Text · dynastic chronicle · India
Rājataraṅgiṇī
Also known as Rajatarangini, Kalhana's chronicle, River of Kings
Kalhana's Sanskrit history of the kings of Kashmir, finished about 1149, in eight books and nearly eight thousand verses. It is the only substantial dynastic chronicle in Sanskrit, uses inscriptions, coins, earlier chronicles and land records as sources, and judges its kings rather than praising them.
- Date
- 1148–1149
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Traditional / narrative attribution
Worth knowing
M.A. Stein's 1900 translation and topographical commentary is still the standard tool for locating Kashmiri sites, because Kalhana names villages, canals and temples with enough precision to be surveyed. Almost everything known about the Karkota and Utpala dynasties comes from this one book.
Kalhana is far better informed about the centuries nearest his own; the early books are legendary and their chronology is not usable.
Connections (3)
- Canonised by textKalhaṇa
Everything in this journey except the excavated tile pavements at Harwan is known primarily from Kalhana's chronicle. He names the founders, the temples, the villages granted to them and the canals dug to water them, and he wrote three hundred and fifty years after the Karkotas, using earlier chronicles he names and criticises. The repository's Kashmir is largely his.
- Canonised by textAvantipora temples
Kalhana attributes Avantipura and its two temples to Avantivarman, the founder of the Utpala line, and credits his engineer Suyya with the drainage works that reclaimed the valley's flooded land. The temples were themselves buried under flood silt for a thousand years and dug out in the 1900s, which is a fair summary of the relationship between the chronicle and the ground.
- AnalogueChangu Narayan
Changu Narayan's inscription of 464 is the earliest dated document in Nepal, and Nepal's early history is written almost entirely from inscriptions of this kind — grants, water-conduit records, temple foundations. Kashmir, by contrast, has a chronicle. Two Himalayan regions with substantial early records, one epigraphic and one narrative, and the difference shapes what can be said about each.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Rajatarangini”. Kalhana, Rājataraṅgiṇī, trans. with commentary by M.A. Stein, 2 vols (1900).
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