Chandupatla

The village and its inscriptions

Chandupatla is a village near Nalgonda. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry located its best-known inscription beside a small Shiva shrine outside the village, on the road from Nakrekal (Nekarikallu) to the district town of Nalgonda.¹ The stone carries two records, one on each side. One belongs to the reign of the Western Chalukya king Vikramaditya VI. The other is a short Telugu record of the Kakatiya period.¹

In the Telugu record the local god is called Somanathadeva of Chandrupatla, and the land given lay behind a tank called Rasamudra.¹ Most grants of the period have an opening invocation and a closing curse on anyone who might violate the gift.¹ The Telugu record has neither.¹

Rudramadevi’s death

The Kakatiya record is dated Saka 1211 (November 1289; Saka is an Indian way of counting years).¹² It records a gift by Puvvula Mummadi to the god Somanathadeva.¹² He made it for the merit of the queen Rudramadevi and of his master Mallikarjuna-nayaka, both of whom had died.¹² Its discovery moved the accepted date of the queen’s death from the mid-1290s to 1289.¹³

Parabrahma Sastry identified this Mallikarjuna-nayaka as a general based at nearby Panugallu.¹⁴ That general’s son set up an inscription at Panugallu in May 1290.¹⁴ He and the editors of the 1992 Nalgonda district volume suggested that the queen and her general died together fighting the rebel Kayastha chief Ambadeva. The inscription itself does not say how they died.¹²⁴

The editors of the Nalgonda volume pointed out that Chandupatla lies close to Panugallu, the seat of Nissanka Mallikarjuna-nayaka.⁴ In their view, this supports the identification of the general named in the record.⁴ The full record is described on the Chandupatla inscription page.

Footnotes

1. Gajjala Vasanta Lakshmi (ed.), Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 3 (2023), pp. 81–82, No. 94, reprinting P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, “Did Kakati Rudramadevi die on the battlefield?”, Studies in Indian Epigraphy I (1974), pp. 40–49. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

2. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), p. 125. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

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

4. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry (ed.), Inscriptions of Andhra Pradesh: Nalgonda District, vol. I (1992), p. xi. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵