BadamiIt's fifteen minuts of historical fame

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

The ride to Badami, another two hours, has little to differentiate it from the earlier journey to Gadag. The bus seats are as painful, the landscapes as cruel. I try to speak to the man beside me. He tries to speak to me. Our lack of each other's language dooms us to failure.

Badami, not a big town - it is the smallest I have stopped at since Mamallapuram - is astir with the sleepy kind of energy that seems to characterize small places in the South and give them an air of desultory self-importance. I am not sure if it is the product of optimism for the future, or of pride from past glories. With so many small kingdoms in its mediaeval past, and such a wealth of myth, even the remotest town or village in the South can cling to some colourful scrap of history that makes it more important than it really is.

Badami's fifteen minutes of historical fame had come early, in the 6th century, when it was the capital city of the Chalukyas. During the reign of Pulakeshin II, at the turn of the 7th century, the kingdom had reached its peak, occupying the whole of present-day Karnataka as well as lands north and east. It enjoyed, if enjoyed is the word, a rivalry with the Pallava kingdom of Tamil nad, leading to a seesawing of fortunes: it captured the Pallava capital, Kanchipuram, later lost it and its own capital of Badami, and although Pallava rule lasted a mere thirteen years, after which Pulakeshin's son recaptured the capital and much of the former kingdom, Badami's brief turn in the historical limelight was at an end.