Harsha’s army melted away, his son was killed, and the king was cut down in hiding; Uchchala took the throne.
01The king who melted the gods
Harsha came to the throne in 1089, a poet and musician who knew many languages and dressed his court in new fashions. Wars, famine and his own extravagance emptied the treasury. Kalhana says he then appointed an officer, the devotpatana-nayaka, whose task was to tear down images of the gods, and had the gold and silver images of temples across the valley seized and melted, leaving the stone. Kalhana, who otherwise admires his talents, calls him a Turushka for this and records that he kept Turkish captains in his army.
02The end in a hut
In 1100 two princes of the Lohara family, the brothers Uchchala and Sussala, rose against him with the support of the Damaras, the landholders of the valley. Harsha’s forces deserted. His son Bhoja was killed fighting. The king, abandoned, hid in a monk’s hut outside the city, where Uchchala’s men found and killed him in 1101. Kalhana’s father Champaka had been one of Harsha’s high officers and stayed loyal, and Book VII of the Rajatarangini tells the fall with unusual closeness and pity.
The fall of Harsha ended the first Lohara line and opened half a century of civil war in Kashmir; Kalhana’s account of it is the closest a Sanskrit historian came to writing about his own time.