The kingdom
Mūlarāja founded the dynasty in 942, and under Bhīma I, Jayasiṃha Siddharāja and Kumārapāla it became the dominant power of western India, contending with the Paramāras of Malwa and the Chāhamānas of Rajasthan and controlling the Gujarat ports through which much of India's western trade passed.
Mahmud of Ghazni sacked the Somnath temple on the Saurashtra coast in 1026, during Bhīma's reign — an event that the Persian chronicles magnified into a founding episode of iconoclastic legend and that has had a long and contentious afterlife in modern politics. Bhīma rebuilt the temple, and it was rebuilt several times more.
Building
Chaulukya Gujarat produced the Māru-Gurjara style at its height. The sun temple at Modhera, built under Bhīma I, is set with a great stepped tank before it and aligned so that the equinox sun enters the sanctum. The Rāṇī kī Vāv at Patan, a stepwell of seven descending storeys lined with more than five hundred principal sculptures, was built by Queen Udayamatī in the eleventh century and silted up soon after, which is why its carving is almost undamaged.
Jayasiṃha Siddharāja built the Sahasraliṅga tank at Patan and patronised scholarship without regard to sect; the Jain polymath Hemacandra, author of a grammar, a lexicon and much else, worked at his court and at his successor's.
Kumārapāla and Jainism
Kumārapāla, under Hemacandra's influence, is said to have adopted Jainism and to have prohibited animal slaughter across his kingdom. The Jain sources treat this as a great conversion; the extent and durability of the measures are harder to assess, and Kumārapāla continued to patronise Śaiva institutions.
What is not in doubt is that Gujarat under the Chaulukyas became the centre of Śvetāmbara Jainism, that its merchant communities financed temple building on an extraordinary scale — Dilwara, Taranga, Girnar, Shatrunjaya — and that the manuscript libraries assembled then preserved much of what survives of Prakrit and early Gujarati literature.
The dynasty gave way to its Vāghela branch in 1244.
Further reading
- Michell, George. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms. University of Chicago Press, 1988
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Blurton, T. Richard. Hindu Art. Harvard University Press, 1993
- Davis, Richard H. Lives of Indian Images. Princeton University Press, 1997
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.