This is Part 22 of 47 in HorizonDesk's chronological series on Indian history, from the Stone Age to Independence in 1947. It follows Part 21: Chalukyas and Rashtrakutas, Badami to Ellora.
For roughly two centuries after Harsha, the richest prize in north India was a single city on the Ganga: Kannauj, also called Kanyakubja or Mahodaya. Three dynasties fought over it again and again. The Palas of Bengal and Bihar pushed in from the east, the Gurjara-Pratiharas from Malwa and Rajasthan in the west, and the Rashtrakutas of the Deccan swept up from the south. Textbooks call this the "tripartite struggle", and it runs from the late 8th century to the early 10th.
A word of caution first. Almost everything we know comes from inscriptions and copper-plate grants written to glorify their own kings, so each side claims to have beaten the other two. Reign dates are approximate, often by a decade or more, and some battles appear in only one source. Read the "c." markers seriously.
Why Kannauj mattered
Kannauj sits on the Ganga in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Under the Maukharis and then Harshavardhana (606 to 647) it became the imperial capital of the north, the city the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang described with its monasteries, temples and great assembly; see Part 19: Harshavardhana and Xuanzang's India. Holding it meant the revenue of the Ganga plain and the prestige of Harsha's name: a claim to be paramount ruler of the north.
After Harsha died without an heir, the city passed through obscure hands. In the early 8th century Yashovarman made it powerful again; his court poet Vakpati wrote the Prakrit poem Gaudavaho about his victory over a king of Gauda (Bengal). Around the 740s Yashovarman was defeated by Lalitaditya Muktapida of Kashmir, according to the Kashmiri chronicle Rajatarangini, written centuries later. Kannauj then fell to a weak line known as the Ayudhas (Vajrayudha, Indrayudha and Chakrayudha), who were the pawns, not the players, of what followed.
Three rising powers
- The Palas: Bengal in the mid-8th century was in what its own records call matsyanyaya, the "law of the fish". The Khalimpur copper plate of Dharmapala says that the people (prakriti) made Gopala king to end this chaos, around 750. Historians read this as a choice by leading chiefs, not a popular election.
- The Gurjara-Pratiharas: their origin is debated. An older theory linked the Gurjaras to Central Asian groups who came with the Hunas; most historians now favour an Indian origin. The imperial line began with Nagabhata I (c. 730 to c. 760), based in Malwa around Ujjain.
- The Rashtrakutas: as we saw in Part 21, they overthrew the Chalukyas of Badami around 753 and ruled the Deccan.
The Pratiharas and Arab Sindh
The Pratiharas first made their name in the west. The Arabs had conquered Sindh in 711 to 712 under Muhammad bin Qasim. In the 730s the governor Junayd and his successors raided east into Rajasthan, Gujarat and Malwa; the 9th-century Arab historian al-Baladhuri lists places attacked, including Ujjain. The Gwalior inscription of Mihira Bhoja, written a century later, praises Nagabhata I for crushing the armies of a powerful mlechchha (foreign) king, which is usually read as the Arabs. Arab rule did not expand beyond Sindh and Multan after this, and the Pratiharas long remained the main barrier against it.
Round one: Vatsaraja, Dharmapala and Dhruva
The first full clash came in the 780s and 790s. The Jain Harivamsha of Jinasena, dated 783 to 784, mentions Vatsaraja ruling in the west and Indrayudha in the north, a rare fixed date for this period. Vatsaraja, Nagabhata I's grandnephew, marched east and defeated the Pala king Dharmapala (c. 770 to c. 810) somewhere in the Ganga-Yamuna region.
Then the Rashtrakuta king Dhruva (c. 780 to 793) came north. His records say he drove Vatsaraja into the desert of Rajasthan and then beat Dharmapala between the Ganga and the Yamuna, and that he added the two rivers to his royal emblem. Dhruva went home with the spoils, leaving a vacuum. Dharmapala filled it: he removed Indrayudha and placed his own protege Chakrayudha on the throne of Kannauj.
The Khalimpur plate describes a grand court at Kannauj where Dharmapala installed Chakrayudha with the approval of the kings of the Bhojas, Matsyas, Madras, Kurus, Yadus, Yavanas, Avanti, Gandhara and Kira, bowing "with trembling diadems". Boastful, but it shows Dharmapala as overlord of the north for a time.
Round two: Nagabhata II and Govinda III
Vatsaraja's son Nagabhata II (c. 795 to c. 833) rebuilt Pratihara power and, according to the Gwalior inscription, won over or defeated kings from Andhra and Sindh to Vidarbha and Kalinga. He then moved against Kannauj, defeated Chakrayudha and beat Dharmapala in a big battle near Mudgagiri (Munger in Bihar).
The Rashtrakutas intervened again. Govinda III (793 to 814) marched north, probably around 800, defeated Nagabhata II, received the submission of Dharmapala and Chakrayudha, and by his records' account watered his horses in the Himalayan streams. As before, he went home. The order of events is debated: some historians put Nagabhata's capture of Kannauj before Govinda's raid, others after. Britannica gives about 816 for Nagabhata's final conquest of Kannauj, after which it became the Pratihara capital for two centuries.
Devapala and the Pala peak
Dharmapala's son Devapala (c. 810 to c. 850) kept the Palas strong in the east. Pala praise poems, such as the Badal pillar inscription of his minister's family, claim he conquered the Utkalas (Odisha), the Hunas, Pragjyotisha (Assam), the Dravidas and the Gurjaras, and ruled from the Himalayas to the Vindhyas. Historians treat most of this as exaggeration.
The most striking evidence of his reach is the Nalanda copper plate: at the request of Balaputradeva, the Sailendra king of Suvarnadvipa (Sumatra and Java), Devapala granted five villages to support a monastery the Sailendra king had built at Nalanda.
Pala Buddhism: Vikramashila, Nalanda and Somapura
The Palas were the last great royal patrons of Buddhism in India, though they also funded Brahmins and Hindu temples. Under them Mahayana and the newer Vajrayana (tantric) Buddhism flourished.
- Nalanda: the old monastery-university in Bihar, already famous in Xuanzang's day, received fresh Pala grants and buildings. The archaeological site was inscribed by UNESCO in 2016; our Nalanda Mahavihara guide covers its history and how to visit.
- Vikramashila: founded by Dharmapala in the late 8th or early 9th century, at Antichak near Bhagalpur in Bihar, where the Archaeological Survey of India has excavated a huge square monastery with a cross-shaped central stupa. Its most famous teacher, Atisha Dipankara, went to Tibet in 1042 and helped revive Buddhism there.
- Somapura Mahavihara: at Paharpur in northern Bangladesh, built by Dharmapala in the late 8th century. UNESCO, which inscribed it in 1985, calls it one of the best-known Buddhist monasteries south of the Himalayas; its terraced, cross-shaped central temple influenced Buddhist architecture as far as Myanmar and Java.
Pala workshops also produced a distinctive school of black-stone and bronze sculpture that travelled to Nepal, Tibet and Southeast Asia.
Mihira Bhoja and Mahendrapala: the Pratihara empire
After a short reign by Ramabhadra, Mihira Bhoja (c. 836 to c. 885) took the throne and ruled for about half a century. His silver coins carry his title Adivaraha, after Vishnu's boar form. He fought the Palas and Rashtrakutas with mixed results, but at his height his power stretched from the Himalayan foothills to the Narmada, and from Bengal's borders towards Sindh.
His son Mahendrapala I (c. 885 to c. 910) took the empire to its widest extent. Inscriptions in his name have been found from Kathiawar in Gujarat to north Bengal, though much of that land was held loosely through vassals. His court poet and teacher was Rajashekhara, author of the Prakrit play Karpuramanjari and the Kavyamimamsa, a handbook on poetics.
How Arab travellers saw it
Some of the best outside views of this period come from Arab writers.
- The Akhbar al-Sin wa al-Hind (Accounts of China and India), compiled around 851 and often attributed to a merchant named Sulaiman, names the Balhara (the Rashtrakuta king) as the greatest king of India. It describes the king of Juzr (the Gurjara, meaning the Pratihara) as having a large army and the finest cavalry, as unfriendly to the Arabs, and his land as rich and very safe from robbers. It also describes the kingdom of Rahma, usually taken to be the Pala realm, as having a larger army than the others and many elephants.
- Al-Masudi, the Baghdad historian and traveller who visited western India around 915 to 916, wrote in his Meadows of Gold that the king of Kannauj, whom he calls Baura, kept four large armies, one for each direction, and was at war with the Balhara in the south and with the Muslim rulers of Multan in the west.
Indra III sacks Kannauj
After Mahendrapala's death, the Pratihara succession was disputed. In this weak moment the Rashtrakuta king Indra III (c. 914 to 929) led a great raid north. His Cambay plates of 930 say his horses crossed the Yamuna and that he destroyed the city of Mahodaya, that is, Kannauj, around 916. The Pratihara king Mahipala fled. Mahipala recovered his capital with the help of feudatories such as the Chandelas, but the Pratiharas never regained their old strength.
Decline and the successor states
By the mid-10th century all three powers were weakening. Their great vassals turned into kingdoms: the Chandelas of Bundelkhand, builders of Khajuraho; the Paramaras of Malwa, who sacked the Rashtrakuta capital Manyakheta in 972; the Kalachuris of Tripuri; the Chahamanas (Chauhans) of Shakambhari; and the Chaulukyas (Solankis) of Gujarat. In the Deccan, the Rashtrakutas fell to Tailapa II in 973, as told in Part 21.
The Pratiharas shrank to the doab. In 1018 Mahmud of Ghazni attacked Kannauj and its king Rajyapala fled; he was later killed by a Chandela-led alliance for giving in. Kannauj itself revived under the Gahadavalas in the late 11th century. Today it is a quiet town famous for perfume; see our piece on Kannauj rose water and attar.
The Palas lasted longest. Mahipala I (c. 988 to c. 1038) revived them, but his kingdom was raided by the Chola army of Rajendra I, which reached the Ganga around 1022; see Tamil History Part 21: Rajendra Chola I and Srivijaya. Ramapala (c. 1077 to c. 1120) was the last strong Pala king; after him the Senas took over Bengal in the 12th century.
How historians see the "tripartite struggle"
The label is useful but simplifies. It was never a single war: it was a series of campaigns over about 150 years, with long gaps. It also had more than three players, including the Ayudhas, Kashmir, the Arabs of Sindh and many vassal chiefs whose loyalty decided battles. The Rashtrakutas never tried to rule Kannauj; their northern raids were displays of power that brought home wealth and titles. Historians such as R. S. Sharma saw the age as one of fragmentation and "Indian feudalism"; others, including B. D. Chattopadhyaya, argue that regional states were growing, not decaying. Either way, the contest drained all three powers.
Key takeaways
- Vatsaraja (Pratihara), Dharmapala (Pala) and Dhruva (Rashtrakuta) fought the first round in the 780s and 790s; Dharmapala briefly installed Chakrayudha at Kannauj.
- Nagabhata II took Kannauj around 816 and made it the Pratihara capital, despite Govinda III's raid north.
- The Palas, under Dharmapala and Devapala, were great patrons of Buddhism at Nalanda, Vikramashila and Somapura (UNESCO 1985).
- Pratiharas from Nagabhata I to Mihira Bhoja checked Arab expansion beyond Sindh; Arab writers Sulaiman and al-Masudi describe their power.
- Indra III sacked Kannauj around 916; the Pratiharas declined, and Chandelas, Paramaras and other successor states rose.
Next part
In Part 23, we turn south to The Imperial Cholas: Rajaraja, Rajendra and a Maritime Empire, who sent fleets across the Bay of Bengal.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Pala dynasty
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Rashtrakuta dynasty
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Ruins of the Buddhist Vihara at Paharpur
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara at Nalanda, Bihar
- Archaeological Survey of India, Patna Circle, Vikramashila excavated remains, Antichak
- Majumdar, R. C. (ed.) (1955), The Age of Imperial Kanauj (History and Culture of the Indian People, vol. 4), Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan
- Puri, B. N. (1957), The History of the Gurjara-Pratiharas, Hind Kitabs, Bombay
- Altekar, A. S. (1934), The Rashtrakutas and Their Times, Oriental Book Agency, Poona
- Majumdar, R. C. (1971), History of Ancient Bengal, G. Bharadwaj, Calcutta
- Elliot, H. M. and Dowson, J. (1867), The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, vol. 1 (Sulaiman, al-Masudi, al-Baladhuri)
- Chattopadhyaya, B. D. (1994), The Making of Early Medieval India, Oxford University Press
- Thapar, R. (2002), Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, University of California Press
- Singh, U. (2008), A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, Pearson
