The Rashtrakutas and their Times c15.14

c15.14

The Yuvaraja had the status of a Pañcamahāśabda-Sāmanta and was invested with a necklace which was the insignia of his office, as would appear from the observation of Govinda III to his father, that he was quite content with the necklace with which he was invested by the latter at the time of his appointment as an heir-apparent.⁶ He was a member of the ministry, according to the Nīti-śāstra writers of the period, and we find him exercising the royal prerogative of granting villages.⁷ When the ruling emperors were old and of a retiring or religious disposition like Amoghavarsha I or Amoghavarsha III, the heir-apparents exercised almost all the powers of the ruling kings. We have already seen how this was responsible for the overlapping of the reigns of the kings just mentioned and their sons, who succeeded them.⁸ The Yuvaraja usually stayed at the capital. He was hardly ever deputed as a viceroy to an outlying province under the Rāṣṭrakūṭa administration. The reasons were obvious; if the Yuvaraja were absent from the capital his chances of succession were likely to be affected by the machinations of other aspirants to the throne. This was a real danger in the Rāṣṭrakūṭa dynasty, whose records are too full of the wars of succession. The Rāṣṭrakūṭa practice was to depute younger princes and cousins as provincial governors. Thus Dhruva was a governor at Dhulia in 779 A.D., before he rebelled against and ousted his elder brother Govinda II; Dhruva's cousin Saṅkaragaṇa was a governor in Berar in 793 A.D., Indrarāja of the Gujarat branch had appointed his younger son Govinda as a provincial governor.⁹ These examples can be multiplied almost ad infinitum. The only case of the eldest son being a provincial viceroy is that of Stambha; but his viceroyalty of the newly conquered province of Gangawadi was rather an exile than an appointment. He was sent there by his father who had superceded his claims in the Yuvaraja selection.