INTRODUCTION
2. The Most Important Empire that No One Has Ever Heard Of
The heading of this section is something of a hyperbolic statement. The classification of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas as an empire does appear, in a limited fashion, in
scholarship—most notably in the work on Ronald Inden.135 However, scholarship on
Indian history, often with a nationalist tinge, has typically focused on the Mauryas, Guptas, Cōḷas, Bādami Cāḷukyas, Vijayanagara, and Mughals as the paradigmatic empires of the subcontinent. Indeed, histories of empire have been deeply bound to the Indian nationalist project; A.S. Altekar and R.C. Majumdar’s The Vakataka-Gupta Age Circa 200-550 a.d., for instance, envisioned the Gupta dominions spread over the entire expanse of the contemporary India state. Here empire translates to territorially driven expansion as orchestrated from a centralized state. However, while inscriptions, numismatics, and other historical evidence do attest to some sort of center of power, beyond this there seems to have been little more than a regional feudal state. The
historian Romila Thapar has challenged the notion of a highly centralized state advocated by nationalist historians by proposing the notion of empire as a complex form made up of a metropolitan state (e.g. Magadha), core areas, and peripheral areas that included
“differentiated political and economic systems.”136 Her dynamic vision of empire also
incorporates change through which subregional areas became metropolitan states when the metropolitan state declined. The mechanics of Thapar’s notion of empire neatly line up with Burton Stein’s segmentary state model of premodern political organization in which the state is constructed as a center and periphery reduplicated in a beehive
structure of identically organized units of varying sizes, which at every scale contain both a center and periphery. Symbolic power and ritual exchange were strongest at the
imperial center that held together the segments of the state, but was weak in real power.
135 See for example Ronald Inden, “Reconstructions” in Imagining India (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990), 213-262.
136 Romila Thapar, The Mauryas Revisited (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social
Rather, Stein argues that real power adhered at the level of the region, or the nāḍu, in the hands of regional leaders called nattar. In many ways, both Thapar and Stein’s
understanding of the politics of power in premodern South Asia hinged upon the relationships that polities maintained with other smaller-scale and regional politics. Neither Thapar nor Stein fully unpacks the ways in which relationships between the center and the periphery were made, remade, and sustained.
Like previous imperial formations, the Rāṣṭrakūṭas began as a feudatory, in their case of the Bādami Cāḷukyas. Dantidurga (r. 735-756 C.E.), the first independent
Rāṣṭrakūṭa ruler, began his ascent through a series of targeted regional attacks in Kośala, Bharoch, and Gujarat.137 His territorial consolidation was supported by an alliance with
Nandivarman II (r. 730-796 C.E.), the Pallava ruler and enemy of the Bādami Cāḷukya
king Kīrtivarman II (r. 746-753 C.E.). Dantidurga inflicted significant damage upon
Kīrtivarman II, whose overthrow was completed by Rāṣṭrakūṭa Kṛṣṇa I (r. 756-774 C.E), Dantidurga’s uncle and successor. The Rāṣṭrakūṭas immediately set about to consolidate their power at home in the Deccan. This meant bringing the Western Gaṅga and Eastern Cāḷukya dynasties to heel. Kṛṣṇa I first attacked and defeated the Gaṅgas in their
stronghold of Gaṅgavāḍi. Kṛṣṇa I’s issuance of the Talegoan plates from Maṇṇe, the Gaṅga capital, attests to his control of the region.138 Next, Kṛṣṇa I dispatched his crown
prince (yūvarāja) Gōvinda east to Veṅgi where he defeated the Eastern Cāḷukya king Viṣṇuvardhana IV (719-755 C.E). The Gaṅgas and the Eastern Cāḷukyas joined other
regional powers including the Śilāharas of the Konkan as key Rāṣṭrakūṭa feudatories.
137 A.N. Altekar, The Rashṭrakūṭas and Their Times (Poona: Oriental Book Agency,
1967), 37-38.
However, such relationships were not always simple given that feudatories—including the Rāṣṭrakūṭas themselves—exploited any perceived weakness at the center to
destabilize and ultimately overthrow the imperial power. The Rāṣṭrakūṭas had to be militant in policing their vassals. For example, Dhruva (r. 780-793 C.E), Kṛṣṇa I’s second
son to take power after Gōvinda II (r. 774-780 C.E), stamped down a Gaṅga rebellion by imprisoning their king Śivamāra and placing control of the region in his son Stambha’s hands.139 Similarly, after Dhruva, Gōvinda III (793-814 C.E) was required to reconquer
his contemporary Eastern Cāḷukya ruler Vijayāditya. Such maintenance and constant consolidation and reconsolidation at the level of their local regional base allowed the Rāṣṭrakūṭas to mount a serious territorial expansion into north India in Bengal and south to Kāñci and the Pallava domains. By the period of Dhruva’s reign, the Rāṣṭrakūṭas controlled the vast majority of the subcontinent stretching from South India up to Kannauj (Fig. 2.1), but as much as the Rāṣṭrakūṭa rulers aspired to look out to regions beyond the Deccan, they always trained one eye on home.
The facilitation of a smooth political transition was key to the longevity of South Asian polities, a fact of which Rāṣṭrakūṭa Gōvinda III was clearly aware. He died when his son Amōghavarṣa was a mere six years old. Yet Gōvinda III seemed to have planned for such a possibly by leaving his relation Karka Suvaraṇavarṣa from the Rāṣṭrakūṭa Gujarat branch in place as regent. Karka facilitated the child Amōghavarṣa’s rule and quelled the inevitable rebellion that his youthful ascension to the throne brought about: the Western Gaṅgas asserted their independence almost immediately and Eastern
139 Ibid., 54.
Cāḷukya ruler Vijayāditya II (808-847 C.E.) helped overthrow the boy ruler.140 With
friends like these who needed enemies? However, the teenage Amōghavarṣa took back control of the situation; as expressed in the Karda plates, he became a “fire of destruction to the Chālukyas.”141 With Veṅgi brought back into line, Vijayāditya II became a close
vassal of Amōghavarṣa and was given the title aṅkakāra or sworn warrior on behalf of an overlord.142 Elevated to this new position, Vijayāditya was mobilized to fight the
Noḷambas, themselves a nested feudatory of the Western Gaṅgas, who were fighting alongside the Gaṅgas against the Rāṣṭrakūṭas. When the Noḷambas and the Gaṅgas were subdued, Amōghavarṣa further stabilized the situation through the marriage of his daughter to the Western Gaṅga crown prince Bhūtuga.143
The literary and religious efflorescence of Amōghavarṣa court explored in the previous chapter was not matched by the same degree of political success and stability. His rule was defined by a series of internal uprisings, most notably at first during his childhood, but also later when the Gujarat branch of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas rebelled in the 830s. A.N. Altekar observes, “What with these internal revolts and what with his naturally spiritual temperament, Amoghavarsha had neither the time or the inclination to take energetic part in the politics of northern India.”144 Yet, the claim of political quietism
only holds up if we understand military engagement as the exclusive form of political maintenance of this period. Amōghavarṣa’s reign suggests instead an investment in the
140 Ibid., 74-74; N. Ramesan, The Eastern Chalukyas of Vengi (Hyderabad: Andhra
Pradesh Sahithya Akademi, 1975), 19.
141 Altekar, The Rashṭrakūṭas, 75.
142 N. Vekataramanayya, ed. Epigraphia Āndrica Vol. 3 (Hyderabad: Government of
Andhra Pradesh, 1969), 10.
143Altekar, The Rashṭrakūṭas and Their Times, 79. 144 Ibid., 77.
ideological and cultural reproduction of imperium, one that would ultimately prove more enduring than any territorial gains. The two interrelated phenomena that defined his court—the rise of Jain literati and the emergence of Kannada as a literary language— flowed like blood, filling the arteries and veins of the Rāṣṭrakūṭa Empire. Moving across a variety of elite roles beyond simply author, Jains penetrated beyond the Rāṣṭrakūṭa center into the worlds of the its feudatories, most notably the Gaṅgas and the Eastern Cāḷukyas. As these Jains and their texts traveled, they carried with them tastes and sensibilities related to genre, language, and style that would come to define the literary culture of the entire medieval period of the Deccan. A vision of the political was also part of this package; Jains produced the texts that underpinned symbolic power, but they also expressed a vision of power and ideal political worlds that were themselves distinctly Jain. When viewed from the historical perspective of alliances, insurrections, and military engagements, the tumultuous relationship between the Rāṣṭrakūṭa center and its
peripheries appears fragile and precarious. I now want to turn to a different sort of history, one of cultural and religious engagement and connection traced through the lives of Jain poets and their works.