In 1323 the army of the Delhi Sultanate under Ulugh Khan — the future Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq — took Warangal, capital of the Kakatiya kingdom. King Prataparudra was captured and died on the way to Delhi, and the Telugu country was placed under Tughlaq governors. Contemporary Telugu records describe temples damaged, land grants seized and the old order overturned.
Kapaya Nayaka took the title <em>Andhra-suratrana</em>, "Sultan of the Andhra country" — a ruler who now stood as the equal of the sultans.Title recorded in inscriptions of Kapaya Nayaka
Within about a dozen years that rule had collapsed in Andhra. The leaders of the uprising were the Musunuri family, Nayakas — military chiefs — of the old Kakatiya service. Little is known of their origins; the family was not prominent before this crisis.
Prolaya Nayaka and the Vilasa grant
Prolaya Nayaka appears around 1325–1330 as a ruler based at Rekapalle, in the hill country near Bhadrachalam on the Godavari, gathering other Nayakas around him. Our main record of him is the Vilasa grant, a Sanskrit copper-plate charter issued around 1330 near Pithapuram. It laments the conquest of the Telugu land — the overthrow of Prataparudra, the seizure of brahmins' lands and the hardships of the people — and presents Prolaya as the one who restored order, giving back the agraharas (endowed villages) to their owners and reviving worship.
Historians read the grant both as a real witness to the upheaval and as a carefully framed claim to legitimacy for a new ruler. Prolaya died without children around 1333.
Kapaya Nayaka takes Warangal
Leadership passed to his cousin Kapaya Nayaka (Kapaneedu). Taking advantage of the revolts spreading through the Tughlaq empire, he led a confederacy of Nayakas against the Sultanate governor at Warangal, Malik Maqbul. In 1336 Warangal fell, and Maqbul fled to Delhi. The historian Firishta, writing around 1600, says that Kapaya had the help of the Hoysala king Veera Ballala III. The same years saw the founding of Vijayanagara further south, and the two movements together ended Delhi's direct rule over most of the Deccan.
R. C. Majumdar described the rising as a "national revolt", though modern historians stress that it was also a contest among local chiefs for power in the vacuum the Kakatiyas left.
Against the Bahmanis
Kapaya ruled from Warangal, keeping the old Kakatiya palace and even the Sultanate's audience hall in use. He at first supported the revolt in the western Deccan that founded the Bahmani Sultanate in 1347, but the new state soon turned on him. In a series of wars he lost the fort of Golconda and, under a treaty of about 1361, handed over the famous turquoise throne of Warangal to Sultan Muhammad Shah I.
Meanwhile his allies among the Nayakas drifted away. In 1368 Kapaya was killed in battle at Bhimavaram near Warangal against the Recherla Nayakas, his former subordinates. With him the Musunuri power ended; the Recherlas dominated Telangana until 1435.
How they are remembered
The Musunuri Nayakas ruled for little more than forty years, but they won back the Telugu heartland from Delhi and kept alive, in the decades after the Kakatiyas, the Telugu warrior culture that later flowered under Vijayanagara and the Nayaka kingdoms of the south. In Telangana and Andhra they are remembered as liberators who restored Telugu rule. The Ekatmata Stotra names them in one line with Maharana Pratap and Ranjit Singh, as defenders of their land.
Ekatmata Stotra · Stanza 24
Named in Stanza 24 of the Ekatmata Stotra — the warriors of resistance.
मुसुनूरिनायकाः प्रतापो रणजीतसिंहश्च।
शिवाजी नृसिंहसत्त्वो धर्म-रक्षण-दीक्षिताः॥
Sources: Wikipedia: Musunuri Nayakas · Wikipedia: Kapaya Nayaka · Wikipedia: Prolaya Nayaka. Written afresh for The Hindu Book; corrections welcome at [email protected].
