Chedi

The kingdom

Chedi occupied the plateau country between the Yamuna and the Narmada, with a capital named as Śuktimatī which has not been securely located. Its position made it a corridor between the Ganga plain and the Deccan, and the Jātakas treat it as a distant but familiar place, a day's story-telling remove from the eastern cities.

The kingdom is one of the sixteen mahājanapadas in the standard lists, but leaves less trace than most of them. No Chedi coinage or inscription of the period has been identified.

Śiśupāla

In the Mahābhārata the Chedi king Śiśupāla is Kṛṣṇa's cousin and enemy, killed at Yudhiṣṭhira's royal consecration when he exhausts the hundred insults Kṛṣṇa has agreed to forgive. The episode is one of the epic's set pieces and became the subject of Māgha's Śiśupālavadha, among the most admired of Sanskrit court poems.

The Jain tradition supplies a different Chedi connection: the kingdom is associated with the vasudeva-prativasudeva cycle of its universal history, in which Śiśupāla's death is a fixed episode.

The name afterwards

Chedi lost independent existence during the Magadhan expansion. The name was taken up again in the early medieval period by the Kalachuri house of Tripurī, near modern Jabalpur, which called its territory the Chedi country and dated inscriptions in a Chedi era. That usage is a deliberate archaism, not a continuity of state.