917–918 CE; Laukika year 3993 | Kashmir Valley
Kalhana describes the destruction of the autumn rice crop by flooding, severe famine and profiteering by ministers and troops.
A harvest disaster during Partha’s reign
Kalhana’s Rajatarangini records a destructive flood and famine during Partha’s first reign in Kashmir. The flood ruined the autumn rice crop; the famine is dated to Laukika year 3993, conventionally rendered as 917–918 CE. The account brings the experience of hunger into a political narrative otherwise dominated by rival kings, ministers and military factions.
The date identifies a historical calendar year spanning parts of two Common Era years. It does not establish that flooding continued uninterrupted throughout 917 and 918. Nor does the reference to an autumn crop provide a definite Gregorian month for the flood, the onset of famine or its end. The event is therefore listed under 917 with its full date range and an unknown month.
What the chronicle says happened
Book V places the disaster amid a period of political extraction. Partha’s father Nirjitavarman acted as royal guardian, ministers accumulated wealth, and the Tantrin infantry could demand payment in exchange for supporting a ruler. Against that background, Kalhana says a flood destroyed the autumn rice crop. The harvest loss is presented as an additional injury to people already suffering under their rulers.
The next verse describes severe famine and difficulty obtaining food. Kalhana then depicts the Vitasta, the Jhelum, filled with bodies and the surrounding country strewn with bones. These are descriptions of widespread death and distress in a literary chronicle written more than two centuries after the event. They preserve a powerful memory of catastrophe, but do not constitute a contemporary count of fatalities.
The account does not distinguish how many people drowned, died of hunger or succumbed to illness. It provides no list of affected villages, no map of the inundation and no measured crop-loss percentage. Its sweeping description of the rice harvest should be reported as the chronicler’s claim, rather than converted into a modern agricultural survey.
Rice prices and access to food
Kalhana gives a famine price of one thousand dinnaras for a khari of grain. The khari was a measure used for agricultural produce, while the dinnara belongs to the monetary reckoning of the period. The price is evidence for how the chronicler represented extreme scarcity. It does not tell us the earnings, household needs or purchasing power of a particular cultivator.
Elsewhere in Book V, Kalhana praises the water-management works associated with Suyya and Avantivarman. In that earlier account, he contrasts a price of two hundred dinnaras per khari in prosperous harvest conditions with thirty-six after Suyya’s improvements. These figures are useful for understanding the contrast between abundance and famine within the chronicle. They are not a continuous series of annual market observations.
Stein’s discussion of the khari compares it with measures known from much later records. That comparison helps explain the terminology but does not independently establish an exact modern weight for every medieval transaction. This article consequently retains the historical units rather than assigning a precise price per kilogram or a modern currency equivalent.
Stored grain and political profiteering
The famine narrative does not describe an absolute disappearance of all food. Kalhana says ministers and Tantrins became wealthy by selling stored rice at high prices. In his explanation, the destruction of the harvest and the control of remaining supplies worked together: food could still be held by powerful people while others struggled to obtain it.
The chronicler also accuses the king of favouring ministers who could raise the money owed to the troops. An accompanying passage describes this through the language of selling the subjects. Stein interprets it as probably referring to the mortgaging of villages to obtain loans. The wording and that interpretation must be kept separate; neither supplies a surviving contract identifying a particular village or a documented sale of individual famine victims.
These accusations place responsibility on political choices as well as on the flood. Kalhana condemns those who gained from distress instead of protecting the population. The account supports a history of unequal access and alleged profiteering, but does not quantify the rice held in store, identify each seller or explain how prices differed between local markets.
The contrast between palace and countryside
Kalhana portrays Nirjitavarman, also called Pangu, enjoying the comfort of his palace while the population suffered. He develops the contrast through an image of someone sheltered in a heated room looking out at people exposed to wind and rain. This is a moral illustration of indifference, not a dated eyewitness report of a particular conversation inside the palace.
The passage compares the rulers unfavourably with earlier kings whom Kalhana regarded as protectors of their people. His judgment belongs to a broader understanding of royal duty: a ruler should preserve livelihoods and life, rather than use public resources chiefly to secure military loyalty. The famine becomes a test of that obligation.
No detailed programme of famine relief is described in this passage. That absence limits what can be reconstructed; it does not justify inventing relief measures, or claiming to know every action taken by every local community. The voices and names of most people who endured the disaster are missing from the surviving account.
What modern flood research adds
A 2020 study by Juan Antonio Ballesteros Canovas and colleagues includes 917–918 in a longer history of Kashmir floods. It combines written records with recent instrumental measurements, hydraulic modelling and tree-ring evidence from a mountain tributary. For this medieval episode, however, its description of famine and human remains comes from Kalhana. The tree-ring component does not independently date or measure the flood of 917–918.
The study is useful for placing historical accounts within research on recurring flood hazards. Its combined chronology should not be mistaken for a continuous series of measured medieval river flows. A classification or model estimate based on a written description has a different evidential status from a recorded water level.
Roger Bilham and Bikram Singh Bali’s study of a proposed ninth-century earthquake, landslide and flood also discusses the later disaster of 917. The two episodes must remain distinct. An earthquake-induced blockage proposed for the earlier event does not establish the cause of the flood during Partha’s reign. Kalhana’s famine passage supplies no definite earthquake, landslide, rainfall total or snowmelt measurement for 917–918.
The event’s place in Kashmir’s history
The flood and famine belong in the chronology as an event in their own right, not only as background to a royal succession. The chronicle connects the loss of a staple harvest with hunger, death, expensive stored grain and demands for money from armed factions. Those connections make the episode important to the history of livelihoods and political responsibility in Kashmir.
Further work may clarify the language of the fiscal passages, the transmission of the date and the relationship between historical descriptions and environmental evidence. For now, the strongest detailed narrative remains Kalhana’s. Repetition of that narrative in later histories adds to the record of its reception, but should not be counted as multiple independent eyewitness accounts.
Evidence and dating
The account is based on Book V, verses 270–278. The traditional year spans 917–918. The narrative’s imagery is not a measured death toll; month, flood extent and crop-loss estimates require further evidence.
Read this topic in the encyclopedia. Reviewed 1 October 2026.