The Chalukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts c6.s8: The Great Feudatory Families
The Chālukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts c6.s8
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The Great Feudatory Families
c6.s8.1
Under the supreme government of the reigning family of the Chālukyas and their supplanters were minor hereditary chiefs of provinces, who, though governing their own particular districts with all the authority of petty rulers, were subordinate and answerable to the former. For the purposes of Government the kingdom was divided up into areas, each containing a definite number of towns and villages such as the Banavasi Twelve-Thousand, the Panuṅgal Five-Hundred, and the Belvola Three-Hundred, over each, or groups of which, a *Mahāmaṇḍaleśvara* or other officer had charge. These petty chiefs not only came to the assistance of their feudal lord with troops when required, but occasionally fought out their own little neighbourly quarrels among themselves. These families seldom, if ever, held their posts for more than a couple of generations. Sometimes they were in rebellion against their masters, when, as in the case of the Kaḷachuris, Hoysaḷas and Yādavas, they grew powerful enough, for the time being, to dispossess them and usurp full sovereign authority. They issued their land grants in their own names.
c6.s8.2
The oldest of these families was that of the Śilāhāras of which there were three leading branches—two in the Koṅkaṇ and one above the Ghāts. The southern Koṅkaṇ branch appears to have occupied the seaboard south of Bombay as far as Goa at least, while the northern branch had their headquarters at Puri, a place not yet satisfactorily located but possibly in the centre of Sālsette island, where, around and north of Marol village, there are still indications of an ancient settlement.¹ The family above the Ghāts occupied the districts surrounding Karāḍ and Kolhāpur.
c6.s8.3
¹ See Progress Report of the Archæological Survey of India, Western Circle, 1907-8, p. 30.
c6.s8.4
The Raṭṭas of Saundatti possessed that part of the country immediately around Saundatti and Belgāum, these two places having been, in turn, their capitals. They were first vassals of the Rāshṭrakūṭas and then of the Western Chālukyas, when, after, perhaps, a short period of independence, they were subdued by the Yādavas of Dēvagiri.
c6.s8.5
During the early years of the Chālukyan occupation of the Kanarese districts there was a short line of Kādamba kings who ruled at Banavāsi (Vaijayantī), and who came into conflict with Kīrtivarman I. They were followed up, in later times, by two families calling themselves Kādambas, one of which was the Kādambas of Hāngal, with that place as their capital. Although they styled themselves “supreme lords of Banavāsi,” that district was not always under their jurisdiction. The second family of Kādambas ruled at Goa in the Koṅkaṇ.
c6.s8.6
Another family of feudatory nobles was the Sindas of Yelburga, of which there apperas to have been more than one branch. That which came into more immediate contact with the Chālukyas, and was subordinate to them, governed the district from Bāgalkot to Yelburga.
c6.s8.7
Finally there were the Guttas of Guttal, who, for a time, were governing a small district around Guttal and Chauḍadampur in the Dhārwār district.