इतिहास
The deltas have the deepest continuous record in the Telugu country and the earliest dates in it, so their periodisation is unusually long at the front and unusually sharp at the back. The ancient period runs from the Bhattiprolu relic caskets, whose inscriptions are among the earliest Brahmi in the south, through the Satavahana stupa at Amaravati and the Ikshvaku city at Vijayapuri, to the Eastern Chalukyas at Vengi, under whose Rajahmundry court Telugu literature begins. The medieval period is defined by the fact that this coast was a frontier rather than a heartland — Kakatiya, Reddi, Gajapati, Vijayanagara and Qutb Shahi authority all reached it from elsewhere — and it closes with the Company's capture of Masulipatnam in 1759. The modern period does not begin with a battle but with an engineering work: the anicuts thrown across the Godavari and the Krishna between 1847 and 1855 turned flood-and-famine country into canal-irrigated double-crop land, and the surplus, the schooling, the printing presses and the politics that followed are all downstream of them. This entry ends in 1947.
कालक्रम यहाँ क्षेत्रीय है, राष्ट्रीय नहीं — मध्यकाल हर क्षेत्र में एक ही सदी से शुरू नहीं होता।
प्राचीनc. 300 BCE – c. 1000 CE
Silt, a sheltered coast and a river highway made this the earliest densely settled part of the Telugu country, and its early record is overwhelmingly Buddhist. The relic caskets from the stupa at Bhattiprolu, of about the third or second century BCE, carry some of the oldest Brahmi writing in southern India. Under the later Satavahanas the great stupa at Dhanyakataka, now Amaravati, was faced with a limestone railing whose narrative sculpture became one of the two or three most influential schools in Indian art, carried from here to Sri Lanka and South-East Asia. In the third century the Ikshvakus built a planned city at Vijayapuri in the Krishna gorge above the delta, where the endowment records name royal women as the principal donors. The Salankayanas and Vishnukundins followed, and in 624 Kubja Vishnuvardhana established the Eastern Chalukya house at Vengi, whose court at Rajamahendravaram later commissioned the first Telugu literary work.
मध्यकालीनc. 1000 – 1759
For seven centuries the deltas were the prize rather than the seat. Kakatiya power reached the coast from Warangal in the thirteenth century and Ganapati Deva issued a charter at Motupalli guaranteeing foreign merchants against the seizure of shipwrecked goods, which is the earliest explicit statement of trade policy from this coast. The one indigenous power of the period is the Reddi kingdom, founded at Addanki in 1325 and moved to the hill fort at Kondavidu, with a second branch at Rajahmundry from 1395; its courts kept Errana, Srinatha and Potana and are the reason so much classical Telugu is delta Telugu. After the Reddis the coast was divided between Vijayanagara and the Gajapatis of Kalinga, taken by Krishnadevaraya's Kalinga campaign, then absorbed by Golconda, which made Machilipatnam its principal port. That port is why the Dutch, English and French all placed early factories on this coast, and why the region's oldest export crafts were designed for foreign buyers before they were designed for anyone here.
आधुनिक1759 – 1947
The Company's title to this coast was settled by paper rather than by conquest — a grant of the five Northern Circars from Shah Alam II in 1765, confirmed by treaty with Nizam Ali in 1768 and bought out finally in 1823 — and the permanent settlement of 1802 fixed the intermediary estates that governed rural life for the next century. What changed the region was water. Famine in the Guntur country in 1832 and 1833 emptied villages, and the anicuts built across the Godavari at Dowleswaram between 1847 and 1852 and across the Krishna at Vijayawada between 1852 and 1855 turned two flood-prone deltas into the most intensively canal-irrigated ground in the Telugu world. Everything the region is known for afterwards follows from that surplus: an early and unusually broad spread of schooling, a reform movement that arranged its first widow remarriage at Rajahmundry in 1881, a Telugu press from the 1900s, and a dense, locally organised nationalist politics whose characteristic form was not the procession but the collective withdrawal — a whole town walking out of its municipality, a whole tract refusing a grazing tax.
शासक और सेनापति
Vasishthiputra Pulumavi Raja शासक c. 2nd century CE
Ruled the later Satavahana state from the Krishna, in the period when the stupa at Dhanyakataka was cased in the carved limestone that made the Amaravati school one of the most widely copied in Asia.
राजवंश: Satavahana. राजधानी: Dhanyakataka (Amaravati)
Vasishthiputra Chamtamula Maharaja संस्थापक c. 227–250 CE
Founded the Ikshvaku house and its planned capital in the Krishna gorge above the delta, a city with monasteries, a stadium and a grid of streets excavated before the valley was submerged.
राजवंश: Ikshvaku. राजधानी: Vijayapuri (Nagarjunakonda)
Chamtisri Mahatalavari संस्थापक c. 3rd century CE
Sister of the founder and the principal donor of the mahachaitya at Vijayapuri, endowed during the reign of her nephew Virapurushadatta. The Ikshvaku inscriptions record royal women, not kings, as the main patrons of the Buddhist establishment there.
राजवंश: Ikshvaku. राजधानी: Vijayapuri (Nagarjunakonda)
Kubja Vishnuvardhana Maharaja संस्थापक 624–641
Placed in the Vengi country as a Chalukya viceroy and founded a house that held the deltas for four centuries and made Telugu the language of its administration and, eventually, of its literature.
राजवंश: Eastern Chalukya. राजधानी: Vengi
Rajaraja Narendra Maharaja शासक 1022–1061
Commissioned Nannaya's Telugu rendering of the Mahabharata, the work with which written Telugu literature begins. The town that carries his title is still the literary capital of the coast.
राजवंश: Eastern Chalukya. राजधानी: Rajamahendravaram (Rajahmundry)
Prolaya Vema Reddi Reddi संस्थापक 1325–1353
Founded the one durable indigenous kingdom of the deltas out of the collapse of Kakatiya authority, moving its seat to the hill fort at Kondavidu and endowing temples and irrigation works along the Krishna.
राजवंश: Reddi kingdom. राजधानी: Addanki, later Kondavidu
Kataya Vema Reddi Reddi शासक 1395–1414
Established the northern branch of the Reddi house on the Godavari. Its court and that of Kondavidu kept Srinatha and Potana, and the classical Telugu of the fifteenth century is largely delta Telugu because of them.
राजवंश: Reddi kingdom, Rajahmundry branch. राजधानी: Rajahmundry
Zamindar of the Northern Circars Zamindar प्रशासक 1802–1947
From the permanent settlement of 1802 the countryside was administered through intermediaries holding a fixed revenue engagement, some of them old chiefly families and some of them revenue farmers who had bought in. The office, not any dynasty, is what stood between the cultivator and the state on this coast for the whole colonial period, and the tenant politics of the 1920s and 1930s was addressed to it.
राजवंश: An office created by settlement, not a lineage. राजधानी: The estates of the coastal districts
Arthur Cotton Engineer, Madras Presidency प्रशासक 1803–1899
Designed and built the Godavari anicut at Dowleswaram between 1847 and 1852 and pressed for the Krishna anicut that followed. The double-crop delta, the canal network dense enough to make ferries ordinary transport, and the surplus behind the region's schooling and politics all date from that work.
राजवंश: Company and Crown administration. राजधानी: Dowleswaram