by John Keay
A fundamental problem seems to be that of there being rather too many kings for the, at most, 130 years of their involvement in India. It is as if all these Platos and Stratos, Demetriuses and Diodotuses had got wise to the idea that immortality was theirs provided they could but strike their own coins. Scholars meet this problem by proposing that there was usually more than one king and more than one kingdom. The Yavanas had a reputation for quarrelling amongst themselves, and their territories must therefore have frequently been divided and subdivided. As well as rival kings, it seems that sub-kings, joint-kings, expectant-kings and satraps or governors may all have minted their own coins. Where their various territories lay can be vaguely inferred from the find sites of a particular coin-type.
Many clearly never crossed the north-west frontier from Afghanistan, and those who did may not have come as invaders. Perhaps, like other Greeks in Asia, they came bearing gifts. Bactria had grown rich as a corridor of east – west trade and was also an important source of bloodstock. Indians, ever anxious for horses (but blissfully ignorant of the one gifted to Troy), may have welcomed them as both traders and mercenaries. It could be significant that three centuries later, when the Gandhara school of sculpture popularised Greek themes, the Trojan horse seems to have been a favourite.
First of these Indo-Greeks into India was a Demetrius, probably Demetrius II, who seems to have achieved success in the Panjab and to have established himself at Taxila. He may also have continued down the Indus to its mouth. This is thought to have happened some time soon after 180 BC and, from the fact that the legends on his coins are in Prakrit or Kharosthi as well as in Greek, it is clear that he acquired Indian subjects. A successor, Menander, fared even better with mid-century acquisitions to the north in Swat and possibly Kashmir, as well as to the east. How far east is uncertain. He probably extended his territory to the river Ravi, but may have raided much further afield. In Indian sources a Yavana force that was probably Menander’s is said to have joined the kings of Panchala and Mathura (both in the Ganga-Jamuna Doab) for a raid down the Ganga. Perhaps it was this combination of Greeks and Indians that the all-conquering Kharavela of Kalinga encountered. If so, he failed to stop them since, realising Alexander’s dream, they stormed Pataliputra and routed its presumably Shunga incumbent. Then, typically, they quarrelled; maybe Menander, like Alexander, faced a mutiny. ‘They came, they saw, but India conquered,’ writes one of their biographers.5
On his coins Menander does not have the look of a conqueror. His topi-style helmet appears much too big; protruding curls and delicate features suggest effeminacy; and he calls himself ‘Basileos’ and ‘Soter’, ‘King’ and ‘Saviour’, rather then ‘Conqueror’ or ‘Patriot’. With this gentler image his other legacy is more in keeping; for in Buddhist tradition he is remembered as ‘Milinda’, the great king who in a celebrated question-and-answer session with the philosopher Nagasena became the vehicle for an exposition of Buddhist doctrine; he may even himself have adopted Buddhism. The meeting took place in Menander’s capital of Sagala, whose whereabouts are uncertain but which may have been in the boulder-strewn valley of Swat. If this surmise is correct, it must be thanks to Menander that the gentle terraces beside the racing river Swat came to accommodate the pre-eminent centre of Buddhist teaching in the north-west.
Of Menander’s successors we know little. One, Antialcidas, is thought to have briefly reunited the Greeks’ territories on either side of the Hindu Kush in around 110 BC. He is mentioned in an inscription on a pillar erected by one Heliodorus in a village in central India hundreds of miles away to the south-east but just fields from Vidisha and the stupas of Sanchi. Heliodorus was Antialcidas’ emissary to a King Bhagabhadra who is otherwise unknown but who may have been one of the Shungas. Perhaps Antialcidas was seeking some kind of alliance against his ever quarrelsome rivals. The memorial is more revealing about ambassador Heliodorus who, though decidedly a Greek and the son of a certain Dion of Taxila, nevertheless describes himself as a devotee of the god Vasudeva. Accordingly he crowned his pillar with an image of the winged Garuda, Vasudeva’s ‘vehicle’. Already associated with both the Greek Heracles and the Yadavas’ Lord Krishna, the heroic Vasudeva was about to become absorbed into the multiple persona of the great Lord Vishnu. Heliodorus thus provides an early example of the adoption by a non-Indian, not of the generally more accessible and proselytising doctrines of the Buddha, but of an orthodox cult within the so-called ‘Great Tradition’ of what we now call Hinduism.
Such cross-cultural adoptions, for which the word ‘conversion’ is still too strong, become commonplace amongst those who in the first century BC supplanted the Bactrian Greeks. On their coins, modelled on those of the Bactrian Greeks, Greek gods are jumbled up with unmistakably Indian deities, amongst whom Lord Shiva and his consort Uma have been identified. Elephants also appear, and kings are often depicted mounted on horseback. The newcomers have unfamiliar names – Maues, Azes, Spalirises; each is typically designated a ‘king of kings’ and, less proud of their profiles, they eschew the close-up portraits so beloved of the Greeks.
Who these people were, when they reigned and where, is still debated. Most authorities believe that Maues, who first displaced the Greeks in the Taxila region, was a Shaka, others that he was a Pahlava. The Pahlavas, it appears, may or may not be the same as the Parthians of northern Iran, just as the Shakas may or may not be the same as the Scythians of the Caucasus. But if Maues and his immediate successors in the first century BC were Shakas, their immediate successors in the first century AD were probably Parthians.
Of one of these Parthians we know from a source other than his coins and the odd inscription. His name was ‘Gondophares’, which, as the French scholar M. Reinaud noticed in the 1860s, bears a more than coincidental resemblance to ‘Gudnaphar’, an Indian king mentioned in an early Christian text. This text was the Acts of St Thomas, wherein the self-same apostle is said to have actually attended the court of King Gudnaphar. Thomas, it seems, had reached the Panjab under protest. After the death of Christ, when the apostles drew lots as to their respective missions, Thomas had drawn India and, ever the ‘doubting Thomas’, immediately knew that the task was beyond him. ‘Whithersoever thou wilt, O Lord, send me,’ he prayed, ‘only to India I will not go.’ But the prayer was of no avail. Thomas, apparently a skilled carpenter, found himself indentured to a passing Indian merchant who took him back to work on Gondophares’ new palace. In the Panjab he was eventually rewarded with honours and converts. Later, he would undertake a second mission to peninsular India, where his misgivings would prove tragically well-founded.
Whether this Thomas was really Thomas the apostle, and whether he really reached the Panjab, is suitably open to doubt; likewise the ‘converts’ he is supposed to have made there. But at least the tradition implies that Gondophares must have ruled after the death of Christ. This may not seem a great point. It deserves, though, to be greeted as something of a milestone in what is otherwise a trackless wilderness of dynastic uncertainty.
Both Shakas and Parthians had originated beyond the Hindu Kush. There, along the desert routes from China and across the steppes of Turkestan, a major upheaval had been taking place. Chinese sources tell of the construction of the Great Wall in the third century BC and the repulse of various marauding tribes. Forced to head west and eventually south, these tribes displaced others in an ethnic knock-on effect which lasted many decades and spread right across central Asia. The Parthians from Iran and the Bactrian Greeks from Bactria had both been dislodged by the Shakas coming down from somewhere near the Aral Sea. But the Shakas had in turn been dislodged by the Yueh-chi who had themselves been driven west to Sinkiang by the Hiung-nu. The last, otherwise the Huns, would happily not reach India for a long time. But the Yueh-chi continued to press on the Shakas and, having forced them out of Bactria, it was sections or clans of these Yueh-chi who next began to move down into India in the second half of the first century AD.
Once again the ready
assumption that the Yueh-chi, or Kushana as they are known in Indian history, actually invaded India should be treated with caution. Little is known either of the circumstances which accounted for the movements of these peoples or of the reception they received in India. They may have come as allies or mercenaries, invited by disaffected Indians like Alexander’s Ambhi; or they may have come as refugees fleeing invasion just like the Tibetans, Afghans and Bangladeshis of the twentieth century. India’s ancient history was first reconstructed largely by British scholars in the nineteenth century who, schooled on the invasions of Aryans, Macedonians and Muslims, readily detected a pattern of incursions. Their own presence conformed to it; indeed this pattern of constant invasion conveniently excused their presence.
The coins and inscriptions of the first few centuries BC/AD certainly testify to alien rulers, but of battles we know nothing, let alone who won them. Marital alliances, economic crises, coups and assassinations have probably triggered more dynastic changes than have successful invasions. Given the crisis of political legitimacy, given too the obscure origins of most indigenous dynasties of the period, plus the absence of anything like a national consciousness, there may have been no fundamental objection to accepting as kings men with strange names, remote origins and unusual headgear.
The Pahlavans/Parthians quickly disappeared from the Indian scene. They would be resurrected only once, and much later, as the doubtful antecedents of the Pallavas of Kanchipuram, a distinguished dynasty but one separated from the Parthians by three centuries and the breadth of the entire subcontinent. The Shakas/Scythians, segmenting into a variety of junior kingdoms, or satrapies, and readily assimilating to Indian society, made a more lasting impression. At one time they penetrated to Mathura and Ujjain but would latterly be penned into Saurashtra (in Gujarat); thence, as the ‘Western Satraps’, they would resurface briefly in the first and second centuries AD. Only the Yueh-chi or Kushanas, and in particular their great king Kanishka, would establish anything like an Indian empire.
Coins, plus an inscription found at Taxila, bear early testimony to the pretensions of the Kushana. ‘Maharajah’, ‘King of Kings’, ‘Son of God’, ‘Saviour’, ‘Great One’, ‘Lord of all Lands’, ‘Caesar’ and other such titles are reeled off as if the incumbent wished to lay claim to every source of sovereignty going. ‘Son of God’ is thought to be a legacy of the Yueh-chi’s familiarity with China and its celestial rulers; ‘King of Kings’ was borrowed from the Shakas, who had imitated the Achaemenids of Iran; ‘Saviour’ came from the Greeks; ‘Caesar’ from the Romans. The coins are of the highest quality and show a switch to Roman weight standards; possibly they were actually recast Roman aurei. But to accommodate such fanfares of majesty in the limited space available, the name of the king in question was often left out. The succession of the Kushana kings is therefore far from certain. It is thought that there was a Kujula Kadphises and then a Wima Kadphises, evidently another devotee of Lord Shiva, who between them added to their Afghan territories those of Gandhara, the Panjab, and the Ganga-Jamuna Doab at least as far south as Mathura.
After these Kadphiseses came, probably, Kanishka. Inscriptions referring to him (or to the era which supposedly began with his accession) are found over a vast area extending from the Oxus frontier of Afghanistan to Varanasi and Sanchi. Tradition further testifies to his conquest of Magadha and to vast responsibilities in and beyond the western Himalayas, including Kashmir and Khotan in Sinkiang. Buddhist sources, to which we are indebted for much of this information, hail him as another Menander or Ashoka; he showered the sangha (the monastic community) with patronage, presided over the fourth Buddhist council and encouraged a new wave of missionary activity. At Purushpura, or Peshawar, his capital still boasts the foundations of a truly colossal stupa. Nearly a hundred metres in diameter and reliably reported to have been two hundred metres high, it must have ranked as one of the then wonders of the world.
Mathura on the Jamuna seems to have served as a subsidiary capital, and nearby have been found suitably massive statues of Wima Kadphises and of Kanishka himself. Unfortunately both have been decapitated. While for the Greeks, thanks to their coins, we have notable heads but few torsos, for the Kushanas we have notable torsos but few heads. Kanishka stands in challenging pose, his outsize feet encased in quilted felt boots and splayed outwards. The full-frontal presentation reveals a belted tunic beneath a stiff ankle-length coat that looks as if it could have been of leather. One hand rests on a grounded sword of skull-splitting potential, the other clutches an elaborate contraption sometimes described as a mace but which could equally be some kind of crossbow. Hopelessly overdressed for the Indian plains and most un-Indian in its angular and uncompromising posture, this statue evokes the harsh landscapes whence the Kushana came and where, while campaigning in Sinkiang, Kanishka is said to have died. Although surely not ‘one of the finest works of art produced on Indian soil’, his statue is indeed ‘unique as the only Indian work of art to show a foreign stylistic influence that has not come from Iran or the Hellenistic or Roman world’.6
Kanishka’s successors, many with names also ending in ‘-ishka’, continued Kushana rule for another century or more. As with other august dynasties, their territories are assumed to have shrunk as their memorials became fewer and nearer between; in the course of time the Kushanas dwindled to being just one of many petty kingdoms in the north-west. Unfortunately it is impossible to be precise about their chronology since all inscriptions are dated from the accession of Kanishka, itself a subject of yawning complexity which numerous international gatherings on several continents have failed to resolve. Today’s Republic of India, as well as having two names for the country (India and Bharat), has two systems of dating, one the familiar Gregorian calendar of BC/AD and the other based on the Shaka era which is reckoned to have begun in 78 AD. Although called ‘Shaka’ (rather than ‘Kushana’), this era is supposed by many to correspond with the Kanishka era. Others have tried to match Kanishka with another Indian era, the Vikrama, which began in 58 BC. This seems much too early. On the other hand the latest scholarship, based on numismatic correlations between Kushana and Roman coins, pushes Kanishka’s accession way forward to about 128 AD.
Clearly these variations are significant. Were Kanishka’s dates certain, it might be possible to be a little more dogmatic about his achievements, although the same can hardly be said of his elusive successors. If there has to be a blind summit somewhere along north India’s chronological highway, the second to third centuries AD would seem as good a place as any. Should, however, the controversy be resolved, it could mean whole-scale revision of our understanding of the preceding centuries; upgrading even chronological highways can have dramatic results.
ACROSS THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
When Pakistani and Chinese engineers began construction of a road link between their two countries in the late 1970s, eyebrows were raised in Delhi and elsewhere. The planned ‘Karakoram Highway’ was seen as evidence of a menacing alignment between Mao-tse Tung’s China and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan. As well as being politically sinister and strategically unprecedented, it was thought geographically perverse. For if ever there was a frontier decreed by nature it was the Himalayan chain. This, after all, was India’s Great Wall; behind it the peoples of the subcontinent had traditionally sheltered from the whirlwinds of migration and conquest which ceaselessly swept the arid pastures beyond. Moreover, nowhere was this wall more formidable than at its western bastion where, in the far north of Pakistan, the Great Himalaya becomes entangled in the pinnacles of the Hindu Kush and the glaciers of the mighty Karakoram. Extremes of temperature, colossal natural erosion, frequent seismic activity and recent glacial acceleration also make this the most unstable region on earth. Breaching the rampart with the viaducts, tunnels and easy gradients of an all-weather, two-lane highway looked to be short-sighted, provocative and exceedingly challenging.
Nevertheless, at fearful cost in lives and plant, the road was built. �
��The eighth wonder of the world’ was duly hailed, and convoys of battered trucks and buses began occasionally to emerge at its either end after eventful days of motoring across ‘the roof of the world’. The benefits have been mixed. At five thousand metres above sea-level, the Sino – Pakistan border on the blizzard-swept Khunjerab Pass has witnessed a modest flow of trade but little other intercourse. The road has been more of a boon to the isolated mountain communities of Pakistan’s ‘Northern Areas’, although the discreet charms of their valleys have been prejudiced in the process. Only to archaeologists and historians has the road opened a wholly welcome perspective.
That from India the teachings of the Buddha had originally spread to China via central Asia had long been known. The Han dynasty had opened trade with the West via the so-called Silk Route in the second century BC; the Route ran north of Tibet, on through Sinkiang and then down the Oxus through Bactria to Bukhara, Iran and the Mediterranean. The Han dynasty had also been in diplomatic contact with the Yueh-chi long before the latter, as Kushanas, entered India. Later, when Kushana dominion spread in a great arc from Sinkiang through Afghanistan and across the Indus into India, an obvious India–China conduit was created. Additionally Kanishka had clearly revived Ashoka’s policy of patronising the Buddhist sangha and promoting the spread of Buddhist doctrine. From Chinese sources it was even known that the first Buddhist missionaries to China had set out from India in 65 AD. It was therefore probably under the Parthians or the Kushanas that the monks Dharmaraksa and Kasyapa Matanga had made their way to China, there to found the first monastery and begin their work of preaching and translating the sacred doctrines. In their footsteps would follow the procession of teachers and artists, of icons, texts and relics which over the next three hundred years would nurture the new faith and diffuse new art forms in China and beyond.