Indra III sacks Kannauj

Indra III succeeded his grandfather Krishna II at the end of 914 and was formally crowned on 24 February 915. According to A. S. Altekar, he struck when the Pratihara court had been weakened by a struggle for the throne after the death of Mahendrapala I, in which Mahipala I displaced his half-brother Bhoja II; R. C. Majumdar doubted that there had been such a struggle and believed that the empire was at peace when Mahipala came to the throne about 912. The chief record of the campaign is a verse in the Cambay copper plates issued in 930 by Indra’s son Govinda IV: his elephants made the courtyard of the temple of Kalapriya uneven with the blows of their tusks, his horses crossed the unfathomable Yamuna, and he so utterly uprooted the hostile city of Mahodaya — Kannauj — that it was still known by its old name Kushasthala, now in the literal sense, ‘field of kusha grass’. Kalapriya used to be identified with Ujjain, but A. S. Altekar pointed out that it might be Kalpi, which lies on the Yamuna on the way to Kannauj.

The Kannada poet Pampa, writing a generation later at the court of the Chalukyas of Vemulavada, says that Indra’s feudatory Narasimha of that family wrested victory from the Gurjara king: Mahipala ‘fled as if struck by thunderbolts, staying neither to eat, nor rest, nor pick himself up’, while Narasimha, pursuing him, bathed his horses at the confluence of the Ganges — probably its meeting with the Yamuna at Prayaga. As on earlier occasions, the Rashtrakutas did not stay long enough to consolidate their conquest. Mahipala returned with the help of his feudatories — a Chandella inscription says that King Harsha placed Kshitipala, usually identified with Mahipala, on the throne — and in 931 the Pratihara empire still reached from Saurashtra to Banaras. Yet its prestige had suffered a blow from which, in Majumdar’s view, it never recovered: its feudatories, among them the Chandellas and the Paramaras, gradually made themselves independent, and Majumdar compared its slow break-up with the fate of the Mughal empire in the 18th century. Majumdar dated the campaign to between 915 and 918, Altekar to about 916.