The Dynastic History of Northern India (Early Mediaeval Period) v2.c31.18

v2.c31.18

Though it is difficult to disentangle truth from fiction in this story it undoubtedly contains some elements of fact. The existence of the Cāvoṭakas as a ruling power in Gujarat in the first half of the 8th century A.D. is proved by the Nausari grant of the Cālukya prince Pulakeśi Avanijanāśraya (739 A.D.).⁶ It tells us that sometime before 739 A.D. an army of the Arabs (*Tājikas*) destroyed the Saindhava, Kacchella, Saurāṣṭra, Cāvoṭaka, Maurya and Gurjara kings, and on their way to the Deccan advanced as far as the Navasārikā country (situated in Lāṭa). The Haddala grant of Mahīpāla shows that the Cāpas as a feudatory power lingered on in Eastern Kathiawar and Central Gujarat, till 914 A.D. The Una grants indicate the existence in Gujarat of the Cālukya feudatories of the Kanauj rulers in A.D. 893 and the period preceding it. It is therefore not unlikely that one of these vassals who was connected by blood with the Cālukyas of Kalyani and through marriage with the Pratīhāras of Kanauj, overthrew the small Cāpotkaṭa principality at Pañcāsara.¹ This may have been the origin of the distorted tradition of a prince from Kalyāṇa in Kanauj. But in the present state of our knowledge of Indian history it is unsafe to assert dogmatically that there could not have existed in the first half of the 10th century a city named Kalyāṇa in the province of Kanauj² which was also the seat of a local Cālukya principality. Whatever may be the value of these guesses, we may probably conclude that Mūlarāja, the founder of the Caulukyas of Gujarat, was really the son of a Cāvaḍā princess who destroyed his maternal uncle and seized his principality at Aṇahilapāṭaka.³ In the inscriptions his father Rāji is designated a *Mahārājādhirāja*.⁴ During the period under survey this title often indicated no more than feudatory rank,⁵ and it is not impossible that Rāji's family, as well as that of his wife, were vassals of the great Gurjara-Pratīhāra empire. As I have already suggested, Mūlarāja profiting by the decline in the power of the Pratīhāras and the Rāṣṭrakūṭas in the second half of the 9th century carved out a small independent principality in the Sarasvatī valley. His Kadi grant tells us that he acquired the *Sārasvata-maṇḍala* by the prowess of his own arms.¹ In the Vadnagar *praśasti* of the reign of Kumārapāla, dated in 1151 A.D., we are told that he took captive ‘the fortune of the kingdom of the Cāpotkaṭa princes.’² Both these statements tend to support the chronicles according to which Mūlarāja captured Aṇahilavāḍa on the Sarasvatī from the last Cāvaḍā prince.