Gahadavala Dynasty of Kanauj

A city reclaimed

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

By the closing decades of the eleventh century Kanauj had spent nearly a century as a shadow of the city Mihira Bhoja once ruled from - a diminished court under obscure chiefs, tributary to whatever power happened to hold the middle Gangetic plain, its old Pratihara dynasty fading into names nobody thought worth recording. Into that vacuum came Chandradeva, a chief of the Gaharwar clan, who conquered and occupied Kanauj a little before 1090 and installed his own line there

• a line later writers would sometimes call "Rathor," though Smith is careful to note the label is a later misapplication, and that the family the inscriptions actually name is Gaharwar, or Gahadavala.

Little beyond the bare fact of conquest survives from Chandradeva's own reign. What his rule did establish was the platform his grandson would use to make Kanauj a real power again rather than merely a reclaimed name - proof that the contest for paramountcy over the Gangetic plain, quiet since the Pratiharas' own final obscurity, still had one more chapter left before a still greater power arrived from beyond India's own northwestern frontier.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Koba-chan · CC BY-SA 3.0

The glories of Kanauj restored

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

Chandradeva's grandson Govindachandra held the throne for at least half a century, his reign attested between 1104 and 1155 by land grants numbering close to sixty - more than survive from any other Gahadavala king - and by coins distributed widely enough to trace the real extent of his authority. Smith reads this evidence plainly: Govindachandra "succeeded to a large extent in restoring the glories of Kanauj," rebuilding a genuine regional power on the foundation his grandfather's conquest had only sketched out. The court held both Kanauj and Varanasi, and one of his own land grants from Oudh, dated to 1129, records a special levy called turushka danda - a tax raised specifically to fund resistance against Muhammadan raiders already probing the kingdom's own frontier, proof that even at its own strongest the Gahadavala state was organizing its finances around a threat it could see coming decades before that threat became fatal.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 3.0

A restored throne, an unfinished contest

What Govindachandra's reign did not do was settle, once and for all, the older question the Pratiharas and Palas had spent three centuries fighting over - which power would hold Kanauj permanently. His own restoration was real, but it was also, in retrospect, a last full flowering rather than a new equilibrium: the same turushka danda that funded his own defenses shows a kingdom already budgeting for a war it expected to keep fighting, against an enemy whose own raids into India were only going to grow more frequent, not less, in the generations after his death.

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

The story ends at Chandawar

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

Govindachandra's grandson Jayachandra - remembered in the popular Hindi poems and tales of Northern India as Raja Jaichand - ruled from what Muhammadan historians treated as his capital at Varanasi, and was reputed, in his own day, the greatest king in India. Popular tradition credits him with a domain stretching from the borders of China to Malwa, and from the sea to within ten days' march of Lahore

• claims Smith judges impossible to credit at face value, though they capture how the kingdom's own reputation had grown since Govindachandra's restoration. The same popular tradition also remembers Jayachandra as the father of a daughter carried off by Prithviraj Chauhan of Ajmer, a story told and retold in Hindi verse for centuries afterward, though it belongs to legend rather than to anything the inscriptions themselves record.

A single battle, a whole kingdom's end

What is not legend is what happened at Chandawar, in the Etawah district near the Jumna, in 1194. Shihab-ud-din - Muhammad of Ghor - met Jayachandra's own army there and, in Smith's words, defeated "his huge host with immense slaughter, in which the Raja was included." The Ghurid sultan pressed on afterward to Varanasi itself, plundering the city and carrying its treasure home on fourteen hundred camels. Smith's own verdict on the battle is blunt: "Thus ends the story of the independent kingdom of Kanauj" - a paramountcy three dynasties had fought over for nearly four centuries, closed out in a single afternoon by an army from beyond India's own northwestern frontier.

British Library, London · Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · James Prinsep · Public domain

What was left behind

Kanauj itself did not vanish from the map. When the Gaharwar line died out, local rule passed to chiefs of the Chandela clan from Mahoba, who governed the city for eight more generations - a subordinate, tributary afterlife under Muhammadan overlordship rather than a resumption of the independence Chandawar had ended. The paramountcy itself, the thing three great kingdoms had spent two centuries fighting to hold, never returned to any Hindu dynasty in Northern India again.