on palm leaf), but are situated at the 'hinge' between these two categories, as revealed by their format, content and purpose. Among the many issues raised by the nature of archival records, I will address here only a selection. How, by whom and for which purposes are administrative, legal, archival records produced? Is there any observable difference between archives, inscriptions and literary manuscripts concerning materials, formats, and producers? Where are archives stored? Are there other objects stored together with the records? Which practices are involved inside the archive, how and by whom are they used? I will deal with these issues by focussing on Indian copper-plate grants, in particular South Indian examples of the first millennium CE and the beginning of the second, which show that the copper-plate grants' content and format are similar to that of palm-leaf account books. Still, Indian copper-plate grants are traditionally treated as inscriptions because of the durability of the material. But are they? And if not, what are they? Documents? My argument is that copper-plate grants, i.e. charters of donation inscribed on copper so as to serve as permanent title-deeds, are a peculiar type of documents to be situated at the intersection between inscriptions and archives for several reasons, which, I hope, will be clear at the end of this essay.

Domaines: Histoire

Emmanuel Francis. Indian Copper-Plate Grants: Inscriptions or Documents?. Alessandro Bausi; Christian Brockmann; Michael Friedrich; Sabine Kienitz. Manuscripts and Archives: Comparative Views on Record-Keeping, De Gruyter, pp.387-418, 2018, ⟨10.1515/9783110541397-014⟩. ⟨halshs-01892990⟩