Rayaparti fragment of Saka 1169

The stone

Rayaparti lies about 20 miles from Warangal on the road to Khammam.¹ This broken inscription is on a stone slab outside the village, near a temple of Anjaneya and the ruined wall of a fort.¹ It is badly damaged, and only parts of three faces survive.¹²³ They are in Sanskrit verse, and the plates of the 1956 Corpus reproduce two of them.¹²³

The reprint of the Warangal district inscriptions instead places the stone in front of a Shiva temple and lists the language as Telugu.⁴

What the text says

The surviving lines on the second face give a date, Saka year 1169 (1247).²⁵ They say that when a king Rudra had gone to heaven, a king Surya ruled the earth.²⁵ They then name Beta, the younger brother of that king.²⁵

On the third face a lady named Suramba is born in this family.² The rest is too damaged for a connected reading.¹

Three readings

The editors disagree about how these persons are related and who they were.

• The 1956 Corpus. P. Sreenivasachar’s English note says that the record dates the death of a Rudra of the Kakatiya dynasty to Saka 1169 (Saka is an Indian way of counting years).¹ It says that his brother Beta then became king, and that Suramamba, born in this line, fought on the side of Mahadeva.¹ Its list of plates calls the record an inscription of Mahadeva.¹³
• The 1964 state catalogue. This calls the Corpus summary faulty. It reads the fragment as saying that a certain Rudra died in Saka 1169 and was succeeded by his son Sura, whose brother was Beta. A lady named Suramba was born in that family, and her son Suresha fought for a king named Mahadeva.⁵
• The 2016 Warangal district volume. Here Surya-bhupati ruled after Rudra-bhupala’s death, and his younger brother Beta probably took the throne after him. Suramba, born in their family, probably had two sons.⁴ They served King Mahadeva as his two chief supports in a fierce battle.⁴

None of these sources explains how a Kakatiya Rudra could have died in 1247. In P. V. Parabrahma Sastry’s chronology, the Kakatiya Rudradeva’s last known date is April 1195.⁶⁷ His brother Mahadeva ruled only from 1195 to about 1199.⁶⁷ The two later readings leave the family unnamed. The sources consulted do not identify them further.⁵⁴

Footnotes

1. P. Sreenivasachar (ed.), A Corpus of Inscriptions in the Telingana Districts of Andhra Pradesh, Part III (1956), pp. 159–160, No. Wg. 17 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

2. Sreenivasachar, Corpus, Part III (1956), p. 160, second face lines 1–9 and third face lines 1–4 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. Sreenivasachar, Corpus, Part III (1956), list of plates, p. iii, plates 11–12 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 2 (2023), pp. 372–373, Indeterminate inscriptions No. 35, summarising Inscriptions of Warangal District (reprint 2016), pp. 200–202. Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Gajjala Vasanta Lakshmi (ed.), Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 2 (2023), pp. 245–246, No. 220, summarising A Catalogue of Inscriptions copied upto 1964, pp. 92–93. Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

6. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 100. ↩ ↩²

7. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 103. ↩ ↩²