by John Keay
Inevitably both Hsuan Tsang and Bana were interested parties. The former depended on Harsha’s protection and the latter on his patronage. In no sense is either of their works a critical appraisal. Hsuan Tsang was blinded by a Buddhist bigotry which he would fain hoist on Harsha, while Bana saw Harsha and history as combining to provide the material for a historical romance. Yet in a way each author complements the other, the Chinese monk providing the outline and the Indian author the detail, the Buddhist the libretto and the brahman the music.
They also complement one another chronologically. Hsuan Tsang would coincide with the climax of Harsha’s career while Bana records only his early years, from his birth in C590 to his accession in C606 and his first campaign soon after. This period is of particular interest since Harsha, as a second son, was not the obvious successor. His father, Maharajadhiraja Prabhakara-Vardhana, died when Harsha and his elder brother were away, the latter fighting the Huns while the teenage Harsha enjoyed a spot of hunting. Harsha got home first and alone saw the dying king, at which meeting, according to Bana, he named him as his heir. The brother then returned victorious from the battlefield with his troops. Harsha said nothing of their father’s last wish and the brother therefore remained heir presumptive.
At this point Bana introduces yet another reason for Harsha’s succession. Apparently Rajya-Vardhana, the brother, was so overcome with grief over their father’s death that he declined the throne and opted to retire to a hermitage. Improbably he too, therefore, insisted that Harsha succeed their father. Yet from other sources, including Hsuan Tsang, it is known that in fact it was Rajya-Vardhana who succeeded. Bana, in short, protests too much. Perhaps he simply wanted to bolster Harsha’s legitimacy by suggesting that he was the direct heir. Or perhaps he had a less creditable motive. As a recent biographer delicately puts it, ‘it is hard to escape the conclusion that the unusual twists in the story … were rendered inevitable because of some episode uncomplimentary to the author’s hero.’7 More specifically it may be that Bana was trying to lull suspicions, still current at the time he was writing, that Harsha had had a motive, if not a hand, in Rajya-Vardhana’s imminent removal.
This came about as a result of more ‘unusual twists’. Rajya-Sri, the princes’ sister, had been married to their neighbour and ally, the Maukhari king of Kanauj. In the midst of the succession crisis in Thanesar, this Maukhari king was suddenly attacked by the king of ‘Malava’ (presumably Malwa). The Maukhari king died in battle; Rajya-Sri was taken hostage; and the victorious ‘Malava’ now moved to attack Thanesar. In this desperate situation it was not Harsha but again his brother who took the initiative. Suddenly abandoning his idea of a quiet life of grief, he now insisted on his right to revenge. Harsha’s wish to accompany him was swept aside and, taking ten thousand cavalry, the righteous Rajya-Vardhana raced off to give battle.
Clearly an awesome campaigner, Rajya-Vardhana duly routed the men from Malwa. But then the real villain of the piece emerged. Sasanka, king of Gauda in Bengal, had been assisting the Malwa forces. The victorious Rajya-Vardhana met Sasanka under a safe-conduct, presumably to arrange a truce, and was treacherously murdered. At last the stage was clear for the young and hitherto somewhat subdued Harsha to explode upon it.
Instantly on hearing this [the news of his brother’s murder] his fiery spirit blazed forth in a storm of sorrow augmented by flaming flashes of furious wrath. His aspect became terrible in the extreme. As he fiercely shook his head, the loosened jewels from his crest looked like live coals of the angry fire which he vomited forth. Quivering without cessation, his wrathful curling lip seemed to drink the lives of all kings. His reddening eyes with their rolling gleam put forth, at it were, conflagrations in the heavenly spaces. Even the fire of anger, as though itself burned by the scorching power of his inborn valour’s unbearable heat, spread over him a rainy shower of sweat. His very limbs trembled as if in fright at such unexampled fury …
He represented the first revelation of valour, the frenzy of insolence, the delirium of pride, the youthful avatar of fury, the supreme effort of hauteur, the new age of manhood’s fire, the regal consecration of warlike passion, the camp-lustration day of reckoning.8
Understandably his supporters were impressed. Ably, and of course volubly, encouraged by his commander-in-chief and then by the commandant of his elephant corps, Harsha mobilised ‘for a world-wide conquest’. Meanwhile his enemies were beset by all manner of ill omens: jackals, swarming bees and swooping vultures terrorised their cities; their soldiers fell out with their mistresses while some, looking in the mirror, saw themselves headless; a naked woman wandered through the parks ‘shaking her forefinger as if to count the dead’.
Sasanka, ‘vilest of Gaudas’, would be Harsha’s main objective but, Gauda being thousands of kilometres to the east of Thanesar, many other kings would have to submit first. One, evidently a hereditary rival of the Gauda kings, quickly entered into a treaty of friendship and subordinate alliance with Harsha. This was Bhaskara-varman, king of Kumara-rupa (Assam) on Gauda’s northern border. Sasanka would therefore have to fight on two fronts. Additionally Harsha could count on the forces of the Maukharis and on the defeated Malwa army which was now put at his disposal by his late brother’s commander.
The latter also brought news of the escape from her confinement in Kanauj of Rajya-Sri (Harsha’s sister and the queen of the Maukharis). Unfortunately she had fled into hiding in the Vindhya hills where, as a widow, she was thought to be about to commit sati. Harsha had other plans. He saw both merit and, though unmentioned by Bana, advantage in rescuing her. Dousing his rage, therefore, he led a search party into the wild tracts of central India. A community of pioneers who were busily engaged in harvesting forest produce and clearing trees knew nothing of her whereabouts. But at another settlement, this time of assorted Buddhists, brahmans and other renunciates who were pooling their insights in an admirable spirit of ecumenism, he heard tell of a party of grief-stricken ladies hiding nearby. Rajya-Sri, horribly scratched and reduced to rags by her forest odyssey, was amongst them. In the nick of time she was duly plucked from her funeral pyre and reunited with her brother.
Rajya-Sri’s only wish now was to become a Buddhist nun. Harsha would not hear of it. He needed her active support and insisted on her accompanying him. As the Maukhari queen, she was vital to his plans since, through her, he in effect controlled the Maukhari kingdom. As a result of this identity of interest he would subsequently move his capital from Thanesar to the more central and significant city of Kanauj. Kanauj now became the rival of Pataliputra as the imperial capital of northern India and, through many vicissitudes and changes of ownership, would remain so until the twelfth century.
Meanwhile the campaign could be renewed. Accompanied by Rajya-Sri and a Buddhist sage who was to act as her confessor, Harsha hastened back to rejoin his army encamped by the Ganga. There, as he related the story of his successful rescue mission, the shadows lengthened and the sun went down in a blaze of gory omens, each of which presaged an imminent victory. The evening, says Bana, advanced as if ‘leaning on the clouds’ which were flecked and bright with the setting sun, like an ocean sunset. Then, with darkness closing in, the Spirit of Night respectfully presented Harsha with the moon; it was ‘as if the moon were a cup to slake his boundless thirst for fame’, says Bana, or even ‘a sasana of silver issued by king Manu himself entitling Harsha to conquer the seven heavens and restore the golden age’. And so, somewhat unexpectedly, amidst a welter of page-long adjectival compounds and with a well-flagged trail of conquest stretching into the distant future, Bana’s tale abruptly ends.
If there was more, it has not survived. Instead there is only the odd inscription plus the testimony of Hsuan Tsang, by the time of whose visit Harsha the teenage Galahad had become Harsha the middle-aged Arthur and his little kingdom on the Jamuna a universal dominion over the ‘Five Indies’. What this term actually comprehended is not clear. ‘He went from east to west,’ says Hsuan Tsang, ‘s
ubduing all who were not obedient; the elephants were not unharnessed, nor the soldiers unbelted. After six years he had subdued the Five Indies.’9 The division of India into five parts – north (uttarapatha), south (daksinapatha), east, west and centre (madhyadesa or arya-varta) – was fairly standard; but if this was what Hsuan Tsang meant by the ‘Five Indies’, he was grossly exaggerating. Harsha had indeed triumphed throughout much of north India, but his conquests were often tenuous and short-lived; they would take much longer than six years; and they certainly never included the Deccan or the south.
From his camp beside the Ganga, where Bana had left him basking in the prospect of bloody victories to come, Harsha seems to have continued east. Prayaga (Allahabad), Ayodhya, Sravasti, Magadha and a host of minor kingdoms in UP and Bihar, many of them previously under Sasanka’s sway, must have submitted before he sighted his quarry. According to a much later source, the great encounter with Sasanka of Gauda took place at Pundra in northern Bengal. Sasanka was apparently defeated, but not so decisively as to forfeit his kingdom, for he continued to rule Gauda itself and seems even to have reclaimed parts of Orissa and Magadha. Only after Sasanka’s death in C620–30 did Harsha successfully claim these kingdoms and apparently share them with his Assamese ally.
His other ‘campaigns’ and ‘conquests’ are no less vague. That he did indeed overrun all of north India from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal is well-attested. The Maitrakas of Vallabhi in far-off Gujarat were forced to flee their capital, Kashmir was obliged to part with a cherished relic of the Buddha, Sindh and Orissa look also to have been invaded. To reach these places, kingdoms which intervened or were adjacent to the probable line of march must also have submitted. Likewise those kingdoms which were subordinate to Harsha’s new vassals, including most of the Panjab hill states in the case of Kashmir. On this evidence, and on Hsuan Tsang’s failure to indicate that they were fully independent, numerous other kingdoms and tribes stretching from the eastern Panjab to Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are presumed to have formed part of Harsha’s empire.
But whether he held all of them simultaneously, for how long, and on what terms is very uncertain. The Maitrakas of Saurashtra, for instance, soon returned to their capital of Vallabhi and, despite being united with Harsha’s family by a matrimonial alliance, seem to have pursued independent policies. But perhaps the most persuasive argument for the ephemeral nature of Harsha’s empire rests on its sudden and total eclipse. An intimation of troubles ahead had been provided by Hsuan Tsang when he was witness to an attempt on Harsha’s life. Those responsible he identified as ‘heretics’, the Buddhist’s term for disaffected brahmans. Evidently by the seventh century not all religious rivalries were being resolved in friendly debate. Sasanka’s ‘vileness’ seems to have had a lot to do with his having allegedly harassed Buddhists and cut down the sacred Boddhi tree under which the Buddha received enlightenment. Elsewhere in arya-varta it was the other way round, with orthodox opinion being antagonised by Harsha’s growing preference for, and generosity to, the Buddhist sangha.
At a lavish ceremony organised by Harsha to celebrate his meeting with the king of Kamarupa, these dissidents attempted sabotage by setting fire to the tower in which the Buddha image was placed. Harsha, according to Hsuan Tsang, put out the flames not by blowing but, no less miraculously, by rushing headlong into them. Frustrated, the ‘heretic’ fanatics then persuaded one of their followers to make an attempt on Harsha’s life. The assassin lunged, knife in hand, but Harsha, still nimble on his feet despite advancing years, dodged the blow and then seized and disarmed his assailant. Hsuan Tsang makes much of the clemency later shown to those responsible. Only their leader was ‘punished’, which probably means that he was executed; the rest were pardoned. Nevertheless five hundred brahmans had to be packed off into exile. Obviously, if not a rebellion, this was much more than an intrigue.
How Harsha eventually died is not known. But when in 647 his long reign finally ended, so did his empire; it simply fell apart. No Chandra-Gupta II stepped forward to round off his conquests and no Ashoka arose to consolidate his dominions. Confederate kingdoms simply allowed their allegiance to lapse; subject dynasties simply resumed their old rivalries.
The throne itself was usurped by one of Harsha’s brahman ministers, who was then badly discredited by the mismanagement of a Chinese embassy. Harsha had cultivated good relations with the new T’ang empire and, thanks to his Buddhist sympathies and his generous treatment of visitors like Hsuan Tsang, several diplomatic missions had been exchanged. But, according to Chinese sources, a T’ang embassy which arrived immediately after his death found India in confusion. In what looks like an incident born more of sectarian than political rivalry, the Chinese were robbed and taken captive while the Celestial Emperor’s emissary barely escaped to Tibet with his life. Thence he organised reprisals which apparently culminated in a resounding Chinese victory, ‘whereupon India was overawed’.
Although there is no mention in Indian sources of this first trans-Himalayan incursion, and although it was probably no more than a raid into northern Bengal, it was indicative of the vacuum left by Harsha. Thanks to Bana, his personal fame would indeed last, and in that he also sponsored religious debate, championed scholarship, and himself wrote plays, he has often been compared with Akbar, greatest of the Mughals. But there would be no ‘House of Harsha’ to bestride India during succeeding generations, no ‘Vardhana Age’ to foster the memory of northern India’s last cakravartin, and no ‘Kanauj School’ to continue his patronage of Buddhist ‘universities’ like Nalanda (Bihar) and of scholars like Bana. The red-hot coals vomited so freely by the fiery Harsha were extinguished in a hiss of steam as the political monsoon finally broke over the arya-varta heartland of northern India.
ROUND AND ROUND THE MANDALA
It was not so elsewhere. Indeed there is ample evidence that the ideal of a universal, or pan-Indian, sovereignty simply shifted ground. With Harsha the hegemony so long assumed by northern India came to an end. Sixty years after his death, Arabs would establish a Muslim bridgehead in Sind, their task eased by his own incursions into that region. The north-west, or in other words most of what now comprises the rest of Pakistan, had been irrevocably humbled by the Huns and was now politically irrelevant. Into the Gangetic heartland itself, adventurous dynasts from Kashmir, Bengal and the Deccan were about to raid, indeed briefly rule, with impunity. And where Harsha had signally failed to make of the Gupta tradition of paramountcy any more than a fragile and fleeting confederacy, other great dynasties, especially those of the Deccan and the south, would so refine and substantiate the concept as to make it their own.
In the course of his wanderings round India, Hsuan Tsang traversed an area of the western Deccan which he calls ‘Mo-ho-la-ch’a’. The translation of proper names from Chinese back into Sanskrit often stretches credulity, but in this case there is little room for doubt: by ‘Mo-ho-la-ch’a’ Hsuan Tsang meant Maharashtra. This was the land either side of the Western Ghats, once the patrimony of the trading Shatavahanas whose cave temples pocked its rocky outcrops, then of the Vakatakas who so loyally served the Guptas, and nowadays more or less the modern state of Maharashtra centred on Bombay. Hsuan Tsang found the soil rich and fertile, which in parts it is; the people were honest but implacable, and they included ‘a band of champions’ who, when both they and their elephants were fired up on alcohol, proved irresistible in battle. ‘No enemy can stand before them,’ wrote the visitor, wherefore their king was able to ‘treat his neighbours with contempt’.10
The name of this contemptuous sovereign was given as ‘Pu-lo-ki-she’, otherwise Pulakesin II, and according to Hsuan Tsang his ambitions were extensive. At the time in question, C630, he was confidently defying even Harsha who, despite summoning all his troops plus the ablest commanders from his ‘five Indies’, and despite himself leading this horde in battle, had failed to impress Pulakesin II’s gladiators or to dent his roving ambitions.
Hsuan
Tsang, and no doubt Harsha, saw this impasse as a stalemate; Pulakesin not unreasonably celebrated it as a victory. He belonged to a dynasty, the Chalukya, which because of its long-lasting consequence and numerous offshoots (whence it is often distinguished as the ‘Western Chalukya’) deserves special attention. The Chalukyas hailed from Karnataka to the south, and in the course of a couple of generations had soared to prominence at the expense of various neighbours, including the Kadambas, their erstwhile suzerains. Their capital, fortified by Pulakesin I, founder of the dynasty and the first to perform the horse-sacrifice (and also Pulakesin II’s grandfather), was situated at Vatapi, now Badami, a small town scrabbling up both sides of a cliff-stepped ravine in northern Karnataka.
There or thereabouts the Chalukyas would continue to celebrate their successes with a remarkable series of temples, at first cut into the rock but by the time of Pulakesin II already free-standing buildings. They were not the first structural temples, timber and brick having been used for such constructions since long before the time of Christ. Nor were they the first stone-built temples: at Sanchi, Nalanda, Buddh Gaya and several other sites in eastern Madhya Pradesh, UP and Bihar a dozen scattered temples from the Gupta period survive in various degrees of dilapidation or over-zealous restoration. But at Badami and its neighbouring sites (Aihole, Mahakuta and Pattadakal) the feast of architecture and sculpture heralds a new identity between dynasty and endowment in which temple-building becomes an expression and paradigm of a sovereign’s authority.