Lalitaditya's rule was followed by a succession of short and weak reigns, but his grandson was almost as great a hero of popular legend as himself. He too, "full of ambition, collected an army and set out for the conquest of the world." He reached the Ganges and defeated the King of Kanauj, but had to return to Kashmir to subdue a usurper to his throne. He encouraged scholars and poets and founded cities. After him followed, first, "an indolent and profligate prince"; then a child in the hands of uncles, who as soon as he grew up destroyed him and put another child on the throne. He indeed maintained his position on the throne for 37 years, but only on account of the rivalries of the uncles, and as a mere puppet king, and was eventually deposed by the victorious faction to make place for yet another puppet king, who again was killed by a treacherous relative. So the record goes on till we come to the reign of Avantivarman, 855-883, and this appears to have brought a period of consolidation for the country, which must have greatly suffered economically as well as politically from the internal troubles during the preceding reigns. There is no indication of the reassertion of Kashmir sovereignty abroad, but there is ample proof of the internal recovery of the country, and the town of Avantipura, named after the king, has survived to the present day. It lies one march above Srinagar, and the ruins of the ancient buildings, though not equal in size to Lalitaditya's structures, yet rank, says Stein, among the most imposing monuments of ancient Kashmir architecture, and sufficiently attest the resources of the builder.
This reign was, too, remarkable for the execution of an engineering scheme to prevent floods and drain the valley, a precisely similar idea to that on which Major de Lotbinière is working under the direction of the present Maharaja. The Kashmiri engineer Suyya, after whom is named the present town of Sopur, saw more than a thousand years ago what modern engineers have also observed, that floods in the valley are due to the waters of the Jhelum not being able to get through the gorge three miles below Baramula with sufficient rapidity. The constricted passage gets blocked with boulders, and both Suyya and our present engineers saw that this obstruction must be removed. But while Major de Lotbinière imported electrically-worked dredgers from America and a dredging engineer from Canada, Suyya adopted a much simpler method: he threw money into the river where the obstruction lay. His contemporaries, as perhaps we also would have, looked upon him as a madman. But there was method in his madness, for the report had no sooner got about that there was money at the bottom of the river than men dashed in to find it, and rooted up all the obstructing boulders in their search. So at least says the legend. In any case the obstruction was removed by Suyya, and the result was the regulation of the course of the river, a large increase of land available for cultivation, and increased protection against disastrous floods. May the modern Suyya be equally successful!