THE REGIONAL KINGDOMS OF EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIAlegend connected with this rise is typical for the origin of such dynasties. A
Shailodbhava inscription of the seventh century recorded the following
story: Pulindasena, a ruler of Kalinga, was tired of ruling his realm and,
therefore, prayed to God that he install a new young ruler instead. God
granted him this wish; a rock split open and out of it stepped a young man
whom Pulindasena called Shailodbhava and whom he made the founder of
a new dynasty.^2 This legend and the names of the two kings clearly point to
the tribal origin of state formation in this area. The Pulindas were a tribe
which had been known to Ashoka, and Pulindasena must have been a war
chieftain (sena) of that tribe. His successor Shailodbhava whose name
means ‘Born of the Mountain’ must have descended from the mountains to
settle at the Rishikulya river. But several generations passed before a
member of that dynasty could celebrate the great horse sacrifice and
extend his sway into the neighbouring nuclear area, the southern
Mahanadi valley. The Shailodbhava legend shows that even the Hindu
kings of a later age proudly referred to their tribal origin. They also
continued to worship the great mountain, Mahendragiri, as their ‘family
mountain’ (kula-giri).
The further political development of Orissa is characterised by a
constant territorial expansion of the regional kingdom which
incorporated several nuclear areas. But this process was not one of
‘expansion from within’ but of ‘addition from without’, not one of
centrifugal expansion but of a centripetal quest for the more highly
developed and more prosperous nuclear region at the centre by forces
emerging at the periphery. It owed its dynamics to a sequence of
conquests of the kingdom’s centre by mighty neighbours who then added
their own nuclear areas to the expanding kingdom. In the eighth century
the Shailodbhavas were dislodged in this way by the Bhaumakaras who
united their nuclear area north of the Mahanadi delta with the
Shailodbhava area in southern Orissa and the other parts of the
Mahanadi delta which the Shailodbhavas had conquered before. At this
stage the regional kingdom encompassed the three main nuclear areas of
coastal Orissa. In the tenth century the Somavamshi kings of western
Orissa conquered the coast and added two of their own nuclear areas to
the regional kingdom. The Somavamshis came from Dakshina Koshala on
the upper Mahanadi and had slowly worked their way downstream
conquering in due course the small but important nuclear area of the
Bhanja rulers of Khinjali Mandala. Altogether the new regional kingdom
now contained five nuclear areas, three at the coast and two in the
hinterland. In the beginning of the twelfth century a ruler of the Ganga
dynasty whose base was in Kalinga captured the regional kingdom of
Orissa and united it with his own homeland in present northern Andhra
Pradesh. The fate of this imperial kingdom of Orissa in the Late Middle
Ages will be described in the next chapter.