WARANGAL

The Kakatiyas began as feudatories of the Western Chalukyas, ruling from Hanamkonda — five kilometres from the present fort — by the end of the eleventh century. Independence came under Prola II (r. c. 1116–1157); his son Rudradeva (r. 1158–1195) consolidated the kingdom and raised the great Thousand Pillar Temple at Hanamkonda in 1163, the year now taken as the founding of Warangal as a sovereign capital.

It was Ganapati Deva (r. 1199–1262), the dynasty's longest-reigning king, who shifted the capital downhill to the granite-hill site of Orugallu, walled it three times over, and pushed the Kakatiya frontier from the mouths of the Godavari almost to Kanchipuram. His campaigns into the Tamil country were the southernmost a Telugu power had ever reached.

After Ganapati Deva came his daughter Rudrama Devi, and after her her grandson Prataparudra II — under whom the kingdom was at its height in territory and at its most exposed in geography. Five reigns, a hundred and sixty years; the Kakatiyas are remembered as the makers of medieval Telangana.

The Veyi Stambhala Gudi — Thousand Pillar Temple — was raised by Rudradeva in 1163 on the slope of Hanamkonda hill, five kilometres north of the later fort. It is a trikutalaya, three shrines opening onto a single dance-mandapam: Shiva at the centre, Vishnu and Surya to either side — an unusually ecumenical dedication for a royal foundation.

The temple is celebrated for the carved pillars that give it its name (the actual count is closer to three hundred), for the monolithic Nandi in front of the central shrine, and for a feat of medieval engineering: the entire mandapam was dismantled and rebuilt by the Archaeological Survey between 2004 and 2018, using Kakatiya joinery techniques recovered from the original stones.

The basalt is dark — almost black — and takes a polish that catches the lamps at evening. The Telugu inscription on the eastern wall is one of the earliest royal documents from the Kakatiya court.

Ganapati Deva had no son. He named his daughter Rudramamba his successor and, by deed, made her son. She took the throne in 1262 as Rudradeva Maharaja, performed the male upanayana ritual, and ruled in masculine titulature for twenty-seven years — the only sovereign of medieval Telugu country to do so.

Her reign was not nominal. She put down two cousin-led rebellions, repelled a Yadava invasion from Devagiri, and turned the kingdom's southern frontier into a stable border with the Pandyas. The Venetian merchant Marco Polo, passing through Motupalli on the Andhra coast in 1289, recorded that the country was governed "by a queen, a wise and just lady, beloved of all her subjects" — one of the rare medieval European notices of a southern Indian ruler.

She fell, near the end of her reign, in battle against the Kayastha chief Ambadeva at Tripurantakam — at the head of her own troops, in her seventies. She remains, in Telangana memory, the dynasty's defining figure.

Tughluq rule lasted only thirteen years. In 1336 the Telugu Musunuri chiefs, led by Kapaya Nayaka, recovered Warangal in alliance with a confederation of seventy-five nayakas. He held the fort until 1366, when the Bahmani sultan Mohammed Shah I prized it back after a long campaign and the loss of the strategically vital Kaulas pass.

Under the Bahmanis (1366–1518) Warangal was a key frontier garrison facing Vijayanagara. The audience pavilion called the Khush Mahal, with its squat sultanate arches, dates from this period — built into the inner shell of what had been a Kakatiya temple court. After 1518 the city passed, with the rest of Telangana, to the new Qutb Shahi dynasty at Golconda.

Under the Qutb Shahis it was a sarkar headquarters; under Aurangzeb's annexation in 1687 a Mughal faujdari; and from 1724 a district town of the Asaf Jahi state. In 1948, with Operation Polo, it acceded to the Indian Union. In 2014 it became one of the founding districts of the new state of Telangana.