Mayurasharma founds the Kadamba kingdom of Banavasi

The story is told in a Sanskrit verse inscription on a pillar at Talagunda, carved at the order of King Shantivarman in the second half of the 5th century. The Kadambas, it says, were a Brahmin family named after a kadamba tree that grew by their house. Mayurasharma went with his teacher Virasharman — his grandfather, according to another inscription — to the Pallava capital, Kanchi, to study the Vedas at a ghatika, a centre of learning, but after a fierce quarrel with a Pallava horseman he abandoned his studies: the hand used to grasping sacrificial grass and the ladle, the poet says, unsheathed a flaming sword. He overcame the Pallava frontier guards, entrenched himself in the forest at Shriparvata (probably Srisailam), levied tribute from the Banas and other kings and defeated the Pallava armies, until the kings of Kanchi chose him as a friend; entering their service, he received from them a crown (a fillet) and a territory from the western ocean to the limit of Premara (or Prehara), which by the compact no one else was to enter.

The date of about 345 and the reign of about 345–365 are conventional: the Talagunda inscription gives no dates and was written more than a century later. Some historians, among them George Moraes and K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, think that Mayurasharma took advantage of the confusion in the south after Samudragupta had defeated the Pallava king Vishnugopa. His son Kangavarma is said to have changed the family name ending from -sharma to -varma; his descendants enlarged the kingdom and married their daughters into the Gupta and Vakataka houses. The Kadambas of Banavasi ruled until about 540, when their former vassals, the Chalukyas of Badami, took over. The earliest Kannada inscription, found at Halmidi and usually dated to about 450, belongs to their time.