Kallar / Lalliya Shahi

Founder of the Hindu Shahi dynasty · ruling at Udabhandapura by 883 CE

Kallar (also Kalarapala) — identified by Stein, Cunningham, and Seybold with the Lalliya Shahi of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini — is the minister who overthrows the last Turk Shahi king Lagaturman and founds the Hindu Shahi dynasty. He is recorded ruling at Udabhandapura (modern Hund, on the Indus) by 883 CE under Sankaravarman of Kashmir; his son or grandson Kamaluka (Kamalu) is crowned 902–904 CE under Gopalavarman.

Brahmin or Kshatriya?

Al-Biruni’s Kitāb al-Hind calls Kallar a Brahmin and treats the Hindu Shahi dynasty as a Brahmin line. Abdur Rehman, in The Last Two Dynasties of the Shahis (Peshawar, 1988), revises this reading: the dynasty’s title-formula (Parama-bhattaraka-maharajadhiraja, the same one used by Khingila on the Gardez Ganesha), its coinage (the bull-and-horseman drachm series, in continuity with the Alkhan-Hephthalite type), its marriage alliances with Kashmir and the Lohara dynasty, and Kalhana’s own Rajatarangini together support a Kshatriya reading.

Sources

• Kalhana, Rajatarangini, Book V (M. A. Stein, ed., 1900)
• Al-Biruni, Kitāb al-Hind (Sachau trans., 1910)
• Cunningham, “Coins of Indo-Scythians” (1886)
• Abdur Rehman, The Last Two Dynasties of the Shahis (1988)
• Mishra, Y. K., The Hindu Sahis of Afghanistan and the Punjab (1972)