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The Early History of the Deccan (Parts I–XI) v1.c9.s1: Introductory Remarks

The Early History of the Deccan (Parts I–XI) v1.c9.s1

Language
English

Contents

Introductory Remarks

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THE Cāḷukyas were the most important dynasty of rulers that held sway in the Deccan before the foundation of Vijayanagar. With Vātāpai (Bādāmi) as their first capital they brought about the political unification of the Deccan in the sixth century A.D. and held their own for well over two centuries (except for a short interval of about fifteen years) against powerful antagonists like the Pallavas in the south and Harshavardhana in the north. At the same time they established semi-independent kingdoms ruled by their collaterals in Gujerat and in Vengi. The Eastern Cāḷukyas of the Vengi kingdom (Andhradeśa) kept up their rule continuously for four centuries and more, and when their western kinsmen suffered eclipse from the rise of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas they kept their independence with the aid of the Chōḷas, with whom their relations became more and more intimate until in the latter part of the eleventh century a single ruler came to occupy the thrones of both the Vengi and Chōḷa kingdoms. Towards the close of the tenth century the power of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas waned, and the main line of the Cāḷukyas emerged from the obscurity of two centuries, and once more filled the stage of Deccan history with Kalyāṇapurī, ‘the best of all cities in the world’, for their capital, dividing and contesting with the Chōḷas of the Tamil country the sovereignty of India south of the Vindhyas. War and politics were by no means the only concerns of the Cāḷukyas. They were great builders, and one dominant style of Indian architecture derives its name from them. Kannada and Telugu literatures drew sustenance from their patronage, and Vijñāneśvara, perhaps the greatest jurist of ancient India, was proud to count himself among the courtiers of the illustrious Vikramāditya VI. The fortunes of the Cāḷukyas of Gujerat lie beyond the scope of the present volume; the other three lines will claim our attention in the order in which we have named them above.

Sources: Inscriptions

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Inscriptions form our main source, and they are found engraved on stone slabs and pillars or on copper plates. They are written in Sanskrit and Kannada in the western half of the Deccan, and in Sanskrit and Telugu in the eastern zone, and are usually donative or dedicatory in purpose. The inscriptions of the Cāḷukyas of Bādāmi number a few score only; those of the Cāḷukyas of Vengi, mostly on copper plates, do not amount to many more; but those of the Cāḷukyas of Kalyāṇī, the bulk of them on stone, exist in great quantities, though their historical value is by no means proportionate to their numbers. Even this most reliable class of our sources, however, offers problems, not all of which can be solved to satisfaction. Dates are often given in the Śaka era with details which can be verified, but they do not always fall into a consistent system; mutually contradictory statements of fact and of chronology are thus not uncommon; and when the inscriptions of contemporary dynasties with whom the Chālukyas came into contact are also considered, as they must be, these contradictions multiply. Invention and embellishment are constantly at work, later inscriptions sometimes professing to give more detailed and widely different accounts of subjects more summarily treated in earlier records, and this treatment is applied to legends as well as to historical occurrences. The data from inscriptions have therefore to be worked up with discretion, and it would be tedious to set forth fully the reasons governing the choice in every case. Spurious copper-plate grants have been ignored altogether. Fresh inscriptions are being discovered every year, but few of them are as important as the Bādāmi rock inscription of Ś. 465 (A.D. 543)—discovered in 1941—recording the erection of the hill fort of Vātāpi by the Chālukya Vallabheśvara. Notwithstanding this the main outline of Chālukya history may be regarded as now well established, and there is little likelihood that new discoveries will demand revolutionary readjustments on any large scale.

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The information yielded by inscriptions we may eke out with the aid of literature, monuments, and coins. But little help is to be had from these sources for the Bādāmi period; the only important literary sources for this period are the notes of Hiuen Tsang on the country of Mahārāṣṭra, its rulers and its people, and a notice in the Persian historian Ṭabarī which was once held to support the interpretation of some paintings in the first cave at Ajanta as representations of the Persian monarch Khusrau II and his celebrated consort Shirīn, and of Pulakēśin II receiving a Persian embassy. No coins of the Western Chālukyas of this period are known, though several gold and silver pieces of the Vengi branch have been found.¹

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¹ See, however, *MAR*, 1933, p. 98 for a 'boar and lotus' doubtfully assigned to Pulakēśin I.

The name

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'Chalkya' seems to have been the original form of the dynastic name; by the insertion of a euphonic vowel, this became Chalukya, which was later embellished into Chālukya, Chaulukya, the last being a derivative form applied to the later collateral lines of Gujerat and farther north. Possibly Khamda Chaliki Remmanaka, i.e. Remmanaka the Son of Khanda Chaliki of one of the Nāgārjunikonda inscriptions,² who was *mahāsenāpti* and *mahātalavara* under the Ikshvāku ruler Virapurisadata, is the earliest Chālukya chieftain known to history; but this is by no means certain as he is called Vāsiṭhiputa—the Chālukyas were Hāritiputras—and belonged to the family of Hiramnaka. Whether this official was a Chaliki or not, there is now little room for doubt that the Chāḷukyas, like the Chutus and the Kadambas to whom they bear many resemblances, and like the Rāṣṭrakūṭas, were an indigenous clan which rose to importance in the service of the later Sātavāhanas and their successors. They belonged to the Karṇāṭaka country, sometimes called also by the name Kuntala, and their mother tongue was Kannaḍa. There is little evidence to support the view often expressed by earlier writers that they were a foreign tribe who entered India along with the Huns. One of the earliest literary references to them occurs in a Tamil lexicon of about A.D. 800 called Divākaram which mentions Chaḷukkai-Vēndar (Chāḷukya kings) as rulers of Vēlpulam who had the boar-banner (Kēḷal-koḍi) as their emblem; the meaning of Vēlpulam (Vēḷ country) has not been satisfactorily elucidated.

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² *EI*, xx, 18, B. 4.

Legends of origin

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A Bādāmi inscription of A.D. 578 is the earliest record among those which deal with the family legend of the Chāḷukyas; here it is stated in its simplest form, and they are said to be meditating at the feet of the sacred Svāmi (Kārttikeya as later inscriptions show), to be Hāritiputras of the Mānavya gotra, and to have had their heads purified by the final ablutions after the performance of the agniṣṭoma, agnichayana, vājapeya, pauṇḍarīka, bahusuvarṇa, and aśvamedha sacrifices. It should be noted that the Brāhman dynasty of the Kadambas, and before them the Chutus who called themselves Sātavāhanas, were also Hāritiputras of the Mānavya gotra. The Kadambas were also devotees of Kārttikeya, and being Brāhmans of kingly race, were naturally given to the performance of Vedic sacrifices. This identity of family legends at the beginning of the story, particularly of those concerning the metronymic and the gotra, is sure proof of a definite historical connexion most probably dating back to the days of the Sātavāhanas. The long epithet naming the sacrifices, first applied to the family as a whole, is found twenty-five years later applied in the Māhākūṭa inscription to the first great ruler of the line, Pulakēśin I. The legend grew in the course of time in length and complexity; during the Bādāmi period the variations were not great, and very soon a standard form was reached which was subsequently kept unchanged. The Māhākūṭa pillar inscription (A.D. 602), unique in many ways, includes a whole line from the Raghuvamśa of Kālidāsa¹ in the praśasti of the family, but this was not repeated in other records; it also praises the energy, wisdom, strength, and courage of the rulers of the line, their devotion to their parents, and their generosity and beneficence. The definitive form of the praśasti for the Bādāmi period is found first in the Haidarabad grant (A.D. 612) of Pulakēśin II, and speaks of ‘the family of the Chāḷukyas who are Hāritiputras of the Mānavya-gotra which is praised throughout the world; who have been nourished by the Seven Mothers who are the mothers of the seven worlds;

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¹ yathāvidhi hutāgnīnām yathākāmārcitārthinām.

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who have acquired an uninterrupted continuity of prosperity through the protection of Kārttikeya; who have had all kings made subject to them at the sight of the boar-crest which they acquired through the favour of the divine Nārāyaṇa’. Let us note that even in these early legends we find the devotion of the line directed both to Kārttikeya the son of Śiva, and to Viṣṇu, to whose favour they owed their all-victorious boar-crest. This crest was adopted to indicate the nature of their work, that of protecting the earth from molestation by bad rulers, by suggesting a comparison with the task achieved by Lord Nārāyaṇa in his boar-incarnation.

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About the beginning of the eleventh century A.D. a fresh crop of legends grows up and begins to fill a large place in epigraphy and literature; that was the time when all the dynasties of South Indian rulers gave themselves respectable pedigrees with the aid of their court poets, generally claiming descent from the sun or the moon. In the case of the Cāḷukyas, these legends run in two main streams, one western and the other eastern; there is no agreement between them, and no useful purpose will be served by seeking to analyse such late and discordant traditions in any detail. Fifty-nine kings of the Cāḷukya line ruling at Ayodhyā, after them sixteen kings ruling over dakṣiṇāpatha (Deccan), a temporary obscuration of the line, followed by a restoration under Jayasiṃha who overthrew 500 kings besides the Rāṣṭrakūṭa Indra, with the 800 elephants in his army—these are the chief features of the western version starting with the Kauthem grant (A.D. 1009) of Vikramāditya V. Other inscriptions found in the same region trace the descent of the line from Manu through Mānavya and Hārita to Cāḷukya; yet others carry the ancestry back to the moon, or to Brahmā, while Bilhaṇa produces a story that the eponymous ancestor of the line issued from the Chuluka (the cupped palm) of Brahmā in response to Indra’s appeal to the creation of a hero who should put an end to the growing godlessness on the face of the earth. The eastern version beginning with the Raṇastipūṇḍi grant of Vimalāditya (A.D. 1011) is more comprehensive; it includes Brahmā, the moon, and the fifty-nine emperors of Ayodhyā, with Udayana among them, in the pedigree; then it says that Vijayāditya, a member of the family, went on an expedition to the south, and lost his life in battle with Trilocana-Pallava. His widowed queen gave birth to a posthumous son whom she called Viṣṇuvardhana, in honour of the Brāhman Viṣṇubhaṭṭa Sōmayājin of Muḍivēmu with whom she had found refuge in her distress. When he grew up, Viṣṇuvardhana made pūjā to Gaurī, the goddess of the Cāḷukya hill, and by her grace he regained the royal insignia of his line and established its rule in the entire seven-and-a-half-lakh country of the dakṣiṇāpatha, extending from the Narmadā river in the north to Rāmeśvaram (Setu) in the south. Interesting as the beliefs cherished by the members of a historic dynasty for several generations, these puerile stories are of course no value as factual history.

Cites (4)