Vākāṭaka dynasty

The dynasty

The Vākāṭakas rose in Vidarbha as Sātavāhana power collapsed and became the dominant force in the northern Deccan for two centuries. The house divided early into two lines, one ruling from Nandivardhana and later Pravarapura in the east, the other from Vatsagulma, modern Washim, in the west, and both are documented by copper-plate charters.

Their inscriptions are a principal source for the social history of the period: land grants to brahmins, tax exemptions specified in detail, and the growth of the agrahāra as an institution are all visible in them.

The Gupta marriage

Candragupta II gave his daughter Prabhāvatīguptā in marriage to the Vākāṭaka king Rudrasena II. When Rudrasena died young she governed as regent for her sons for some twenty years, issuing charters in her own name in which she gives her Gupta lineage before her husband's — an unusual assertion and one of the clearest cases of a woman exercising sovereign authority in this period.

The alliance is usually read as strategic on the Gupta side, securing the Deccan flank during the campaign against the Western Kṣatrapas of Gujarat. Whether Vākāṭaka policy was in any sense directed from the north is debated; the charters show a state acting on its own account.

Ajanta

The second and greater phase of excavation at Ajanta — caves 1, 2, 16, 17, 19 and 26 among them — belongs to the fifth century and to the patronage of the Vatsagulma branch under Hariṣeṇa and his ministers. Cave 16 carries an inscription of the minister Varāhadeva; cave 17 records a feudatory's gift.

It is the painting that has made these caves famous: the Bodhisattva figures of cave 1, the Jātaka narratives running across walls and ceilings, and a palette and modelling that have no surviving parallel from ancient India because almost all comparable work was on perishable surfaces. The programme appears to have been abandoned unfinished, which is generally connected with the dynasty's fall around 500 CE.