Pulakeshin I fortifies Vatapi: the rise of the Chalukyas of Badami

Pulakeshin I was the son of Ranaraga and the grandson of Jayasimha, the earliest historically attested ruler of the family. How the Chalukyas came to power is debated: K. A. Nilakanta Sastri held that Pulakeshin began as a vassal of the Kadambas of Banavasi and declared his independence by seizing the country around Vatapi. The inscription is carved on an inaccessible part of a cliff about 250 feet high in the northern fort of Badami; it was found in 1941 independently by R. S. Panchamukhi and by the Western Circle of the Archaeological Survey of India, and Panchamukhi published it. Written in Sanskrit, it states that in the Shaka year 465 the Chalukya Vallabheshvara, performer of the horse sacrifice and other rites according to the Vedic shrauta ritual, made the great hill of Vatapi into an invincible citadel, unapproachable from the top as well as from the bottom. Panchamukhi thought that Pulakeshin had established himself at Vatapi before 543 and performed the horse sacrifice in token of his unchallenged position; other inscriptions give him the titles Satyashraya and Dharma-maharaja.

His sons turned the principality into a regional power. Kirtivarman I (from 566/567) was, in the words of the Aihole inscription of 634, ‘the night of doom’ for the Kadambas of Banavasi, the Nalas and the Mauryas of the Konkan, and Pulakeshin’s grandson Pulakeshin II came to control most of the Deccan. The Chalukyas of Badami ruled until 753, when the Rashtrakuta king Dantidurga overthrew the last of them, Kirtivarman II; their cave and stone temples at Badami, Aihole and Pattadakal are landmarks of early Indian temple architecture.