Śālaṅkāyana dynasty

Vengī

The Śālaṅkāyanas established themselves at Vengī, near modern Eluru, after the collapse of Ikṣvāku power, and ruled the delta country between the Krishna and the Godāvarī. Their charters, issued in Prakrit and later in Sanskrit, invoke the god Citrarathasvāmin as the family's tutelary deity and record grants of land to brahmins.

Vengī itself became one of the durable political centres of the Andhra coast, held afterwards by the Viṣṇukuṇḍins and then for four centuries by the Eastern Chalukyas.

In the Allahabad inscription

Samudragupta's pillar inscription lists Hastivarman of Vengī among the kings of the south whom he defeated and then reinstated — the policy the inscription describes as capturing and releasing, in contrast to the annexations carried out in the north. Hastivarman is identified as a Śālaṅkāyana, which fixes the dynasty's chronology against a firm Gupta date and is the reason it is better placed in time than most of its neighbours.

The Gupta campaign in the peninsula was a demonstration rather than a conquest, and the southern kingdoms it touched continued as before. The Śālaṅkāyanas were displaced in the fifth century by the Viṣṇukuṇḍins.