Gurjara-Pratihara Dynasty

The Gurjara Pratihara dynasty ruled the Indian northwest from 730 to 1036, the shield of Hindustan against the Arabs and the third corner of the Kannauj triangle. Gurjara pastoralists turned kings, the Pratiharas, doorkeepers by caste name, held the Rajasthan passes: Nagabhata I threw back the Arab armies of Sindh in the 730s, earning the thanks of chroniclers who wrote that but for him India might have prayed toward Mecca. For two centuries three empires, Pratihara, Pala and Rashtrakuta, tore at Kannauj, the imperial city of the Gangetic plain; in 816 the Pratiharas won it for good and made it their glittering capital of temples and tanks. Mihira Bhoja, greatest of the line, ruled from Kathiawar to Bengal around 850, and Arab travellers called his the best governed land of India. His grandson Mahendrapala held the whole north from the Indus to Assam. Then the feudatories slipped away, the Chandellas and Kalachuris carved their kingdoms out of the flanks, and in 1018 Mahmud of Ghazni stormed Kannauj and stripped its temples; the last Pratihara flickered to 1036, and the northwest broke into Rajput chiefships that remembered his house as their model.