The Early History of the Deccan (Parts I–XI) v1.c9.s2.t8: Vikramāditya II

The Early History of the Deccan (Parts I–XI) v1.c9.s2.t8

Language: English

Vikramāditya II

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Vikramāditya II succeeded his father in A.D. 733-4. During the first years of the reign there was real danger of an Arab invasion of the Chālukyan empire; we hear nothing of it in the records of the main dynasty, but the Nausārī grant (A.D. 739)⁹ of Avanijanāśraya Pulakēśin of Lāṭa, a son of Dharāśraya Jayasimhavarman, gives valuable information about it. There was a formidable invasion of Gujerat by the Tājikas or Arabs; they are said to have already destroyed the Saindhava, Kachchella, Saurāṣṭra, Chāvoṭaka, Maurya, and Gurjara kings, and then, wishing to enter the Deccan to conquer all the southern kings, they attempted to reduce the Navasārikā District in the southern country; but Pulakēśin was equal to the task of stopping their progress and throwing them back out of the Gurjara country, and also of annexing that territory to the empire of the Chālukyas. The Chālukya emperor duly recognized the great service rendered by his kinsman and feudatory by conferring on him many titles, among them Avanijanāśraya (refuge of the people of the earth). The wise policy of Vikramāditya I on the northern frontier of the empire thus bore good fruit even after so many years, as a result of that policy having been scrupulously continued by his successors.

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⁹ DKD, pp. 375-6; EHD, pp. 187-8.

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Very soon after this, Vikramāditya began a war against the Pallava ruler of Kāñchī, Nandivarman II Pallavamalla. The only reference to these campaigns in the documents of the reign occurs in an undated inscription from Paṭṭadakal which describes Lokamahādevī as the queen of Vikramāditya who thrice overran Kāñchī.¹ But the Kendūr and Vakkalēri plates of Kīrttivarman II describe in identical terms two of the three campaigns in some detail; the narrative is confirmed by the presence of a Kannaḍa inscription of Vikramāditya engraved on one of the pillars in the temple of Rājasimheśvara (Kailāsanātha) at Kāñchī; the Pallava inscriptions are altogether silent on these important occurrences. Vikramāditya, we learn, was in high spirits after his attainment of the world's sovereignty, and he then made up his mind to destroy his natural foe, the Pallava, who had cast a shadow upon the glory of his ancestors; he reached the Tuṇḍāka country by forced marches, defeated in battle and drove from the field the Pallava king called Nandipōtavarman who had advanced to meet him, seized the instruments of martial music known as Kaṭumukha-vāditra and Samudra-ghōsha together with the Khaṭvāṅga-banner, a number of high-class war elephants and mounds of sparkling jewels, entered the city of Kāñchī without damaging it, pleased its people by his liberal gifts to Brāhmans, the poor, and the indigent, and achieved great fame by returning to Rājasimheśvara, which Narasimhapotavarma had built of stone, and to all other temples, the heaps of gold that belonged to them. Then follows a rider in two long and wordy paragraphs which tell us that the irresistible valour of Vikramāditya caused distress to the Pāṇḍya, Chōḷa, Kerala, Kaḷabhra, and other kings, and that he erected a Jayastambha to celebrate and keep in memory his great fame which had spread to the southern ocean. The Kāñchīpuram inscription of Vikramāditya says that he took Kāñchī and became happy at the sight of the wealth of Rājasimheśvara, which he duly returned to the deity; the inscription records at the end that it was written by order of the Vallabha-Durjaya.²

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¹ IA, x, 164-5.

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² EI, iii, 360.

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The inscriptions are clear in themselves and no comment is needed. Vikramāditya was the aggressor on this occasion; the disgrace of the Pallava occupation of Vātāpi and the inscription left behind by Narasimhavarman near one of the great temples of the city rankled in the mind of the Chālukya, and he paid his foe back in the same coin by putting up an inscription of his own in his own language on the largest and the most beautiful of the numerous temples of the Pallavas in their capital city. We do not know where the battle between Nandivarman II and Vikramāditya took place, or the route followed by Vikramāditya. An inscription of the 15th year of Nandivarman at Mallam in the Guḍūr tāluk of the Nellore district records a gift of gold to a temple made by order of the Caḷukki-arasar at the request of the Āḷuva-arasar, and this may well be accepted as an indication of the route followed by Vikramāditya either to Kāñchī or on his way back thence.¹ We may well allow his claim to have spared the city and its temples from destruction and loot, and infer that Narasimha’s occupation of Vātāpi a century earlier was marked by the same restraint and moderation.

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¹ Nellore Inscriptions, pp. 429-30, G54. MAR, 1941, p. 220, no. 45 from Tumkur District in Mysore also seems to refer to this expedition of Vikramāditya.

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Some time later another expedition against the Pallava kingdom was led by Vikramāditya’s son Kīrtti-varman II, who is said even as a boy to have gained mastery over the weapons of war as well as over his passions, and to have installed as Yuvarāja by his father who was pleased with the many good qualities of his son. The Yuvarāja asked to be sent to put down the enemy of their family, the lord of Kāñchī, and soon after started on the expedition; the Pallava, who was unable to face him and fight in the open field, took refuge behind the walls of a fort where he was beleaguered until his strength gave out. Kīrtti-varman returned home with numerous elephants captured from the enemy and a vast amount of spoil in the shape of gold and jewels, and presented them to his father. This successful raid, it was clearly nothing more, must have occurred in the last years of Vikramāditya, and the Pallava ruler at the time was doubtless Nandivarman Pallavamalla. This was the third conquest of Kāñchī claimed for Vikramāditya by his queen.

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Two sisters from the Haihaya (Kalachuri) family were the queens of Vikramāditya, and each of them built temples and founded charitable institutions. Lōkamahādevī was the elder; she built the great stone temple of Lokeśvara, now known as the Virūpāksha temple, to the south of the Vijayeśvara temple erected by her father-in-law at Paṭṭadakal.² This shrine was obviously in existence earlier, perhaps as a much smaller structure, for Lōkamahādevī confirmed the old privileges (pūrva-maryādegal) granted to the musicians (gandharvas) of the temple by Vijayāditya.³ The architect of the temple was Śrī Guṇḍan Anivāritāchāri, who was honoured by the grant of many titles and privileges, and the temple itself was richly endowed by the queen with incomes from the district of Narengalla 50.⁴ The younger queen, mother of Kīrtti-varman II, Trailokyamahādevī, also erected a large stone temple, Trailokyeśvara, to the north of the Vijayeśvara temple; the Trailokyeśvara temple is no longer in existence. The construction and location of these three temples are accurately described in an inscription on a pillar to the west of the Vijayēśvara temple, that is in the midst of the three shrines and in front of his own dwelling, by Śubhadeva, alias Jñānaśivācārya, who came from Mṛgathaṇikāhara Viṣaya on the northern bank of the Ganges and was living as a dependant of Vijayēśvara-bhaṭṭāraka; obviously he was the worshipping priest imported from Northern India by Vijayāditya after the construction of the great temple now known as Saṃgameśvara. Evidently the reign of Vikramāditya II was marked by other constructions elsewhere, as inscriptions from Lakshmeśvar and Aihoḷe go to show.¹

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² EI, iii, 1-7.

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³ IA, x, 166.

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⁴ Ibid., pp. 164-5, 167.

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¹ IA, vii, p. 106, ll. 61-82; viii, 286.

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Kīrtti-varman II succeeded his father and began to rule as paramount sovereign sometime in A.D. 744-5.² The building activity that marked his father's reign continued into his, and inscriptions from Āḍūr and Annigere record the erection and endowments of Jain temples.³ The Sindas, Sendrakas, and other feudatories like king Mādhavatti of the Āḍūr record continued to serve the monarch loyally. The king himself was devoted to his duties and we find him in various camps on the banks of the Bhīmā once in his 4th regnal year (Ainuli plates) and again in the eleventh (Vakkalēri grant). Kīrtti-varman was the last Cāḷukya ruler of the Bādāmi period, and, as the later Cāḷukya records put it, ‘in his reign the Rājyaśrī of the Cāḷukyas disappeared from the face of the earth’. Danger to his rule came from the rise of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas. Several petty rulers bearing this name are found in different parts of the Deccan about this time, and some of them were doubtless feudatories of the Cāḷukyan empire like Govindarāja, the son of Śivarāja, and vijñapti of the Naravaṇa grant of Vikramāditya II (A.D. 743);⁴ Naravaṇa is a village in the Chiplun tāluk of the Ratnāgiri district. The Rāṣṭrakūṭa who actually overthrew Kīrtti-varman II was Dantidurga, the founder of the main line of the Imperial Rāṣṭrakūṭas of Mānyakheṭa (Malkhed). He was the son of Indra by a Cāḷukya princess Bhavagaṇā whom he married by force on the battlefield at Kaira⁵ (Kheṭaka). The Sāmangad plates of Dantidurga which come from Kolhapur territory and bear the date A.D. 753-4⁶ already speak of the overthrow of Cāḷukyan sovereignty as an accomplished fact. The fact is reported in two verses which say: one, that the mighty Karṇāṭaka army which had once overcome the lord of Kāñchī, the king of Keraḷa, Chōḷa, Pāṇḍya, Śrī Harsha, and Vajraṭa, was now easily routed by Dantidurga with the aid of a few followers mounted on invincible chariots; and the other, that the Vallabha succumbed at the sight of the enemy forces without offering any resistance and readily surrendered to him the position of Supreme Overlordship. This last is doubtless an exaggeration. Dantidurga evidently made long and adequate preparations, military and diplomatic, before he delivered his assault on the imperial power, and when it came, Kīrtti-varman found that he had lost the battle before ever it had really begun. Dantidurga must have begun his activities somewhere in the Madhya Pradesh, since the scene of his early exploits is laid on the banks of the rivers Mahī, Mahānadī, and Rēvā (Narmadā); he subdued the Gurjaras of Mālwā, the rulers of Kosala and Kalinga, and the Śrīśaila country (the Telugu Choḍas), and most important of all he went down to Kāñchī, and there, after a demonstration of force, struck up an alliance with Nandivarman Pallavamalla to whom he gave his daughter Rēvā in marriage. Having thus by a policy of indirect approach almost completely isolated Kīrtti-varman and deprived him of his outlying provinces, Dantidurga delivered the final assault on Kīrtti-varman’s position and openly declared himself the sovereign power in the Deccan. In fact all indications point to a rapidly progressing attenuation of Chālukyan power before Dantidurga’s aggrandizement rather than a sudden military disaster of an overwhelming character. After the date of Dantidurga’s Sāmangad charter (753), Kīrtti-varman ruled for some years more; for Dantidurga’s successor, Kṛishṇa I, also claims successes against the Chālukyas; it seems possible that Kīrtti-varman put up a belated and futile struggle. However that may be, the Vakkalēri plates which record a grant made by him from his victorious camp at Bhaṇḍāragavittage on the north bank of the Bhīmā river in the 11th year of his reign is the last we hear of the imperial line of the Chālukyas of Bādāmi.

Cites (3)

Sangamesvara temple
Pattadakal pillar inscription (No. CVI) — Kannada
Paṭṭadakal inscription (No. 481) — Sanskrit