Tailapa II overthrows the Rashtrakutas and restores Chalukya rule

Within a few years of the death of Krishna III the Rashtrakuta empire fell apart. Krishna had given the province of Tardavadi, in the heart of the empire, as a fief to Tailapa of the Chalukya family. Under his brother and successor Khottiga the Paramara king Siyaka (Harsha) defeated the Rashtrakuta forces on the Narmada and plundered Manyakheta; the poet Dhanapala noted that he finished his Paiyalacchi at Dhara in Vikrama 1029 (972/973), ‘when Manyakheta was plundered by the king of Malava’. Khottiga died soon afterwards, and his nephew Karka II had reigned for barely a year and a half when Tailapa, probably supported by feudatories such as the Yadava Bhillama II, ousted him. A later inscription of the Chalukya Vikramaditya VI places the overthrow of the Rashtrakutas in the Shrimukha year (March 973 – March 974), and since Karka is last attested in June 973, A. S. Altekar dated it to the autumn or winter of 973.

The Western Ganga king Marasimha II tried to revive Rashtrakuta rule by setting up Krishna III’s grandson Indra IV, but Marasimha fasted to death in the Jain manner (sallekhana) in 975, and Indra IV did the same on 20 March 982 — the end of the attempts to restore the Rashtrakuta empire. Later tradition hailed Tailapa as an incarnation of Krishna who fought 108 battles against the race of ‘Ratta’ demons and took 88 of their fortresses. Ruling from Manyakheta, he spent years establishing his power over the whole western Deccan between the Narmada and the Tungabhadra, defeated the Paramara king Munja and, after keeping him captive, put him to death, and won the first battle against Rajaraja I’s Cholas in 992. His dynasty, later called the Chalukyas of Kalyani after the capital to which Someshvara I moved about 1042, held the western Deccan until the 1180s.