After the Guptas, India became a chessboard of brilliant regional kingdoms — Harsha in the north, the Chalukyas in the Deccan and the Pallavas in the far south — each leaving monuments that still astonish.
§1Harsha of Kannauj
Harshavardhana (606–647) of Thanesar inherited his brother's war with the Gaudas and moved his capital to Kannauj, making it the pivot of northern politics for centuries. His court poet Banabhatta wrote the Harshacharita, the first historical biography in Sanskrit, and the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang spent years at his court and at Nalanda, leaving the most detailed foreign account of seventh-century India.
Harsha was a scholar-king — author of the Sanskrit plays Nagananda, Ratnavali and Priyadarshika — who leaned towards Mahayana Buddhism while honouring all faiths, and who held the great quinquennial assembly of gifts at Prayag. Yet his ambition stopped at the Narmada: the Chalukya Pulakeshin II defeated him there (c. 618–19), a fact proudly recorded in Pulakeshin's Aihole inscription composed by the poet Ravikirti.
§2The Chalukyas of Badami
The Chalukyas of Badami (Vatapi) dominated the Deccan between the sixth and eighth centuries. Pulakeshin II checked Harsha and humbled the Pallavas, but the Pallava Narasimhavarman I retaliated by storming Vatapi itself in 642 — taking the title Vatapikonda — before the Chalukyas under Vikramaditya II returned the blow in 742. From their rivalry were born the rock-cut and structural temples of Aihole, Badami and Pattadakal, the laboratory of Deccan temple architecture.
§3The Pallavas and the Dravida Temple
The Pallavas of Kanchi created the foundations of Dravida architecture. Under Narasimhavarman I (Mamalla), sculptors cut the five monolithic rathas and the great 'Descent of the Ganges' relief at Mamallapuram out of living rock; under Narasimhavarman II rose the Shore Temple by the sea — and at Kanchi, the Kailasanatha temple, the earliest great structural temple of the south.
The Pallava age also saw the devotional revolution begun by the Nayanar (Shaiva) and Alvar (Vaishnava) saints, whose Tamil hymns filled the new temples with congregational worship — the seedbed of the Bhakti movement that would later sweep all India. When Hiuen Tsang visited Kanchi, Pallava power was balancing Chalukya ambition in an enduring Deccan duel.
End of Chapter 09 · Volume I