Lords of The Deccan- Southern India From The Chalukyas To The Cholas

The history of the vast Indian subcontinent is usually told as a series of ephemeral moments when a large part of modern-day India was ruled by a single sovereign. There is an obsession with foreign invasions and the polities of the Gangetic plains, while the histories of the rest of the subcontinent have been reduced to little more than dry footnotes. Now, in this brilliant and critically acclaimed debut book, Anirudh Kanisetti shines a light into the darkness, bringing alive for the lay-reader the early medieval Deccan, from the sixth century CE to the twelfth century CE, in all its splendour and riotous glory.

Kanisetti takes us back in time to witness the birth of the Chalukyas, a dynasty that shaped southern India for centuries. Beginning at a time when Hinduism was still establishing itself through the Deccan, when the landscape was bereft of temples, he explores the extraordinary transformation of the peninsula over half a millennium. In vivid and colourful detail, Kanisetti describes how the mighty empires of medieval India were made: how temple-building and language manipulation were used as political tools; how royals involved themselves in religious struggles between Jains and Buddhists, Shaivas and Vaishnavas; and how awe-inspiring rituals were used to elevate kings over their rivals and subjects. In doing so, he transforms medieval Indian royals, merchants and commoners from obscure figures to complex, vibrant people. Kanisetti takes us into the minds of powerful rulers of the Chalukya, Pallava, Rashtrakuta and Chola dynasties, and animates them and their world with humanity and depth.

It is a world of bloody elephant warfare and brutal military stratagems; of alliances and betrayals; where a broken king commits ritual suicide, and a shrewd hunchbacked prince founds his own kingdom under his powerful brother’s nose. This is a world where a king writes a bawdy play that is a parable for religious contestation; where the might of India’s rulers and the wealth of its cities were talked of from Arabia to Southeast Asia; and where south Indian kingdoms serially invaded and defeated those of the north. This painstakingly researched forgotten history of India will keep you riveted and enthralled. You will never see the history of the subcontinent the same way again.

ANIRUDH KANISETTI is a history researcher and writer based out of Bengaluru and Hyderabad. He currently works at the Museum of Art and Photography. He has received grants from the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities and the India Foundation for the Arts, and his writings and work have been featured in The Hindu, The New Indian Express, LiveMint and The Print, among others. He hosts two critically acclaimed podcasts - Echoes of India and Yuddha.

Every monsoon, rain clouds bathe the cool, dark surfaces of an ancient temple in Ellora, Maharashtra. Peals of thunder echo in its cavernous halls, like the bells that once greeted throngs of devotees.

There's something dazzlingly different about this gigantic temple. You see, it isn't a building of the kind you and I might be used to. It wasn't assembled bottom up from the ground, brick by brick, stone by stone.

It was excavated.

It is called the Kailashanatha, the Lord of Kailasha, because generations of awestruck visitors have seen it as a manifestation of the mountain upon which the god Shiva lives. To fashion it, thousands of sculptors carved up an enormous basalt cliff face, removing two million cubic feet of rock (enough to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools). They did so in barely twenty years in the ninth century CE, with a plan breathtaking in its scale and attention to detail, leaving behind a monolith the size of a football field and about half the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A monolith in the shape of a spectacular south Indian temple, with the weight of its superstructure cascading down in wider and wider tiers, decked with sculptures of frolicking deities. The Kailashanatha is a single sculpture so large that it approaches the size of modern buildings. As a monolithic structure, it is unlikely to be matched in size and beauty for the rest of human history.

This extraordinary edifice was made by people who thought themselves every bit as modern as you or I. They were a vibrant, warlike, sophisticated people. They were ruled by men who claimed the majestic title of Sri-Prithivi-Vallabha, the Beloved of Sri (the goddess of fortune) and Prithivi (the goddess of Earth). Their empire dominated the ancient Deccan plateau at the heart of India, especially the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka, today an area almost as large as Germany and many times more populous. At their peak, these Vallabha emperors received the prostrations of hosts of vassal kings from Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra, Telangana and Tamil Nadu, and dominated most of India south of the Narmada river. One Arab merchant, visiting this medieval superpower in the ninth-tenth centuries, mentioned the lord of the Deccan in the same breath as the Abbasid caliph, the emperor of China, and the Byzantine emperor. Another visited the glittering capital of the Deccan, Manyakheta, and left us with an account of its wonders:

... in that city there are for the ordinary people one million elephants which carry the merchandise ... In this temple there are about twenty thousand idols made of a variety of precious metals, and carved stones mounted with artistically-worked precious jewels ... [There] is an idol whose height is twelve cubits and is placed on a throne of gold in the centre of a golden cupola, the whole of which is set with jewels like white pearl, ruby, sapphire, blue and emerald stone.

Both these accounts - even allowing for some exaggeration - leave no doubt that in the eyes of the medieval world the Deccan was the wealthiest and most powerful of all the kingdoms of the Indian subcontinent.

This book is a story about this time when the Deccan.ruled India: an epic journey through five hundred years of a history that has long been forgotten.

Our tale begins in the sixth century CE, a few decades after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in Europe, only a few years after the disintegration of the Gupta empire of northern India. In the dry and arid heartland of the Deccan, cattle raids, banditry and abduction were ubiquitous. Here, an obscure clan of chalke (crowbar)-wielding agriculturists or pastoralists learned the difficult lessons of war and diplomacy, and began to battle their way up the shifting hierarchies of India's kingdoms. Within the space of three generations, they declared themselves a new imperial dynasty - the Chalukyas - established a mighty citadel in the sandstone cliffs of Vatapi in northern Karnataka, and exploded on to the historical stage by defeating the dominant ruler of north India. That collision, which occurred in 618 CE on the shores of the Narmada river, is where this book begins. It will set the stage for a half-millennium of Deccan dominance.

In the first part of this book we will watch these Chalukyas, masters of medieval Indian geopolitics, at work. They understood very well that there was little wealth to be scratched out of the arid lands of the Deccan. Soon after their emergence on the medieval Indian stage, they went to war north, south, east and west, ruthlessly raiding their wealthier neighbours and breaking into the networks of the Indian Ocean trade. We will watch how an empire was made, attempting to peek, through the dust of centuries, into the minds and hearts of the men and women at its centre. We will accompany them in these wars, gaining a singular look into the machinations of medieval Indian power, and the glories and tragedies associated with it. We'll see how this power shaped and was shaped by the turbulent religious and social tides of medieval India, observing these upstart Chalukyas - constantly looking for new propaganda to rally their unruly vassal chiefs and subjects - ally with the rising tides of bhakti devotion to Shiva the Destroyer; patronize the use of Sanskrit literary texts in south India; and embark on a wave of monumental building projects, establishing some of the oldest surviving temples in the subcontinent.

By the mid-eighth century, this project of dynastic aggrandizement had elevated the Chalukyas to the heart of a sprawling network of vassal kings, governors, trading ports and pilgrimage sites that dominated the Deccan plateau and much of India's western coast. A cadet Chalukya line ruled a kingdom of their own in Andhra, on India's east coast. This vast agglomeration of people could mobilize resources of such a scale that a Chalukya vassal, acting on his own initiative, was able to smash the Umayyad Caliphate's attempt to conquer Gujarat in 737 CE, defeating a seemingly invincible army that had seized Sind and parts of Gujarat, and even reached the outskirts of Ujjain in modern-day Madhya Pradesh.

**Contents and Sample Pages**