Pulakeshin II Ruled the Deccan for More Than 30 Years, Turned Back Harsha at the Narmada, and Had a Court Poet Record His Conquests on a Temple Wall at Aihole

Pulakeshin II ruled the Chalukya kingdom of the Deccan from Vatapi, now Badami in Karnataka, from 610 or 611 until about 642, according to EBSCO’s research summary of his reign. In 634 or 635 the poet Ravikirti, who names Pulakeshin as his patron, had a 37-verse account of the king’s campaigns engraved on a temple at Aihole. It carries the Chalukya armies from the Bhima river to the Kaveri and says that Harsha, the king of Kannauj, lost his “mirth” in fear after his elephants fell in battle.

The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who was Harsha’s guest, wrote that Harsha had conquered the nations from east to west but that the people of the Chalukya country alone had not submitted to him. A king’s own poet and a rival’s guest therefore agree on the main point.

Nearly everything about the reign comes from three kinds of text: the Aihole poem, which is a eulogy written for the king; Xuanzang’s travel record; and the later inscriptions of the Pallavas, the southern rivals who ended the reign. Each claim below says whose voice it is.

A nephew who took the throne

The Chalukya family was already a power before Pulakeshin II. The district administration of Bagalkot, the Karnataka district that holds Badami, credits the first Pulakeshin with laying the foundations of the city and says Mangalesha, a later king, completed its cave temples.

When Pulakeshin II’s father, Kirtivarman I, died, the boy was a minor, and Kirtivarman’s brother Mangalesha took the throne, according to EBSCO’s summary. A civil war began around 609 or 610 and ended with Mangalesha killed. The poem gives Pulakeshin’s side: his uncle was jealous of him, he resolved to wander as an exile, and Mangalesha gave up both his kingdom and his life.

From the Bhima river to the Kaveri, in the poet’s order

Ravikirti lists the conquests in sequence, and F. Kielhorn, who edited the poem for volume 6 of the journal Epigraphia Indica, found that the places follow one another along a route. In verse 17, two invaders, Appayika and Govinda, come to take the land north of the Bhima. Pulakeshin repels one, and in Kielhorn’s reading he wins the other as an ally.

The next verses take the king to Vanavasi, which he besieges; to the Ganga and Alupa lords, whom the poem calls subdued by his dignity; to the Konkan coast; and to a coastal city called Puri, which he is said to attack with hundreds of ships. The Latas, Malavas and Gurjaras of the north, the poem says, submitted to him. Kielhorn notes that the wording of verse 22 suggests they came of their own accord and were not beaten into it. Verse 25 gives the king sovereignty over the three Maharashtrakas, with 99,000 villages.

Then the route turns to the east coast. The Kalingas and Kosalas show fear (verse 26), the fortress of Pishtapura falls (27), and his army occupies the water of Kunala, which Kielhorn identifies with the Kolleru lake between the Godavari and Krishna rivers (28). The Pallava king is driven behind the walls of Kanchipuram (29), and the army crosses the Kaveri (30).

In EBSCO’s account Pulakeshin left his younger brother in charge of the east, which began the Eastern Chalukya line, and his rule ran from the Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal. India’s entry for UNESCO’s Tentative List describes the dynasty’s territory as bounded by the Narmada in the north and the Kaveri in the south.

Harsha at the Narmada

Verse 23 is the poem’s line on Harsha. In Kielhorn’s translation, Harsha “had his mirth (harsha) melted away by fear”, loathsome with his rows of elephants fallen in battle. The pun on the name is the poet’s. Verse 24 says the country around the Vindhya hills and the sandbanks of the Reva, a name for the Narmada, shone more brightly for his splendour. The poem names no battlefield, and it does not say Harsha was killed or captured.

Sayantani Pal, who wrote the Harsha unit for an Indira Gandhi National Open University course, explains why the two kings met. Their kingdoms touched at the Narmada, with the Latas, Malavas and Gurjaras in between, and Pulakeshin claims all three as vassals. After Harsha occupied the Maitraka kingdom of Valabhi, its king Dhruvasena II married Harsha’s daughter and became his ally. That drew Dhruvasena away from Pulakeshin’s influence, Pal says, and might have been the reason for the conflict.

The poem gives no date for the clash either. A summary of the Chalukyan wars on EBSCO places Pulakeshin’s repulse of Harsha in 632, two or three years before the poem was written.

Later Chalukya inscriptions go further than Ravikirti. Pal notes that Pulakeshin’s successors said he took the title Parameshvara, “supreme lord”, by beating Harsha, whom they styled lord of all the northern regions. R. C. Majumdar, she writes, suggested that the successors magnified the result. Her own reading of Xuanzang is that Harsha took the initiative but achieved no success against Pulakeshin.

What Xuanzang saw in Maharashtra

Xuanzang was Harsha’s guest, not Pulakeshin’s, and EBSCO’s summary says he visited the Chalukya country in 641. In Samuel Beal’s English translation the country is about 5,000 li (a Chinese measure of distance) around, with a rich and fertile soil and a hot climate. The people, in Xuanzang’s words as Beal renders them, were honest and simple, tall, and of a stern and vindictive character.

Xuanzang then describes a code of war. A man planning revenge first warned his enemy, and a fighter did not kill an opponent who had fallen. A general who lost a battle was handed women’s clothes and was driven to seek death himself. Several hundred champions kept by the state drank wine before battle, and the elephants were given wine too. The king, a Kshatriya named Pulakesi in Beal’s spelling, treated his neighbours with contempt because of these men and elephants. Xuanzang adds that his plans were wide-spread and his beneficent actions were felt over a great distance.

The country, he says, held about 100 Buddhist monasteries with some 5,000 monks, who followed both the Great and Small Vehicles, the two main schools of Buddhism, and about 100 temples of the gods. A monastery cut into the rock of a mountain valley on the eastern frontier is also described. Beal’s note reads it as the caves at Ajanta, the site covered in Ajanta and Ellora: carved from rock.

On the war with Harsha, Xuanzang is plain. Harsha gathered troops from the five regions of India and went at the head of his army, “but he has not yet conquered their troops.” Harsha’s side of the story, including Xuanzang’s own visit to Kannauj, is in Harshavardhana, the last great northern king.

The Pallava war and the end of the reign

Verse 29 of the poem says Pulakeshin drove the Pallava ruler behind the walls of Kanchipuram. In EBSCO’s summary the king turned south toward Mahendravarman I and forced him back to his capital, but the record of what came next is not clear, and Pulakeshin returned to Vatapi without winning Pallava lands. The Bagalkot page on Badami says he defeated Mahendravarman and that the Pallavas later captured and destroyed Badami in revenge.

The answer came from Mahendravarman’s son, Narasimhavarman I. According to EBSCO’s summary of his reign, he defeated Pulakeshin at Manimangala, about 20 miles (30 km) east of Kanchipuram, and in several other battles, and took the title Vatapikonda, “conqueror of Vatapi”. An inscription at the Mallikarjunadeva temple in Badami, dated 642, records that in his thirteenth regnal year he set up a victory pillar there after capturing the city. That is a Pallava claim, made in the Pallavas’ own voice.

The sources differ on details. One EBSCO summary dates the fall of the capital to about 641 and says Pulakeshin was killed defending it. Another dates the Pallava invasion to 642 and has him rushing south from north Karnataka and dying in the fighting. Both EBSCO and the Bagalkot page end his reign in 642.

The dynasty recovered. Pulakeshin’s son Vikramaditya I invaded Pallava country in 674 and avenged his father’s death, the Chalukyan wars summary says.

The poet on the temple wall

In Kielhorn’s reading of the poem, Ravikirti founded the temple of the Jain teacher Jinendra on which the inscription was engraved, and in verse 36 he calls himself both its author and its founder. The Bagalkot page on Aihole names the building the Meguti temple, says it was built atop a small hill in 634 AD and calls it the only dated monument in Aihole. That page also describes Ravikirti as a commander and minister of Pulakeshin, a different description from Kielhorn’s.

The poem dates itself twice. Verse 33 counts 3,735 years since the Bharata war, and verse 34 counts 556 years of the Shaka kings. Kielhorn converts both to 634 or 635 CE. Verse 37 wishes Ravikirti victory and says his skill has won him the fame of Kalidasa and Bharavi. Kielhorn thought the claim an exaggeration but placed Ravikirti in the front rank of court-poets. The article on Kalidasa, the poet of Shakuntala covers how historians use that verse to date Kalidasa.

Aihole, Badami and Pattadakal

The Chalukyas left a larger record in stone than in verse. Aihole has about 125 temples in 22 groups, the Bagalkot page says. India’s entry for UNESCO’s Tentative List says prototypes of 16 types of free-standing temples and four types of rock-cut shrine were developed at Aihole and Badami, and reached their mature form at Pattadakal.

The Pattadakal temples that the Archaeological Survey and UNESCO attribute to a named patron were built after Pulakeshin’s death. The Archaeological Survey of India names the Sangamesvara temple, built by Vijayaditya (697 to 733), as the oldest there, and says the Virupaksha was built by a queen of Vikramaditya II (733 to 746). UNESCO dates the Virupaksha to about 740 and says Queen Lokamahadevi built it to mark her husband’s victory over the southern kings. The Survey adds that the Virupaksha served as a model for the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I when he carved the Kailasa temple at Ellora.

UNESCO inscribed Pattadakal on the World Heritage List in 1987 under criteria (iii) and (iv), and its description speaks of nine Hindu temples and a Jain sanctuary. India submitted a Tentative List entry on 9 February 2015 to extend the site to the groups at Aihole and Badami.