1879 Odia-Sanskrit copper plate found in Gunupur, seen as Bishama Cuttack's first charter

A copper plate carrying a land grant dated 2 October 1879 has turned up in a private home in Gunupur, a town in Odisha's Rayagada district, according to reports published on 6 and 7 October 2026. Local researcher Akshaya Das and Ramanaguda Tehsildar Dr Pranakrishna Panigrahi recovered the plate from a house on Brahman Street. Epigraphist Bishnu Mohan Adhikari has read the inscription for the first time. He describes it as a land-grant deed, or patta, issued by Thataraja Ramachandra of the Bishama Cuttack royal house, and it is believed to be the earliest known charter linked to that family.

For centuries, rulers across India put important grants on metal rather than palm leaf or paper. Copper did not rot and was hard to forge, so the plates served as title deeds that a family could produce generations later. Most plates known today come from the first millennium CE. This one shows the same legal habit still alive in a small hill kingdom of southern Odisha well into British rule, more than a thousand years after many of the famous examples were cut.

The two-language layout is the detail scholars will look at most closely. The working terms of the grant, meaning who got which land, sit in Odia, the language people in the area actually spoke. The Sanskrit verses on the reverse add the formal, almost ceremonial, layer that charters traditionally carried. Putting both on one plate shows how a local court used Sanskrit as the language of authority and record while relying on the regional language to make the deal clear. For students of Indian knowledge systems, it is a small but concrete case of a classical tradition working side by side with a living language in daily administration.

The find also fills a gap in the record of the Bishama Cuttack house. If the plate is indeed the first known charter from this family, it gives historians a fixed date, a named ruler and a named place to check against revenue records, family papers and oral history. Gunupur has produced copper plates before, including a grant from the Nandapur rulers dated 1649 and an early nineteenth-century regrant of a village, so the area clearly holds more of this kind of material, much of it still in private homes.

Short-term: The plate gives local historians and the district administration a dated document to study, photograph and record. The reading by Bishnu Mohan Adhikari is a first decipherment, so other epigraphists are likely to want to examine the text and the Sanskrit verses.

Long-term: Finds like this build the case for a systematic survey of copper plates and other family-held documents in southern Odisha before they are sold for scrap, melted or lost. A dated charter can anchor the history of a settlement, a family and a dynasty for which written evidence is thin.

Who is affected: Historians of Odisha and of the Eastern Ghats region, epigraphists and Sanskrit scholars, families in Gunupur and Bishama Cuttack with links to the grant, and heritage officials in Rayagada district.

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