The Story of Pratap Rudra: The Last Sovereign of the Kakatiya Dynasty in the Telegu-Speaking Region (1289-1323)
As the sun ascended on a clear
morning in the year 1318, Pratap Rudra, the reigning monarch of the Telegu-Kakatiya
dynasty found himself at the endgame of the medieval game of thrones. His
citadel at Warangal was surrounded by a massive and modernized war
machine that had rolled down from the plains of North India to enforce
submission on his proud kingdom. Realizing any further resistance to be futile,
Pratap Rudra agreed to discuss terms with his invaders. A settlement was soon
reached, according to which the Kakatiya kingdom would cede to the Sultan of
Delhi a single fortress of Badrkot, a vast amount of gold and jewels, 12,000
horses and a hundred war elephants ‘as huge as the demons’.
Negotiations settled, the Kakatiya
king ascended the eighteen steps leading to the parapets of his massive fort.
There, in full view of the serried ranks of his intrepid Telugu warriors, and
the invading army, Pratap Rudra, solemnly turned in the direction of Delhi and
bowed to kiss the floor in a gesture of humble submission.
Medieval warcraft was proud, but not naïve. It understood the concept of strategic retreat and surviving today to fight tomorrow. Nor was it unaccustomed to victors imposing harsh and humiliating terms. In fact, the terms imposed by the invading army did not seem too harsh by the standards of the time. The invaders had annexed just one fort and seemed content for the time being to return with the looted money and a promise of yearly tributes to Delhi. But what was new this time was the use of distinctly Persianized rituals that the invaders insisted upon. Pratap Rudra received a robe of honour (qaba) sent by the Sultan in Delhi. He also bestowed upon Pratap Rudra the high title of ‘Salatin Panah’ (the refuge of kings). A new Perso-Islamic vocabulary and grammar of statecraft now looked poised to absorb the Telegu realm. Pratap Rudra’s ancestors had all been Maharajas; the word ‘Sultan’ had never been heard in the Deccan before. But within a generation of Pratap Rudra’s demise, scores of upstarts in the region would style themselves ‘sultan’. Even the mighty emperor of the Vijaynagar empire, that arose in the decades to follow, would assume the title of ‘Surutrana Rajanam’ (A sultan among Rajas).
The Iranian idea of divine kingship
stood ill-at-ease with the egalitarian tribal ethos of the nomadic Arab desert
life of early Islam. This resulted in an ongoing struggle between the idea of Islamic
brotherhood, and the institution of Badshahat, which arrogated to itself
the vice-regency of the Almighty in the human realm. Persian tropes of kingship
and statecraft were older than Islam itself. Pre-Islamic Iran had been a land
of empires. Over successive generations, a distinctly Persian imperial
tradition and style of kingship had come into being. It was well-suited to rule
over lands inhabited by diverse populations, governed by an imperial capital with
the iron hand. When Islam got itself an empire in Asia, its Caliphs stepped
into the shoes of traditional Persian monarchs and styled themselves in the
manner of the great pre-Islamic emperor of Iran. It was this Islamized Iranian
theory of divine kingship that the new Sultans at Delhi had been nurturing and
adapting to their needs.
Parallelly, Andhra had been emerging as a
distinct and self-conscious cultural region for almost three centuries prior to
the reign of Pratap Rudra. As early as 1053, we come across an inscription that
uses the term Andhra Bhasha interchangeably with Telugu, pointing to the
fact that people already associated their land with a shared language, culture
and identity. Similar developments had been taking place in Marathi and Kannada
regions as well. In 1163, when Pratap Rudra’s ancestors declared their
independence from the Chalukyan empire, they immediately switched the language
of their inscriptions from Kannada to Telugu. Pratap Rudra’s Telugu warriors
were not mere feudal levies or soldiers of fortune. They were tied together by
a bond of history, a common identity, and a shared way of life.
Pratap Rudra’s great-grandfather, Ganapati
(1199-1262) had launched a series of military campaigns in the Krishna-Godavari deltas
to unify all Telugu-speaking lands. Hoysalas did the same for Kannadas and Yadavas
for Marathi-speaking people during this period. By the time these kingdoms came
under attack from Delhi at the beginning of the 14th century, there
was a general sense that the Marathi, Telugu and Kannada were distinct cultural
regions and ‘natural’ political units.
Pratap Rudra’s mother Rudrama Devi
had been an energetic ruler who bequeathed him a full treasury and an efficient
army. But they were still a ‘regional kingdom’, lacking the resources that a
trans-regional empire based in Delhi could mobilize. Thankfully, Pratap Rudra's capital was
protected by an immense wall that his mother Rudrama Devi had constructed. It was
an imposing structure- an earthen wall, one-and-a-half miles in diameter and surrounded
by a moat some 150 feet wide. In addition to this, there was a formidable inner
wall made of huge blocks of granite. Built originally by Ganapati and heightened
by Rudrama Devi to over twenty feet, this wall consisted of forty-five massive bastions,
projecting outward from the wall.
Pratap Rudra's ancestors had faced few
serious foes. When Pratap Rudra rose to the Kakatiya lion throne in 1289, many expected
a golden era for the ascendant Kakatiya dynasty. But twenty years into his reign
Delhi’s Sultan Alauddin sent his general Malik Kafur to raid the Kakatiya capital.
He brought along an army of the kind never seen in the Deccan before. Invaders'
cutting-edge military technology included huge stone-throwing engines/trebuchets
(manajiq), tension-powered ballistas (arrada), wooded parapets (matars),
stone missiles (ghadban), boulder chucking engines (guroha), and the
most effective -a 450-foot-long earthen ramp (pashib), that could be used
as a platform to cross moats.
Malik Kafur rained arrows on the defenders
for a full month. Soon, the outer walls were breached, and Kafur’s troops invested
the fort’s inner stone wall. With no hope of a respite in sight, Pratap Rudra
sued for peace. Kafur had been advised by Alauddin to neither annihilate Pratap
Rudra’s kingdom nor annex it, but rather to incorporate Warangal within the Sultanate’s
circle of tributaries. At a time when means of transport and communication were
notoriously deficient, it was better to reduce a conquered kingdom to tributary
status than to annex it outright. This was a time-tested strategy used by transregional empires, going as far back as the Mauryan time. Pratap Rudra was presented with
a khilat (robe) and a chhatr (royal parasol) sent by the Sultan
(a Persian tradition). The invading army received a huge amount of loot and the
promise of a yearly tribute of elephants, horses, and gold, and Kakatiya’s
support in the event of a future invasion of the Deccan. And sure enough, the
next year Alauddin enlisted Pratap Rudra’s aid in his invasion of the
Pandya Tamil kingdom. This opportunity was also utilized by Pratap Rudra to
suppress some of his rebellious and errant vassals in the Nellore region with
the help of the Sultan’s army. The joint campaign against Kanchipuram proved to
be a grand success.
With Alauddin’s death in 1316, the
Sultanate was plunged into a phase of confusion and infighting. Taking advantage
of this situation Pratap Rudra stopped sending the annual tribute to Delhi. This
evoked the punitive invasion of Khusrau Khan in 1318, who, after another bout of
fierce fighting, accepted the arrears of the tribute, made Pratap Rudra climb once
again to the parapet of his fort to bow to the Sultan, and returned. However,
the indomitable Kakatiya monarch once again asserted his independence when the
Khalji dynasty was replaced by Tughlaq’s in 1320. By now, these raids from the
north had come to resemble annual plundering expeditions. Despite successive defeats,
Pratap Rudra displayed no sign of shedding his recalcitrance.
The new Sultan at Delhi, Ghiyasuddin,
dispatched a fresh punitive expedition, under the leadership of his son Ulugh Khan,
who would go on to be the future Sultan of Delhi, under the title of Muhammad
Bin Tughlaq. Unlike, Alauddin his vision was to bring the whole of Deccan under
Delhi’s direct control. He also intended to move his capital from Delhi to
Devagiri in the Deccan- partly to avoid the annual invasions and ravages of Mongols
from the northwest, and partly to consolidate the Sultanate’s conquests in
Deccan.
On this occasion, no attempt was
made to engage Pratap Rudra in negotiations. Upon breaching the city walls Tughlaq’s
forces subjected the capital to unchecked plunder and destruction. The great Svayambhusiva
temple situated within the fort was an obvious target for the marauding army.
Not just for its wealth, but also because it housed the state deity that watched
over the realm and protected the king. Such a source of spiritual authority
could easily serve as the rallying point for future rebellions. The new plan
was to eradicate all traces of the Kakatiya empire, state symbols and public
emblems.
After the plundering was over, a
governor was appointed to rule over the kingdom- now appropriated as a province
of the Sultanate. The city itself was renamed Sultanpur, and new silver, gold
and copper coins were minted in the name of the Tughlaq Sultan. As for the
king, he remained a potential threat. So long as he was alive, his person could
serve as a rallying point for the turbulent Telegu people. Under these
circumstances, Ulugh Khan decided to remove him from Warangal altogether and
send him away to Delhi court, to be held as a ‘royal guest’.
However, Pratap Rudra never made it
to Delhi. A contemporary Sultanate historian writes that he died on the road to
Delhi. A Telugu inscription carved seven years after the event says that he died
on the bank of Narmada. Another Telugu inscription from some twenty years later
says that he died of his own wish. Combining the testimony found in various
sources, it appears that the valiant ‘lion king’ of Warangal committed suicide
on the banks of Narmada while being led to Delhi. He would have known that his
life as a historical actor was over; what awaited him at Delhi was a lifetime
of vegetative existence, a fate to which this scion of indomitable warriors
could not have reconciled. Pratap Rudra’s memory was preserved and commemorated
in the local ballads and literature, most notably in the extant ballad of his
life- Prataparudra Charitramu.
As for the Telugu culture and way
of life, it not just survived but also thrived. Within two decades of the
passing of the Kakatiya empire, from its ruins emerged the mighty Vijaynagar
empire. Though not a Telugu kingdom per se, under its aegis, Telugu and Kannada
both thrived. Simultaneously, a centuries-long process of the development of a
distinctly Deccani Muslim culture too began. Both the Qutbshahis and
Nizamshahis who would go on to rule these lands in the subsequent centuries
would be self-consciously Deccani in their outlook, customs, and attitude.
Bibliography
Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial
India in Practice: Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra, Oxford
University Press, 2001
Richard Eaton, The New Cambridge
History of India: A Social History of Deccan, 1300-1761, Cambridge University
Press, 2005
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