The hill kingdom
The Katyūrīs held the Kumaon and Garhwal hills from a seat at Kārttikeyapura — modern Joshimath — and later from Baijnath in the Katyur valley, which gave the dynasty its name. Their territory at its height reached from the Nepal border across to the Sutlej, though the sources for this are late.
Their copper-plate grants, including the Pandukeshwar plates, are the main documentary evidence, and record the usual gifts of land to brahmins.
Temples
The Katyūrī period established the temple landscape of the Uttarakhand hills. The Jageshwar group — over a hundred small stone shrines in a deodar grove — and the temples at Baijnath, Bageshwar and Dwarahat belong to it or to its immediate aftermath, and they carry the north Indian nāgara form into a mountain idiom of small scale and heavy stone.
The shrines at Badrinath and Kedarnath, the two great Himalayan pilgrimage temples, were also patronised in this period, and the tradition connecting their reorganisation to Śaṅkara belongs to the same broad milieu.
The kingdom fragmented in the twelfth or thirteenth century into a number of small principalities, from which the Chand dynasty of Kumaon and the Panwars of Garhwal later emerged.
Further reading
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Hawley, John Stratton. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Harvard University Press, 2015
- Kramrisch, Stella. The Hindu Temple. Motilal Banarsidass, 1976
- Michell, George. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms. University of Chicago Press, 1988
- Talbot, Cynthia. Precolonial India in Practice. Oxford University Press, 2001
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.