Mahāmeghavāhana dynasty

After Aśoka

Kalinga had been conquered by Aśoka around 261 BCE at a cost his own edict records, and it re-emerges as an independent power within a century or so under a dynasty calling itself Mahāmeghavāhana. The best-known of its kings, Khāravela, ruled in the first or second century BCE — the date is contested and turns on the reading of an era in his inscription.

The dynasty was Jain, and its monuments are the rock-cut cave dwellings for monks at Udayagiri and Khaṇḍagiri, near Bhubaneswar: small, low cells cut into two facing hills, with carved façades and a great deal of inscription.

The Hāthīgumphā inscription

Khāravela's inscription in the Hāthīgumphā, the elephant cave, runs to seventeen lines and gives a year-by-year account of his reign: repairs to the city gates and embankments of Kaliṅganagara, festivals and entertainments provided for the people, campaigns west against the Sātavāhana country, north into Magadha, and south, and the recovery of a Jina image that a Nanda king had carried off from Kalinga centuries before.

It is the most detailed royal narrative surviving from ancient India before the Gupta praśastis, and it is also difficult: the stone is damaged, several critical readings are disputed, and the chronology built on it varies by more than a century between scholars. The claim that he forced a Sātakarṇi to retreat, and the reference to a Yavana king, are among the passages on which reconstructions of the whole period have been hung.

Afterwards

The dynasty disappears from the record after Khāravela's immediate successors, and Kalinga's political history resumes with the Māṭharas and Eastern Gangas several centuries later. The Udayagiri and Khaṇḍagiri caves remain in use as a Jain site and are among the oldest continuously venerated monastic settlements in eastern India.