Chandela Dynasty of Jejakabhukti

Hinduized Gonds

formationDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

The Chandels of Jejakabhukti - the old name for the region later called Bundelkhand, between the Jumna and Narmada rivers - did not descend from the same Gurjara stock as the Pratiharas, Chahamanas and other clans grouped under the Agnikula legend. Smith describes them instead as Hinduized Gonds, closely tied to another indigenous tribe, the Bhars, who acquired a small principality near modern Chhatarpur and only gradually advanced their own frontier northward until it reached the Jumna and the edge of Kanauj's own territory. The dynasty first enters the historical record around 831, when a chieftain named Nannuka Chandel overthrew a Parihar chieftain and made himself lord of the southern parts of Jejakabhukti - the Parihars in question being a branch of the same Gurjara clan then ruling Kanauj itself, displaced here on a local scale generations before the main Pratihara line would meet a similar fate.

Builders in stone and water

What distinguished the Chandels early on was less conquest than construction. Smith records the dynasty as great builders who beautified their chief towns - Mahoba, Kalanjar and Khajuraho - with temples and artificial lakes formed by damming the gaps between hills, a practice they borrowed, by the source's own account, from the Gaharwar rulers credited with some of the most attractive lakes in Bundelkhand. For its first century the dynasty likely acknowledged the suzerainty of Kanauj's own most powerful kings, Bhoja and Mahendrapala; only in the first half of the tenth century did the Chandels become unambiguously independent, at exactly the moment Kanauj's own Pratihara dynasty began the long decline that would let a once-subordinate hill kingdom start acting as an equal, and eventually a superior.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Ms Sarah Welch · CC0

An image of Vishnu demanded

peakDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

The reversal of fortune between Kanauj and its onetime Bundelkhand subordinate played out across two generations. In 916, when the Rashtrakuta king Indra III's army sacked Kanauj and drove the Pratihara king Mahipala from his own throne, it was Chandel troops under Harsha who helped restore him - the first recorded instance of the Bundelkhand kingdom acting as Kanauj's ally rather than its tributary. Harsha's son and successor Yasovarman completed the reversal within a single generation. Strengthened by his own occupation of the powerful fortress of Kalanjar, Yasovarman compelled the reigning Pratihara king Devapala to surrender a prized image of Vishnu that the Chandel king wanted for a new temple he was building at Khajuraho - a demand a genuine subordinate could never have made of its own overlord, and proof, in Smith's own reading, that the Chandels had become the stronger power.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Chetansoni · CC BY-SA 4.0

A hundred years, and the grandest temples

Yasovarman's own son Dhanga carried that strength further than any Chandel king before or after him. Reigning from around 950 to 999 and living, by tradition, past the age of a hundred, Dhanga funded some of the grandest of the temples still standing at Khajuraho and took an active hand in the wider politics of Northern India - joining, in 989 or 990, the confederacy King Jaipal of the Punjab organized against the Ghaznavid amir Sabuktigin, sharing in the confederacy's own disastrous defeat between Bannu and Ghazni alongside the Rajas of Ajmer and Kanauj. His son Ganda continued the same double pattern after him: outward participation in failed pan-Indian resistance to Ghaznavid raids, alongside a Bundelkhand kingdom secure enough at home that Ganda's own heir apparent, Vidhyadhara, could march on Kanauj itself in 1019 and kill its king for the humiliation of an unearned surrender - the clearest possible sign that the balance of power Yasovarman had first tipped a century earlier now ran entirely the Chandels' way.

J. Paul Getty Museum · Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Unknown · CC0

Fleeing under cover of darkness

peakDrafted from Dikshit, The Candellas of Jejakabhukti (1977)

Vidyadhara, who came to the throne around 1015, was by his own contemporaries' account the most formidable ruler the Chandels ever produced. Not one inscription of his own reign survives - everything known of him comes from later Chandel records and from Muslim chroniclers - but those chroniclers alone are unambiguous: Dikshit quotes them calling him "the greatest ruler of India in territory, possessing the largest army," a reputation that reached as far as Ghazni and unsettled the Sultan Mahmud himself. His killing of the Kanauj king Rajyapala in 1019 spread that fame further still - Ibn al-Athir writes that his name "spread throughout India" - but by the same stroke marked him as a target worth punishing.

Dikshit, The Candellas of Jejakabhukti (1977) · Ms Sarah Welch · CC0

Two campaigns, and a very different outcome each time

Mahmud marched against Vidyadhara that same autumn, either to avenge a ruler he considered his own tributary or to punish Vidyadhara's support for one of his own enemies, the Punjab Shahi prince Trilochanapala. Vidyadhara rode out from Kalanjar at the head of a large army to meet him - and then, by the Muslim chroniclers' own account, fled the field under cover of darkness, abandoning his elephants and baggage train to the invaders. It was the same cowardice he had reproached Rajyapala for only months before.

The defeat did not cripple him. Three years later, in 1022-23, Mahmud returned, took Gwalior, and laid siege to Kalanjar itself. This time the Chandels held: the siege dragged on, by Dikshit's account, for "a considerable time" before Vidyadhara sued for peace on terms Mahmud was willing to accept, unable to storm a fortress that had withstood what Kanauj's own defenses could not survive in a single day. Smith records that the Chandel kingdom passed a hundred and eighty years after this without another Muhammadan attack - the fortress Vidyadhara had once abandoned a field beside was the one he held.

British Library, London · Dikshit, The Candellas of Jejakabhukti (1977) · Colin Mackenzie · Public domain

Uprooted by the lord of Cedi

contractionDrafted from Dikshit, The Candellas of Jejakabhukti (1977)

Vidyadhara's own successors could not hold what he had defended. Neither his son Vijayapala nor his grandson Devavarman left an inscription recording any success against the kingdom's neighbours, and the Kalachuri king of Dahala, Lakshmikarna - called by modern historians the "Hindu Napoleon" for a sphere of influence Dikshit describes as reaching, on the chroniclers' own telling, from the borders of Kashmir to the Bay of Bengal - overran the Chandel kingdom outright. A later court drama, the Prabodhachandrodaya, states flatly that "the race of the Moon was uprooted by the lord of Cedi, the destroyer of all the princes"; a Chandel inscription of the next generation describes Lakshmikarna's armies as having "destroyed many princes." Dikshit judges it likely that the Chandel king who lost his throne to Karna, and quite possibly his life defending it, was Devavarman - whose name later Chandel records omit entirely from their own dynastic lists, an erasure his family reserved for rulers they did not care to remember.

A drama staged at the court of the king who reversed it

It was Devavarman's younger brother, Kirtivarman, who retrieved the family's fortune. Contemporary and later inscriptions credit him directly with crushing Lakshmikarna in turn - one calls him "the pitcher-born [Agastya] in swallowing that ocean Karna" - and an Ajayagadh inscription hails him as the ruler who created the kingdom anew. The victory became celebrated enough in his own lifetime that a court poet, Krishna Misra, wrote it into the Prabodhachandrodaya, a Sanskrit drama performed, on its own internal evidence, before Kirtivarman himself; the play credits an ally or feudatory named Gopala with the actual battlefield success, comparing him in turn to Varaha raising the earth from the flood and to Narasimha tearing open a tyrant's breast, while the king's own inscriptions give the credit to Kirtivarman directly. Whichever man led the army, the Chandel kingdom that Lakshmikarna had, by the drama's own word, "uprooted" was standing again by the time Kirtivarman's reign ended around 1100.

Dikshit, The Candellas of Jejakabhukti (1977) · Yogendra awasthi · CC BY-SA 4.0

Wearied of government

contractionDrafted from Dikshit, The Candellas of Jejakabhukti (1977)

Kirtivarman's own successors left little trace of distinguished rule, and his grandson Jayavarman, who came to the throne around 1110, left the least of all. The one dated act of his reign that survives is a modest one: in 1117 he had a royal clerk re-engrave, "with clear letters," a Dhanga-era inscription at Khajuraho whose text had become illegible after more than a century - a king remembered, where he is remembered at all, for preserving somebody else's monument rather than raising his own. A Kalanjar inscription gives the reason his reign ended: "wearied of government," Dikshit's rendering has it, Jayavarman abdicated the throne and departed for the Ganges to wash away his sins. He left no capable heir.

An uncle's throne, and a nephew's revival

The throne passed to Jayavarman's uncle, Prithvivarman, the younger brother of Jayavarman's own father Sallakshanavarman - later scholars proposed a disputed succession or even a coup, but Dikshit finds nothing in the inscriptions to support it beyond the ordinary awkwardness of an uncle inheriting past a living line. No record of Prithvivarman's own reign survives at all; his rule is known only because his successors' inscriptions name him.

That successor was his son Madanavarman, whose accession around 1128 began what Chandel inscriptions of the next reign would remember as a recovery of the initiative Kirtivarman had first restored and his own descendants had let lapse. Coins and inscriptions from Madanavarman's reign survive in unusual number, and one of them, raised by his minister Gadadhara, credits the king with driving the Kalachuri (Cedi) king to flight "before his name even," holding the ruler of Kashi to careful deference, and destroying an arrogant king of Malwa outright - very likely the Paramara Yashovarman, whose own dynasty had already been broken by a Chalukya invasion from Gujarat and had nothing left to answer a Chandel attack with. It was Madanavarman's own son, Paramardi, who would inherit the kingdom he rebuilt.

Dikshit, The Candellas of Jejakabhukti (1977) · Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 3.0

A drought, not a battle

endDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

The last Chandel king to matter on the wider stage of Northern Indian history was Paramardi, known popularly as Parmal, whose reign ran from 1165 to 1203. His defeat in 1182 by Prithviraja Chauhan, who captured the Chandel town of Mahoba, became one of the most celebrated episodes in the popular Hindi epic tradition, the Chand-Raisa - a war still remembered in Upper India long after the kingdoms that fought it had both disappeared. But it was not that defeat that ended the Chandel dynasty. Prithviraja's own confederacy fell to Muhammad of Ghor within a decade of humbling Parmal, and it was the Ghurid general Qutb al-Din Aibak, not any Rajput rival, who finally closed out Chandel independence.

The wall of Alexander, undone by drought

Parmal himself, according to the contemporary Muhammadan account Smith quotes, resisted Aibak's forces in the field before retreating into the fortress of Kalanjar, surrendered, and agreed to pay tribute - "placed the collar of subjection round his neck," in the chronicler's own phrase - but died before he could make good on any of it. His minister, Aj Deo, refused to give up as easily as his king had, and held Kalanjar against the siege until a severe drought dried up every reservoir inside its walls, leaving the garrison, "in an extreme state of weakness and distraction," no choice but to march out and abandon the fort. Kalanjar itself, a stronghold the same chronicler calls "celebrated throughout the world for being as strong as the wall of Alexander," fell in the spring of 1203 not to storm or breach but to thirst - the last major holdout of organized Hindu resistance in Bundelkhand, and, with Gwalior's own surrender in 1196 and Anhilwara's capture in 1197, the final piece completing Ghurid control of Hindustan proper.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Ms Sarah Welch · CC0