by John Keay
Yet the works which embodied these findings were framed with such Sanskritic refinement as to make them incomprehensible to all but the initiated. The craftsman remained ignorant of them, and the mathematician remained jealous of them. Later works on iconography, architecture and painting are often cited as examples of Sanskrit’s contribution to applied science. Yet according to Kosambi, himself a scientist as well as a historian, their dicta ‘do not tally with the measurements of [actual] statuary and buildings or the chemical analysis of pigments’. Clearly ‘the artists and masons went their own way’. Likewise whoever cast the ‘Iron Pillar’ of Mehrauli was indisputably a master metallurgist; yet there is no known treatise on metallurgy.
Sanskrit’s monopoly of scholarship was not, then, fatal to creativity or the development of productive skills. Enormous achievements, especially in architecture, which are barely hinted at in the Gupta era, would soon follow. Nor was the exclusivity of Sanskrit any kind of deterrent to the propagation of its mythology and precepts. During and after the Gupta age the gods and heroes of Sanskrit literature, its endless canons and codes, and its impossible concepts and ideals continued to trickle down through society; they even seeped out into the hills and forests where tribal peoples continued to be absorbed into the caste hierarchy and tribal chiefs into that ‘society of kings’.
Although as much by default and exception as by observance and conformity, a degree of integrity was achieved. It was more than an upper-caste veneer. Awareness of India as a territorial entity with a distinctive and shared religio-cultural heritage is clearly evident. Yet it fell far short of anything remotely resembling a national consciousness. The obvious comparison would be with contemporary Europe’s awareness of something called Christendom. Briefly a Charlemagne, like a Samudra-Gupta, might impose some semblance of political unity; more typically both these great cultural worlds were riven with rivalries as kings and princelings vied for hegemony and as dynasties rose and fell with bewildering rapidity.
8
Lords of the Universe
C500–700
COPPER-PLATE FLOURISHES
GIVEN THE TASK of elucidating sixth-century politics for a volume of the monumental History and Culture of the Indian People, D.C. Sircar, an outstanding epigraphist and historian, writes at length on each of seventeen major dynasties. Numerous lesser dynasties also claim his attention; and the chapter in question covers only the Deccan. With the addition of western India, the Panjab, the north-west, Kashmir, Bengal, the south and the vast Gangetic arya-varta, the sixth century’s dynastic count could easily be doubled. All of which makes ‘happy hunting for professional historians’.1 The prospect of tracking three dozen royal houses at once may, however, discourage the non-specialist, who will not be reassured to learn that during the next five centuries the situation gets, if anything, worse. Dynasties multiply, territories (insofar as they can be determined) diminish, authority erodes. Hemachandra Ray’s Dynastic History of Northern India charts the rise and fall of a further thirty dynasties between 900 and 1100 – and that excludes those of the Deccan, south, and western India. In the history of what used to be called ‘medieval’ India, the key words are ‘fragmentation’ and ‘regionalisation’.
Whether or not this represented a new state of affairs is debatable, but that it becomes progressively evident is because of the proliferation of a new kind of evidence. So far the reconstruction of India’s past has depended on very grudging materials: some enigmatic archaeology, long mostly religious texts of uncertain antiquity, snippets of surviving tradition, the patchy accounts of European and Chinese visitors, coins, and a few mostly stone-engraved inscriptions. All these continue to be relevant, but to them must now be added a more generous corpus of official records, or charters, plus the occasional piece of biographical literature.
The former, the charters, are the more informative. They have been found all over India, and along with royal panegyrics like the Allahabad inscription they are largely responsible for the dynastic log-jam. Indeed many royal lineages, as also the kingdoms over which they ruled, are known only because one or more of their charters happens to have survived. These charters (sasanas) usually record grants of land. They were originally written on palm leaves, but as title-deeds they were of sufficient value subsequently to be engraved, sometimes on a cave wall or a temple but more usually on plates of copper which were then kept in a safe place or hidden somewhere. ‘A large number of copper plates have been found immured in walls or foundations of houses belonging to families of the donees, or hidden in small caches made of bricks or stone in the fields to which the grant refers.’2 Some of these plates were used more than once, a cancelled charter being over-struck with a new one; all originally included a royal seal, often of brass; yet forgeries were not uncommon; and many charters were long enough to run to several plates which were then held together, like a heavy set of keys, with a stout copper ring.
It seems likely that such records had been in use since the beginning of the Christian era. The earliest authentic plates to have survived come from south India and were issued by kings of the Pallava dynasty of Kanchipuram in the fourth century AD. Some of these charters seem to date from before Samudra-Gupta’s uprooting of his Pallava contemporary and are in Prakrit. Thereafter they switch to Sanskrit and provide limited information on no less than sixteen early Pallava kings between 350 and 375. The Pallavas, whose origins are uncertain, had established themselves in the region known as Tondaimandalam, west of the later city of Madras. They had already elevated Kanchipuram into an important religious and intellectual centre but, on the evidence of these plates, they were having severe difficulties holding their own. Only after 375 would the Pallavas emerge as the first great south Indian dynasty, and not till the seventh to eighth centuries would they endow Kanchi and Mamallapuram (Mahabalipuram) with the reliefs and temples now associated with their greatness.
In north India similar, but not always helpful, glimpses of dynastic activity are provided by rare copper plates of the Gupta period. Thereafter such plates become more numerous and remain a prime source for many centuries to come. Muslim chroniclers would notice them and they were still in use in the eighteenth century when newcomers, like the European trading companies, sometimes relied on them as title-deeds to their coastal settlements. At the same time the more historically-minded of the companies’ employees began to collect them for scholarly study.
Legal documents not being renowned for originality or innovative phrasing, the charters, although written in numerous regional languages as well as Sanskrit, all follow much the same formula. After an invocatory word or passage, the text identifies the royal donor with a string of those compound Sanskritic titles and a long panegyric on his forebears, his exploits and his personal qualities. There then follow details of the grant itself, its recipient(s), the occasion for it, and a stern command that posterity respect it. Hefty, if wishful, penalties are detailed for any transgressor of this last provision: the crime of overruling a sasana was commonly equated with that of killing ten thousand Varanasi cows – a sacrilege of unthinkable enormity in a city of unassailable sanctity for which the penalty was that of being reborn as a dung-worm with a lifespan of eighty-four thousand years.
Of all these standard components of a charter, that applauding the donor and his lineage has generally been found the most useful. As noted, entire dynasties and their histories have been reconstructed from the chance survival of a single such charter. Yet their extravagant language should in itself provide a warning. Whether on copper or stone, inscriptions can be misleading.
According to a neat two-plate charter issued in 571 at Vallabhi, which place had succeeded Rudradaman’s Junagadh as the capital of Saurashtra, the incumbent king was the son of a maharaja of truly spectacular memory. Maharaja Guhasena had ‘cleft the temples of the rutting elephants of his foes’; the toenails of his left foot emitted rays as dazzling as those of the jewels in the head-dresses of his enemies as they lay prostrate b
efore him; in beauty he surpassed the God of Love, in lustre the Moon, in constancy the Lord of the Mountains, in profundity the Ocean, in wisdom the Protector of the Gods and in riches the Lord of Wealth. Carelessly showering his supporters with gifts, ‘he was, as it were, the personified happiness of the circumference of the whole earth’.3
The rulers of Vallabhi were indeed destined for some distinction, and their capital, misheard as ‘Balhara’, would be amongst the first to be noticed by Muslim chroniclers. But the ruler of all India whom these same chroniclers called ‘The Balhara’ was not the Maitraka king of Vallabhi but the ‘Valabha-raja’, a title used by the later and much more significant Rashtrakuta dynasty. Moreover in 571 the Maitrakas had barely established themselves at Vallabhi; descendants of a Gupta general, they had only just ceased to acknowledge Gupta suzerainty. Although typical of many other successor dynasties within the region of direct Gupta rule, they had scarcely begun the mysterious business of cleaving rutting elephants’ temples and were not politically significant in India as a whole.
The year in question was more notable for an event outside India. Also in 571, but across the Arabian Sea and in obscure circumstances, the wife of an impoverished merchant of the Quraysh tribe gave birth to a son of less suspect lustre. To him, forty years later and now known as Muhammad, the divine word would be revealed; and by him the world would be irrevocably and very rapidly changed. But it would be over a century before the Prophet’s followers made any impact on India. And by then most of those sixth-century dynasts, although not the Maitrakas, had long since ceased to outshine the moon and personify all earthly happiness.
No excuse, therefore, is offered for ignoring most of the dynasties which are known to have succeeded the Guptas and which, from their charters, may appear even to have outdone the Guptas. Some will be noted later. Here it is sufficient to mention that several claim to have turned the tide of Hun incursion. It will be recalled that from Gandhara the Huns had been rampaging across the Panjab and as far as Malwa since C500. In the north-west the great Buddhist establishments at Taxila, Peshawar and Swat suffered severely from their iconoclasm. Where Fa Hian in the fifth century had found packed viharas and towering stupas, Hsuan Tsang, another Chinese visitor but in the mid-seventh century, found only devastation. Taxila’s monasteries were ‘ruinous and deserted, and there are very few priests; the royal family being extinct, the nobles contend for power by force’. In Swat some fourteen hundred Buddhist establishments were ‘now generally waste and desolate’, their eighteen thousand monks having dwindled to a handful.4 Buddhism in the Indus basin would never recover from this blow; nor, until the advent of Islam, would the overland trade with China and the west. Although Hsuan Tsang found some commercial activity in Kabul, his omission of any mention of markets or trade in connection with Taxila and Peshawar is significant. The lifeblood of the region had dried up, and with it the all-important supply of equine bloodstock from central Asia to India. Henceforth horses reached India mainly by sea from Arabia, in a trade which would rapidly become a Muslim monopoly. Other frontier trails, like the pilgrim’s calvary that had been the Karakoram route, fell into disuse as Buddhist traffic shifted east to the Tibetan tableland.
The rest of India was spared from the Hun perhaps thanks to one Yasodharman of Malwa. Evidently a very successful adventurer if not a noted dynast, Yasodharman claims to have inflicted a defeat on the Huns in C530. Under their leader Mihirakula, the son of Toramana, the Huns then retired to Kashmir, there in a land of sad but incomparable beauty to burnish their reputation for persecution, vandalism and unspeakable atrocities for another generation.
Victories over the Huns are also claimed by Baladitya, a later Gupta, and by the Maukharis and the Vardhanas. The Maukharis, comprising one or more dynasties, had established themselves in central Uttar Pradesh with their capital at Kanauj on the upper Ganga (near Kanpur). Thereby dominating an important slice of the Guptas’ erstwhile arya-varta, they would provide a thread of legitimacy for the next and arguably the last north Indian cakravartin. This was the great Harsha of the Vardhana family from Thanesar near Delhi. The Vardhanas and the Maukharis were already closely allied and may have repelled the Huns in unison. Their territories, too, marched with one another; conjoined, they would soon form the nucleus of Harsha’s great empire.
But before returning to the dynastic fray, and lest the charters of the sixth century be dismissed simply as copper-red herrings, it is worth considering the information they provide not only about their royal donors but also about their beneficiaries and about the nature of the grants themselves. To the economic, as opposed to the dynastic, historian these are of great significance since they foreshadow a fragmentation and dispersal of resources far more ominous than what Kosambi calls the ‘nice but meaningless’ litany of dynasties.
Munificence was incumbent on any ruler and was an essential attribute of kingship; indeed a particularly generous sovereign is described as one who makes so many grants as to exhaust the supply of copper. Distributing land was a way of rewarding supporters and of gaining merit; it also had important economic connotations. In the Vallabhi charter of 571 already cited the beneficiary was a brahman called Rudrabhuti. Nearly all charters of the period are in favour of brahmans or religious establishments – notably temples, Jain communities and, now more rarely, Buddhist monasteries. In this case Rudrabhuti was granted the revenue and other rights in respect of certain lands, such proceeds to be used to finance in perpetuity various important sacrificial rituals. Where once the brahmans’ support and performance of rites might have been rewarded with a few hundred head of cattle, it was now prepaid with revenue.
Both the rights and the lands thus granted are specified in detail. Although the meaning of several technical terms is disputed,5 it seems that in this case the extensive lands were pastures belonging to certain named individuals. Rudrabhuti was to receive their yield in various dues and taxes, plus their mineral and other rights. He was exempted from royal exactions (as, for instance, for the support of the military establishment), and finally he was awarded rights to the forced labour of the incumbents. The lands themselves were not transferred; on the other hand their entire yield was irrevocably alienated so far as the royal exchequer was concerned.
Other grants often include the proceeds from fines for various crimes and the right to exclude royal troops and law-enforcers; even the administration of justice was being devolved. Rudrabhuti and his like were in effect becoming fief-holders. Although as yet grants were made largely to brahmans and for religious purposes, and although as yet they included no provision for the reciprocal military service associated with European feudalism, the basis of a quasi-feudal relationship was being laid. Soon state officials, who according to Fa Hian had been salaried even under the Guptas, were being remunerated with similar grants of lands, villages and even districts. Evidence of commendation (whereby villagers themselves sought the security and protection of a royally approved superior) and of sub-infeudation (when such a superior sub-leased parts of his feu to agents and supporters) would follow.
This ‘feudalism from below’ is sometimes contrasted with that ‘from above’, the latter being epitomised in the royal hierarchy of a maharajadhiraja surrounded by his proliferating feudatories or maha-samantas (literally ‘great neighbours’ but now signifying dependent dynasties and vassals). Both contributed to the process of fragmentation, ‘feudalism from above’ by regionalising authority even as the kings who exercised it shrilly proclaimed their universal sovereignty, and ‘feudalism from below’ by a more insidious erosion of the loyalties and resources on which all authority depended.
HARSHA-VARDHANA
As if to contradict such theorising, a new ‘king-of-kings’ was nevertheless about to shine forth in fleeting brilliance. A new chronological era, always a significant pointer, would be inaugurated; and another ‘victorious circuit of the four quarters of the earth’ (digvijaya) would be celebrated. In the early seventh century the rival dynas
ties, which like close-packed clouds had clustered over arya-varta ever since the great Guptas, began to thin. The monsoon, it seemed, had been delayed; northern India was about to experience a last searing glimpse of pre-Islamic empire.
Of the no doubt many sasana issued by Harsha-Vardhana of Thanesar (and later Kanauj) few survive. A single seal, once presumably attached to a copper plate, does however list Harsha’s immediate antecedents. Apparently he belonged to the fourth Vardhana generation; his father had been the first to assume the title maharajadhiraja and his brother the first to call himself a follower of the Buddha. Harsha seems to have adopted both styles, although his Buddhist sympathies would preclude neither aggressive designs nor the worship of orthodox deities. Sadly the seal in question has no room for further information, and were it, and his coins, the only evidence of Harsha, he would be but another shadowy dynast.
Mercifully, though, the somewhat sterile evidence provided by sasana is supplemented by two much more informative witnesses. One was Hsuan Tsang (Hiuen Tsiang, Hsuien-tsang, Yuan Chwang, Xuan Zang, etc. etc.), a Chinese monk and scholar who, inspired by Fa Hian’s pilgrimage to the Buddhist Holy Land two hundred years earlier, himself spent the years 630–44 visiting India. He returned to China with enough Buddhist relics, statuary and texts to load twenty horses, and subsequently wrote a long account of India which, except in the case of the extreme south, seems to have been based on personal observation.
The other and the more endearing witness was Bana, an outstanding writer and also, incidentally, a rakish brahman whose ill-spent youth and varied circle of friends ‘shows how lightly the rules of caste weighed on the educated man’.6 Of Bana’s two surviving works the most important is the Harsa-carita, a prose account of Harsha’s rise to power. Though more descriptive than explanatory, and though loaded with linguistic fancies and adjectival compounds of inordinate length, it rates as Sanskrit’s first historical biography as well as a masterpiece of literature. In it the hectic excitement of camp and court is conveyed with all the vivid incident of a crowded Mughal miniature. Forest and roadside teem with life as Bana minutely observes every detail of rural industry and identifies every species in the natural environment. No Kipling, no Rushdie better evokes India’s heaving vitality or the lifelong industry of its people.
