Nallamala Tiger Reserve Inscriptions: ASI's 2026 Find Explained

The story begins with a routine but ambitious operation: ASI's Epigraphy Branch sent a team into the Nallamala Tiger Reserve — part of the larger Nagarjunsagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve — for what reports describe as the first major epigraphical survey of its kind inside this tiger reserve. The survey ran under tight security in coordination with forest officials, since the terrain straddles core tiger habitat in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

Over three days — 11, 12, and 13 June 2026 — the team moved through villages and forest tracts along ancient routes leading to the Srisailam temple. The haul: 25 inscriptions in total, plus rock art. But here's the twist — this wasn't a single uniform discovery. It was a layered one, spanning multiple scripts, multiple dynasties, and nearly a millennium-and-a-half of continuous human activity in one forest belt.

Day-wise Breakup

Epigraphy is the study of inscriptions — writing engraved on durable surfaces such as stone, rock faces, copper plates, pillars, and temple walls. Unlike literary texts that get copied (and corrupted) over centuries, an inscription is a one-time, dated, on-the-spot record. That's why historians treat epigraphs as among the most reliable sources for reconstructing dynastic chronology, land grants, religious patronage, and administrative practice.

The discipline's modern Indian story starts with James Prinsep, who deciphered the Brahmi script in 1838 — unlocking Ashokan edicts that had sat unread for two millennia. Every subsequent inscription discovery, including the Nallamala find, builds on that 19th-century breakthrough.

Core Concepts at a Glance

The Nallamala Hills — the name means "black hills" in Telugu, a reference to the dense, dark forest cover — form part of the Eastern Ghats and host the Nagarjunsagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve (NSTR), India's largest tiger reserve at roughly 3,728 sq km across five districts spanning Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The reserve was notified in 1978 and brought under Project Tiger in 1983; it was briefly renamed Rajiv Gandhi Wildlife Sanctuary in 1992.

What makes this terrain an epigraphist's goldmine is the Krishna River, which cuts a basin nearly 200 metres deep over 130 km through the reserve. Rivers attracted settlements, trade routes, and pilgrimage corridors — and pilgrimage corridors attracted inscriptions, because donors recorded their grants at temples and waystations along the way. The ancient route to the Srisailam temple, whose origins trace to at least the 2nd century CE with Satavahana-era inscriptional evidence, runs straight through this inscription-rich belt.

What the 2026 survey actually recovered is less a single discovery and more a cross-section of South Indian dynastic history, layer upon layer, etched into the same forest over fourteen centuries.

Here's where students often trip up: script and language are not the same thing. A single script can carry multiple languages, and a single language can be written in multiple scripts over time. The Nallamala inscriptions are a textbook demonstration of this.

The Satavahana records use Brahmi script to write the Prakrit language — the standard combination for the early historic Deccan. Brahmi, deciphered by Prinsep, is the ancestral script behind nearly all modern Indic scripts, including Telugu and Kannada themselves. By the time you reach the Kalyani Chalukya and Vijayanagara layers, the inscriptions are written directly in Kannada and Telugu scripts — by then fully evolved regional descendants of Brahmi.

Seven dynasties surface in the 2026 survey — a roll call that effectively traces the entire political history of the eastern Deccan from the post-Mauryan period to the eve of Mughal expansion southward. Knowing which dynasty did what, and roughly when, is the single highest-value takeaway from this topic.

The body that actually conducted this survey has a history almost as long as some of the inscriptions it studies. The Epigraphy Branch of the ASI was established in 1886 at Bangalore — a colonial-era recognition that inscriptions were essential to reconstructing Indian history. It moved to Ootacamund in 1903, stayed there until 1966, and has been headquartered at Mysore ever since. Today it's formally called the Office of the Director (Epigraphy), with zonal offices at Chennai and Lucknow set up in 1990 to handle Dravidian and Sanskritic inscriptions respectively. A separate branch for Arabic and Persian inscriptions exists at Nagpur since 1950.

The Mysore office isn't just an archive — it's a working repository of roughly 75,000 estampages (inked impressions of inscriptions), and the ASI has so far copied around 73,000 inscriptions nationwide. Important ones get critically edited in Epigraphia Indica, the flagship research journal, while regional collections appear in South Indian Inscriptions and North Indian Inscriptions. Since 2023-24, the BharatSHRI project (Bharat Shared Repository of Inscriptions) has been digitising this estampage collection — a modernisation effort that places a 19th-century institution squarely inside India's digital heritage push.

The Nallamala find doesn't sit in isolation — 2025-26 has seen a small wave of ASI epigraphical surveys across forest regions, suggesting a deliberate institutional push to survey under-documented forest belts before development or encroachment damages the sites.

UPSC rarely asks about a current event verbatim — it strips the news down to the underlying static concept and tests that. Here, the underlying concepts are: script vs language, dynasty-period matching, and the institutional facts about the Epigraphy Branch.