Most of the details regarding the achievements of Pulakesin II and about his ancestors in the royal line are gleaned from a very important and valuable inscription discovered in the Maguti temple near Aihole (Bijapur district in Kamataka). The temple is dedicated to Jinendra.

The inscription commonly known as the Aihole inscription written in chaste classical Sanskrit was composed by one Ravikirti who seems to have been a scholar of some merit but quite conceited for he compared himself to Kalidasa and Bharavi a pardonable error in self-assessment since the comparison is quite useful to the modern historian in fixing the upper limit to the dates of Kalidasa and Bharavi.

The inscription left by Narasimhavarman in Vatapi after his occupation of the Chalukya capital and which is engraved on a rock behind the temple of Mallikarjunadeva in Vatapi is an important document in fixing the year of the battle of Vatapi.

Government

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The government of the Chalukyas was modeled more or less on that of the Satavahanas and the influence of Magadhan polity was obvious. Pulakesin II started the imperial tradition of government and after he had brought the whole of the Deccan under his sway he felt the need for partitioning it with his brother.

The provincial organisation of the Vatapi Chalukyas was the basis on which the Rashtrakutas and the Chalukyas of Kalyani ruled the vast Deccan. From the accounts one gets from Hiuen-Tsang it will be seen that Buddhism was at least according to him on the decline.

Pulakesin II conducted his administration imperially; he sent out embassies to foreign government and received envoys from them. The army was exceedingly well organised and was a powerful instrument for the conquest of the trans-Vindhyan conqueror.

Art and Architecture

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The tradition of rock architecture associated with the Pallavas was part of Chalukyan artistic tradition too. In regard to the origin of cave (rock-cut) architecture, the authorship of the system could be attributed with equal justification to the Vatapi Chalukyas.

Just before the advent of the Vatapi Chalukyas, the Gupta artistic tradition passed on to the Deccan through the Vakatakas and found expression in the paintings in Ajanta.

These paintings are source material for the social and religious history of the times; what is more, it is living and eloquent testimony to the standards which painting had reached then. The Ajanta paintings of course are not frescos; and they qualitatively differ from the Sittannavasal paintings or the Sigiriya paintings.

The rock architecture of Ellora owes much to the Buddhists and exhibits twelve rock- cut halls. These halls were residential and meeting places for monks. We have a group of four pillared rock-cut halls at Badami three of them being Hindu and one Jaina. One of the caves is dated 578.

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It is known that the temple architecture as such was quite familiar to the South Indian even in the Sangam age or in the Satavahana period. But these temples were built of extremely and easily perishable material so that we get no material evidence about them. But the remains of some brick temples in Nagarjunakonda built by the Ikshavakus have now been excavated.

The next stage can be seen in a group of temples in Aihole and it might have had its beginning in the seventh century. Round about Aihole there is a complex of seventy temples. This complex extended to Badami and Pattadakkal. The temple at Aihole is known as Ladhkhan built about the fifth century.

Apart from the Ladhkhan there is one Durga temple which was a bramanical adaptation of Buddhist Chaitya. This temple is usually ascribed to the eighth century. In Aihole we have also the Jaina temple of Maguti, built in the middle of the seventh century; it is an unfinished structure. The Melagutti Siva shrine at Badami is contemporaneous with this. At Pattadakkal in the neighborhood of Badami there are ten temples.

Even after structural temples came into vogue, rock-cut architecture continued. The best example of this is the Ellora rock-cut complex, which is earlier Buddhist and later Hindu. In fine the Vatapi Chalukya period saw the beginnings of a solid tradition of temple building not inferior to what the Pallavas attempted farther south.