Medieval Indian queens are usually imagined as “ideal wives” rather than powerful, self-interested rulers like their male relatives. They are often depicted as the victims of invaders, the upholders of “culture”, and, more recently, as glamorous warriors. Actual medieval queens were very different. Between 850–950 CE, the ladies of the Bhaumakara dynasty, ruling a small but important kingdom on the banks of the Mahanadi, repeatedly transferred the throne between each other for nearly a century. In the process, they fought off invaders and coup attempts, disinherited male relatives, and ordered war and murder.
Goddesses and queens
During a recent trip to Bhubaneswar, I met a few regular readers of Thinking Medieval, all of whom requested that I write about Odisha. The absence of Odisha from our historical imagination is truly baffling. In Bhubaneswar alone, a pair of Ravenshaw University students accompanied me to Shaivite temples at least 1,300 years old, and showed me massive complexes dating to around the 10th–11th centuries. One of these, the Lingaraja temple, is comparable in scale to the colossal Brihadishvara temple at Thanjavur. Bhubaneswar also preserves traces of Buddhists and Jains from 2,000 years ago.
The Odisha region is truly one of the great centres of South Asian civilisation. Especially in the medieval period, it had many features that distinguished it from its neighbours.
Perhaps the most important of these was the interaction of hills and coast. Historically, much of present-day Odisha was dominated by the Eastern Ghats and dense forests, with only the deltaic regions being suitable for large-scale agriculture. The people of hills and forests were crucial to the trajectory of the early medieval period, c. 600–1100 CE. As Professors Y Subbarayalu and Noboru Karashima have shown in South India Under the Cholas and Ancient to Medieval: South Indian Society in Transition, they served as mercenaries in the conquering armies of the Cholas.
They founded their own Sanskritised dynasties, such as the Hoysalas of South Karnataka, whose inscriptions claim an origin in the Western Ghats, as well as the title of Maleparolganda, “Man Among the Hill-Chiefs”. And as Hermann Kulke writes in Imaging Odisha: The Emergence of the Cultural Identity of an Indian State, hill peoples ruled large tracts of present-day Odisha, and their traditions influenced the development of the region’s Sanskritic court culture.
The medieval Bhanjas of Khinjila, ostensibly related to the present-day Bhanj dynasty of Mayurbhanj, are a case in point. Ruling the upstream tracts of the Mahanadi river, they were originally an autochthonous group, worshipping a formless goddess later known as Khambeshvari or Stambheshvari, the Goddess of the Pillar. The Bhanjas adopted elements of Sanskritic culture, particularly the gifting of lands to Brahmins, but retained their reverence for this tribal goddess. In her brilliant book, From Obscurity to Light: Women in Early Medieval Orissa (Seventh to Twelfth Centuries AD), historian Devika Rangachari described Stambhesvari as the “best example of aboriginal goddesses of Orissa who underwent the process of Hinduization in earlier times,” and notes that the goddess is now considered an incarnation of Durga in the form of a pillar.
The Bhanja kings claimed to have obtained the boon of rulership from Stambhesvari. Rangachari also notes that Bhanja queens made land grants by themselves, maintained the dynasty’s official seal, and validated documents related to land grants. All of these are traditionally “male” roles. The Bhanjas either did not perceive gender as we do, or, somewhat less likely, respected the women of their family as an extension of their devotion to Stambhesvari. Either way, such a systematic prominence of women is uncommon, but not unheard of, in medieval India. It resulted from Odisha’s unique mixture of Sanskritic and local traditions.
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A dynasty of queens
In the early 9th century, a crisis engulfed Tosali, the lands surrounding the downstream regions of the Vaitarani River around present-day Jaipur. The ruling Bhauma-Kara dynasty, a highly Sanskritised clan of Buddhists and Shaivites, was raided by two of South Asia’s great powers: the Rashtrakuta Empire of the Deccan and the Pala Empire of Bengal. We have come across the Bhaumas in an earlier edition of Thinking Medieval, when one of their early kings sent a hand-copied tantric Buddhist text to the Tang Chinese court.
The invasions killed and discredited the men of the Bhauma line. After a civil war between two lineages, the young king died, leaving a child as heir. In this moment of crisis, sometime before 846 CE, the dead king’s mother, Tribhuvana-Mahadevi, seized power not as regent but as king in her own right. In her Dhenkanal Plates, published in Pandit Binayak Misra’s Orissa Under the Bhauma Kings, she bore the sovereign title of Maharajadhiraja, Great King-of-Kings.
Tribhuvana-Mahadevi was the daughter of Rajamalla Ganga, a king of southern Karnataka and a rival of the Rashtrakuta emperors. Her marriage had been a political alliance between the two dynasties, and her natal connections made her a good candidate in this time of crisis. Her ascension to the throne, according to her court, was “entreated by a great circle of chiefs”. (Incidentally, Tribhuvana’s husband is rather colourfully praised in her Dhenkanal Plates as “one whose hands were perfumed by the flowers in the locks of his enemies’ wives, whom he dragged by their hair”—even medieval queens thought about rulership in terms of conquest and virility). Tribhuvana was an astute politician. Though she eventually gave up power to her grandson, she was celebrated by many of her descendants for saving the kingdom.
But this did not end the Bhauma kingdom’s troubles. In the late 9th century, they negotiated a marriage alliance with the Somavamsis of Southern Kosala in present-day Chhattisgarh. Unfortunately, the Somavamsis were not “allies” so much as opportunistic conquerors. Sometime before 894, they invaded Tosali and killed the Bhaumakara king. Though he had male heirs, his sister-in-law—the Somavamsi princess Prithivi-Mahadevi—dismissed their claims and took power for herself. Rangachari notes that she rather cleverly associated herself with the name of an earlier and respected queen, taking the title of Tribhuvana-Mahadevi II. Her nephews eventually took back the throne, after which they expunged her from dynastic records.
After a string of short-lived male rulers, around 916 CE, another queen, Gauri-Mahadevi, took the Bhauma throne and then passed it to her daughter, Dandi-Mahadevi. Dandi was a powerful ruler, making land grants across Tosali. She was succeeded by a junior wife of her father’s, Vakula-Mahadevi, a Bhanja princess whom Rangachari reports bore the title of “an ornament like a flag with insignia in the family of the Bhanja kings”. By this time, the Somavamsis had occupied Northern Tosali, but Vakula still made land grants there in defiance. She passed the throne to her sister-in-law, another Bhanja princess, Dharma-Mahadevi. Both queens, ruling from the traditional Bhauma capital of Guhesvara-Pataka (present-day Jajpur), resisted Somavamsi aggression to the end, with the active support of male Bhanja relatives who served as their feudatories.
The sovereign queens of the Bhauma-Kara dynasty, coming from tribal and royal backgrounds, were extraordinary examples of how Sanskritic court culture absorbed local traditions. But it could not last. By the end of the 10th century, the Somavamsi kings had taken over most of Odisha, only to be shattered in their turn by a Chola invasion in 1022–23. Powerful women never disappeared from the Odia scene, but they would never again hold the sovereignty they once did in that lost medieval world.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. Views are personal.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)