Lāṭa
This house held the fertile coastal country around Bharuch — the Barygaza of the Greek merchants, still one of the principal ports of western India. Their copper-plate charters, issued from Nandipurī, record grants to brahmins and to Buddhist monasteries, and are dated in the Kalachuri-Chedi era.
They were subordinate at various times to the Maitrakas, the Chalukyas of Bādāmi and the Harṣa empire, which is characteristic of a small rich state in a contested position.
The Gurjara question
The name Gurjara appears from the sixth century onward attached to several dynasties — this one, the Pratihāras, and others — and to a region, Gurjaradeśa, which gave Gujarat its name. Whether Gurjara was originally an ethnic designation, a territorial one, or both, and whether the various Gurjara dynasties were related, has been argued since the nineteenth century without resolution.
Jayabhaṭa IV's charter records that he went to the aid of Vallabhī against an Arab attack, which places him in the frontier fighting of the early eighth century. The dynasty ended around 740 as Arab pressure and Chalukya expansion converged on Lāṭa.
Further reading
- Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade. University of Hawaii Press, 2003
- Wink, Andre. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Brill, 1990
- Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
- Hawley, John Stratton. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Harvard University Press, 2015
- Ray, Himanshu Prabha. The Winds of Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early South Asia. Oxford University Press, 1994
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.