The kingdom
Pulakeśin I fortified the hill at Vātāpi — modern Badami, in northern Karnataka — in the middle of the sixth century, and his successors built from it the first empire to unify the Deccan since the Sātavāhanas. At its height the kingdom ran from the Konkan across the plateau to the Andhra coast, and its fleets operated on both seas.
Their long rivalry with the Pallavas of Kāñcī defines the political history of the peninsula in this period: each side took the other's capital at least once, and the wars ran for three generations without a decision.
Pulakeśin II
Pulakeśin II ruled from 610 to 642 and is the dynasty's central figure. The Aihole inscription of 634, composed by the Jain poet Ravikīrti, is his praśasti — a Sanskrit poem of high polish that records his campaigns and, most famously, states that Harṣa, lord of the north, had his joy melted by fear when his elephants fell in battle. It is the only Indian record of the encounter, and it fixes the limit of Harṣa's empire at the Narmada.
Pulakeśin also received an embassy from Khusrau II of Persia, an exchange depicted, according to a widely held interpretation, in a painting at Ajanta. He was killed in 642 when the Pallava king Narasiṃhavarman I took and sacked Vātāpi; the Chalukyas recovered the capital thirteen years later.
The temples
The Chalukya country holds one of the most important groups of monuments in India, because it is where the temple form was experimented with rather than perfected. Aihole has been called a laboratory: shrines of every plan, apsidal, rectangular and square, with flat roofs and curved ones, built over two centuries. Badami has four rock-cut cave temples, Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva and Jain, cut into the red sandstone above the tank.
At Pattadakal, where the kings were consecrated, ten temples stand together in two styles — the northern nāgara and the southern drāviḍa — several of them built by the same patrons in the same decades. The Virūpākṣa temple there was built by Queen Lokamahādevī to mark a victory over the Pallavas, and its architects were brought from the Pallava country. It is the clearest surviving evidence that the two great regional traditions of Indian temple building were understood as alternatives, and could be chosen between.
The dynasty was overthrown in 753 by Dantidurga, a feudatory who founded the Rāṣṭrakūṭa empire.
Further reading
- Michell, George. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms. University of Chicago Press, 1988
- Blurton, T. Richard. Hindu Art. Harvard University Press, 1993
- Davis, Richard H. Lives of Indian Images. Princeton University Press, 1997
- Dehejia, Vidya. Art of the Imperial Cholas. Columbia University Press, 1990
- Elgood, Heather. Hinduism and the Religious Arts. Cassell, 1999
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.