Kandikonda

Kandikonda is the Skandadri, “Skanda’s hill”, of its fourteenth-century inscriptions. P. Sreenivasachar’s Corpus of 1956 placed the village in the Khammamet taluk, 30 miles from Mahbubabad on the road to Koravi. It had a fort and an earthen fort wall. Its inscription of 1375 lay in a field between the fort and the earthen wall, about a mile and a half from the village.¹

Epigraphia Telanganica summarises later editions of the inscriptions.²³ It places Kandikonda in the Mahabubabad taluk of the Warangal district, about ten miles from Mahabubabad on the road to Khammam.²³

The inscriptions

Two inscriptions of the Recherla family are known from Kandikonda. The first is dated in the year Rakshasa (2 August 1375).¹² It records that Venna, son of Mada Nayaka and Tippamba, built a temple of Janardana and gave it lands.¹² By his father’s order Venna had come from Devarakonda (Devagiri) to rule Skandadri.¹²

The second is a Sanskrit poem cut on a slanting rock at the top of a hillock.³⁴ It is summarised in Epigraphia Telanganica from two editions.³⁴ It records that Venna built a temple of the god Skandadrinatha with his consorts Uma and Ganga.³⁴ The river goddess Ganga was represented by the water of the tank.³⁴

The poem says that a teacher, a Desika, gave Venna his name.⁵ The volume Epigraphia Telanganica suggests that this was the Vaishnava teacher Vedanta Desika.⁵ See the Kandikonda inscription of Venna and the Recherla Velamas.

Where the sources disagree

The two sources place the village differently:¹³

• Sreenivasachar’s Corpus (1956) puts it in the Khammamet taluk, 30 miles from Mahbubabad on the road to Koravi¹
• the Kandikonda inscription summarised in Epigraphia Telanganica puts it in the Mahabubabad taluk, 10 miles from Mahabubabad on the road to Khammam³

About the sources. The Wikidata item for the village gives no coordinates, so the village is not shown on the map.

Footnotes

1. P. Sreenivasachar (ed.), A Corpus of Inscriptions in the Telingana Districts of Andhra Pradesh, Part III (1956), p. 5, No. Km. 3 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Gajjala Vasanta Lakshmi (ed.), Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 4 (2023), p. 20, No. 7. Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 4 (2023), pp. 28–29, No. 12. Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

4. Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 4 (2023), p. 32, No. 13. Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Epigraphia Telanganica, vol. 4 (2023), p. 31, No. 12. Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩²