by John Keay
Rudradaman had actually done rather better than that. As well as twice defeating the Shatavahanas and reconquering the whole of Malwa, he claimed to have made extensive acquisitions in Rajasthan and Sind and to have routed the Yaudheyas. The latter were ksatriyas who still followed their hereditary calling as professional warriors and who retained a republican form of government in their territory to the west of Delhi. Presumably Rudradaman encountered them somewhere further south, perhaps in Rajasthan; certainly he did not occupy their homeland. Whereas the claimed conquests of, say, Kharavela of Kalinga positively invite suspicion, Rudradaman’s are generally plausible. He avoids the usual clichés about an empire reaching from the ocean to the Himalayas; not one of his elephants had ever been watered in the Ganga. His coins, mostly silver, describe him simply as ‘Mahakshtrapa’; their royal busts, if we may assume that they are portraits, have been taken to ‘show a man of vivacious and cheerful disposition’.2
The Junagadh inscription, while failing to elaborate on this cheerful disposition, does add much personal detail. Rudradaman staunchly upheld dharma, possibly in imitation of Ashoka, with whose Edicts he was so happy to share rock-space. He was also a fine swordsman and boxer, an excellent horseman, charioteer and elephant-rider, universally praised for his generosity and bounty, and far-famed for his knowledge of grammar, music, logic and ‘other great sciences’. Clearly he aspired to what he took to be an essentially Indian ideal of kingship; and he succeeded so well that thereafter his name (which unlike ‘Maues’ and ‘Azes’ was a decidedly Indian one) was ‘repeated by the venerable … as if it was another Veda demanding assiduous study and devout veneration and yielding the most precious fruit’.3 He also, his inscription claims, wrote both prose and verse which were ‘clear, agreeable, sweet, charming, beautiful, excelling in the proper use of words, and adorned’. Moreover, as if to prove his point, he had taken the novel and perhaps presumptuous decision to have his memorial written in classical Sanskrit. Rudradaman’s Junagadh inscription is in fact ‘the earliest known classical Sanskrit inscription of any extent’.4
The records of Ashoka, Kharavela and Kanishka and all those Shatavahana cave inscriptions are in some form of Prakrit, usually Magadhi or Pali. These were the languages of everyday use which, since their adoption by early Buddhist and Jain commentators, had become the normal medium of record. Much-simplified derivatives of classical Sanskrit, the Prakrit languages have sometimes been unfairly likened to pidgin; after a further stage of adaptation, they would spawn the Indo-Aryan regional languages of today – Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Panjabi, etc. Sanskrit, on the other hand, remained a prestige language, imbued with sacral powers, reserved mainly for religious and literary purposes, and jealously guarded as well as principally understood by brahmans. Its unexpected emergence as a language of contemporary record in the second century AD, and its subsequent acceptance as the medium of courtly and intellectual discourse throughout India, may be taken as a sure sign of a brahmanical renaissance.
Such would indeed prove to be the case under the Guptas. The great era of all that is deemed classical in Indian literature, art and science was now dawning. It was this crescendo of creativity and scholarship, as much as the unevenly documented political achievements of the Guptas, which would make their age so golden; and it was to the wider use of Sanskrit and the exploration of its myriad subtleties that this awakening owed most.
In the development of languages the classical phase usually precedes the proliferation of vernacular derivatives; thus the Latin of Cicero, Virgil and Horace precedes the vulgarised vernacular from which the Romance languages developed. Sanskrit somehow reversed the process; it was making its great comeback when it should have been dying. Why this happened remains a puzzle. ‘The answer cannot be given in purely cultural terms,’ wrote D.D. Kosambi. A Marxist as well as a brahman, Kosambi sought an explanation in ‘the development of India’s productive systems’ and ‘the emergence of a special position for the brahman caste’.5 Behind the glittering façade of Gupta culture, society was about to undergo the profound changes associated with the Indian version of feudalism. A gradual process of unsensational devolution, it would give a new impetus to the Aryanising primacy of both the brahmans and their language.
One other linguistic question remains. How was it that Rudradaman and his minister anticipated such a quintessentially classical trend as the triumph of Sanskrit by a couple of centuries, and in an inscription so remotely located that it can have been seen only by a literate few? The suggestion has been made that the Satrap’s use of Sanskrit was ‘a method followed to endear a ruler of foreign descent to the indigenous ruling class’; thus, in the case of Rudradaman, a Shaka, and his deputy Suvisakha, a Parthian, the adoption of Sanskrit and the patronage of those who held it dear was designed to reconcile brahman opinion to a foreign ruler – or as Kosambi puts it ‘to mitigate the lamentable choice of parents on the part of both Satrap and governor’.6 This seems plausible and is generally accepted in respect of the Sanskrit inscriptions soon to be composed by, or for, Indophil rulers in Sumatra, Java, Indo-China and other parts of Indianised south-east Asia. The employment of a prestige language lent distinction and authority even to non-Indic dynasties. One wonders why, though, if Sanskrit offered such ready legitimacy it was not also adopted by the earlier Shakas or the contemporary Kushanas.
However objectionable to north Indian pride, the possibility must remain that in a little-regarded region of the subcontinent long-Indianised dynasts, albeit originally of foreign extraction, could actually have pioneered and popularised such a cardinal feature of the classical Indian tradition. Aryanisation was, as will appear, a two-way process; and many other cultural achievements associated with the Gupta age cannot readily be ascribed to Gupta rule. To the emerging ‘Great Tradition’ of Hinduism, borrowing from the subcontinent’s far-flung store of local custom and innovation was quite as natural as banking on the Indo-Aryan orthodoxies of the Gangetic heartland.
But the history of India’s so-called ‘regions’ (Gujarat, Bengal, Tamil Nadu and so on) is still today in its infancy. Habitually disparaged as divisive, ‘regional’ history has few champions in the Senior Common Rooms of power. Untypical and brave are the scholars who insist that Rudradaman of Gujarat did himself write such ‘clear, agreeable, sweet, charming, beautiful’ and altogether excellent Sanskrit; or that under the Satraps’ patronage classical Sanskrit was actively promoted (as is further suggested by its appearance in the donative inscription of a Shatavahana queen who was of Satrapal birth); or that ‘the Shakas had shown the way by using Sanskrit in their inscriptions … [and] the Guptas only perpetuated the tradition when they came to power.’7
THE ARM OF THE GUPTAS
History, whatever its parameters, is said to repeat itself. Seldom, though, does it oblige so readily as with the creators of ancient India’s two greatest dynasties. A Chandragupta had founded the Mauryan empire in C320; just so did a Chandragupta found the Gupta dynasty in C320. It could be confusing. But the first date was, of course, BC, the second AD; and to clarify matters further, the Gupta Chandragupta is often phonetically dismembered as ‘Chandra-Gupta’ or ‘Chandra Gupta’. Unfortunately there would be another Gupta Chandra-Gupta. The founder of the Gupta dynasty is therefore designated as Chandra-Gupta I – which naturally brings to mind the Mauryan Chandragupta. (Here the Gupta founder will be called Chandra-Gupta I and his Mauryan counterpart Chandragupta Maurya.) Coincidence, however, continues. As well as a name, the Gupta founder shares with his Mauryan predecessor a shadowy profile, a reputation for important but doubtful conquests, and the misfortune of being hopelessly upstaged by a more illustrious successor – Ashoka in the case of Chandragupta Maurya, Samudra-Gupta in the case of Chandra-Gupta I.
Of earlier Guptas before Chandra-Gupta I, a Sri Gupta and a Ghatotkacha Gupta are listed in inscriptions. The former would be remembered solely for having endowed a place of worship in Bihar for Chinese Buddhists. By the third century AD the first Chi
nese monks had begun trickling back along the Karakoram route to tour the sites associated with the Buddha’s life. For these foreign pilgrims to the Buddhist ‘Holy Land’ Sri Gupta built a temple; when first noticed in the fifth century, it was already in ruins. Sri Gupta was probably not a Buddhist but was raja of some minor polity near or within erstwhile Magadha. He was succeeded by his son Ghatotkacha. Their origins are unknown; their caste may have been vaisya.
Chandra-Gupta I was Ghatotkacha’s son. He is regarded as founder of the dynasty partly because he assumed a new title, partly because later Gupta chronology is calculated from what is taken to be the date of his accession (320 or 321 AD), and partly because by marriage or conquest he acquired more territory and authority than he inherited. The new title was Maharajadhiraja, ‘great raja of rajas’, an Indian adaptation of the Persian ‘king of kings’ as previously adopted by the Kushanas. Its assumption seems premature, but lofty titles and epithets would be important to the Guptas. They would soon up the stakes to paramaharajadhiraja and even rajarajadhiraja, ‘king of kings-of-kings’.
Presumably the title reflected growing ambitions. Chandra-Gupta I was the first of his line to feature on coins. According to the Puranas, his territory stretched along the Ganga from Magadha (southern Bihar) to Prayaga (the later Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh). Whether he conquered this rich swathe of the Gangetic heartland and, if so, from whom, is not known. Magadha, for instance, or part of it, may have come to him as a marriage settlement. Kumaradevi, his chief queen, was a Licchavi and so a descendant of one of those 7707 Licchavi knights-raja who had been defeated by Ajatashatru seven hundred years previously. The Licchavis had a distinguished pedigree which was doubtless highly desirable to unknowns like the Guptas. But the importance the Guptas attached to this union was of an altogether higher order. Chandra-Gupta I’s successor would style himself not ‘son of a Gupta father’ but ‘son of a Licchavi daughter’. There are even coins showing king and queen together, an unprecedented development; they bear, as well as the king’s name, that of ‘Kumaradevi Licchavayah’. It is known that the Licchavis had acquired territory in Nepal and it may be that ‘they had taken possession of Pataliputra, the city which had been built and fortified many centuries earlier for the express purpose of curbing their restless spirit.’8 Certainly it is probable that the Guptas and the Licchavis ruled adjacent territories ‘and that the two kingdoms were united under Chandra-Gupta I by his marriage with Kumaradevi’.9
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THE IMPERIAL GUPTAS Probable Succession
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Only under their son Samudra-Gupta does the dynasty emerge from obscurity. Once again this is mostly thanks to the survival of a single inscription. Like Kharavela’s, it advances extravagant claims, but, like Rudradaman’s, these claims are substantiated by other epigraphic and numismatic evidence. The inscription is probably the most famous in all India. Written in a script known as Gupta Brahmi (more elaborate than Ashoka Brahmi), and composed in classical Sanskrit verse and prose, its translation is often credited to James Prinsep of Ashoka fame, although it had been known and partially translated by earlier scholars. Its idiom and language echo that of Rudradaman. So does Samudra-Gupta’s choice of site; for as if aspiring to Mauryan hegemony, his panegyric appears as an addition to the Edicts of Ashoka on one of those highly polished Ashokan pillars.
The pillar stands in the city of Allahabad where, soon after Prinsep’s death, another Ashokan pillar, or part of it, was found in the possession of a contractor who used it as a road-roller. British antiquarians were mortified. A similar fate had almost befallen the pillar with the Samudra-Gupta epigraph. It had been uprooted in the eighteenth century and was discovered by Prinsep’s colleagues lying half-buried in the ground. They re-erected it on a new pedestal and designed an Achaemenid-style replacement for its missing capital. Supposedly a lion, the capital ‘resembles nothing so much as a stuffed poodle on top of an inverted flower pot’, wrote Alexander Cunningham, the father of Indian archaeology in the nineteenth century.
Cunningham also deduced that the Allahabad column had been shifted once before. Evidently later Muslim rulers had come to see these spectacular monoliths as a challenge to the excellence both of their sovereignty and their transport. They had therefore attempted to relocate them as totemic embellishments to their palatial courts. The truncated pillar which now tops Feroz Shah’s palace in Delhi originally stood near Khizrabad higher up the Jamuna. A contemporary (thirteenth-century) account describes how it was toppled onto a capacious pillow, then manoeuvred onto a forty-two-wheeler cart and hauled to the river by 8400 men. Lashed to a fleet of river transports, it was finally brought to Delhi in triumph.
Just so, the Allahabad pillar had apparently been shifted downriver from its original site in Kaushambi. It was meant to enhance the pretensions of the Allahabad fort as rebuilt by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the late sixteenth century. Akbar’s son Jahangir would add his own inscription to those of Ashoka and Samudra-Gupta; and thus it is that scions of each of north India’s three greatest dynasties – Maurya, Gupta and Mughal – share adjacent column inches in the heart of Allahabad, a city whose further claim to fame is as the home of a fourth great dynasty, that of the Nehru-Gandhis.
Miraculously, all that shunting around of the Allahabad pillar little damaged its inscriptions. That of Samudra-Gupta, if not posthumous, dates from near the end of his reign, which was a long one. He is thought to have succeeded as maharajadhiraja, or been so nominated by his father, in C335, and to have died in C380. The inscription may therefore be of about 375 and, with forty years’ achievements to cover, it has much to tell. The most important sections consist of long lists of kings and regions subdued by ‘the prowess of his arm in battle’, otherwise ‘the arm that rose up so as to pass all bounds’; indeed the pillar itself ‘is, as it were, an arm of the earth’ extended in a gesture of command.10 Some historians take these strong-arm conquests to be arranged in chronological order and, on that basis, have divided them into separate ‘campaigns’. Thus the first campaign seems to have taken Samudra-Gupta west where, with the strength of his arm, he ‘uprooted’ kingdoms in the Bareilly and Mathura regions of what is now Uttar Pradesh and in neighbouring Rajasthan. These were incorporated into the Gupta kingdom.
Next he headed south down the eastern seaboard and, perhaps in the course of several campaigns, elbowed aside a dozen more rivals. He turned back only after capturing Vishnugopa, the Pallava king of Kanchipuram (near Madras). Further campaigns in the north saw Gupta forces overrunning most of Bengal, ‘exterminating’ independent republics like that of the Yaudheyas west of Delhi, and establishing Gupta rule throughout the ancient arya-varta (the Aryan homeland – roughly the modern states of West Bengal, Bihar, UP, Madhya Pradesh and the eastern parts of Rajastan and the Panjab). This became the core region of Gupta rule, within which numerous tribal peoples were also deprived of their autonomy and where most extant inscriptions of the early Guptas have been found. Further afield the Kushanas in Gandhara, Great Satrap Rudradaman’s descendants in Gujarat and Malwa, various rulers in Assam and Nepal, and the kings of Sri Lanka and ‘other islands’ (which could mean the Indianised kingdoms of south-east Asia) are all said to have acknowledged Samudra-Gupta’s sovereignty and to have solicited his favour with deferential missions, handsome gifts and desirable maidens.
Now indisputably ‘the unconquered conqueror of unconquered kings’, Samudra-Gupta stood on the threshold of a pan-Indian empire. Other favourite epithets describe him as ‘conqueror of the four quarters of the earth’ and ‘a god dwelling on earth’. He performed the horse-sacrifice; 100,000 cows were distributed as gifts, presumably to his brahman supporters. His coins reveal Vaishnavite leanings but, as a world conqueror, he was seen not just as a devotee of Vishnu but as an emanation or incarnation of that deity. Universal dominion was his. Besides the Garuda symbol of Vishnu, some of his coins feature the one-umbrella of a samrat. Its welcome shade was seen to engulf the political landscape as he
turned the cakravartin’s wheel of world-rule.
But what kind of empire was this? Not, it seems, a continually intrusive one. Gupta rhetoric had perhaps outstripped reality; alternatively its richly allusive phrasing may simply have been misinterpreted. For a close scrutiny of Samudra-Gupta’s rule reveals little of the bureaucratic interventionism associated with Mauryan empire; and despite the best efforts of patriotic scholarship, the claims advanced by zealous nationalists about his ‘unifying India’ and arousing a nation are hard to sustain. He may indeed have been ‘a man of genius who may fairly claim the title of the Indian Napoleon’;11 the Allahabad inscription certainly refutes the idea that only foreigners have conquered India. But it was a conquest to little lasting political purpose other than dynastic gratification. Just as the celebrity of the Guptas was only perceived after the translation of the Allahabad inscription in the nineteenth century, so a deeper design for their empire was only discovered in the twentieth century. ‘Far from the Guptas reviving nationalism it was nationalism that revived the Guptas,’ writes Kosambi.12
In such championship, Indian nationalism reveals as much about its own ambiguities as about those of the Guptas. Thus we learn that Samudra-Gupta ‘was not moved by a lust for conquest for its own sake. He worked for an international system of brotherhood and peace replacing that of violence, war and aggression.’13 A less likely candidate for the Gandhian mantle of non-aggressive satyagrahi it would be hard to find. Nor is this a very convincing explanation for Samudra-Gupta’s failure to consolidate his conquests. In the Deccan and elsewhere beyond the frontiers of his Gangetic arya-varta, he had made no attempt at annexation. ‘Uprooted’ kings were reinstated, their territories restored, and the Gupta forces withdrawn. A one-off tribute was exacted and on this the Gupta court waxed wealthy, with conspicuous patronage of the arts and a prolific output of the beautifully minted gold coins to which the Guptas first owed their ‘golden’ reputation. But unlike the directly administered empire of the Mauryas, this was at best a web of feudatory arrangements and one which, lacking an obvious bureaucratic structure, left the sovereignty of the feudatories largely intact.