Chalukya Empire (Badami)

A boulder records a fort

formationDrafted from (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960)

Long treated as a matter of legend and reconstructed genealogy, the Chalukyas' own founding came into much sharper focus in 1941, when an inscription was discovered on a boulder in the fort at Badami itself. It records that by Saka 465 — 543 or 544 AD — the hill fort at Vatapi had already been fortified, above and below, by a ruler styled the Chalukya Vallabhesvara, who performed several sacrificial rites there including the Ashvamedha, the horse sacrifice long recognized across India as the ritual symbol of sovereign, undisputed power. This ruler is identified with Pulakeshin I, and the source treats him plainly as "the real founder of the Chalukyan kingdom" — the man who established Chalukya independence from prior Kadamba overlordship by fortifying Vatapi and making himself master of the surrounding country.

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · VasuVR · CC BY-SA 4.0

A capital chosen for its defenses

Vatapi's own selection as capital reflected clear strategic thinking: the site stood on a defensible eminence within three miles of the Malaprabha river, and its surrounding neighborhood — Mahakuta a short distance to the east, Pattadakal and Aihole further along the same river — would in time become studded with the dynasty's own temples and inscriptions, physical testimony to two centuries of Chalukya rule radiating outward from this one fortified stronghold.

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · Dineshkannambadi · CC BY-SA 3.0

A name and a reputation that outlasted the man

Later Chalukya inscriptions, some composed centuries after his own death, continued to recall Pulakeshin I's horse sacrifice as proof of the dynasty's own legitimate claim to paramount sovereignty — a foundation myth grounded not in legendary origin stories but in an actual ritual act his own descendants kept invoking as late as the twelfth century, long after the Chalukyas of Badami themselves had ceased to exist.

The frontier Harsha could not cross

peakDrafted from (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960)

Pulakeshin II inherited a kingdom in ruins. A civil war during the closing years of his predecessor Mangalesha's reign had brought the Chalukya empire to the edge of collapse, and when Pulakeshin took the throne around 609-610 the world was, in a contemporary court poet's own words, "encompassed by the darkness of enemies." He held Vatapi and little else, and had to rebuild Chalukya power from that single foothold outward.

An empire rebuilt from one fortress

Pulakeshin proved equal to the task. Within a few years he had brought the whole of the Deccan back under Chalukya control, launched the eastern branch of his own line into the Telugu country, and made his own name respected as far away as the Persian court of Khusrau II. It was against this rebuilt power that Harshavardhana, whose own conquests had brought most of northern India under his control, turned south — and met the one reversal his otherwise unbroken career would ever suffer.

British Library, London · (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · Henry Cousens · CC0

A battle that fixed a frontier

Harsha's army lost heavily in the fighting, particularly in elephants, and the Narmada river became the fixed boundary his forces could never push past — the single check on an emperor whose campaigns elsewhere in India met no comparable resistance. The victory, won sometime before 612, stood as the defining achievement of Pulakeshin's own reign: proof that the kingdom he had rebuilt from a single fortress could turn back the most powerful ruler in India.

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · Ms Sarah Welch · CC0

A debt collected by a different rival

The empire that had stopped Harsha could not stop everyone. Some three decades later, a Pallava army under Narasimhavarman I advanced rapidly on Vatapi itself and took the city and its fortress by force — retribution, Pallava inscriptions make clear, for Pulakeshin's own earlier advances that had twice threatened Kanchipuram with the same fate. Nothing more is heard of Pulakeshin II after the fall of his own capital, and the source treats his death in the fighting as the only reasonable reading of that silence. The king who had stopped an emperor at the Narmada could not, in the end, stop the revenge of a neighbor he had humiliated twice.

Three kings conceal a fortune

contractionDrafted from (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960)

Pulakeshin II's death in the fighting at Vatapi did not simply cost the Chalukyas a battle - it opened thirteen years in which no one could say for certain who actually ruled the empire he had built.

An empire that could not agree who inherited it

Feudatories who had answered to Pulakeshin began declaring themselves independent within months of his death, issuing land grants that made no mention of Chalukya overlordship at all. Worse, his own sons could not agree on a single successor. A copper-plate grant survives from the first regnal year of one son, Adityavarman, who took the full royal titles and claimed to have brought "the whole earth" under his own sway; a second grant, from a different year, was issued by Queen Vijaya-Bhattarika, ruling in the name of her late husband Chandraditya

• Adityavarman's own brother, evidently already dead by the time of her grant, and clearly succeeded by no adult son of his own. Later Chalukya court genealogies, confused by the whole episode, tried to paper over it by inserting two invented generations between Pulakeshin II and the eventual restorer.

A fortune "concealed by three kings"

That restorer was Vikramaditya I, whose own early inscriptions describe him as having gained back his father's "regal fortune, which had been concealed by three kings" - Adityavarman, Chandraditya, and, by most readings, the Pallava king Narasimhavarman I himself, whose sudden invasion had triggered the whole crisis in the first place. Vikramaditya did not do it alone. His maternal grandfather, the Western Ganga king Durvinita, intervened on his behalf - later inscriptions credit Durvinita with defeating a Pallava threat and personally establishing his own grandson in his hereditary kingdom, motivated as much by loyalty to his own daughter's dead husband's line as by any formal obligation to the Chalukyas as overlords. Vikramaditya's own war-horse, Chitrakantha, is remembered by name in the tradition as having carried him through the battles that followed.

A throne restored, piece by piece

Vikramaditya dated his own reign from 654-655, and spent its early years doing exactly what his own inscriptions claimed: restoring lapsed temple grants his predecessors had let fall away, and recovering, district by district, territory that had slipped from Chalukya control during the interregnum. Copper-plate grants from his third and sixth regnal years show Chalukya authority reasserted in the Ceded Districts and along the Nellore coast; feudatory families who had drifted toward independence, or even toward the rival Pallavas, were brought back or confirmed in a looser but still recognizably Chalukya orbit. It was not a swift recovery, and it was not complete - but within a decade of an empire that could not settle who ruled it at all, Vikramaditya had rebuilt something recognizably continuous with what his father had lost.

A rag for a cloak

contractionDrafted from (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960)

Having rebuilt his own inheritance, Vikramaditya I turned the same campaign south, toward the kingdom whose invasion had cost his own father's life a generation before.

A camp outside the enemy's own capital

By 670-671, sixteen years into his reign, Vikramaditya had advanced a large military camp to Malliyur, west of Kanchipuram itself, in what a contemporary land grant describes as an active subjugation of the Pallava dynasty already under way. A further grant, issued four years later from a victorious camp south of the Kaveri, credits him with having crushed three successive Pallava kings in turn - a rhetorical flourish playing on the divine names each Pallava ruler had carried - and with capturing Kanchi itself, "the city which was her girdle," in language triumphant enough to leave no doubt the grant's own scribes believed the war already won.

A king who fled the way his own father had died

The Pallava side of the story survives too, and it does not agree. A charter of the Pallava king Paramesvaravarman I claims that he forced Vikramaditya's own army - "several lakhs of men," in the grant's own exaggeration - to flee the field, the Chalukya king himself covered by nothing more than a rag. Paramesvaravarman had escaped the fall of his own capital, rallied forces from the rest of his kingdom, and sent a diversionary force under the general Siruttondar into Chalukya territory to split Vikramaditya's attention before the decisive engagement. That battle came at Peruvalanallur, near Trichinopoly, around April 674 - and by every later Pallava account, it was Vikramaditya who was driven back into his own territory, not the Pallavas who lost their capital for good.

A war neither side's own inscriptions could end cleanly

The truth sits somewhere between the two boasts: Vikramaditya plainly took Kanchi at some point in the campaign, and just as plainly did not hold it, driven out by a Pallava counterattack he had not fully anticipated. Through the years of this southern campaign, Vikramaditya left the Chalukya homeland in the hands of his own son, Vinayaditya - a delegation of authority that meant the kingdom kept functioning even while its king spent years fighting an inconclusive war on someone else's frontier, one round in a Pallava-Chalukya rivalry that had already claimed one king's life and would go on claiming ground back and forth for another century.

A feudatory's patient isolation

endDrafted from (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960)

Kirttivarman II, the last Chalukya king of Badami, took the throne around 744-745 to inherit an empire that had recovered from Pulakeshin II's own death a century earlier but was already showing signs of renewed strain. Feudatory chieftains bearing the Chalukya name had spread across the Deccan by this point, some loyal, some increasingly independent in all but title — among them a rising family descended from one Indra, whose son Dantidurga would prove the most dangerous of them all.

(ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (1960) · RameshM · CC BY-SA 4.0

An heir who married his way into the family he would destroy

Dantidurga's own rise combined military ambition with calculated alliance-building. He married a Chalukya princess he had taken by force on the battlefield at Kaira, tying his own line to the imperial family even as he prepared to supplant it. Rather than move directly against Kirttivarman, he spent years building strength on the margins of Chalukya power — subduing the Gurjaras of Malwa, campaigns against Kosala and Kalinga, and, most consequentially, marching all the way to Kanchipuram, where he struck an alliance with the Pallava king Nandivarman Pallavamalla by giving him his own daughter in marriage.

An empire isolated before it was ever attacked

By the time Dantidurga turned against Kirttivarman directly, the Chalukya king had been stripped of his outlying provinces and diplomatic support through years of patient maneuvering rather than open war. The source is explicit that this was no sudden catastrophe: "a rapidly progressing attenuation of Chalukyan power" preceded Dantidurga's final assault rather than any single decisive battle. Dantidurga's own Samangad copper-plate grant, dated 753, already describes the overthrow of Chalukya sovereignty as an accomplished fact, declaring that the once-invincible Karnataka army that had defeated the lords of Kanchi, Kerala, Chola, Pandya and Harsha himself was "now easily routed by Dantidurga with the aid of a few followers."

A lingering reign with nothing left to rule

Kirttivarman did not vanish immediately. Records from his own camp show him still issuing grants in his eleventh regnal year, and his conqueror's own successor, Krishna I, still found it worth claiming further victories against him — evidence, the source suggests, of "a belated and futile struggle" rather than any real continuation of Chalukya power. That eleventh-year grant is the last trace history has of the imperial line Pulakeshin I had founded two centuries before at Vatapi, a dynasty that ended not in one battle but in the slow, deliberate isolation a former subordinate had spent years arranging before he ever moved against it.