Places

Chandurti

1758 CE

Village seven miles north by east of Pithapuram in the Godavari country. The Godavari gazetteer identified it with the 'Condore' of Orme's history. Near it, on 9 December 1758, Colonel Forde's English and the Raja of Vizianagaram's troops routed the French army of the Marquis de Conflans. The victory opened the way to Rajahmundry and Masulipatam and ended French rule in the Northern Circars.

Padmanabham

1794 CE

Village on the Chittivalasa river ten miles north-west of Bheemunipatnam, under a hill with a Vishnu temple. Here the Raja of Vizianagaram, Vijayarama Raju II, made his last stand against the East India Company on 10 July 1794. He was killed with some three hundred of his followers, most of them Rajputs. A small masonry memorial marks the spot where he fell.

Chittoor

1911 CE

Town in southern Rayalaseema. It was the headquarters of the North Arcot district in the 1890s. From 1 April 1911 it was the headquarters of the new Chittoor District, formed from the Telugu taluks of North Arcot and two taluks of the Deccan districts, with Chandragiri, Madanapalle and Chittoor divisions.

Addanki

Town on the Gundlakamma river, formerly in Ongole taluk. A stone here carries the 9th-century Telugu verse inscription of Pandaranga. Later records name it as the centre of the 'Addanki country'.

Adilabad

Town in the forested north of Telangana, also called Edlabad, head of the district formed in 1905 from the old Sirpur Tandur sub-district of the Nizam's Dominions. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1909 describes a thinly peopled, unsurveyed land of forests, Gond villages, cotton and Telugu and Marathi speech, without a railway or metalled road; the census of 1931 records rapid road building there.

Adoni

Hill-fort town in the Kurnool district. It was a Vijayanagara stronghold, which Bijapur besieged in 1535–37 and took in 1568. Its Bijapur governor Siddi Masud Khan built the Jama Masjid in 1666–67. He held the last Bijapur stronghold in the western Telugu country, and gave it up to Aurangzeb's army after Bijapur fell. The Mughals renamed it Imtiyazgarh, 'Distinction Fort'. Under Farrukhsiyar and his successors it was a Mughal mint for small gold coins of the southern pattern. From 1756 it was the jagir (land grant) of Basalat Jang, the Nizam's brother. Tipu Sultan besieged it in 1786, took its guns when the garrison left, destroyed its walls, and gave it back at the peace of 1787. In 1800 the Nizam ceded it to the East India Company in exchange for his districts north of the Tungabhadra.

Ahobilam

Village and temple of Narasimha on the Nallamalai hills in the Kurnool district, 'the most sacred Vaishnava shrine' of the district. Reddi records credit Prolaya Vema with a flight of steps there. Kataya Vema gave it villages named after Kumaragiri in 1410, and Errapragada dedicated his Narasimha Purana to its god.

Alamanda

Village in the old Sringavarapukota taluk of the Vizagapatam district, now in the Vizianagaram district. Copper plates of the Ganga king Anantavarman, son of Rajendravarman, were found underground here in the early 1890s. They are dated in the 304th year of the Gangeya race.

Alampur

Town on the west bank of the Tungabhadra near its meeting with the Krishna, now in Telangana. It was formerly the head of a taluk of the Raichur and then the Mahbubnagar district of Hyderabad State. Its fort holds the Nava Brahma temples, whose inscriptions name kings and queens of the Chalukyas of Badami. Copper-plate grants of Vikramaditya I and Vinayaditya were found in the taluk. Inscriptions call the place Hatampura, and its god Brahmesvara the guardian of the western gate of Srisailam.

Amaravati & Dharanikota

Neighbouring sites on the south bank of the Krishna. The ramparts of Dharanikota are usually identified with ancient Dhanyakataka. The town of Amaravati is the site of the great Buddhist stupa and the Amaresvara temple.

Amarchinta

Town in the Mahbubnagar district of Telangana (in 1909 in the Raichur district of Hyderabad State). It gave its name to the Amarchinta or Atmakur samasthan, a tributary estate of 69 villages north of the Krishna, with its raja's fort at Atmakur. It paid the Nizam a tribute of Rs 6,363 and was noted for fine muslins with gold and silk borders.

Anantapur

Town in Rayalaseema below a great tank that, by tradition, was built under the Vijayanagara king Bukka I. It was the seat of the Hande poligars (local chiefs). Later it was the seat of Thomas Munro as Principal Collector of the Ceded Districts (1800–07), and of the Bellary Collectorate until 1840. It became a municipality in 1869. In 1882 it became the headquarters of the new Anantapur District, formed from the southern taluks of Bellary.

Arcot

Town on the Palar west of Madras, the capital of the Nawabs of the Carnatic in the eighteenth century. Their province ran along the coast from Guntur to the Coleroon and took in Nellore, and it was also called the province of Arcot. Clive held the town against Chanda Sahib's army in 1751, and Haidar Ali took it in 1780. Tipu Sultan blew up two sides of its fort before leaving the Carnatic. Its mint struck the Nawabs' coins, and the 'Arcot rupee' was coined in their name at Madras.

Arumbaka

Village in the former Repalle taluk of Guntur district. The Eastern Chalukya prince Badapa gave it to the archer Gandanarayana in his Arumbaka plates. Its neighbours named in the grant were found round it within four miles. Among them are Sripundi (Sripudi), the village of Tala II's grant, and Kavuru.

Aurangabad

City in the Marathi-speaking north-west of the former Hyderabad State (now in Maharashtra), founded as Fatehnagar by Malik Ambar in 1610 and renamed by Aurangzeb. Asaf Jah came here as viceroy of the Deccan, and according to the Imperial Gazetteer he later made Hyderabad his capital. Salabat Jang's court and Bussy's French troops were at Aurangabad in the 1750s. Under the Nizams it was the head-quarters of a Division and a cantonment of the Hyderabad Contingent. Asaf Jah is buried at Khuldabad nearby.

Badami (Vatapi)

Town in northern Karnataka, the ancient Vatapi. It was the capital of the Chalukyas of Badami from the 6th to the 8th century. Pulakesin I acquired it, and Kirtivarman I adorned it with temples and finished its great Vaishnava cave temple. The Pallava Narasimhavarman I captured and ruined it about 642.

Banganapalle

Town in the Erramala valley of the old Kurnool district. It was the capital of the small nawabi state of Banganapalle, from the time of the Mughal killedar (fort commander) Muhammad Beg Khan in the early eighteenth century until the Madras government took over its administration in February 1948. It was known for its gardens and orchards on the Jurreru stream, its mangoes, oranges and lacquerware, and an old diamond mine near the town. It lay on the road from Gooty to Cumbum, and declined after the railway bypassed it.

Bayyaram

Village in the old Yellandu taluk. Its great tank, the Dharmakirti-samudra, was built by Ganapatideva's sister Mailama. Her pillar inscription there gives the fullest Kakatiya genealogy (family history).

Bellary (Ballari)

Fort and town on the plain south of the Tungabhadra, now in Karnataka. It was once the head of one of the Ceded Districts. Its poligars held it under Vijayanagara and Bijapur. Shivaji took it in 1678, and in the eighteenth century it paid tribute to Basalat Jang of Adoni. Haidar Ali was beaten off from it in 1768 or 1769. He seized it in 1775 after driving off Basalat Jang's army, and built its present upper and lower forts. Tipu Sultan lost it to the Nizam in 1792, and the Nizam ceded it to the East India Company in 1800.

Bhadrachalam

Temple town on the Godavari, held to be a place where Rama lived after the abduction of Sita. Its temple of Rama is linked with Kancherla Gopanna, remembered as Ramadas, who is said to have spent the revenue on the shrine and to have been imprisoned for it. The Kistna manual (1883) makes him a nephew of Madanna under the last Qutb Shahi king. The Godavari gazetteer (1907) places him about 1725, as an official of the Nizam.

Bhairavakonda

Hill site in the old Udayagiri taluk of the Nellore district, near the Cuddapah border. It has a group of early rock-cut cave temples reported by A. H. Longhurst in 1921. R. Gopalan described them as of the Pallava age and very like the caves of Mahendravarman I.

Bhattiprolu

Village in the Krishna delta. In 1892 its great brick stupa yielded three relic caskets inscribed in an early and unusual variety of Brahmi, dated to about 200 BCE.

Bheemunipatnam

Small port north of Visakhapatnam, at the mouth of the Chittivalasa river, known in old records as Bimlipatam. The Dutch East India Company built a fortified factory (trading post) and a mint here in the seventeenth century, under grants of the Rajas of Vizianagaram. The Marathas burnt it in 1754. The English took it in 1781 and 1795, gave it back to the Dutch in 1785 and 1819, and received it for good in 1825. Francis dates the tombstones of its Dutch cemetery from 1661 to 1720 and calls the 1661 tomb the oldest in the Northern Circars, but Rea reports stones dated 1623.

Bhimavaram (West Godavari)

Town in the western Godavari delta, headquarters of the Bhimavaram taluk. The taluk takes in the old village of Gunupudi with its Somesvara temple. M. Rama Rao (1964) counted the temple as Somarama, one of the five Pancharama shrines, and attributed it to the Eastern Chalukya king Chalukya-Bhima I. Not to be confused with Chalukya-Bhimavaram near Samalkot.

Bhongir

Town at the foot of a great isolated granite rock about thirty miles east of Hyderabad, crowned by a fort. The Warangal kings are said to have built the fort, and the Muslim rulers rebuilt it. The first Bahmani sultan took it in a year-long campaign in Telangana, and it became the eastern limit of his kingdom. Ahmad Shah I later gave it to his commander in Telangana as an estate.

Biccavolu

Village on the Rajahmundry–Kakinada road, nine miles north of Ramachandrapuram, with six early stone temples of Shiva. A Mackenzie manuscript called it the capital of the early Eastern Chalukya kings, under the name Birudanka-Rayapuram. M. Rama Rao (1964) dated its temples to the reign of Gunaga Vijayaditya III.

Bijapur (Vijayapura)

City on the dry plateau between the Bhima and the Krishna, about 240 miles south-east of Bombay. It was the capital of the Adil Shahi sultans from about 1489 to 1686. An inscription of 1074–75 calls it Vijayapura. Yusuf Adil Khan was its Bahmani governor when he declared his independence in 1489. Its walls were completed in 1565 with the plunder of Vijayanagara, and its great buildings include the Ibrahim Rauza and the Gol Gumbaz. Aurangzeb took it on 12 September 1686.

Bobbili

Town in the Vizagapatam (now Vizianagaram) country, seat of the Velama zamindars who bore the title Ranga Rao. Bussy and the Raja of Vizianagaram stormed its mud fort on 24 January 1757, when the defenders killed their families and died on the walls. The siege lives on in the Telugu ballad of Bobbili. The family recovered its lands in 1794, and the estate was settled permanently with it in 1801–02.

Bodhan

Town in the Nizamabad district of Telangana, 16 miles west of Nizamabad, the Bodana or Bhaudhanya-nagara of the inscriptions. A Kannada inscription of 1056, in the reign of the Chalukya king Somesvara I, records the renovation of its temple of Indranarayana. It says that the Rashtrakuta king Indravallabha had built that temple. Inscriptions in its ruined fort wall show that it was a Jain centre in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Bothpur

Village in the Mahbubnagar district, the Budhapura of the inscriptions. The Kakatiya general Malyala Gunda and his wife Kuppambika held court here. They left three inscriptions of 1259, 1272 and 1277 recording tanks, temples and gifts to learned Brahmins.

Bukkarayasamudram

Village at the eastern end of the great tank of Anantapur, named 'king Bukka's sea' after Bukka I of Vijayanagara. A Kanarese inscription of 1364 says that his minister Anantarasa dug the tank. The Anantapur chronicle names the builder Chikkappa Wadeyar, and makes Anantapur, at the western end, the village named after his wife. In the sixteenth century it became a seat of the Hande poligars (local chiefs) of Anantapur.

Chamaluru

Village in the former Jammalamadugu taluk of Kadapa district. A broken stone here records a grant in the 22nd year of the Telugu Chola king Prithivivallabha Vijayaditya, with a Bana king serving under him. Its lost lines survive in an eye-copy (a copy drawn by eye) made by Colin Mackenzie's assistants.

Chandavolu (Chandole)

Village in the western Krishna delta, the old Tsandavolu of the Repalle taluk. E. Hultzsch identified it with Sanadavrolu, the capital of the Velanati Chodas. Gordon Mackenzie (1883) described it as a place of great antiquity, with temple inscriptions of the 1150s–1170s, finds of gold and the foundations of extensive buildings. It appears in the ballad of the Palnadu heroes.

Chandragiri

Town on the Swarnamukhi below a granite hill fort, seven miles from Tirupati in the old North Arcot (later Chittoor) district. Krishnadeva Raya kept his brothers and nephew in its fortress. After 1565 it became the residence of the Aravidu kings, who are said to have moved there from Penukonda. From here Sriranga granted the English the site of Fort St. George in 1639. Golconda took it in 1646. Its palace, the Raja Mahal, survives.

Chandupatla

Village near Nalgonda. Its small Telugu inscription of November 1289 records that the Kakatiya queen Rudramadevi and her general Mallikarjuna-nayaka had died.

Chebrolu

Old town on a sandstone ridge nine miles south-east of Guntur, called Tamrapuri or the 'city of Shanmukha' in its inscriptions, after its temple of Kumarasvamin. Its records run from 1006. They include gifts of the Velanadu chiefs, and a long inscription of 1213 by Jaya, the Kakatiya king Ganapati's general, who received the town and rebuilt its temples and walls. M. Rama Rao attributed its Bhimesvara temple to the Eastern Chalukya king Chalukya-Bhima I.

Chellur

Village near Ramachandrapuram in the Godavari delta, the Chelluru agrahara (village granted to Brahmins) of the Eastern Chalukya records. Two copper-plate grants in Sir Walter Elliot's collection were obtained from its karnam (village accountant). One is the plates of the viceroy Vira-Choda, which record a Vishnu temple and a pond built there by his general Medamarya. The other is a grant of Kulottunga-Choda II of Saka 1056.

Chendalur

Village formerly in the Ongole taluk. It is the Chendalura of a Pallava copper-plate grant of Kumaravishnu II and the Chendapura of an Eastern Chalukya grant of 673. Both sets of plates were dug up there from a pot of paddy husk while a house was being built.

Chevuru

Village in the old Kaikalur taluk of Kistna (Krishna) district, near Vadali and Singarayapalem, west of the Kolleru lake. A copper-plate grant of the Eastern Chalukya king Amma I was dug up here about 1928, and B. Ch. Chhabra published it. The grant concerns the nearby village of Unikili.

Chikkulla

Agrahara (village granted to Brahmins) in the former Tuni division of Godavari district, later East Godavari. A copper-plate grant of the Vishnukundin king Vikramendravarman II was dug up from a tank here in the 1880s.

Chippili

Village in the Madanapalle country of the former Chittoor district. It has been identified with Chirpali, the capital of Renandu named in the Tippaluru inscription of the Telugu Chola Punyakumara. A Kannada memorial stone there names a Punyakomaran ruling Chirpuli.

Chipurupalle (Cheepurupalli)

Small town in the north of the old Vizagapatam district, once the headquarters of a taluk, with the remains of an old fort. Three sets of copper plates were found here in 1867. Among them is the grant of the Eastern Chalukya founder Vishnuvardhana I, dated 7 July 632. J. F. Fleet took Cherupura, the town where that grant was issued, to be an older form of its name.

Darsi

Town formerly in the Podili division of the Nellore district, now in Prakasam, where the first plate of a lost Pallava grant issued from Dasanapura was found in a tobacco field. V. Venkayya suggested that Dasanapura, one of the camps of the Pallava kings of the Nellore–Guntur country, was the old name of Darsi itself.

Devarakonda

Town and hill fort in the south-west of the Nalgonda district. From Mada Nayaka in the 1360s it was the seat of the Devarakonda branch of the Recherla Velamas. In 1459 its chief, with an army from Orissa, routed a Bahmani force sent against it. Sultan Quli of Golconda took it early in the sixteenth century.

Dharmasagar

Village near Hanamkonda with an undated pillar inscription of Ganapatideva's minister Malla, which divides an endowment among temple musicians, dancers and priests.

Dhulikatta

Village on the Hussaini Vagu in the old Karimnagar district, beside an early walled town of 18 hectares. V. V. Krishna Sastry dug its south gate, a palace complex with a granary and a Buddhist stupa a kilometre to the north, which he dated from the late 3rd century BCE. Coins of the local king Samagopa and a silver portrait coin of the Satavahana king Sivasri Pulumavi were found here.

Dirghasi

Village near Kalingapatnam in the Srikakulam district, with a rocky hill called Durga-metta and the ruins of a temple of Durga. An inscription there of Saka 997 (1075–76), in Sanskrit and Telugu verse, was left by Vanapati, a general of the Ganga king Rajaraja I.

Dommara-Nandyala

Village in the former Jammalamadugu taluk of Kadapa district. Here a ploughman found the copper plates of the Telugu Chola king Punyakumara's tenth year in a sealed pot. The plates were edited in 1956.

Dowleswaram

Town on the Godavari, four and a half miles below Rajahmundry, at the head of the delta. Arthur Cotton's great anicut (dam) was built across the river here in 1847–52. In 1907 it was the headquarters of two Executive Engineers and of the Public Works workshops. It is a specially holy bathing place, the last point at which the Godavari flows undivided.

Draksharama

Temple town in the Godavari delta, four miles south of Ramachandrapuram. It is famous as the 'Southern Benares' for its temple of Bhimesvara, whose walls carry hundreds of inscriptions from the 11th century onwards. Tradition derives its name from Daksharama, the garden of Daksha. It counts the temple's linga among the five Pancharama shrines.

Durgi

Village in the Palnadu country (old Palnad taluk, Guntur district), the Dugyapattana of a 1251 inscription. That record names the temple of Vankesvara founded under Ganapatideva's governor Gangaya-sahini.

Ederu (Edara)

Village near Agiripalle in the former Nuzvid zamindari of Kistna district, about 15 miles north-east of Vijayawada. Two Eastern Chalukya copper-plate grants were found there about 1871–73, those of Vijayaditya II and Amma I, and the zamindar of Nuzvid gave both to the Madras Museum.

Eluru (Ellore)

Town in the West Godavari district, the seat of the Ellore sarkar (district), one of the five Northern Circars of the Qutb Shahi and Mughal coast. Its carpet weaving was famous in the seventeenth century. Under the Mughals it had a qazi's court, a kotwal (police chief) and a market officer. Its assessment of about 5.6 lakhs of rupees stood on the imperial records until the French took the Circars in 1753.

Erragudi

Village in Pattikonda taluk, Kurnool district, near Gooty. Asoka's fourteen Rock Edicts and Minor Rock Edicts I–II are carved on boulders of the Yenakonda hill nearby.

Erragudipadu

Village in the former Kamalapuram taluk of Kadapa district. A stone beside its Chennakesava temple carries an inscription of an Erikal-Mutturaju of the Telugu Cholas of Renandu. Its editors dated it to the late 6th century, and it is among the earliest records written in Telugu.

Gadwal

Town in Telangana. In 1909 it was the seat of the Gadwal samasthan (tributary estate) of the Raichur district of Hyderabad State. The Gadval plates of the Chalukya king Vikramaditya I, dated 674, were kept in a house there and were said to have been found in its fields.

Ganapavaram (Huzurnagar)

Village in the old Huzurnagar taluk where a broken pillar of January 1214 records the founding of the town of Ganapatipura and its Rudreshvara temple by Devapala, a servant of the Kakatiyas who had been brought up by the prince Jagaddeva.

Ganapesvaram

Hamlet near Talagada-Divi on Divi island in the Krishna delta. It is named after the Ganapeshvara temple that the Kakatiya general Jaya built there in 1231 in honour of his king Ganapatideva.

Gandikota

Village and hill fort five miles west of Jammalamadugu in the Cuddapah district, above the gorge that the Penner cuts through sandstone cliffs. Its name means 'gorge fort'. Its temple legend credits a Kaka Maharaju with the fort about 1290, and 'Harihara Bukkarayalu' with the temple of Madhavasvami. Under Vijayanagara it was the head of the Gandikota sima (district). Golconda took it in the late sixteenth century, and Mir Jumla held it.

Gangaikondacholapuram

Village in the Tamil country, 38 miles north-east of Tanjore, that was the capital founded by the Chola king Rajendra I and named after his title Gangaikonda-Chola, 'the Chola who took the Ganges'. The later king Virarajendra returned there after his campaign in the Vengi country and displayed the booty he had brought from it.

Gangapuram

Village in the Mahbubnagar district of Telangana with eleven Kannada inscriptions of the Western Chalukya period. The dated ones run from 1091 to 1148, and they record gifts to its temples by royal officers and by merchant guilds. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry took it to be the Gangapura from which the prince Kumara Tailapa claimed to reign in 1137.

Ghanpur (Mulug)

Village north-east of Palampet with the Kota Gullu, a walled group of twenty-two Kakatiya-period shrines, and the Ghanpur tank.

Ghantasala

Village west of Machilipatnam in the Krishna delta, site of a large brick Buddhist stupa excavated by A. Rea in 1892. Carved limestone slabs and inscribed pillars from it survive scattered through the village.

Golconda

Fortress and old royal town five miles west of Hyderabad. It was a Warangal frontier fort ceded to the Bahmanis in the 14th century, and then the first capital of the Qutb Shahi sultans. The court moved to Hyderabad in the 1590s, but the fortress remained their stronghold until 1687.

Gooty

Town inside a ring of rocky hills in the Anantapur district, crowned by the hill fortress of Gutti, 2,105 feet above the sea. Western Chalukya records of 1121–23 are cut on its summit rock, beside a Sanskrit verse in praise of king Bukka of Vijayanagara. Vijayanagara held it as the head of a province until after 1565, and it later fell to Golconda and to the Maratha Morari Rao. Haidar Ali took it in 1776 (1775 in the Anantapur gazetteer). Tipu Sultan named it Faiz Hisar and struck copper coins there. After his death it went to the Nizam in 1799, and to the Company with the Ceded Districts in 1800.

Gudimallam

Village near Renigunta in the Kalahasti country of the old Chittoor district, called Tiruvippirambedu (Sanskrit Viprapitha) in its inscriptions. Its Parasuramesvara temple holds the earliest records of the Bana chiefs, dated under the Pallava and Ganga-Pallava kings and in Saka 820 and 827 (898 and 905), and a copper-plate grant of the Bana king Vikramaditya II was found there. Later Tamil inscriptions of the Chola kings include a record of Vikrama-Chola's ninth year on the building of the temple.

Gudivada

Taluk town in the Krishna delta, about twenty miles north-west of Machilipatnam. It has the remains of a demolished Buddhist stupa. An old village mound here has yielded large numbers of Satavahana (Andhra) lead coins, beads and pottery.

Gudivada (Sarvasiddhi)

Village in the old Sarvasiddhi taluk of Visakhapatnam district, near Yellamanchili. A landholding family here kept three copper-plate grants of the Eastern Chalukya king Jayasimha I. Their editor identified the village with the Kulivataka or Kudivada of the grants, in the Plakki district. It is not to be confused with Gudivada in Krishna district.

Gudur (Jangaon)

Village in the old Jangaon taluk. A pillar here carries Telugu verses telling how the Viriyala chief Erra and the lady Kamasani restored the young Kakatiya chief Beta. Beside them are Kannada records of the Viriyala chief Malla and of the Chalukya prince Someshvara (1124).

Guntur (Murtazanagar)

Town south of the Krishna that gave its name to the Guntur or Murtazanagar sarkar (district), the southernmost of the five Northern Circars of the Qutb Shahi and Mughal coast. Its standard assessment of about 11.7 lakhs of rupees, more than half of it crown land, was entered on the Mughal records after 1687. The Mughals counted the coast south of it as the Haidarabadi Karnatak. It passed to the East India Company only in 1788.

Guraja

Village in the old Gudivada taluk of Kistna (Krishna) district. It is the findspot of a copper-plate grant of 1346. In it the Musunuri chief Kapaya Nayaka gave the village of Prolavaram for the merit of his predecessor Prolaya Nayaka.

Gurazala

Town in the Palnadu, west of Dachepalle. An inscription of 1129 calls it Madhavipattana; in it Beta Birudankarudra, a Haihaya feudatory (subordinate chief) of the Western Chalukyas, gave land to a temple there. In the ballad of the Palnadu heroes it is the capital of King Alugu Bhupati and of Nayakuralu, from which Brahma Nayudu broke away.

Gurramkonda

Hill fort in the uplands of the old Cuddapah district (later Chittoor), the seat of a Muslim governorship from Golconda times. The Nawab of Cuddapah ceded it to the Marathas, apparently after his defeat by Balwant Rao in 1757. In 1767 the Maratha Peshwa gave it to Haidar Ali's brother-in-law Mir Sahib, who handed it to Haidar. The Marathas took it back by siege in 1771 and kept it by the treaty of 1772, and Tipu recovered it in 1773–74. It held out against the Nizam's army for a year in 1791–92, and passed to the Nizam by the treaty of 1792.

Halebidu

Village in the Belur taluk of Hassan district, Mysore (now Karnataka), the site of Dorasamudra (Dvarasamudra), capital of the Hoysala kings from the 12th century until it was sacked by Malik Kafur's army in 1311 and destroyed by a Tughluq army later. Its unfinished double temple of Hoysalesvara, with friezes of elephants, lions, horsemen and scenes from the Ramayana, and the lost Kedaresvara temple were described by James Fergusson and James Burgess.

Hampi (Vijayanagara)

Hamlet on the Tungabhadra in the Hospet taluk of the old Bellary district, now in Karnataka. It lies among the ruins of Vijayanagara, 'the city of victory', the capital of the empire from about 1336 to 1565. The ruins cover about nine square miles of granite hills. The Muslim allies sacked the city after the battle of 1565, and the court fled to Penukonda. Hampi is outside the Telugu country. It is included here as the capital of the empire that ruled Rayalaseema and, for a time, the Telugu coast.

Hanamkonda

Anumakonda, the first Kakatiya capital beside Warangal. It has the Thousand Pillar Temple, the Padmakshi hill shrine and the Kakatiya inscriptions that record the dynasty's rise.

Hayathnagar

Village about nine miles east of Hyderabad on the old road to Masulipatam. Hayat Bakhsh Begum, mother of Abdullah Qutb Shah, founded it in AH 1035 (1625–26) as Hayatabad. Its great Qutb Shahi mosque stands inside a walled caravanserai (travellers' inn) of several hundred rooms. Tavernier's 'Jatenagar', the first stage on his road from Golconda to the Kollur diamond mine, has been identified with it.

Hemavati

Village in the Madakasira taluk of Anantapur, eight miles south of Amarapuram, identified with Henjeru or Penjeru, a chief town (in H. Krishna Sastri's words 'the capital') of the Nolamba-Pallavas. A pillar there gives the family tree of the Nolamba kings, and two Tamil records of the Chola period and a grant of the Hoysala Vira-Ballala II of 1205–06 are among its later inscriptions. Its temples, with pillars of polished black stone, include the Doddesvara (or Nonesvara), the Mallesvara, the Virupakshesvara and the Siddhesvara.

Hyderabad

City on the Musi founded by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah around 1589–91 as Bhagnagar. It was the Qutb Shahi capital until 1687, then a Mughal provincial seat. From the 1720s it was the capital of the Asaf Jahi Nizams.

Inavolu

Village near Warangal with a temple of Mailara (Malleshvara). In 1369, after the fall of the Kakatiyas, the Recherla Velama chief Anapota-nayaka granted the village to this temple.

Inugurti

Village in the old Mahbubabad taluk, the town of Ganapatideva's sister Mailama and her husband the Natavadi chief Rudra, with their inscriptions and temples.

Ipur

Village in the former Tenali taluk of Guntur district. Two sets of Vishnukundin copper plates, kept as heirlooms in a Brahmin household, were secured here in 1919–20. One is a grant of Govindavarman's son Madhavavarman, the other of Madhavavarman II. With them were two early Eastern Chalukya grants.

Jaggayyapeta

Market town on the Paleru near where it meets the Krishna, formerly called Betavolu. On a hill nearby, James Burgess excavated in 1882 the remains of an early Buddhist stupa with an inscription of the Ikshvaku period.

Jirjingi

Village near Tekkali in the Srikakulam district. Copper plates of the Ganga king Indravarman, lord of Trikalinga, dated in the year 39, were found here during the excavation of an old temple. The village is itself the Jijjika granted in the plates.

Kadapa (Cuddapah)

Town near the Penner river and headquarters of the district to which it gave its name. A Golconda officer is thought to have built its fort about 1570. In the early eighteenth century it became the capital of the Pathan Nawabs of Cuddapah. Haidar Ali took it in 1779 and gave the country to his brother-in-law Mir Sahib. Tipu Sultan ceded the Cuddapah districts to the Nizam in 1792, and the Nizam ceded them to the East India Company in 1800. The town became the district headquarters in 1817.

Kakinada

Port on the Godavari coast, known to the English as Cocanada, which grew as Coringa silted up. Its southern suburb, Jagannathapuram, was a Dutch factory (trading post) with a mint from the seventeenth century until 1825. A French party that landed there in 1759 was forced to surrender in the Dutch fort. Cocanada was one of the first Collectorates of the Northern Circars in 1794.

Kalamalla

Village in the former Kamalapuram taluk of Kadapa district. A broken pillar in its Chennakesava temple carries a late-6th-century inscription of the Telugu Chola Dhananjaya. It is one of the earliest records written entirely in Telugu.

Kalidindi

Village on the eastern edge of the Kolleru lake, in the old Kaikalur taluk of Krishna district. A copper-plate grant of the Eastern Chalukya king Rajaraja I was dug up here in 1938. It says that the king built three Shiva temples at Kalidindi in memory of Chola generals killed in battle. He gave the temples the village, renamed Madhurantakanallur. In the 18th and 19th centuries Kalidindi was a pargana (revenue division) of the Nuzvid zamindari (estate).

Kalingapatnam

Seaport at the mouth of the Vamsadhara in the Srikakulam district, long supposed to be Kalinganagara, the capital of the Ganga kings of Kalinga. E. Hultzsch still thought so in 1895. But G. V. Ramamurti found no antiquities there fit for a capital, and he placed Kalinganagara at Mukhalingam instead.

Kalyani (Basavakalyan)

Town in the Bidar district of Karnataka, outside the Telugu country, formerly in the Nizam's Dominions. J. F. Fleet identified it with Kalyana or Kalyanapura, the capital of the Western Chalukyas from the time of Somesvara I, and of the Kalachuris after them. According to the poet Bilhana, Somesvara I 'made the town'. Fleet found no ancient remains there.

Kanchipuram

City in the Tamil country, the capital of the Pallava kings. The earliest Pallava charter of the Telugu country, the Mayidavolu plates, was issued from Kanchipura. So were later Pallava grants of villages in the Ongole and Nellore country. The Chalukyas besieged the city in the 7th and 8th centuries, and the Chola Aditya I conquered it at the end of the 9th.

Kandikonda

Village with a hill fort near Mahabubabad, the Skandadri of the inscriptions. Venna, son of the Recherla chief Mada Nayaka, ruled here in the 1370s and built temples of Janardana and of Skandadrinatha.

Kandukur

Town formerly in the Nellore district, now in Prakasam. C. R. Krishnamacharlu took it to be the Kandukura of the Pallava Uruvupalli grant. The grant gave land to a temple of Vishnuhara there, which he thought was one of the early temples of Kandukur. He also thought the southern part of the Kandukur taluk lay in the ancient Mundarashtra.

Kanukollu

Village in the Krishna delta, formerly in the Gudivada taluk of Krishna district. Two copper-plate grants of the Salankayana kings Nandivarman I and Skandavarman were dug up here on the old village site, outside the ramparts of a ruined mud fort.

Karempudi

Town on the Nagileru river in the Palnadu, west of Guntur. It is remembered as the battlefield of the Palnadu heroes and the seat of their cult. Its temple of the heroes, described by Robert Sewell in 1879, has inscriptions of 1324 and 1333. A minister of the Velanati chief Gonka II built a temple of Suresvara there in 1154.

Karimnagar

District town in northern Telangana. A pillar here of January 1171 records, in Telugu verse, the foundations of Gangadhara, minister of the Kakatiya chiefs Prola II and Rudradeva.

Katakshapur

Forest village on the Warangal–Mulug road beside the Katachpur tank, with two ruined temples on the tank bund dated by style to the Kakatiya period.

Kaulas

Fort of the Telugu country which the first Bahmani sultan took from the ruler of Warangal. Haig names this ruler Kanhayya Naik, and an epigraphy report of 1934–35 notes that he has been identified with the Musunuri chief Kapaya Nayaka. His attempt to win Kaulas back led to war with the Bahmani sultan Muhammad Shah I.

Kavali

Town in the north of Nellore district. A stone by its tank records the agrahara (village granted to Brahmins) Sripura, founded in 1207–08 by the Telugu Choda king Tammusiddhi. A record of 1228–29 near by is dated in the reign of Gandagopala Tirukaladeva Choda. Robert Sewell's table of the family gives these names to Tikka I.

Kazipet

Town in the old Warangal taluk. A pillar now in the Dargah of Syed Shah Afzal Biyabani carries the Kakatiya inscription of 1090 and 1098, the main source for the earliest Kakatiya chiefs.

Khammam

Town in Telangana. In 1909 it was the head-quarters of the Khammamett taluk of the Warangal district of Hyderabad State, and the district's chief trading place after Mathwada near Warangal. In 1847 the future minister Salar Jang I, aged nineteen, began his career as talukdar (revenue officer) of the district.

Kharda

Small fort in the hills between Paranda and Ahmadnagar, outside the Telugu country. In March 1795 the Nizam Nizam Ali Khan took refuge here after his army broke up in a night panic during a battle with the united Maratha armies. Surrounded, he gave up his minister, ceded territory worth thirty-five lakhs a year and promised three krores of rupees by the convention of Kharda (Kurdla). The Nawab of Kurnool's troops fought on the Nizam's side.

Kolanupaka

Village in the Nalgonda district of Telangana, the Kollipake of the Western Chalukya records. In the 11th and 12th centuries it was the seat of the Kollipake seven-thousand province. A Choda chief, the Paramara prince Jagaddeva and the prince Somesvara (the future Somesvara III) governed it for the kings of Kalyani. Kannada inscriptions there run from 1033 to the reign of Jagadekamalla II.

Kollapur

Town in the Mahbubnagar district of Telangana. From the early nineteenth century it was the residence of the rajas of the Jatprole samasthan, one of the five chief tributary estates of Hyderabad State. In 1901 the estate had 89 villages and 31,613 people, and it paid the Nizam a tribute of Rs 73,537. Its raja was then a younger brother of the Raja of Venkatagiri, adopted into the family.

Kollur

Deserted diamond-mining site on the Krishna, in the west of the old Sattenapalle taluk (Guntur). Tavernier visited its 'Gani' or 'Coulour' mine under the Qutb Shahis, and his editor V. Ball identified that mine with Kollur. Tavernier found close on 60,000 people working there. He was told that the great diamond Mir Jumla gave the Mughal emperor came from it. By 1883 only ruins of extensive habitations remained.

Kondapalli

Town and hill fortress on the north side of the Krishna, about ten miles north-west of Vijayawada. The fort is said to have been built by the Reddi kings of Kondavidu in the 14th century. It passed to the Gajapatis, was ceded to the Bahmanis in 1470, and was taken by Krishnadeva Raya about 1515 and by Golconda in 1531. It was later the seat of the Kondapalli or Mustafanagar Circar.

Kondaparti

Village near Warangal with two Kakatiya pillar inscriptions of the Malyala generals. They are Chaunda's Chaundeshvara temple record of 1203 and Kata's record of 1241.

Kondavidu

Village and hill fortress in Guntur district. It was the capital of the Reddi kings in the 14th and early 15th centuries, a prize fought over by Orissa, Vijayanagara and Golconda in the 16th, and the seat of the Murtazanagar or Kondavidu Circar.

Konidena

Village south of the Krishna, in the former Guntur country. In the first half of the 12th century it was the seat of a branch of the Telugu Chodas. Its chiefs, Kama-Choda, Tribhuvanamalla Pottapi-Choda and Nanni-Choda, ruled under the Chola emperors, and one of them founded the Ballesvara temple there.

Kopparam

Village in the old Narasaraopet taluk of the Guntur district, near which the copper-plate grant of the 21st year of the Chalukya king Pulakesin II (probably 631) was found. The grant gives land in Karmarashtra and shows the Chalukyas of Badami granting land in the Guntur country at that time.

Kotagiri

Town in Nizamabad district. The Viryala chief Sura lived at a Kotagiri when he made his copper-plate grant of 1273 in Rudramadevi's reign. A Delhi army besieged a fort of that name in the 1320s.

Kotilingala

Village on the south bank of the Godavari in the old Karimnagar district, at the mouth of the Peddavagu stream. Its large early mound, ringed by a mud fort, has given what its excavation report calls the earliest inscribed coins of the Deccan. They name local kings, Gobhada, Kamvaya, Narana and Samagopa, and the only known coins of Simuka, first king of the Satavahanas. Scholars disagree on whether these kings ruled before the Satavahanas, under them or beside them.

Kukunoor

Village on the Godavari near Bhadrachalam, in the old Khammam district. It was transferred to Andhra Pradesh in 2014 and is now in the Eluru district. It is the findspot of the Kukkunur copper plates of Kusumaditya of the Mudigonda Chalukyas, and their editor thought it was the village of Krichchaka granted in them.

Kuravi (Koravi)

Village in the Mahabubabad country of Telangana, the Koravi of medieval inscriptions. The Mudigonda branch of the Chalukyas held it as Koravipura, the seat of their Koravi country. A stone inscription there tells how a Mudigonda chief recovered it from the Rashtrakutas in the time of the Eastern Chalukya Chalukya-Bhima I. The early Kakatiyas also held it for a time.

Kurikyal

Village near Gangadhara in the Karimnagar district of Telangana. On the Bommala Gutta, a rocky hill in its lands, Jinavallabha, younger brother of the Kannada poet Pampa, carved Jaina images and an inscription in Sanskrit, Kannada and Telugu. He did this in the time of the Chalukya king Arikesari II of Vemulavada, about 945.

Kurnool

Walled town where the Handri meets the Tungabhadra, the headquarters of the Kurnool district. Tradition says its fort was built in Achyuta Raya's time. Early in the seventeenth century the Bijapur general Abdul Wahab took it from Gopala Raja, a grandson of Aliya Rama Raya. It was then governed from Bijapur until the Mughal conquest of 1686–88. The two-domed tomb of Abdul Wahab (1618) is its chief old building. From the Mughal conquest until 1839 Kurnool was the seat of the Pathan Nawabs of Kurnool. The French stormed the fort in 1751. In 1839 the last Nawab gave it up to a British commission, and the town became the headquarters of a British district. From 1 October 1953 Kurnool was the capital of the new Andhra State, and its Legislative Assembly met there. In November 1953 the Assembly debated moving the capital, but the resolution was lost. Andhra Pradesh, formed on 1 November 1956, had Hyderabad as its capital.

Lakkireddipalle

Village on a pass in the Rayachoti taluk of the old Cuddapah district. Early in 1751 the Pathan Nawabs of Kurnool, Cuddapah and Savanur turned on the new Nizam, Muzaffar Jang, here, as he marched north from Pondicherry with Bussy's French corps. Muzaffar Jang was killed, by the Nawab of Kurnool's javelin in most accounts. The Nawab of Kurnool was cut down, the Nawab of Savanur was killed and the Nawab of Cuddapah was badly wounded. Bussy then raised Salabat Jang to the throne.

Laknavaram

Stream and large tank of the old Warangal district. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry counts the tank among the big tanks of the Kakatiya period.

Lepakshi

Village nine miles east of Hindupur in the Anantapur district. It is known for the Virabhadra temple on the low Kurmasaila hill and for the colossal stone bull near it. Virupanna of Penukonda built the temple in the reign of Achyuta Raya. The temple's inscriptions of 1533–1538 place Lepakshi in Rodda-nadu, a subdivision of the Penukonda province.

Macherla

Town on the Chandravanka in the west of the Palnadu. A Sanskrit and Telugu inscription of 1111 calls it Mahadevi-tataka and records the gift of the Haihaya chief Beta, of the Chagi family, to a temple there. The ballad of the Palnadu heroes makes it the city founded by Brahma Nayudu, and 19th-century writers called it the capital of the Palnadu heroes.

Machilipatnam

Port near the mouth of the Krishna, known to Europeans as Masulipatam and locally as Bandar. It was the main sea outlet of the Golconda kingdom, where the English, Dutch and French traded from the 17th century. Later it was the chief town of the Northern Circars and of Kistna district.

Madakasira

Town at the foot of a fortified rock in the south of the Anantapur district, near the Mysore border. Its fort belonged to a family of chiefs from Sira, whom the Bijapur kings left with Madakasira and Ratnagiri. Morari Rao of Gooty made them his tributaries. Haidar Ali took the rock by bombardment in 1762, lost it to Morari Rao and took it again in 1776. Mysore held it until 1799, when it went to the Nizam's share of Tipu Sultan's lands.

Madanur

Village about ten miles from Ongole. The copper plates of the Maliyapundi grant of the Eastern Chalukya king Amma II (945–970) were found in its Ramalingesvara temple. The temple also has a stone inscription recording a gift of the village in the Vijayanagara period.

Magallu

Village near Nandigama, probably the Mangallu of an Eastern Chalukya grant of Amma II. The grant was issued while Danarnava held the kingdom, and it gave the village to a Brahmin at the request of Kakatya Gundyana. The 1917 epigraphy report left the choice open between Magallu and Mangollu. The editor of the 1960 edition preferred Magallu because of its position on the Munneru river.

Mahbubnagar

Town in south-western Telangana, formerly called Palmur, head of a district of the Nizam's Dominions formerly known as Nagar Karnul. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1909 describes a Telugu-speaking district on the Krishna, with the samasthans of Wanaparthy, Gopalpet and Jatprole, the silk weavers of Narayanpet, a revenue survey that doubled the recorded farm land, and the great famine of 1876–78.

Mahendragiri

Mountain in the Eastern Ghats in southern Odisha. It is the Mahendra mountain of the Eastern Ganga grants, and on its summit the kings worshipped the god Gokarnasvamin. Old temples of large granite blocks stand on the top, and an inscription there records a Chola pillar of victory.

Malepadu

Village on the south bank of the Penner near Proddatur in Kadapa district. The copper plates of the Telugu Chola king Punyakumara and a stone inscription of Satyaditya came to light here in 1904. The 1956 editors of the Telugu Chola records thought it was perhaps Biriparu, one of the family's capitals.

Malkapuram

Village in the old Guntur taluk, beside Mandadam, near the Krishna. It has the ruined Visvesvara temple and the great pillar inscription of 1261, which records Rudramadevi's gift to the royal preceptor (guru) Visvesvara Sambhu.

Malkhed (Manyakheta)

Village in the Kalaburagi (Gulbarga) district of Karnataka, formerly in Hyderabad State. It is the ancient Manyakheta, capital of the Rashtrakuta kings from the 9th century until 973. J. F. Fleet thought that the Eastern Chalukya king of Vengi built its outer wall for Govinda III. The Eastern Chalukya Gunaga Vijayaditya III claimed to have burnt it.

Manchikallu

Village in the old Palnad taluk of the Guntur district, near Rentachintala. A fragment of an octagonal pillar came from here, with a Prakrit inscription of the Pallava king Simhavarman. D. C. Sircar took the inscription for the earliest Pallava record.

Mangalagiri

Town at the foot of a hill twelve miles north-east of Guntur, with a temple of Narasimha on a rock-cut platform up the hill and a deep square reservoir in the town. A four-sided pillar near the steps of the hill temple records that Saluva Timma, minister of Krishnadeva Raya, captured Kondavidu on 23 June 1515. It also records the gifts of his nephew Nadindla Appa, among them a temple with nine golden pinnacles for the god of Mangalasaila.

Matedu

Village on the Warangal–Khammam road with twin Shiva and Vishnu temples. Pillar inscriptions of 1120 there record temples built by Malle-nayaka, a soldier of Prola II. A record of 1310 records a levy given by the villagers in Prataparudra's reign.

Mayidavolu

Village about twelve miles east of Narasaraopet, formerly in the Kistna and later the Guntur district, where the Prakrit copper plates of the Pallava crown prince Sivaskandavarman, the earliest Pallava charter, were dug up in 1899 on the site of an abandoned village with the ruins of a small old temple.

Medak

Hill-fort town in western Telangana that gave its name to a district and, from 1905, to the Medak Gulshanabad Division of the Nizam's Dominions, although the district headquarters were at Sangareddy. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1909 describes the fort with its Dutch gun of 1620, the Wesleyan mission of 1887, a rice-growing district that the gazetteer called free of famine thanks to its tanks, the new Manjra canal of 1904 and the revenue settlements of 1892–1905.

Mellacheruvu

Village in the old Huzurnagar taluk. Its Svayambhudeva temple has a Telugu inscription of January 1312, in Prataparudra's reign. It records an endowment by the Velamas and people of the village under a nayamkara holder (a chief holding land for military service).

Motupalli

Coastal village, formerly in Guntur district, that was the main Kakatiya sea port. Ganapatideva set up his 1244 edict protecting sea traders here. Henry Yule identified it with a place Marco Polo called Mutfili.

Mudigonda

Village near Khammam in Telangana. It is identified with Mudugondu, the place that gave its name to the Mudigonda branch of the Chalukyas in the copper-plate grant of Kusumayudha IV. Its inscriptions include a broken Kannada record of 999 and two Telugu records of 1294 for the temple of Gopinatha.

Mukhalingam

Village on the left bank of the Vamsadhara in the Srikakulam district. Since 1897 it has been identified with Kalinganagara, the capital named in the copper-plate grants of the Eastern Ganga kings. Its three Orissan-style Siva temples, the Madhukesvara, Bhimesvara and Somesvara, stand among ruins that stretch south to Nagarakatakam. They carry scores of Ganga inscriptions in Telugu and Sanskrit.

Nadagam

Village in the Narasannapeta area of the Srikakulam district. A cultivator found the copper plates of the Ganga king Vajrahasta here in the 1890s. The plates, dated in Saka 979 (1058), give the date of Vajrahasta's coronation in 1038 and a genealogy of the Ganga kings.

Nagarjunakonda

Hill and enclosed valley on the right bank of the Krishna in Palnad taluk, Guntur district. It is the site of Vijayapuri, capital of the Ikshvakus in the 3rd and early 4th centuries CE. A. H. Longhurst excavated its Buddhist monuments in 1927–31. The Archaeological Survey excavated the whole valley in 1954–60, before the Nagarjunasagar dam was to submerge it.

Nagulapadu

Village on the east bank of the Musi south of Suryapet, once a walled town, with ruined Kakatiya-period temples and inscriptions of Ganapatideva's and Prataparudra's reigns.

Nagunur

Village north-east of Karimnagar with the remains of many temples, among them a large three-shrined Shiva temple with an inscription of Rudradeva's reign.

Nalgonda

Town in southern Telangana, head of a district of the Nizam's Dominions. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1909 describes its fort, its market of Osmanganj and the Telugu-speaking district around it, which gained Cherial (Jangaon) and Kodar in 1905. The district suffered in the famines of 1877 and 1899–1900, and in 1946–48 it was a centre of the peasant struggle and of Razakar raids.

Nellore

Town on the Penner near the east coast, called Vikramasimhapura in its medieval inscriptions. From about 1205 it was the capital of the Telugu Chodas, the Madhurantaka Pottapi-Cholas. Tammusiddhi was anointed there, and Tikka I and Manumasiddhi II ruled the Pakanadu from it. Kakatiya armies restored Manumasiddhi there, and the Pandya Sundara Pandya claimed to have been crowned there. In the eighteenth century it belonged to the Nawabs of the Carnatic (Arcot). Their brother Najib-ullah held it and rebelled in 1757, and he beat off an assault by the Nawab's army and an English detachment. In 1801 it became the headquarters of a British district.

Nirmal

Fortified town north of the Godavari, among hills of granite boulders crowned with forts, on the old Hyderabad–Nagpur road. Its raja was killed in 1752 fighting the Nizam Salabat Jang and Bussy; the main walls were built by French officers in the Nizam's service. The town was known for painted toys and playing cards, and in 1905 its taluk moved from Indur (Nizamabad) to the new Adilabad district.

Nizamabad

Town in north-western Telangana, formerly Indur, head of the district renamed Nizamabad in 1905. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1909 describes the Indur fort turned into a Central Jail, the railway to Manmad, rice and silk, and a revenue survey finished in 1898. The great Nizam Sagar irrigation scheme, finished in 1931, watered the Bodhan, Nizamabad, Armur and Yellareddy taluks.

Nizampatnam

Old port on the Guntur coast south of the Krishna mouths. The Fifth Report's tables identify it with the Pettipolee or Pettapoli of the English records. Here the Globe landed English merchants on 20 August 1611, the first English trade on the eastern coast of India. It was a minor factory (trading post) of the Company in the seventeenth century. It gave its name to the Nizampatam Circar, granted to the French in 1751 and to the English by Salabat Jang's treaty of 1759.

Ongole

Town on the Gundlakamma in the old Guntur district, now the headquarters of Prakasam district. H. Krishna Sastri suggested that it was the Omgodu given away in two Pallava copper-plate grants. The country round it was the Karmarashtra (later Kammanadu) of the Pallava and Eastern Chalukya charters. In the eighteenth century Ongole belonged to the Nawabs of the Carnatic (Arcot). The Company took over its management in 1790 and its government in 1801, when it was joined to the Nellore district.

Pakhal

The Pakhal lake east of Warangal, the largest Kakatiya irrigation tank. Jagadala Mummadi built it in Ganapatideva's reign, and his pillar inscription stands on its bund (embankment).

Palakollu

Market town in the western Godavari delta, six miles north of Narasapur. It is known as Kshirarama for its Shiva temple, one of the five Pancharama shrines. It was the first Dutch settlement on this coast, founded in the mid-17th century, and passed finally to the British in 1825.

Palampet

Village beside the Kakatiya-built Ramappa Lake. It is the site of the Rudreshvara (Ramappa) temple, founded by the general Recherla Rudra in 1213, and of several smaller Kakatiya temples.

Palvancha

Town in the Khammam district of Telangana. It was first the seat of the Paloncha samasthan, the tributary estate of the Ashwarao rajas in the forests of the Godavari valley. The family traced its title to the Kakatiya Prataparudra, and its grant of the parganas of Hasanabad and Sankargiri to 1324. It received a sanad (charter) from the Nizam in 1798. In 1901 the estate had about 800 square miles and 38,742 people. The seat later moved to Bhadrachalam and then to Ashwaraopet.

Panugallu (Panagal)

Village on the eastern edge of Nalgonda town in Telangana. It was one of the capitals of the Kandur Choda chiefs, who held the Kandurunadu country under the Western Chalukya kings of Kalyani and later under the Kakatiyas. Its inscriptions include grants of the chief Gokarna Choda (1122) and of his mother Mailamba (1124). P. V. Parabrahma Sastry noted an old temple of the Chalukya period there.

Patancheru

Town near Hyderabad, in the old Medak district of Telangana. A Kannada inscription there records a grant made on the day of the coronation of the Western Chalukya king Somesvara III in February 1127. P. B. Desai took it to identify Patancheru with Pottalakere. J. F. Fleet had listed Pottalakere among the minor capitals of Jayasimha II and placed it in the Bellary district.

Peddabankur

Village near Peddapalli in the old Karimnagar district, beside a 30-hectare early settlement dug for the Andhra Pradesh Department of Archaeology and Museums before 1978. The dig found brick enclosures and 22 wells, two hoards of silver punch-marked coins, Roman coins of Augustus and Tiberius with Satavahana coins, and coins of the local king Samagopa.

Penukonda

Town at the foot of a fortified hill over 3,000 feet high in the Anantapur district. It was the seat of a Vijayanagara prince from 1354, the refuge of the court after the defeat of 1565, and the capital of the Aravidu kings until they moved to Chandragiri. An inscription says its fort was built in 1354, and Channappa Nayudu repaired it for Tirumala. The Gagan Mahal palace, the Rama and Isvara temples and the Sher Khan mosque stand within it. Bijapur took it about 1652.

Phirangipuram

Village near Guntur, two miles from the Kondavidu hills. A pillar in front of its Virabhadra temple carries a verse inscription of 1410, composed by Srinatha. It records the tank Santana-sagara built by Suramamba, queen of the Reddi king Peda Komati Vema.

Pillalamarri

Village near Suryapet, seat of a branch of the Recherla generals of the Kakatiyas. It has temples and inscriptions of Nami-reddi (1195 and 1202) and of his family, including the Nameshvara temple record.

Pithapuram

Town in the Godavari country, about twelve miles north by east of Kakinada (Cocanada). It has been identified with Pishtapura, the fortress taken by the Chalukya king Pulakesin II according to his Aihole inscription of 634–35. It has also been identified with the Pishtapura of Samudragupta's Allahabad inscription.

Polamuru

Village near Anaparti in the former Ramachandrapuram taluk of Godavari district. D. C. Sircar identified it with Puloburu, the village granted by the Vishnukundin king Madhavavarman Janashraya. The Eastern Chalukya Jayasimha I granted it again to the donee's son. Another scholar placed the village at a Polamuru in Bhimavaram taluk.

Polasa (Polavasa)

Village in the Jagtial country of the old Karimnagar district of Telangana. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry identified it with Polavasa, the capital of the Jaina chief Medaraja and his family. They were feudatories (subordinate chiefs) of the Western Chalukyas, and their fief adjoined the Kakatiya country. The Kakatiya Rudradeva sacked Polavasa before 1163.

Potnuru

Village on the Chittivalasa river north of Visakhapatnam, near Simhachalam. According to his court poets and the Telugu chronicles, the Vijayanagara king Krishnadeva Raya set up a pillar of victory here over the Gajapati Prataparudra about 1515–16. The pillar had disappeared by 1907. Later in the seventeenth century the ancestors of the Rajas of Vizianagaram lived here.

Pottapi

Village on the Cheyyeru river in the former Pullampet taluk of Kadapa district. It was the early seat of the Telugu Choda chiefs who called themselves Madhurantaka Pottapi-Cholas. They governed the Pakanadu for the Chola emperors from the 11th or 12th century until they moved to Nellore.

Punganur

Town and seat of a zamindari (landed estate) on the Mysore plateau, in the north-west of the old North Arcot district. It was part of Cuddapah until 1858. Its Telugu poligar family held Kolar until Bijapur took it in 1639, and then held Punganur under Golconda, the Mughals and the Nawabs of Cuddapah. When the Marathas killed the Nawab of Cuddapah in 1757, Punganur passed to them. After about twenty years of contest it went to Haidar Ali, who took it in 1774. After Tipu's fall in 1799 the whole estate was transferred to the East India Company.

Rachakonda

Village and ruined hill fort in the hills east of Hyderabad, the Rajukonda or Rajachala of the inscriptions. It was the capital of the Recherla Velama kings of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Anapota Nayaka fortified it in 1365, and Sultan Quli of Golconda took it early in the sixteenth century.

Raichur

Fort town, now in Karnataka, that was a district headquarters of the Nizam's Dominions in 1939. An inscription in the rampart records that Vithala-natha built its stone fort in 1294. He was an officer of Prataparudra's commander Gona Gannaya-reddi.

Rajahmundry

Town on the left bank of the Godavari, the ancient Rajamahendravaram. It was the eastern capital of the Reddis, and a frontier fortress fought over by Orissa, the Bahmanis, Vijayanagara and Golconda. It was Bussy's headquarters in the 1750s, and in the 1920s the home of the Andhra Historical Research Society.

Rajula-Mandagiri

Hamlet of Juthru near Pattikonda, Kurnool district, where a damaged copy of Asoka's Minor Rock Edicts is carved on the rock of the Ramalingesvara temple.

Ramatirtham

Village near Vizianagaram, where a family of pandits kept the copper-plate grant of the Vishnukundin king Indravarman. It was published in 1914 as the Ramatirtham plates. The grant itself concerns a village in the Plaki district, which most writers place in the Vizianagaram region.

Rayaparti

Village south-east of Warangal on the Khammam road, with the ruins of a fort wall and a damaged Sanskrit inscription of 1247 whose persons its editors identify differently.

Rekapalli

Village on the Godavari in the old Bhadrachalam taluk. N. Venkataramanayya and M. Somasekhara Sarma identified it with the Rekapalli at the foot of the Malyavanta hill that was the capital of the Musunuri chief Prolaya Nayaka, after the Telugu coast was freed from the Delhi Sultanate.

Samalkot and Chalukya-Bhimavaram

Town seven miles north of Kakinada (Cocanada). It takes in the old village of Bhimavaram, called Chalukya-Bhimavaram in its inscriptions after the Eastern Chalukya king Chalukya-Bhima. Its great Bhimesvara temple, one of the five Pancharama shrines of Shiva, is named in an inscription of 1202 as a foundation of that king. Samalkot was later the first seat of the Pithapuram zamindars and an English garrison town.

Sangareddy

Town north-west of Hyderabad, called Sangareddipet in the Imperial Gazetteer of 1909, which was the headquarters of Medak district in the Nizam's Dominions. It had the district offices, a court and a jail, and the state stud farm at Rajampet nearby; the trading town of Sadasivpet lay ten miles to the west.

Secunderabad

British cantonment (military station) six miles north-east of Hyderabad, named after the Nizam Sikandar Jah. The British subsidiary force was stationed here, paid for by the cession of the Ceded Districts (1800). In 1901 it had 83,550 people, besides Bolarum and Trimulgherry, and was one of the largest military stations in India. The Hyderabad Contingent, absorbed into the Indian Army in 1902, had its head-quarters at neighbouring Bolarum.

Siddhavatam (Sidhout)

Fortified town on the Penner below Cuddapah, called Dakshina Kasi, 'the southern Benares'. The Matla chiefs of Chitvel built the first fort. Under the Nawabs of Cuddapah it was the jagir (land grant) of a branch of their family, and a state prison. The last Nawab, Abd-ul-Halim Khan, surrendered to Haidar Ali there on 27 May 1779 (local and later accounts give 1778 and 1780). Tipu's diwan of Cuddapah stored lead there. The taluk went to the Nizam in 1792 and to the Company in 1800, and Sidhout was for a time the Collector's residence after 1807.

Simhachalam

Hill just north of Visakhapatnam with the temple of Narasimha, the richest and best-known shrine of the old Vizagapatam district. More than five hundred inscriptions on the temple record gifts from the Chola king Kulottunga I, the Eastern Ganga kings and their feudatories, the Reddis and the Vijayanagara king Krishnadeva Raya.

Srikakulam

Town on the Langulya river, formerly Chicacole. In 1908 it was the headquarters of a taluk of the Ganjam district. A hoard of six copper-plate grants dug up in the town is now in the Madras Museum. It includes several of the oldest grants of the Ganga kings of Kalinganagara. In the Qutb Shahi period the town was the capital of the Chicacole Sarkar.

Srikalahasti

Temple town on the right bank of the Swarnamukhi at the end of the Nagari hills, in the old North Arcot (later Chittoor) district. It was the seat of the Kalahasti zamindars. Its Siva temple of the wind linga was extended by the Cholas. By an inscription of 1516, it received a hundred-pillared hall and its great gopura (gateway tower) from Krishnadeva Raya. The North Arcot manual took the zamindars to have begun as officers of the Vijayanagara kings.

Srikurmam

Village and place of pilgrimage near Srikakulam, with the temple of Vishnu as the tortoise (Kurma). The temple's black stone pillars carry more than a hundred inscriptions. Many of them are of the Eastern Ganga kings, their ministers and feudatories (subordinate chiefs), and of the Gajapatis.

Srirangam

Temple town on the Kaveri in the old Trichinopoly district, Tamil Nadu. An inscription of 1317 in its Ranganatha temple records the victory of the Kakatiya general Devari-nayaka at Tiruvadikunram. It also records how he put Sundara-Pandya back on the throne.

Srisailam

Temple town of Siva as Mallikarjuna, on the northernmost plateau of the Nallamalai hills, above the gorge of the Krishna in the Kurnool district. The Reddi kings of Kondavidu claimed the country 'from Srisailam to the eastern sea'. Their inscriptions credit Prolaya Vema with a flight of steps from the Patalaganga to the shrine, and Anavema built a hall there in 1378. Shivaji spent about ten days at the shrine in March 1677, on his way from Hyderabad to the Karnatak.

Suryapet

Town on the old Hyderabad–Masulipatam road in Nalgonda district, head of a taluk of the Nizam's Dominions. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1909 records its rice lands and a fast-growing population; in 1948, according to Sarojini Regani's Congress-side history, villages of the taluk were the scene of a no-tax campaign and of killings by Razakars and the Nizam's police.

Suvarnagiri

Seat of Asoka's southern province, named in his Mysore edicts as the residence of a royal prince and his high officers. Its site is unknown: Kanakagiri, the gold country around Maski and a hill in Bihar have all been proposed, and scholars disagree on whether the Kurnool edicts were sent through it.

Tadikonda

Village about eight miles north of Guntur, identified by B. V. Krishna Rao with Tandikonda, which the Eastern Chalukya king Amma II gave with three other villages to the temple of Uma-Mahesvara at Bezwada. Two old tanks named in the grant were still in use in the 1930s, and a mound on the bank of one held the ruins of a Shiva temple.

Tadpatri

Town on the south bank of the Penner in the Anantapur district. It was founded under Vijayanagara by Ramalinga Nayudu, whose family built its two richly carved temples of Ramalingesvara and Chintala Venkataramana. It passed to Muslim governors after 1565, to Morari Rao of Gooty and then to Haidar Ali. A Mughal-style pagoda (gold coin) was struck there. By the treaty of 1792 Tipu Sultan ceded the taluks of Tadpatri and Tadimarri to the Nizam, who ceded them to the East India Company in 1800.

Talamanchi

Village north of Nellore town, in the old Nellore taluk. Here a ploughman turned up the copper-plate grant of the sixth year of the Chalukya king Vikramaditya I (660). He found it in land called Talamanchipadu, said to be the site of a former village.

Talikota

Small fortified town about 25 miles north of the Krishna, in the old Bijapur district, now in Karnataka. The allied armies of four Deccan sultans gathered here in December 1564, before the battle of January 1565 that broke the power of Vijayanagara. The battle is named after the town, though it was fought south of the Krishna. Sewell placed it near Bayapur on the road to Mudkal. H. Heras placed it near the villages of Raksasji and Tagdiji, and so called it the battle of Raksas-Tagdi.

Tatikonda

Village among hillocks in the old Warangal district, with two ruined forts, one on the hill and one at its foot. Local tradition ascribes them to the rebel Sarvaya Papadu (Pap Rai) of the early eighteenth century. The census of 1961 recorded his legend here: his last stand of nine months, his betrayal, and the well of his concubine Yerukala Nanchari.

Teki

Village in the eastern Godavari delta, formerly in Ramachandrapuram taluk. In 1901 a cultivator ploughing his field here found the copper plates of the Chola-Chalukya viceroy Rajaraja-Chodaganga. Before the Godavari anicut (dam) the village also gave its name to one of the old irrigation channels on the eastern side of the delta.

Thanjavur (Tanjore)

City in the Kaveri delta of the Tamil country, the capital of the Chola king Rajaraja I. His great Rajarajesvara temple, begun at the end of the 10th century and finished about 1012, carries the inscriptions in which he claims the conquest of Vengai-nadu, the Eastern Chalukya country of the Telugu coast.

Tippaluru

Village in the former Kamalapuram taluk of Kadapa district, the Tirpaluru of an early Telugu stone inscription of the Telugu Chola Punyakumara. The letters of the inscription resemble those of the Pallava Mahendravarman I. Its date contains the earliest mention of the hora (planetary hour) then known in south Indian inscriptions.

Tirupati and Tirumala

Pilgrim town at the foot of the Tirumala hills in the old North Arcot (later Chittoor) district, and the hill town of Tirumala above it. Tirumala has the temple of Venkatesvara, which James Fergusson's revisers called the most sacred in the Madras Presidency. Krishnadeva Raya visited it after his eastern wars, gave it jewels and set up copper statues of himself and his queens. The later Aravidu kings made their grants before its god and lived at Chandragiri, in sight of the hill.

Tripurantakam

Temple village in the Markapur country, in the old Kurnool district and the later Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh, with the temple of Tripurantakesvara. Kannada inscriptions of the Western Chalukya king Vikramaditya VI stand there. One of them, of 1126, names his general Anantapala as ruler of the Vengi twelve-thousand. They mark the eastern reach of the kingdom of Kalyani.

Udayagiri (Nellore)

Town in the west of the Nellore district below the Udayagiri Droog, an isolated hill of 3,079 feet once fortified with thirteen strongholds. It was the seat of a Vijayanagara province in the fourteenth century. The Gajapatis of Orissa held it in the later fifteenth century, and Krishnadeva Raya took it from Prataparudra after a long siege in 1512–13. Later it was a seat of Golconda and of the jagirdars (land-grant holders) of the Nawabs of Arcot.

Udgir

Fort town in the Bidar district of the Nizam's Hyderabad State (now in Maharashtra), outside the Telugu country. In 1760 the Peshwa's army under Sadashiv Rao Bhau surrounded the Nizam Salabat Jang and his brother Nizam Ali here. The brothers were forced to cede forts and districts worth more than sixty-two lakhs of rupees a year, including the province of Bijapur and most of Aurangabad.

Umamahesvaram

Hill shrine of Siva near Achampet in the Mahbubnagar district, known as the northern gateway of Srisailam. The Recherla chief Mada Nayaka of Devarakonda built a pavilion for the god here in 1377.

Undavalli

Village on the south bank of the Krishna opposite Vijayawada (Bezwada), in Guntur district. It is known for its large rock-cut temple of several storeys with a colossal reclining Vishnu. G. Jouveau-Dubreuil attributed the caves to the Vishnukundins. A. H. Longhurst thought them Pallava work of the early 7th century.

Upparapalli

Village in Warangal district where a Telugu pillar inscription of 1236, from Ganapatideva's reign, records the temple endowments of Kataya, son of Recherla Rudra's minister Raje-nayaka.

Vandram

Village in the western Godavari delta near Bhimavaram, where copper plates of the Eastern Chalukya king Amma II (945–970) were found in a backyard and edited in 1908. The grant gives a village to Kuppanayya, a minister who had founded a Shiva shrine at Draksharama.

Vavveru

Village near Buchireddipalem in the old Kovur taluk of the Nellore district. About 1928 the copper-plate grant of the Pallava king Simhavarman, giving the village of Vilavatti, was dug up here from about eight feet below the old village site. Its editor thought Vilavatti might be Vavveru itself or the neighbouring Vidavaluru.

Velpuru

Village in the former Sattenapalle taluk of Guntur district. Its hilltop Ramalingasvamin temple holds a marble pillar with the only known stone inscription of the Vishnukundin dynasty. The hill is covered with old bricks of the kind found on Buddhist stupa mounds, and a second early Brahmi inscription has been found in the village.

Vemulavada

Temple town in the Karimnagar country of Telangana (Rajanna Sircilla district since 2016), called Lembulavataka in its 10th-century inscriptions. It was the capital of the Chalukyas of Vemulavada, feudatories of the Rashtrakutas, and the court of Arikesari II, patron of the Kannada poet Pampa. Later it was the seat of governors of the Chalukyas of Kalyani. In 1909 it was a jagir town of the Sirsilla taluk, with a temple beside a large tank. In the temple enclosure was the tomb of a Muslim saint honoured by Hindus and Muslims alike.

Vemuluripadu (Vemalurpadu)

Village close to the Phirangipuram railway station in Guntur district, from a resident of which the Vemalurpadu plates of the Eastern Chalukya king Amma II were acquired for the Madras Museum in 1910.

Vengi (Pedavegi)

Village a few miles north of Eluru (Ellore). It stands on the site generally taken to be Vengipura, the capital of the Salankayana kings and then of the early Eastern Chalukyas. Nineteenth-century surveys found ruined temples and mounds spread over Pedavegi, Chinavegi and Denduluru. The city gave its name to the whole country between the Krishna and the Godavari.

Venkatagiri

Town in the old Nellore district, the seat of the Velugoti Rajas of Venkatagiri. Their estate was one of the great permanently settled zamindaris (landed estates) of the Madras Presidency, held under a sanad (grant) of 1802. In the 1930s it was the second town of the district, known for its fine lace-bordered saris. The Rajas built the Indra Mahal, a Town Hall and other public buildings there in the 1880s.

Vijayawada (Bezwada)

Town on the north bank of the Krishna, where the river passes through a gap in the hills. Eastern Chalukya records call it Vijayavada, and the British called it Bezwada. Copper plates of Chalukya-Bhima I were found in a quarry chamber here in 1897. A pillar in its Mallesvara temple carries one of the earliest Telugu verse inscriptions, of the Eastern Chalukya Yuddhamalla.

Vilasa

Village of the Konasima, the Godavari delta between the Vasishtha and Gautami branches, a few miles from Amalapuram. The Musunuri chief Prolaya Nayaka granted it to the scholar Vennaya in about 1330. Vennaya renamed it Prolavaram after the king.

Visakhapatnam

Port on the Vizagapatam coast, known to the English as Vizagapatam, where the East India Company founded a factory (trading post) in 1682. The factory was seized under Aurangzeb in 1689 and besieged by the Faujdar of Chicacole in 1710–11. It surrendered to Bussy in 1757, and the Raja of Vizianagaram gave it to the English in 1758. From 1769 it was the seat of a Chief and Council, and then of the Collector of the Vizagapatam district. Its old cemetery holds the graves of Chiefs of the settlement from 1705.

Vizianagaram

Town north-west of Visakhapatnam, built round a fort that Vijayarama Raju I of the Pusapati family founded in 1713–14. He named it Vijaya-nagaram, 'place of victory'. The Rajas of Vizianagaram were the most powerful zamindars (landholders) of the Northern Circars. They were Bussy's chief allies in 1754–57 and drew him against Bobbili. Under the East India Company they dominated the Vizagapatam country until the estate was sequestrated (taken over) in 1793, and the Raja was killed at Padmanabham in 1794. The zamindari paid the largest peshkash (tribute) in the Madras Presidency.

Wanaparthy

Town in the Mahbubnagar district of Telangana, seat of the Wanaparthy (Wanparti) samasthan, one of the five chief tributary estates of Hyderabad State. In 1901 the estate had 124 villages and 62,197 people. It paid the Nizam a tribute of Rs 76,883. Until 1727 its rajas had their seat at Sugur.

Warangal

Orugallu, the fortified Kakatiya capital, founded beside Hanamkonda in the late twelfth century. Delhi armies besieged it three times and captured it in the 1320s.

Yanam

Small town on the Godavari where the Coringa river leaves the Gautami branch. It was a French factory (trading post) from about 1750, and French territory apart from long English occupations in the wars, until the Government of India took over the French Establishments on 1 November 1954. It was famous in the eighteenth century for white long-cloth. Yanam is now a district of the Union Territory of Puducherry, surrounded by the East Godavari country.

Yelavarru

Village near Amruthalur in the Repalle country of Guntur district, the Elavarru of a copper-plate grant of the Eastern Chalukya king Amma II (945–970). The grant gives the village itself to a Brahmin treasury official. The plates were dug up there in 1864, hanging from an iron bar across a buried jar.