A History of India, Third Edition

THE REGIONAL KINGDOMS OF EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIA

The great regional or imperial kingdom of the third phase was based on
the conquest and annexation of at least one other early kingdom and of
some principalities which existed in intermediate regions. The
appropriation of the surplus within such an extended core area of the
realm was necessary in order to defray the cost of the army, of a larger
number of retainers and Brahmins and of the ‘imperial temple’ which
usually marked the centre of such an imperial kingdom. Subjected rulers of
early kingdoms would surround the ruler of such an imperial kingdom as
his mahasamantas and they in turn would have some princelings as their
samantas. Marital alliances often served as a means to keep the
samantachakra together. In spite of their large size, which could well be
compared to that of medieval European kingdoms, these imperial
kingdoms of medieval India were not in a position to install a centralised
administration beyond the confines of the extended core area. Within this
area, however, they sometimes achieved a high degree of direct central
administration as recent research on the core area of the Cholas in the
eleventh century has shown.

Orissa: a case study of the evolution of a medieval polity

The history of medieval Orissa provides an interesting illustration of the
stages of development ‘from below’ of a regional kingdom (see Map 9).
Orissa had been a province of North Indian empires under the Nandas and
Mauryas and under Kharavela it had even served as the base of a major
kingdom. But these were not instances of indigenous political development
but of a kind of development which were either imposed from above or
imported from some other region (e.g. Dakshina Koshala). It was only
several centuries after the decline of Kharavela’s short-lived realm that
indigenous state formation of the first phase, i.e. a principality, was seen in
Orissa.
Samudragupta’s Allahabad inscription provides some information about
the petty rulers whom he vanquished there. He met with four independent
rulers when proceeding via Kalinga towards the Krishna-Godaveri delta
covering a distance of about 200 miles. None of these rulers claimed any
suzerainty over any of the others. But perhaps Samudragupta’s
intervention did initiate the second phase of state formation there, because
immediately after he had returned to the North the Mathara dynasty,
which had its base in the northern Godaveri delta, extended its sway all the
way north to the mouth of the Mahanadi.
In central Orissa, however, the transition to the second phase began only
after the decline of the Gupta empire when the Shailodbhava dynasty
emerged in the seventh century after defeating several small principalities
and establishing an early kingdom in the southern part of central Orissa.
The rise of this dynasty can be traced back to the fifth century and the