Kāma at the Kadamba Court

Abstract

In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in the village of Guḍnāpur in Karnataka. The monument has since become known as the Guḍnāpur Pillar Inscription of Ravivarman (ca. 465–500 CE) after the ruler of the early Kadamba kingdom who commissioned it. The inscription preserves a compelling historical record that details the intersections of religious and political performance at the Kadamba court as centered around a temple to Kāma constructed within the confines of the royal residence at Vaijayantī (Banavasi), and the distribution of agrarian lands to support its maintenance. This study presents a new translation and analysis of the text and a discussion of the pillar as a ‘text-monument’ that was both embedded within and constitutive of landscapes: physical and built as well as rhetorical and imagined. By presenting the Guḍnāpur inscription as a text-monument situated within multiple landscapes, the article reveals how documentary, donative, religious, and agrarian practices supported state-making in an early South Indian kingdom. In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in the village of Guḍnāpur in Karnataka. The monument has since become known as the Guḍnāpur Pillar Inscription of Ravivarman (ca. 465–500 CE) after the ruler of the early Kadamba kingdom who commissioned it. The inscription preserves a compelling historical record that details the intersections of religious and political performance at the Kadamba court as centered around a temple to Kāma constructed within the confines of the royal residence at Vaijayantī (Banavasi), and the distribution of agrarian lands to support its maintenance. This study presents a new translation and analysis of the text and a discussion of the pillar as a ‘text-monument’ that was both embedded within and constitutive of landscapes: physical and built as well as rhetorical and imagined. By presenting the Guḍnāpur inscription as a text-monument situated within multiple landscapes, the article reveals how documentary, donative, religious, and agrarian practices supported state-making in an early South Indian kingdom.