Mangalesha defeats the Kalachuri Buddharaja

01Two records

The Mahakuta pillar inscription, set up in 602 at the Mahakuteshvara temple near Badami, records that Mangalesha, having defeated Buddharaja and taken his wealth, wished to set up a pillar of victory, and granted villages to the god. The Nerur plates of Mangalesha speak of the same war and of the Kalachuri king fleeing. The Aihole inscription adds that Mangalesha drove out the Kalachuris, with their wealth of elephants and horses, as a lamp drives out darkness.

02The northern frontier

Buddharaja’s own plates, issued from Vidisha and Anandapura, show a kingdom stretching across Malwa and Gujarat. Driving him north left the Chalukyas masters of the upper Godavari, and set their frontier on the line where, eighteen years later, Pulakeshin II would meet Harsha. The Kalachuris did not vanish. A branch of the same family rose again in central India, and from Tripuri near Jabalpur the later Kalachuris became one of the great powers of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Place · Fortified 543 CE by Pulakeshin I; cave temples 6th century, Cave 3 dated 578 CEBadami (Vatapi)Vatapi, capital of the Chalukyas, set in red sandstone cliffs around the Agastya lake. Its four cave temples hold some of the earliest dated Hindu sculpture in the Deccan.Read →