In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in the village of Guḍnāpur in Karnataka. The monument has since become known as the Guḍnāpur Pillar Inscription of Ravivarman (ca. 465–500 CE) after the ruler of the early Kadamba kingdom who commissioned it. The inscription preserves a compelling historical record that details the intersections of religious and political performance at the Kadamba court as centered around a temple to Kāma constructed within the confines of the royal residence at Vaijayantī (Banavasi), and the distribution of agrarian lands to support its maintenance. This study presents a new translation and analysis of the text and a discussion of the pillar as a ‘text-monument’ that was both embedded within and constitutive of landscapes: physical and built as well as rhetorical and imagined. By presenting the Guḍnāpur inscription as a text-monument situated within multiple landscapes, the article reveals how documentary, donative, religious, and agrarian practices supported state-making in an early South Indian kingdom.

1971 年 3 月，BR Gopal 在卡纳塔克邦的 Guḍnāpur 村发现了一个部分掩埋的柱子，上面刻有可见的文字。这座纪念碑后来被称为拉维瓦曼的 Guḍnāpur 柱子铭文（公元 465-500 年）) 在委托它的早期卡丹巴王国的统治者之后。铭文保留了令人信服的历史记录，详细描述了 Kadamba 宫廷中宗教和政治表演的交叉点，以在 Vaijyantī (Banavasi) 皇家住所范围内建造的 Kāma 神庙为中心，以及支持其发展的耕地分布维护。这项研究对文本进行了新的翻译和分析，并讨论了作为“文本纪念碑”的支柱，它既嵌入在景观中，又构成景观：物理和建筑以及修辞和想象。通过将 Guḍnāpur 铭文呈现为位于多个景观中的文本纪念碑，文章揭示了纪录片、捐赠、宗教、