Field trip in Odisha 2025: Metadata collection continues

Between mid-January and mid-February, three members of the DHARMA Project (Annette Schmiedchen, Samana Gururaja and Amandine Wattelier-Bricout) travelled to India to continue the documentation of inscriptions and to collect the metadata needed to complete the DHARMA database.

Dr. Bharati Pal deciphering a copper plate, Odisha State Museum
During the first part of our field trip, we pursued the documentation of the inscriptions preserved in the Odisha State Museum, Bhubaneswar. As in the previous two years, Dr. Bharati Pal, the curator of the Odisha State Museum, made every effort to facilitate our access to the copper plates preserved in the museum’s storeroom. Thanks to her perfect knowledge of the museum’s collections,[1] we were able to gather invaluable information about some specific inscriptions. We would like to warmly thank her for the help and support she has given us on each of our visits to the Odisha State Museum. With the permission of Dr. Bhagyalipi Malla, we were able to photograph and measure several copper plates. This year, our work focused on copper plates issued by the kings of the Gaṅga dynasty and those of minor dynasties such as the Nalodbhavas, Nandodbhavas and Tuṅgas. [2]

In addition to an impressive collection of copper plates, the Odisha State Museum also has a very fine collection of manuscripts. Ms. Priyanka Samal (SOA University) enabled us to find certain manuscripts and identify passages that were useful for our research. We would like to thank her most sincerely for her help and time.

During the second part of our stay, we visited the Archaeological Survey of India in Mysore, where we met the Director, Dr. Munirathnam, and the Epigraphist, Dr. Varma. Both gave us a warm welcome and helped us with our search for estampages. The work of the Archaeological Survey of India is extremely valuable for the current and future research on Indian epigraphy. In addition to preserving the estampages produced in the past, the Archaeological Survey of India continues to produce new estampages based on epigraphic discoveries made regularly throughout India. Each year, the Annual Report of Indian Epigraphy (ARIE) mentions these discoveries and accompanies them with the information needed for future epigraphic studies. During our stay, we also took the opportunity to consult the library’s collections of scholarly journals, some of which are simply not available in European libraries.

Thanks to direct and indirect access to epigraphic sources, this field mission was extremely fruitful: it enabled us to obtain digital images of several artefacts (photographs or estampages), collect their metadata and complete the bibliographic references. The collection of this information would not have been possible without the invaluable help of the Indian researchers who welcomed us.
[1] See Pal, Bharati (2018). Descriptive catalogue on Copper Plate Inscriptions Preserved in Odisha State Museum, Govt. Press, Cuttack. Three volumes devoted to the inscriptions of Odisha are also available: Pal, Bharati (2019). Inscriptions of Odisha: Inscriptions of Bhañjas of Khiñjalimaṇḍala, Govt. Press, Cuttack; (2020). Inscriptions of Odisha: Inscriptions of Gaṅgas of Śvetaka,Govt. Press, Cuttack; (2021). Inscriptions of Odisha: Inscriptions of Bhañjas of Vañjulvaka, Govt. Press, Cuttack.
[2] To learn more about the previous field trips, see https://dharma.hypotheses.org/5943 , https://dharma.hypotheses.org/5795 , https://dharma.hypotheses.org/5767 and https://dharma.hypotheses.org/4799
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Amandine Wattelier-Bricout (February 13, 2025). Field trip in Odisha 2025: Metadata collection continues. DHARMA project ERC n° 809994. Retrieved November 13, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13bby


