Page:Historic Landmarks of the Deccan.djvu/77



WARANGAL.

EAR the south-eastern corner of the Haidarabad State stand the remains of an old town, once the capital of a kingdom and for a time one of the strongholds of Hinduism in southern India against the Muhammadan invaders from the north, but now so decayed as to be little more than an appanage of a town which, though older than itself, was for a long period no more than one of its suburbs. Warangal is a station on the Haidarabad-Bezwada branch of the Nizam's State Railway, but the traveller who alights there will be borne, unless he clearly explains his destination, to Hanamkonda, which is itself a delight to the antiquary and now overshadows the former Hindu capital.

Warangal was for many years the capital of the Kakatiya dynasty of Telingana, which, according to the Muhammadan historian Badaoni, reigned for 700 years before the capture of the city by Muhammad bin Tughlaq of Delhi in 1321, and therefore, if Badaoni is to be trusted, rose to power early in the seventh century of the Christian era. According to Hindu legend a Chalukya king, possibly one of the Chalukya feudatories of the Rashtrakutas, reigned at Nandagiri (Nander) in the Deccan, and before his death divided his dominions between his two sons, one of whom reigned at Hanamkonda and the other at Kandhar, now in the Nander district of the Haidarabad State. Ballahundu, king of Cuttack, warring against Kandhar, slew king Somadeva, whose widow, Siriyal Devi, fled to Hanamkonda and there gave birth to a posthumous son, who founded the Kakatiya dynasty. There may be a substratum of truth in the legend, but at present it is of little or no historical value, for no dates are given ; much remains to be done by the epigraphist in Telingana, and it is possible that inscriptions exist which would verify or contradict both the Hindu legend and Badaoni's chronology. The first known king of the Kakatiya dynasty is Tribhuvanamalla Betmaraja, whose exact date cannot be ascertained. His grandson built the temple of the thousand pillars in Hanamkonda in 1163 and, allowing about thirty years as the average length of a reign, it may be surmised that