Kappe Arabhatta

Who is Kappe Arabhatta?

Kappe Arabhatta was a Chalukya warrior of the 8th century who is known from a Kannada verse inscription, dated to c. 700 CE, and carved on a cliff overlooking the northeast end of the artificial lake in Badami, Karnataka, India. The inscription consists of five stanzas written out in ten lines in the Kannada script. Stanza 2 consists of a Sanskrit śloka. Of the remaining stanzas, all except the first are in the tripadi, a Kannada verse metre.

Stanza 3, which consists of twelve words of which nine are Sanskrit loan-words in Kannada, is well known in a condensed version, and is sometimes cited as the earliest example of the tripadi metre in Kannada. However, neither stanza 3 nor stanza 4 strictly conform to the precise rules of the tripadi metre; they each have more than 18 moras in line two, in excess of the allowed 17.