Hemavati

Hemavati is a village in the Madakasira taluk of the Anantapur district, eight miles south of Amarapuram.¹ It has been identified with Henjeru or Penjeru, a chief town of the Nolamba-Pallavas in the 9th and 10th centuries.¹² The Anantapur gazetteer of 1905 said it had “as ancient a history as any place in the district”.¹

Henjeru of the Nolambas

B. Lewis Rice identified Hemavati with the Penjeru or Henjeru of the inscriptions.¹ A hamlet a short way south of the village was still called Henjeru in 1905.¹ H. Krishna Sastri (1910) called Henjeru “the capital of the Nolambas”.²

Three inscriptions of the Nolamba line had been copied there by 1905.¹ One gives a long family tree of its kings.¹ Krishna Sastri printed this tree from a Hemavati pillar, from the Pallava ancestor Trinayana down to Dilipa (Iriva-Nolamba).³ The inscription of Dilipa is dated Saka 864 (942–43; Saka is an Indian way of counting years).³ Krishna Sastri noted that Rice had printed the Hemavati pillars in his Tumkur volume.²

Later records

The Anantapur gazetteer listed these later inscriptions at Hemavati:¹

• records of a Western Chalukya king¹
• two Tamil records of a Chola ruler, one of them of the reign of a Kulottunga-Chola¹⁴
• a grant of the Hoysala king Vira-Ballala II, of 1205–06, to the Nolambesvara temple⁴¹

The gazetteer thought this Nolambesvara temple was probably the present Doddesvara shrine.⁴ V. Rangacharya (1919) also listed a record there of a chief named Mallideva Choda Maharaja, dated Saka 1090.⁵ Rice wrote that in 1072 a chief named Udayaditya ruled Nolambavadi from Penjeru.⁶

The temples

The chief temples stand in a group to the north-east of the village.¹ The gazetteer noted their delicate carving and their many massive pillars of polished black stone.¹ The village houses were often built of carved stones from vanished shrines.¹

The Doddesvara (or Nonesvara) temple is small and low.¹⁷ Its large stones are carved to look like slender pillars set into the wall.⁷ In front of the gate is a bull of dark granite, about eight feet long.⁷ Inside is a porch on twenty black stone pillars, carved with scenes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana.⁷ The other temples of the group are those of Mallesvara, Virupakshesvara and Siddhesvara.⁷

Footnotes

1. Francis, Anantapur (1905), p. 180 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵

2. H. Krishna Sastri, “Two Nolamba Inscriptions from Dharmapuri”, Epigraphia Indica X (1909–10), p. 57 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Krishna Sastri, “Two Nolamba Inscriptions” (1910), p. 58 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²

4. Francis, Anantapur (1905), p. 16 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. V. Rangacharya, A Topographical List of the Inscriptions of the Madras Presidency, Vol. I (1919), p. 22, Anantapur No. 139 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

6. B. Lewis Rice, Mysore and Coorg from the Inscriptions (1909), p. 59 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

7. Francis, Anantapur (1905), p. 181 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵