Nalagama’s side held the field; Malideva was killed, Brahmanaidu’s young son Balachandra fell, and the warrior class of Palnadu was all but wiped out.
01Two ministers
Palnadu, the dry upland west of the Krishna delta, was ruled in the twelfth century by Haihaya chiefs who owed allegiance to greater powers. Two half-brothers divided it: Nalagama at Gurazala and Malideva at Macherla. Each had a famous minister. Nayakuralu Nagamma, a woman who rose to the highest office at Nalagama’s court, was his strategist; Brahmanaidu, the soldier-statesman of Macherla, was Malideva’s. In the telling of Srinatha’s Palnati Viracharitra and the ballads, a cockfight wagered by the two courts cost Malideva’s party its kingdom and sent it into exile, and when the exile ended Gurazala refused to give the land back.
02The field at Karempudi
The armies met at Karempudi on the Naguleru river, each backed by allies from the larger kingdoms around. The fighting went on until most of the warriors on both sides were dead. Malideva fell. Brahmanaidu’s son Balachandra, a youth sent off to battle by his new bride Manchala, died a hero’s death and is the best loved figure of the ballads. Nalagama kept his throne, but Palnadu was ruined and the Kakatiyas soon took the region. At the Veerla Gudi, the heroes’ shrine at Karempudi, the weapons of the Palnadu warriors are worshipped every year in the month of Kartika, and the ballad singers still perform the war.
Palnadu weakened the old feudal houses of coastal Andhra and cleared the way for the Kakatiyas; its epic is a founding work of Telugu heroic literature.