Saurashtra · Arid Northwest
Saurashtra has never had one capital, and its periodisation reflects that. Its medieval period begins about 475 CE with the Maitrakas at Valabhi — the first power seated inside the peninsula rather than governing it from outside — and it is a history of many small states rather than of one line. Its modern period begins in 1807, half a century before the usual date, with the settlement Colonel Alexander Walker negotiated on behalf of the East India Company. That settlement fixed what each chief owed in tribute, ended the annual mulkgiri raiding season by which the Marathas had collected it, and in doing so froze the peninsula's political map: the several hundred estates and states that existed in 1807 were still there in 1948, when 217 of them were merged at once. Almost everything distinctive about the region's nineteenth century — the density of small courts, the Charan poets attached to them, the pilgrimage economy left undisturbed — follows from that freeze.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
The peninsula was Harappan at its edges rather than in its interior: Lothal, at the head of the Gulf of Khambhat in the Bhal lowland, held a brick basin usually read as a dock, and Rangpur and Rojdi lie inland on the same river systems. What follows is unusually well documented for western India, and it is documented on one rock. The granite boulder outside Junagadh carries Ashoka's fourteen major rock edicts from about 250 BCE; then, cut beside them shortly after 150 CE, the Western Kshatrapa ruler Rudradaman I's inscription, twenty lines in Sanskrit, recording the repair of the Sudarshana reservoir after a breach and tracing its construction back through an officer of Ashoka's named Tushaspha to a vaishya named Pushyagupta under Chandragupta Maurya; and later a third inscription of the Gupta emperor Skandagupta on the same lake. Three regimes, four centuries apart, all recorded on the same stone for the same reason — the peninsula has no long river and holding water was the standing political problem.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 2400–1900 BCE | Lothal, in the Bhal lowland at the head of the Gulf of Khambhat, is occupied as a Harappan town with a large brick basin generally interpreted as a dock; Rangpur and Rojdi lie on the same drainage. |
| c. 250 BCE | Ashoka's fourteen major rock edicts are cut on the boulder outside Junagadh, at the foot of Girnar. |
| c. 320–232 BCE | The Sudarshana reservoir at Junagadh is built under Chandragupta Maurya by an officer named Pushyagupta and given conduits under Ashoka by one named Tushaspha, according to the later inscription that records it. |
| c. 150 CE | Rudradaman I records the rebuilding of the Sudarshana dam after a breach, on the same rock, in one of the earliest long inscriptions composed in literary Sanskrit. |
| 5th century CE | A third inscription, of the Gupta emperor Skandagupta, is cut on the same rock, again concerning the Sudarshana reservoir. |
Bhatarka, a Gupta military governor of Saurashtra, made himself independent about 475 and founded the Maitraka line at Valabhi, near the head of the Gulf of Khambhat. Valabhi became a centre of learning substantial enough that the Chinese traveller I-Tsing, visiting late in the seventh century, set it beside Nalanda; the dynasty ran to about 776 and how it ended is not recorded in any contemporary source. From the tenth century the Chudasamas held the Girnar country from Vamanasthali and then from Junagadh, and the coast carried a pilgrimage traffic that made it worth raiding: Mahmud of Ghazni's force reached Somnath in 1026, and the temple was rebuilt more than once afterwards. The peninsula's characteristic political form — dozens of small chiefships rather than one kingdom — sets in after 1472, when the Gujarat Sultanate annexed Junagadh, and consolidates through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as Jadeja, Gohil, Kathi and Jhala houses each took a district. The eighteenth century added a fiscal layer over the top of it in the form of the mulkgiri, an annual armed tribute-collecting expedition mounted by the Marathas.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 475 | Bhatarka, Gupta military governor of Saurashtra, establishes himself independently and founds the Maitraka dynasty with its capital at Valabhi. |
| late 7th century | I-Tsing describes Valabhi as a major centre of learning, comparable in his account to Nalanda; the dynasty runs to about 776. |
| 1026 | A force under Mahmud of Ghazni reaches the temple at Somnath on the southern coast and plunders it; the temple is rebuilt more than once in the centuries that follow. |
| late 11th century | Ra Navaghana of the Chudasamas moves the capital from Vamanasthali to Junagadh and builds the Navghan Kuvo and the Adi Kadi Vav, two of the peninsula's deepest rock-cut wells. |
| 1472 | Sultan Mahmud Begada of Gujarat defeats the last Chudasama ruler, Mandalika III, and annexes Junagadh; Mandalika III converted to Islam after his defeat. |
| 1540 | Jam Rawal, a Jadeja from Kutch, founds Nawanagar on the Halar coast, carrying the Jadeja line and its speech across the gulf. |
| 1723 | Bhavsinhji Gohil founds Bhavnagar as a port capital, moving down from Sihor to a site chosen for maritime trade; the Gohils had come to the coast from Marwar in the thirteenth century. |
| 1730 | Mohammad Bahadur Khanji I declares independence from the Mughal governor of Gujarat and founds the state of Junagadh under the Babi line. |
| 18th century | Maratha forces mount the annual mulkgiri expedition through Kathiawar to collect tribute from its chiefs, the practice the settlement of 1807 replaces. |
Colonel Alexander Walker's settlement of 1807 converted an annual raid into a fixed assessment. Each chief's tribute was written down, the Company guaranteed the arrangement, and the peninsula was administered thereafter through the Kathiawar Agency, with Rajkot as its centre and, from 1924, the headquarters of the Western India States Agency. The effect was to preserve an extraordinary number of very small states, and with them the courts that employed Charan poets, the pilgrimage circuit and the pastoral economy. The nineteenth century's one sustained armed resistance came from the Waghers of Okhamandal on the north-west shore. Twentieth-century politics here was princely-state politics from the start: praja mandals demanding responsible government from durbars, beginning at Bhavnagar in 1921 and culminating in the Rajkot agitation of 1938–39. The peninsula also supplied a disproportionate number of people to the national movement, beginning with a boy born at Porbandar in 1869 whose father was diwan there.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1807 | The settlement negotiated by Colonel Alexander Walker fixes the tribute owed by each Kathiawar chief and ends the mulkgiri expeditions; Junagadh becomes a British protectorate in the same year. |
| 22 February 1812 | Nawanagar comes formally under British protection, following the 1807 settlement; the other states are brought in on similar terms. |
| 2 October 1869 | Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is born at Porbandar, where his father was diwan; the family moved to Rajkot in his childhood. |
| mid-19th century | The Waghers of Okhamandal rise against Company and Gaekwad authority on the north-west shore, taking Kodinar under Jodha Manek and making a last stand in the Barda hills. Accounts differ on the exact years; Okhamandal was afterwards transferred to Baroda. |
| 1921 | Balwantrai Mehta founds the Bhavnagar Praja Mandal, the earliest of the peninsula's organisations demanding responsible government from a durbar. |
| 1924 | Rajkot becomes the headquarters of the Western India States Agency, the administrative centre for the peninsula's several hundred states. |
| 1930 | Zaverchand Meghani is sentenced to two years' imprisonment for his poem collection Sindhudo. |
| 1938–1939 | The Rajkot satyagraha: an agitation against taxation and restrictions on assembly and speech in Rajkot state, led by U. N. Dhebar, who was imprisoned for it. |
| 15 February 1948 | 217 princely states of Kathiawar are merged to form the United State of Kathiawar, renamed Saurashtra State in November of that year. |
Rulers and commanders
Rebuilt the Sudarshana dam at Junagadh after a breach and recorded it on the Girnar rock in twenty lines of literary Sanskrit — among the earliest such inscriptions anywhere, and the source for what is known of the reservoir's Mauryan construction.
Dynasty: Western Kshatrapas. Seat: Junagadh region, within a realm centred on Ujjain
A Gupta military governor of Saurashtra who made himself independent and founded the Maitraka line. Valabhi under his successors became a centre of learning that a seventh-century Chinese visitor compared with Nalanda.
Dynasty: Maitraka. Seat: Valabhi
Moved the Chudasama capital from Vamanasthali to Junagadh and cut the Navghan Kuvo and the Adi Kadi Vav into the rock below the fort — water works of a depth that only a place with no perennial river would attempt.
Dynasty: Chudasama. Seat: Junagadh
The last Chudasama ruler of Junagadh. Defeated by Sultan Mahmud Begada of Gujarat in 1472, after which the state was annexed and he converted to Islam; the peninsula's politics fragmented into small chiefships from that point.
Dynasty: Chudasama. Seat: Junagadh
Founded Nawanagar on the Halar coast in 1540 after crossing from Kutch. The Jadeja settlement on this shore is why the Gulf of Kachchh has closely related ruling families, craft vocabularies and speech on both of its sides.
Dynasty: Jadeja. Seat: Nawanagar
Moved the Gohil seat down from Sihor and founded Bhavnagar as a port, negotiating terms for a share of its sea revenue. The port traded to Zanzibar, Mozambique, Singapore and the Gulf for nearly two centuries.
Dynasty: Gohil. Seat: Bhavnagar
Declared independence from the Mughal governor of Gujarat in 1730 and founded the state of Junagadh, which held the Gir forest and the Girnar pilgrimage country until 1947.
Dynasty: Babi. Seat: Junagadh
Negotiated the settlement of 1807 that fixed each Kathiawar chief's tribute and ended the annual mulkgiri collection. It was an accounting exercise rather than a conquest, and it did more to determine the peninsula's political shape for the next 140 years than any battle fought on it.
Dynasty: East India Company. Seat: Baroda, acting across Kathiawar
The history of Saurashtra from ancient through medieval to modern times, and the rulers, commanders and administrators who shaped it. (8)