Maitraka dynasty

The Maitrakas were a royal house of western India that ruled the kingdom of Valabhi, centred on the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat in today's India, from roughly 475 until the later eighth century. Founded by a former Gupta general, the kingdom outlived its old overlords by centuries, and its capital, Vallabhi, became one of the great centres of learning in early medieval India. Our maps label it the Maitraka Kingdom.

As the Gupta Empire weakened in the late fifth century, Bhatarka, its military governor in Saurashtra, made himself independent around 475. He and his successor Dharasena I were content with the title senapati, or general; the third ruler, Dronasimha, took the title of maharaja. For several generations the kings still acknowledged the Guptas in their titles, a formula that Guhasena, a later king, dropped.

Their origins are uncertain. Early scholars misread a copper-plate grant and took the Maitrakas to be a foreign tribe, and the name was once linked to Mithra and sun worship. Later readings showed Bhatarka himself was a Maitraka. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang called the ruler a Kshatriya, Buddhist and Jain works described the family as Yadavas, and the historian Virji argued, with others agreeing, that they descended from a Mitra dynasty once based around Mathura.

Expansion came in the early seventh century. A copper-plate grant of 616 shows Kharagraha I holding Ujjain, and north Gujarat was later added. Xuanzang, who visited around 640, praised the king Shiladitya I as an able and compassionate ruler. In the mid-seventh century the Maitrakas came under the rule of Harsha of northern India but kept local autonomy; Dhruvasena II married Harsha's daughter, and independence returned after Harsha's death. Their son Dharasena IV adopted grand imperial titles and kept the Sanskrit poet Bhatti at his court.

Nearly all the kings were devotees of Shiva, using the bull Nandi and the trident on coins and seals; Dharapatta was associated with sun worship and Dhruvasena I with Vishnu. The kings gave grants to Brahmins, Buddhist monasteries and Jains alike. A Jain council at Vallabhi, dated to 454 in one account and to the reign of Dhruvasena I in another, worked to preserve the Jain canonical scriptures. The Chinese traveller I-Tsing found Vallabhi a major centre of Buddhist and secular study late in the seventh century, and it was compared with Nalanda; its graduates, it was said, went on to high office. More than a hundred temples of the period are known, mostly along Saurashtra's western coast, and the numerals on Valabhi inscriptions are cited as a step in the development of Hindu-Arabic numerals.

Repeated Arab raids from the sea weakened the kingdom, and an Arab invasion probably took place under Shiladitya V. The last known king, Shiladitya VI, is dated to about 762 to 776, and the dynasty had ended by 783. Beyond legends linking Vallabhi's fall to Arab attackers, no historical source explains how it ended.

Our 700 map shows the Maitraka Kingdom in Gujarat and western India, with the Kingdom of Sind to the west, the Chalukyas to the south and the kingdom of Kanauj in the north.