Place · Godavari river city · India
Rajamahendravaram / Rajahmundry
Also known as Rajahmundry, Rajamahendri, Rajahmahendravaram, Rajamundry
Written Telugu begins here. The city is named for Rājarāja Narendra, the Eastern Chalukya king at whose court Nannaya began the Āndhra Mahābhāratamu in the eleventh century — the first work in the language. Eight centuries later, on the same left bank of the Godāvarī, Arthur Cotton’s anicut at Dowleswaram turned a famine delta into the rice bowl of Andhra.
- Function
- Water & infrastructure
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 17.014, 81.781
Worth knowing
Cotton told the Secretary of State for India that “one day’s flow in the Godavari river during high floods is equal to one whole year’s flow in the Thames of London”, which is the argument the barrage was built on. He had to justify the scheme before a House of Commons committee in 1878, decades after it was finished and working.
Connections (5)
- Life routeArthur Cotton
The Godāvarī anicut at Dowleswaram, just downstream of the city, is his monument and the work he is remembered by. Begun in 1847 and completed in 1852, it raised the river enough to feed canals across both delta districts, and the famine country he had ridden through became the rice bowl of Andhra. The structure was rebuilt between 1970 and 1982 with a hundred and seventy-five bays and renamed for him.
- Court associationNannaya
Nannaya began the Āndhra Mahābhāratamu at the court of Rājarāja Narendra here, and got two and a half books into it before stopping; Tikkana and Errana finished it over the next three centuries. The city is named after that king, so the place-name and the first book in the language date from the same reign — which is about as close as a literature comes to having an address.
- River adjacencyGodāvarī / Gautamī
The city stands on the left bank where the Godāvarī comes out of the Papikonda gorges onto the delta and splits into the Gautamī and the Vasishtha. That is why a capital was placed here, why the anicut was placed here, and why the twelve-yearly Pushkaram brings crowds to these ghats: the head of the delta is the one point on the river where everything has to pass.
- Site adjacencyBhīmeśvara, Drākshārāmam
Drākshārāmam is thirty-odd kilometres into the delta, both a Maha Shakta Pitha and one of the five Pancharama Kshetras — two networks meeting at one temple. It and Rajamahendravaram are the two poles of the Godavari delta’s older geography, the royal city at the head of the distributaries and the double-network shrine among them, both of them on land the canals later made continuously cultivable.
- CampaignBobbili
Rajahmundry connects to Bobbili through the political tensions preceding the 1757 Bobbili Battle. French commander Bussy was active in the region while relations between Bobbili and Vizianagaram deteriorated. The episode illustrates how eighteenth-century Andhra courts became entangled with European military and diplomatic networks.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Rajamahendravaram”, “Dowleswaram Barrage”, “Arthur Cotton” and “Nannaya”.
Open Rajamahendravaram / Rajahmundry in the repository →