The Karnatas and Simraongarh

Detailed chapter description

A border-crossing kingdom The Karnata polity is best understood as a kingdom whose political geography crossed the modern India–Nepal boundary rather than as a dynasty confined to one present-day national space. Its best-known capital, Simraongarh (Simraungadh), lies in the Nepal Tarai, while its agrarian, religious, intellectual and military field extended southward into the plains of Tirabhukti or Tirhut. The modern frontier therefore cuts through a historical landscape that was connected by roads, river crossings, marriage alliances, landholding networks, pilgrimage, commerce and the movement of scholars. The kingdom’s history belongs simultaneously to the histories of Mithila, north Bihar, Madhesh/Tarai and the Kathmandu Valley, but connection must not be inflated into uniform territorial control over all of those regions. The familiar dynastic sequence beginning with Nānyadeva and ending with Harisiṃhadeva is a scholarly reconstruction assembled from inscriptions, literary works, Nepalese chronicles and genealogical traditions, archaeological evidence and later regional histories. These categories of evidence do not all speak with the same chronological precision. The task is consequently not to make them sound artificially unanimous, but to show where they intersect and where uncertainty remains. This is especially important for the opening date of the dynasty, the rebuilding of Simraongarh’s defences, and the final conquest horizon in the fourteenth century (Sinha 1979; Petech 1984; Salomon 1998). The 1097 horizon and what an inscription can establish The year 1097 CE has long functioned as the conventional beginning of Nānyadeva’s rule. It is useful as a chronological horizon, but it should not be described as though an extant Nānyadeva inscription bears that Gregorian date in an unambiguous modern form. Luciano Petech, reviewing the early 228 chronology in relation to Nepal, noted the traditional chronogram that converts to 18 July 1097 while also observing that the surviving inscription associated with Nānyadeva’s reign and his minister Śrīdhara is undated. The distinction matters: a conventional date can organize discussion without acquiring an evidentiary status it does not possess. Nānyadeva nevertheless marks a genuine transformation in the political history of Mithila. Karnata authority appears in the period when older Pāla-Sena political stru