Western Chalukyas of Kalyāṇi

Restoration

Taila II overthrew the Rāṣṭrakūṭas in 973 and claimed descent from the Bādāmi Chalukyas, restoring the dynastic name after two centuries. The kingdom he founded held the western Deccan for two hundred years and was the Cholas' principal adversary throughout their imperial period.

Vikramāditya VI, who ruled for fifty years from 1076, was the most successful of the line. He set aside the Śaka era in his own records and instituted a Cālukya-Vikrama era dated from his accession — an assertion of sovereignty unusual even among Indian kings. His court poet Bilhaṇa wrote the Vikramāṅkadevacarita, and the jurist Vijñāneśvara wrote the Mitākṣarā there, a commentary on Yājñavalkya that became the most authoritative work of Hindu law in most of India and was applied by British and Indian courts into the twentieth century.

The wars with the Cholas

The Chalukya–Chola wars ran from the tenth century to the twelfth, fought largely over Vengi and the Tungabhadra doab. Both sides sacked the other's territory repeatedly; the battle of Koppam and the campaigns of Rājādhirāja and Someśvara I are the best documented. Neither empire could destroy the other, and both were weakened by the effort.

The Gadag school of temple architecture belongs to this dynasty — the temples at Lakkundi, Dambal, Itagi and Gadag itself, built in soapstone with intricately lathe-turned pillars and stepped star-shaped plans. The Mahādeva temple at Itagi is the finest of them and a direct ancestor of the Hoysala style.

The Vīraśaivas and the end

In the 1160s Basava, a minister at the Kalachuri court that had displaced the Chalukyas at Kalyāṇi, led the movement that became Vīraśaivism or Liṅgāyatism — rejecting caste, temple ritual, and the authority of the Vedas, and producing the vacanas, short free-verse utterances in Kannada that are among the great achievements of Indian devotional literature.

The Chalukyas were restored briefly and then extinguished in 1189, their territory divided among the Hoysalas, the Seunas of Devagiri and the Kākatīyas.