Person · Kakatiya queen
Rudrama Devī
Ganapatideva's daughter, designated heir and ruling monarch of the Kakatiya state for nearly three decades, who governed under the male title Rudradeva and put down a baronial revolt early in the reign. One of the very few women to hold sovereign power in medieval India on her own account rather than as regent.
- Date
- 1262–1289
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Kakatiya
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Connections (3)
- Traveller routeMarco Polo
The queen Polo describes in Mutfili is Rudrama Devī, or more probably her memory a few years after her death, since he reports the reign as having lasted forty years and the widow as still ruling. What matters is that a Venetian merchant, with no interest in Indian dynastic arrangements, thought it remarkable enough to record that a woman held the state alone and was well regarded for it — outside confirmation of what the Kakatiya inscriptions claim.
- Imperial administration ofWarangal Fort
Rudrama ruled the Kakatiya state from Warangal for some twenty-seven years, having been designated heir by her father Ganapatideva and formally given a male regnal name, Rudradeva, in inscriptions and on coins. She survived a revolt of the Kakatiya nobles early in the reign, faced Yadava and eastern Ganga pressure on both frontiers, and strengthened the fort's concentric walls. She appears to have died on campaign against a subordinate chief around 1289.
- Imperial administration ofMotupalli
Motupalli was the Kakatiya state's access to the sea, and the Abhaya Sasana cut there under Ganapatideva — Rudrama's father and predecessor — guaranteed foreign merchants that a wrecked ship would not be plundered and that duties would be fixed and published. The charter is one of the earliest clear statements of merchant security in the Indian Ocean, and it was still governing the traffic Marco Polo saw when he touched this coast in the 1290s.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Rudrama Devi”. Kakatiya inscriptions in South Indian Inscriptions and Epigraphia Andhrica; Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice (2001).
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