The Early History of the Deccan (Parts I–XI) v2.c15.s1.6

v2.c15.s1.6

From these pedigrees it would seem probable that Muchcha and his son Kāṭa were the commanders of Prōla I and his son Bēta II respectively. In this case Kākati Bēta and his commander, Bēta I’s army, ‘flung open, like a curtain, the doors of the city of Kāñchī’, and ‘promptly brought about the marriage of the Kākati monarch with the Goddess of Victory’. Neither the actual date of this victory nor the circumstances in which it was achieved, are known. Bēta I was an obscure petty chief in Telingāna, which was then included in the Western Chālukyan dominions. He thus obviously could not, on his own account and entirely by himself, have led an expedition all the way across the Eastern Chālukyan kingdom to Kāñchī, defeated the powerful Chōḷa emperor, and captured the city. It is, on the other hand, not unlikely that Bēta I and his general Brahma did in fact accompany their Western Chālukyan overlords during an expedition which the latter conducted against the Chōḷa kingdom. Now before the date of the Kāzīpēṭa inscription the Western Chālukyas invaded the Chōḷa kingdom only once and that happened during the reign of Āhavamalla Sōmēśvara I. The Chōḷa king Rājādhirāja I, taking advantage of Sōmēśvara’s expedition to Māḷava, made an attack on the latter’s capital, Kalyāṇi, and destroyed it by fire, in A.D. 1052, whereupon Sōmēśvara, as soon as he returned from Māḷava, sent a large army under Polakēśin, and devastated, in retaliation, the city of Kāñchī, the northern capital of the Chōḷa kingdom. Bēta and his general most probably participated in Polakēśin’s expedition and thereafter assumed credit for the success of the enterprise. Of the other events of Bēta’s rule nothing is known, and it appears to have come to an end soon after his return from the South.