A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c7.25

c7.25

Shorter by a hundred miles in its course than the Godāvari, and perhaps less sacred in popular estimation than either the Godāvari or Kaveri, the Krishna is the largest of the three in the area of its drainage basin. Rising just north of Mahabaleshwar, within forty miles of the Arabian Sea, it flows southwards skirting the eastern spurs of the Western Ghats and receiving a number of tributaries mostly from the west. Below Kurundvad it turns eastwards to pass through the south Maratha country into Mysore and Andhra Pradesh. Near the hills the channel is rocky and the stream too rapid for navigation, but it is used largely for irrigation in the Satara district and the more open country to the south-east. In the Belgaum and Bijapur districts its banks of black soil and laterite are high (between 20 and 50 feet) especially on the southern side. On entering Mysore it drops down from the tableland of the Deccan proper to the alluvial doab of Raichur by crossing a succession of lofty ledges of granite that stretch across the river. The stream is very swift here with a fall of over 400 feet in three miles. It receives first the waters of the Bhima draining the Ahmadnagar, Poona and Sholapur districts, and later the Tungabhadra draining the northern part of the Mysore plateau and the districts of Bellary and Kurnool. Then for a considerable distance its bed is deep and rocky, its channel has a rapid fall, and then its course winds in a north-easterly direction across the Nallamalai range. On reaching the Eastern Ghats, it turns sharply south-eastwards and flows directly to the sea which it enters by two mouths. At Vijayavada, forty-five miles from the sea as the crow flies, it runs through a gap barely 1,300 yards wide in a range of gneissic hills and just below this point the river has been dammed for irrigation purposes. Below the dam the channel of the river is at a somewhat higher level than the surrounding plain.