Bayyaram tank inscription of Mailama

What it is

Mailama (Mailamba) was the younger sister of the Kakatiya king Ganapatideva and the wife of the Natavadi chief Rudra.¹ The Bayyaram inscription records that she built a great tank.¹ She named it Dharmakirti-Maila-samudra, after her title Dharmakirti.¹ To introduce her, the poet traces the Kakatiya family back thirteen generations. It is the only Kakatiya record with so long a family history.²

P. V. Parabrahma Sastry found the inscription and published it in 1974.³ He wrote that the discovery let him rewrite the history of the family’s origin and family line.³

The pillar and the tank

The tank lies about three miles from the village of Bayyaram, in the former Yellandu taluk, within the revenue limits of Kotagadda. Parabrahma Sastry counted it among the largest tanks in Telangana. Its builders chose a place where streams pass between hillocks, and joined the hillocks with high bunds of stone and earth. Near the tank are a ruined rampart and other remains, overgrown with jungle.⁴

After the opening prayer to Mahadeva (Shiva), the text of the inscription is 71 Sanskrit verses in Telugu characters of the early thirteenth century.⁴ It is on a granite pillar inscribed on all four sides. When it was found, the pillar lay fallen on the eastern bank, about a furlong from the head sluice.⁴ It lay beside the base on which it had once stood.⁴

The genealogy

The poem first praises Ganesha, Vishnu as the Boar, and Shiva.⁴ It then says that kings were born from Brahma’s shoulders, and that in their line was Durjaya.⁴

The poem then lists the kings in order:

Venna, a descendant of Durjaya, ruled from a town called Kakati, and so his descendants were called Kakatiyas.⁴
Venna’s son, grandson and great-grandson were each named Gunda. Next came Erra, ruler of the region of Kurravadi, and then Pindi-Gunda.⁴
Pindi-Gunda’s son was Garudanka Beta, named after the Garuda emblem of his family. He killed two enemies called Anuma and Konda and made Anumakonda his capital.⁴
Beta’s son Prola, called arigaja-kesari, a lion among the elephants of his enemies, built the Kesari-tataka. His descendants used the boar as their seal.¹
Prola was followed by Tribhuvanamalla and then by a second Prola. Of the second Prola’s many sons, two became famous: Rudradeva, who became king of kings, and Mahadeva.¹

Mahadeva’s queen was Bayyamamba, and their son was Ganapati. A daughter was born to them in Saka 1105 (Saka is an Indian way of counting years), the cyclic year Sobhakrit (1183). Her parents named her after Mallikarjuna, the god of Srisailam.¹ Her good works earned her the name Dharmakirti.¹ After his son’s wedding, Mahadeva asked his ministers to find a husband for his daughter. They rejected the kings of Anga, Vanga, Kalinga, the Cholas, the Chalukyas, the Seunas and the Malavas. Instead they proposed the Natavadi chief Rudra, of the same caste as the bride. Rudra was the son of Buddha and Muppamamba and the grandson of Vakkadimalla Durga, the brother of Mahadeva’s mother.¹

The poem gives Mailama two younger brothers, Bhadra and Rudra, who are not named elsewhere.⁵ Later verses list Mailama’s pious works and her tank. She also founded villages named after her father, her mother and herself.¹⁶ Parabrahma Sastry identified two of them with the present Bayyaram and Dharmapuram.¹⁶

See Beta I, Prola I, Beta II, Prola II, Rudradeva, Mahadeva and Ganapatideva for the kings from Beta onward. The genealogy can be set out as follows:⁷

Durjaya⁷
(1) Venna⁷
(2–4) Gunda I–III⁷
(5) Erra⁷
(6) Pindi-Gunda⁷
(7) Garudanka Beta⁷
(8) Prola⁷
(9) Tribhuvanamalla (Beta II)⁷
(10) Prola II⁷
(11) Rudra and (12) Mahadeva⁷
(13) Ganapati and his sister Mailama⁷

Date

The record is undated. In his edition, Parabrahma Sastry pointed out that Mailama’s inscription of Saka 1131 (1209) at Tripurantakam does not yet give her the title Dharmakirti. That title appears in all her records near Bayyaram. He therefore placed this inscription after 1209.⁶

Mailama was the younger sister and was born in 1183, so Ganapati must have been born before that year.⁶ The composer is not named. Parabrahma Sastry suggested that it was Ramadeva, who composed another of Mailama’s inscriptions at Bayyaram.⁶

Interpretation

Parabrahma Sastry compared the genealogy with the Mangallu grant of about 956. That grant was made at the request of a chief called Kakatya Gundyana.⁸⁹ Its list names Gundyana’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather as Betiya, Eriya Rashtrakuta and Gundiya Rashtrakuta.⁸⁹ He identified Gundiya, Eriya and Gundyana with the Bayyaram record’s Gunda III, Erra and Pindi-Gunda. He explained the missing Betiya by supposing that Betiya died young.⁸¹⁰¹¹ Pindi-Gunda, on this view, succeeded his grandfather.⁸¹⁰¹¹

On this reading, the Kakatiyas first appear in the Telugu country under the Rashtrakutas.⁷¹²¹³ Beta I, until then taken as the founder of the dynasty, becomes the seventh ruler.⁷¹²¹³ To avoid confusion, Parabrahma Sastry kept the old numbering, in which Tribhuvanamalla is Beta II.¹⁴¹⁵ Strictly, though, Betiya of the Mangallu grant would be the first Beta.¹⁴¹⁵

He drew other conclusions from the record as well:

Kakati. He took the name to come from a town. The town is unidentified, though he suggested Kandara in Nanded district. He held that the place and its goddess, Kakati, could both have given the family its name.⁶¹⁶
Places. He identified the Kesari-tataka with the Kesamudram tank in Warangal district, and Kurravadi with Kuravi.⁶¹⁷¹³ He identified Inumguriki, Mailama’s town, with Inugurti.⁶¹⁷¹³
Caste. The poem calls Rudra kanya-savarna, of the bride’s own caste.¹⁸ He read this phrase together with the Bothpur and Vaddamanu inscriptions, which place the Kakatiyas in the fourth caste.¹⁸ To him this was evidence that the family were not Kshatriyas, despite the poem’s claim of descent from Brahma’s shoulders.¹⁸
Ganapati’s marriage. The later Telugu chronicle Pratapa-charitra claims that Ganapati married a Yadava princess.¹⁹ The poem says that Mahadeva arranged both his children’s marriages.¹⁹ He thought this made the chronicle’s claim doubtful.¹⁹

Parabrahma Sastry did not accept everything in the poem. He called its claim that Beta I won Anumakonda by killing Anuma and Konda fictitious, because the name Anumakonda already appears in an inscription of 872.²⁰ His two accounts of the discovery also differ: his book gives the year as 1966 in one place and 1965 in another.³²

Mailama’s family

The sources differ on Mailama’s marriages and children. The notes to the reprinted edition say that her sister Kundama was married to the same Natavadi Rudra.⁵²¹ They also say that Mailama’s daughter Bayyala-mahadevi married the Kota chief Keta II.⁵²¹

Elsewhere Parabrahma Sastry suggests that the sisters’ husbands may have been two different Rudras.²²²³ Following the Edavalli plates, he names Keta III, not Keta II, as the husband of the Natavadi Rudra’s daughter Bayyala-mahadevi.²²²³ See also the Inugurti inscription of Natavadi Rudra.

Parabrahma Sastry, “Bayyaram Tank Inscription”, in Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 2 (2023), pp. 317–318. Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 30. ↩ ↩²
P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 6. ↩ ↩² ↩³
P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, “Bayyaram Tank Inscription of Kakati Mailama”, Epigraphia Andhrica I (1974), pp. 71–94, reprinted in Gajjala Vasanta Lakshmi (ed.), Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 2 (2023), pp. 316–317, No. 310. Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹
Parabrahma Sastry, “Bayyaram Tank Inscription”, in Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 2 (2023), p. 326. Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Parabrahma Sastry, “Bayyaram Tank Inscription”, in Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 2 (2023), p. 319. Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Parabrahma Sastry, “Bayyaram Tank Inscription”, in Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 2 (2023), p. 320. Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴
Parabrahma Sastry, “Bayyaram Tank Inscription”, in Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 2 (2023), p. 321. Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 17. ↩ ↩²
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 18. ↩ ↩²
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 34. ↩ ↩²
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 26. ↩ ↩²
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 39. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 31. ↩ ↩²
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 32. ↩ ↩²
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 22. ↩
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 45. ↩ ↩²
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 29. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 107. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 172. ↩
Parabrahma Sastry, “Bayyaram Tank Inscription”, in Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 2 (2023), p. 327. Paraphrased. ↩ ↩²
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 152. ↩ ↩²
Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 155. ↩ ↩²