Govinda III — Rashtrakuta Empire
Krishna III — Rashtrakuta Empire
Dhruva Dharavarsha — Rashtrakuta Empire
Amoghvarsha — Rashtrakuta Empire
Pulakeshi II — Chalukya Empire
Vikramaditya II — Chalukya Empire
Indra III — Rashtrakuta Empire
Deva Raya II — Karnataka Samrajya
Vikramaditya VI — Western Chalukya Empire
Krishna Deva Raya — Karnataka Samrajya
THE SACK OF MANYAKHETA AND THE BRUTAL END OF MUNJA
In 972 CE, the Paramara king Siyaka II of Malwa went to war against the Rashtrakuta emperor Khottiga. The Rashtrakuta forces were defeated and driven back south, with Siyaka pursuing them all the way toward Manyakheta, the great imperial capital of Karnataka.
Then came the blow.
Siyaka's army entered Manyakheta and plundered the city. The capital of the Rashtrakutas, which for generations had stood at the centre of one of India's greatest empires, was suddenly in the hands of an invading army from Malwa.
But Siyaka would not have Manyakheta uncontested.
As the fighting continued, the Western Ganga ruler Marasimha II came to the support of the Rashtrakuta forces. A fierce confrontation followed around the imperial encampment. The Paramara advance was checked, and Siyaka was eventually forced to withdraw and escape south Karnataka.
The sack of Manyakheta did not, by itself, destroy the Rashtrakuta Empire. But it exposed a serious weakness at the very heart of Rashtrakuta power. And someone was watching.
Tailapa II.
Tailapa was himself a powerful Rashtrakuta feudatory in Karnataka. He saw the weakening of the imperial throne as an opportunity and moved decisively. In 973 CE, he defeated the Rashtrakuta ruler Karka II, seized Manyakheta, and established the Western Chalukya Empire.
The Rashtrakutas had ruled Karnataka for centuries.
Now Tailapa had taken their capital and replaced them.
And the Paramaras were about to face the dynasty that had risen in their wake.
Siyaka's successor, Vakpati Munja, was no ordinary opponent. Munja was an ambitious and formidable ruler who eventually turned his armies south against Tailapa II. The struggle between the two kings became one of the great confrontations between Malwa and Karnataka.
But this time, the Paramara king walked into a trap.Munja was defeated and captured.The man whose predecessor had once marched into Karnataka and plundered Manyakheta was now a prisoner of the ruler who had seized the city from the collapsing Rashtrakuta order.
Munja was humiliated, forced to beg from door to door, and finally condemned to death.
Then came the final act.
Tailapa had Munja executed having him crushed beneath an elephant.
The Paramara king who had come south as a conqueror ended his life as a captive in the land his dynasty had once invaded.
Thus came a brutal end to what could have been a legendary rivalry.
But the rivalry did not die with Munja.
The Chalukyas of Karnataka would continue to carry the war into Paramara territory. Under Someshvara I, the father of the future Vikramaditya VI, Chalukya armies invaded Malwa and ravaged the Paramara heartland, striking at Dhara, Ujjayini and Mandapa. Dhara and Ujjayini were burned and plundered, while the Paramara king Bhoja was forced to flee before the Chalukya advance.
The wheel had turned completely.
The Paramaras had once stormed Manyakheta.
The Chalukyas would later storm Malwa.
And between those two moments stood the brutal death of Vakpati Munja . A king who came south to challenge Tailapa II, only to become one of the most famous victims of the struggle for supremacy between Karnataka and Malwa.
There's a theory floating around, mostly in colonial-era gazetteers and a handful of modern blogs, that says the Rathore clan of Marwar and Bikaner is basically a branch of the Rashtrakuta dynasty that ruled the Deccan and migrated North sometime after the 10th century. It gets repeated a lot because it sounds neat, it has an epigraphic hook, and it lets people draw a straight line from a big imperial dynasty to a big Rajput clan. But when you actually look at where this claim comes from and weigh it against the clan's own genealogical record, the linguistic evidence, the political chronology, and now population genetics, it falls apart pretty fast. Let's go through it piece by piece.
The Rathores' own bardic and genealogical tradition, most importantly Muhnot Nainsi's Khyat (17th century) and the earlier Prithviraj Raso material, is unambiguous: they claim Suryavanshi descent, tracing back through the Gahadavala rulers of Kannauj. The story goes that after Jaichand's defeat at the Battle of Chandwar in 1194 CE at the hands of Muhammad of Ghor, his grandson Sheoji (or Siyaji) fled west with a band of followers and eventually settled around Pali in Marwar, becoming the patriarch of the entire clan. Every major Rathore lineage, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Kishangarh, ties its patrilineage back to this man. That's the tradition the clan itself preserved for eight centuries, long before any 20th-century monograph proposed a Deccan connection and the tradition is supported by inscriptions found near Kannauj recording several generations of rule there.
The Rashtrakuta-origin theory isn't ancient. It's traceable in its modern form largely to Pandit Bisheshwar Nath Reu's 1933 monograph, written when Reu was employed as a court historian in Jodhpur state itself. Reu argued that the word "Rathore" is simply a corruption of "Rashtrakuta" or "Rattoda," and that inscriptions of "Rathauras" found in and around Marwar dating from the 10th to 13th centuries prove a Rashtrakuta-branch migration into the region. This etymological argument, that Ratta/Rashtrakuta and Rathore/Rathoda are the same word, is the entire foundation the theory rests on. Strip that away and there isn't much left.
There are three big problems with it.
The term "Ratta" appears in the historiography as a Kannada-origin word denoting an office or chieftaincy, not a family or clan identity. Scholars researching the origin of the word Rashtrakuta itself disagree on where "Ratta" even comes from, some link it to the ancient "Rashtrika" administrative title found in Ashokan-era inscriptions, others to a purely South Indian regional term. It's a title, an administrative or geographic descriptor, that shows up attached to multiple unrelated ruling families across centuries and regions, from the Deccan Rashtrakutas to petty "Ratta" chiefs of Saundatti in Karnataka who have no claimed connection to Rajasthan at all. Using a shared root-sound between "Rathore" and "Rashtrakuta" as proof of shared ancestry is the same kind of leap as saying two unrelated families are related because their surnames both mean "smith" in different languages. It's suggestive, not conclusive, and plenty of epigraphists have treated it as coincidental rather than genealogical.
The imperial Rashtrakuta dynasty was overthrown by the Chalukyas around 973 CE. That's the end of them as a ruling power in the Deccan. The Rathore clan's own recorded political emergence in Marwar, per both the bardic tradition and the inscriptional record of "Rathaura" chieftains, doesn't really solidify until the 13th century, over 250 years later, and is tied explicitly to the fall of Kannauj, a north Indian, Gangetic-plains event, not a Deccan one. If you're going to claim a direct migratory offshoot, you need some continuity: a family that left the Deccan, carried its identity west and north, and re-emerged as rulers. What actually exists in the record is a 250+ year gap with the clan's own narrative pointing somewhere else entirely (Kannauj, not Manyakheta or Malkhed).
This is the part that gets glossed over the most. When historian C. V. Vaidya proposed that the Rashtrakutas were ancestors of the modern Marathas, this was rejected by historian A. S. Altekar, who showed that they were of the "Canarese" (Kannada-speaking) stock, ruling from Manyakheta in present-day Karnataka, patronizing Kannada literature, and issuing a large share of their inscriptions in Kannada alongside Sanskrit. A dynasty that is linguistically, administratively, and culturally rooted in the Kannada-speaking Deccan doesn't map cleanly onto a Rajasthani Rajput clan with a Sanskritic Suryavanshi, Kannauj-facing identity and Rajasthani/Marwari linguistic roots. If the Rathores really were displaced Rashtrakuta nobility, you'd expect some cultural residue, Kannada loanwords, Deccan-style temple or administrative traditions, something. That residue simply isn't there in Marwar's early record.
The inscriptions Reu leaned on do show a title or clan-name resembling "Rathaura" cropping up in Marwar from around the 10th century. But a shared or similar-sounding clan title appearing in two different regions isn't evidence of migration, it's exactly the kind of coincidence you'd expect given "Ratta/Rashtra" was a widely used administrative epithet across early medieval India, attached to unrelated local chiefs from Punjab to the Deccan (the Wikipedia article on Rashtrakuta origins itself notes the "Ratta/Rashtrika" epithet turns up from Ashokan-era Gandhara inscriptions all the way to Kalinga, centuries before the Deccan dynasty even existed). Historians who work through this material more cautiously note that the scholarship on most of the smaller Rathore sub-branches Nainsi lists is thin to nonexistent, which is a polite way of saying the record doesn't actually support a confident migration narrative either way, let alone one from Karnataka specifically.
Rajasthani Rajput populations, the Rathore clan included, show a distinctly high Ancestral North Indian (ANI) component, generally cited in the 65–75% range, with the Y-DNA haplogroup R1a-Z93 dominant, often 35-45% of male lineages, reflecting the steppe-pastoralist and Indo-Aryan ancestry layer that's characteristic of northern and northwestern Indian Kshatriya and Brahmin populations.
Deccan and Kannada-speaking populations, the demographic base the historical Rashtrakuta dynasty actually drew its nobility and administration from, show close to the opposite profile: haplogroup H-M69 and L-M20 dominate, both far older South Asian lineages associated with the Ancestral South Indian (ASI) component, and the ANI/steppe contribution runs meaningfully lower. Even the Marathas, who share a home region with the old Rashtrakuta core and have their own (separately contested) Rajput-descent tradition, show ANI in the 40–45% range, well below what you see in Rajasthani Rajput groups, precisely because the underlying Deccan population base is ASI-dominant rather than ANI-dominant.
The Y Haplogroup which denotes the paternal lineage do not change much with mixing patterns of the maternal side even after migration, taking all these infos into account - theres no chance that Rathore Rajputs from Rajasthan can share same lineage from people who historically lived in Karnataka (including its elites). Put simply: the genetic profile you'd expect from a population descended from Kannada-speaking Deccan nobility doesn't match the genetic profile Rajasthani Rathores actually carry. A large-scale migration and lineage-founding event from a Kannada-speaking Deccan dynasty into a population that instead shows a strong North Indian/steppe-ancestry signature is a hard story to square with the data, it's not what you'd predict, and it's not what shows up. This isn't proof of the Suryavanshi/Kannauj tradition either, ancestry markers can't verify a mythological genealogy going back to Rama, but it does independently undercut the specific claim of a Karnataka/Rashtrakuta migration into the Rathore male line. Kannauj Migration from Gahadavala Dynasty still holds some basis as Rathores and Gangetic Rajputs (including Gahadavalas) have same dominant Y haplogroup.
The Rashtrakuta-origin theory rests almost entirely on a single contested etymological link (Ratta/Rashtrakuta sounding like Rathore) proposed in 1933 by a court-employed historian, with a 250-year chronological gap, no cultural or linguistic residue from the Deccan showing up in early Marwar, and now a population-genetics profile that runs the wrong direction for a Kannada-Deccan-origin population. Against that, you've got the clan's own consistent, centuries-old genealogical tradition pointing to Kannauj and the Gangetic plains, not Manyakheta. Majority of the historians today agree with this, that Rathores most probably have nothing to do with Rashtrakutas or Karnataka. It was a story popularised in recent past based on just one assumption and later people got their heads into it and madey their own different variations of the story.
So this was it, I hope y'all got your doubts cleared through this post. Thank You for taking an effort to read all this.
Phalodi Fort, Rajasthan — inscription of Maharav Hammir, son of Maharaja Nar Singh, Vikrama Samvat 1573 (1516 CE).
This inscription records the repair of the fort gateway by Hammir, and in identifying his father, Maharaja Nar Singh, it explicitly gives the lineage as:
“राष्ट्रकूट वंश महाराज श्री नरसिंह” — “Maharaja Shri Nar Singh of the Rashtrakuta lineage.”
This is therefore a significant piece of inscriptional evidence for the Rashtrakuta connection claimed by the Rathore ruling house of Rajasthan. It is not a modern genealogy or a much later legend, but a 16th-century inscription associated with the ruling family.
And this is only one piece of a much wider body of evidence connecting Rajasthan and other parts of North India with the Rashtrakutas. Rashtrakuta power and military campaigns repeatedly reached deep into North India under rulers such as Dhruva, Govinda III, Indra III and Krishna III, leaving behind political, dynastic and cultural consequences across Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Gujarat.
The repeated appearance of Rashtrakuta-linked traditions among ruling families in these regions deserves to be examined in that wider historical context. The Rathore connection is therefore one important part of a much larger Rashtrakuta legacy in North India. Which is a direct result of multiple invasions of Karnataka Rashtrakutas and their establishment of various Rashtrakuta client states.
Credits- karunadu_verse
Got an interesting historical fact.
After the decline of the Pala Empire which is also considered the Golden period of Bengal, the kingdoms arose in the regions of Bengal, Mithila and Magadh were of Kannada origin.
• Senas of Bengal (1070-1230) — Its founder Samanta Sena was a migrant from Karnataka (as Deopara Prashasti inscription composed by Umapati Dhara, a minister in the court of Lakshmana Sena mentions).
• Karnats of Mithila (1097-1324) — Its founder Nanyadeva was a commander in Chalukya army arrived in Mithila as part of Chalukya invasions of North (Inscriptions of the Senas describe him as "Karnata-Kulabhusana").The almost 230 years continuous Sovereign reign of Karnats is considered the Golden period of Mithila.
• Pithipatis of Magadh (1120-1290) — Its founder Vallabharāja Devaraksita was Chindaka Naga. Tho he migrated to Magadh from a place called Ratanpur in Chhattisgarh but but his clan i.e., Chindaka Naga were of Kannada origin, migrated to Bastar region of Chhattisgarh from Sindavadi, Karnataka.
All of these Dynasties while of Kannada origin, embraced the local culture & language and adapted it even in the Courts. They propagated the local culture and language.
Senas crowned themselves as 'Gauḍēśvara'.
Karnats crowned themselves as 'Mithileśwara'.
Pithipatis crowned themselves as 'Magadhādipati'.
Credits- history_maniaa
79 Years Ago Today: The Ultimate Act of Royal Renunciation
"While everyone else became Maharajas by ascending the throne, Jayachamarajendra became a true Maharaja by relinquishing it." - Rashtrakavi Kuvempu On this exact day, August 9, 1947, one of the most defining moments in the making of modern India took place.
Maharaja Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, the last ruling monarch of the progressive and prosperous Kingdom of Mysore, officially signed the Instrument of Accession.While several princely states hesitated, resisted, or placed complex conditions, the Maharaja of Mysore chose a different path. Exhibiting the true spirit of a Rajarshi (Saint-King), he put the vision of a united, democratic India ahead of his absolute crown. Images attached are of the Instrument of Accession and the Standstill Agreement signed by the Maharaja himself, ceding Defence, External Affairs, and Communications to the Indian Dominion.His swift, selfless decision created a massive domino effect, inspiring other major states to peacefully integrate into the Indian Union.
Credits- magadh_itivratt
Lingaraja who was an able administrator. The document of his period i.e. the Hukum Nama issued by him, contains 52 clear cut instructions to be followed by his officials in administering the state. In 1820 A.D., he built the Omkareshvara temple at Madikeri.
Lingaraja Wadiyar is also the same guy who introduced Coorg attire to Kodagu people.
Above picture is the tombs of rajhas of Coorg/Kodagu who belonged to Haleri dynasty of Veerashaiva sect. The kings of Coorg were popularly called Wadiyars of Kodagu.
Kings of kodagu had defeated Imperial Mysore sultanate 31 times.
Physiographically, Karnataka state forms part of four well defined regions.
The state has three main types of climates. For meteorological purposes, the state has been divided into three sub-divisions namely (a) Coastal Karnataka (Dakshina Kannada, Udupi and Uttara Kannada districts), (b) North Interior Karnataka (Belgaum, Bidar, Bijapur, Bagalkote, Dharwad, Gadag, Haveri, Gulbarga, Raichur and Koppal districts) and (c) South Interior Karnataka (the remaining districts of Bengaluru Rural, Bengaluru Urban, Bellary, Chikkamagaluru, Chitradurga, Davanagere, Kodagu, Hassan, Kolar, Mysore, Chamarajanagar, Mandya, Shimoga and Tumkur districts). The tropical monsoon climate covers the entire coastal belt and adjoining areas. The climate in this region is hot with high rainfall during the monsoon season i.e., June to September. The southern half of the state experiences hot, seasonally dry, tropical, savanna climate, while most of the northern half experiences hot, semi-arid, tropical steppe type of climate.
Taking into consideration the topography, bio-climate and soil, the vegetation of Karnataka could be grouped under the following four categories i.e.,
Dialects and Scripts: From ancient times, Karnataka, being a vast area, has developed unique regional variations in dialects, influenced by several factors, including the languages of the neighbouring states. In the present times, one can notice at least 3 well defined regional dialects popularly known as Mysore-Kannada, Dharwad-Kannada and MangaloreKannada, coinciding with the three cultural centres. Even within these regions, numerous dialectal subdivisions are flourishing.
Migration data according to 2001 census
Similarly, migration from Karnataka to other parts of India included:
source: Glimpses of Karnataka, 2012