by John Keay
For the Palas were Buddhists, indeed the last major Indian dynasty to espouse Buddhism. Their lavish endowments included the revival of Nalanda’s university and a colossal building programme at Somapura, now Paharpur in Bangladesh, where sprawling ruins and foundations, all of brick, attest ‘the largest Buddhist buildings south of the Himalayas’.15 They also founded an important new centre of learning at Vikramashila, which was somewhere on the Ganga in Bihar. The fame of all these places travelled widely and suggests that Pala patronage was crucial to the future of Buddhism as a world religion. To the Pala kingdom came students from Sind, Kashmir, Nepal, Tibet, China, Burma, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Pala architecture probably influenced the final remodelling of Borobudur and would be echoed in the stupas and temples of Pagan (Burma) and Prambanam (Java). Pala images, often in highly polished stone and bronze, anticipated and inspired the distinctive iconography of Tibet and Nepal. And the Mahayanist Buddhism of both these countries developed its peculiar traits and doctrines under Pala patronage.
It was a Buddhism far removed from that preached by the Enlightened One, indeed as remote from it in both time and spirit as was medieval Christianity from the New Testament. Although originally a rationalisation of the human condition and a code of ethics, both of which largely ignored the deities and rituals associated with conventional religion, Buddhism had been steadily assuming the trappings of orthodox religious practice ever since the Buddha’s death. In the Boddhisattvas it had long since acquired a pantheon whose myths and attributes rivalled those of Shiva and Vishnu; now, in their numerous Taras, or spouses, it acquired glamorous female counterparts of Parvati and Lakshmi. Indeed Buddhist icons of the Pala period are so anatomically exaggerated and so generously provided with extra heads and arms that only a trained eye would identify them as Buddhist.
In eastern India the demarcation between Buddhists and non-Buddhists was further blurred by both countenancing the efficacy of mantras (repetitious formulae), yantras (mystical designs), mudras (finger postures) and the numerous other practices associated with Tantricism. Tantras were esoteric texts of uncertain origin and profoundly difficult import which offered initiates the chance of communing with the divinity and assuming supernatural powers and states. The rituals and disciplines involved were complex and secret. Some mimicked the sexual imagery of myths involving the union of the deity and his shakti, or female counterpart. Breaking the taboos of caste, diet, dress and sexual fidelity, practitioners might enjoy both a liberating debauch and an enhanced reputation, even if magical powers eluded them.
But it goes without saying that these mystic whisperings, obscurantist doctrines and orgiastic covens were far removed from the Buddha’s ‘Middle Way’. Worse still, compromise was proving counter-productive for Buddhism. In bidding for popular support and competing with other cults as a parallel religion, the sangha had been losing ground throughout India since the time of the Guptas. Populist devotional cults emanating from south India (the so-called bhakti movement) were pre-empting Buddhism’s traditional appeal as a refuge from brahman authority and caste prejudice. At the same time a reform movement started by Sankara (788–820), a brahman from Kerala, was reclaiming for a distilled essence of Vedic philosophy (vedanta) the high moral and doctrinal ground previously enjoyed by the Noble Eightfold Path. As a result Buddhism was already largely confined to the peripheral regions of Sind, Kashmir, Nepal, and of course the Pala heartland in eastern India.
Whether the Pala empire was in any sense a Buddhist state it is hard to say. But in that reference to the ‘election’ of Gopala, its founder, there could be an echo of the more contractual ideas underlying early Buddhist notions of kingship. His successors, while adopting conventional titles like maharajadhiraja and paramesvara, seem to have paid particular heed to their religious advisers, and it may not be fanciful to imagine the Palas reviving the mythology of their illustrious predecessors in Magadha – Ajatashatru, Bimbisara and Ashoka. Certainly Pala patronage of Buddhist institutions afforded to India’s greatest religio-cultural export a last climax under Dharmapala and Devapala and then a last refuge under their successors.
It is, however, their mortal rivals for supremacy in northern India who have attracted the closest scrutiny by Indian historians. Based in western India at the opposite extremity of arya-varta, the Gurjara-Pratiharas have been awarded an imperial sway greater even than Harsha’s and a national resolve worthy of the Congress Party. ‘They were of the people and did not stand away from their hopes, aspirations and traditions.’16 ‘The spearhead of a religio-cultural upsurge’, the Gurjara-Pratiharas were ‘bulwarks of defence against the vanguards of Islam’17 and ‘protectors of dharma’. Yet despite such confident statements, despite comparatively frequent references by Islamic writers, and despite a succession of well attested rulers, the Gurjara-Pratiharas remain as much an enigma as their composite title suggests.
‘The king of Jurz maintains numerous forces and no other Indian prince has so fine a cavalry,’ reported merchant Suleiman in the ninth century. There was also ‘no greater foe of the Muhammadan faith’. Moreover Jurz territory comprised ‘a tongue of land’, presumably Saurashtra in Gujarat, which if correct provides a clue to the identity of its king. For Jurz, sometimes spelled ‘Juzr’, is taken to be a variant of ‘Gurzara’ or ‘Gurjara’, a place or people visited by Hsuan Tsang and mentioned in several inscriptions, including that of the great Chalukya, Pulakesin II, at Aihole. The same word is today found in ‘Gujarat’, ‘Gujranwala’ and numerous other place-names as well as in ‘Gujars’, a ubiquitous community of pastoralists frequenting many parts of the Panjab from the north-west frontier to Uttar Pradesh. This trail of ‘Guj-’ words suggests that the Gurjaras, or Jurz people, had been on the move. Some suppose that they originated beyond the north-west frontier and moved into the Panjab and then western India in the wake of the Hun invasions. Others suppose that any such migration was more probably in reverse, that they originated in western India and then moved north.
Al-Masudi, writing in the early tenth century, has little to say of Jurz but makes much of ‘the Bauura, king of Kanauj’. His forces were reckoned at an incredible three million, and were divided into four armies, one to engage the Arabs of Multan, another to deal with the Balhara (i.e. the Rashtrakutas) and the other two ‘to meet enemies in any direction’. Such a description could only apply to the Pratiharas, a late-eighth- to tenth-century dynasty known to have wrested Kanauj from the Palas and to have been occasionally humbled by the Rashtrakutas. And since the Pratiharas are known to have originated in Rajasthan, whence one branch of the family had first set up in a kingdom in Gujarat, it is now generally accepted that Jurz and the Gurjaras refer to kingdoms and rulers closely related to the Bauura and the Pratiharas. In fact the Pratiharas are taken to be one of several Gurjara clans and are hence known as the ‘Gurjara-Pratiharas’.
The subject is of more than passing interest because the Pratiharas and their descendants are often numbered amongst those more famous clans known as rajputs. In the centuries immediately preceding and following the Muslim conquest of India, the rajputs were destined to play an often heroic and always pivotal role. Their territories would stretch way beyond Rajputana, or Rajasthan, and would eventually constitute the most numerous of the ‘princely states’ under British rule. In fact to the British the rajputs would come to represent the quintessence of all that was admirable in India’s martial traditions. ‘In a Rajpoot,’ wrote Colonel James Tod, their annalist and champion, ‘I always recognise a friend.’
Tod spent ten years amongst the still-independent rajputs as a political agent in the early nineteenth century. In his subsequent Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, one of the most substantial and sonorous works of British Indian scholarship, he would claim to have established ‘the common origin of the tribes of Rajasthan and those of ancient Europe’. Invoking ‘the Scythic tribes’ as the common link, this was simply a variation, albeit less remote, of the Indo-Aryan hypothesis advance
d by philologists like Jones. Tod also delved deeply into the Puranic pedigrees whereby the various rajput houses claimed descent from heroes of the epics and Vedas. And he valiantly tried to trace each clan to its original homeland. But he failed to explain the greatest mystery of all: why the rajputs, so prominent in Indian history throughout the second millennium AD, had figured in it not once during the first millennium. Where, in short, had the rajputs sprung from?
The mystery is still unresolved. Even if rajput clans like the Pratiharas were really Gurjaras, they can still only be traced back to C500; and there remains the problem of where the Gurjaras sprang from. Legends common to some families of both Gurjaras and rajputs associate them with the region around Mount Abu. Upon the dewy downs of this vast upthrusted plateau in southern Rajasthan a great fire-sacrifice was reputedly held at which the progenitors of these clans were accorded ksatriya status and incorporated into royal lineages going back to Lords Rama and Krishna, themselves scions of descent groups from the Sun and the Moon. Clearly in the not too remote past the fortunes of these clans had improved substantially as a result of some dramatic transformation. But whether they were previously indigenous desert tribes who, like those of Arabia, were abruptly inspired to undertake martial exploits in more favoured lands, or whether they should be seen in the context of those republican and tribal entities, like the Yaudheyas, who from roughly the same regions of western India had once offered a stout resistance to Rudradaman of the Junagadh inscription and to Samudra-Gupta of the Allahabad inscription, and whether earlier still they had migrated from somewhere outside India – all such mysteries remain.
What is certain is that the Gurjara-Pratiharas represented a social and political grouping very different from those of their Pala and Rashtrakuta rivals for the imperial patrimony of Kanauj. When they first emerged it was as the most successful amongst several related Gurjara royal families; their extensive conquests were often made and subsequently controlled by feudatories who were often relations; and when their ‘empire’ disintegrated, it did so into powerful local kingdoms ruled by families who claim a similar ksatriya status and a similar Gurjara-rajput provenance. This prevalence of loose, kin-based relationships suggests that tribe and clan were important to the Gurjara-Pratiharas. Unlike the Buddhist Palas, their religious allegiance was variable: some were devotees of Vishnu, others of Shiva, Bhagavati or the Sun-God. And unlike the Rashtrakutas, who were veritable sticklers for ritual refinement, they seem not to have gloried in the elaborate ceremonies of paramountcy. Theirs was a more informal, less rigid and perhaps more effective power structure which, breaking from the mandala conventions of the past, anticipated the more flexible relationships demanded by the dire centuries ahead.
Nevertheless, the Gurjara-Pratiharas observed the conventions and assumed the traditional epithets of paramountcy. Vatsaraja, who from Ujjain appears to have ruled over Malwa and much of Rajasthan in the 780s, had been the first to assume the titles of maharajadhiraja and paramesvara. Despite defeat by Dhruva, the Rashtrakuta king who first threatened Kanauj, Vatsaraja’s son would continue to use and to add to these titles. The son, Naghabhata II, was also the first of his line to seize Kanauj from its Pala puppet and to lay claim to extensive conquests in arya-varta. His success was short-lived, but Bhoja, his grandson, more than made amends. Ruling for at least fifty years (C836–886), Bhoja (and then his son Mahendrapala) accumulated by conquest and alliance more feudatory territories than any contemporary. As the Pala empire retracted under Devapala’s successors and as the Rashtrakutas entered a period of uncharacteristic quiescence, Bhoja looks to have commanded kings and kingdoms which stretched in a great arc from Saurashtra in Gujarat to Magadha and Bengal.
If Kanauj was Bhoja’s capital, Gwalior, a natural fortress of immense strategic value astride the Daksinapatha south of Agra, may have served as the fulcrum of his empire. Thereabouts was found the most important of the Pratihara inscriptions, and henceforth Gwalior’s bluff and increasingly fortified cliffs would loom large in the affairs of north India and provide something of a barometer of current dominion. Its loss in C950 to the Chandelas of Bundelkhand, soon to win immortality as the builders of Khajuraho, signalled the disintegration of Pratihara dominion. Thence Gwalior quickly passed to the Kacchwahas, later of Jaipur, and eventually to the Tomars, later of Delhi. It was one of the Tomars who would build atop Gwalior’s sun-drenched cliffs the unsurpassed Man Singh palace. Significantly all these dynasties, representing a veritable roll-call of rajput prowess, first emerge as feudatories and associates of the Pratiharas.
Only against the Rashtrakutas had Bhoja made little headway. Under Dhruva (C780–93), then Govinda III (C793–814) and much later Indra III (C914–28) the Rashtrakutas repeatedly intervened in the north. Not to be outdone by the parallels between Bhoja and Julius Caesar drawn by latterday champions of the Gurjara-Pratiharas, Govinda III’s generalship has been likened to that of Alexander or Arjuna.18 After victories in the south, he conducted a dazzling digvijaya in the north, defeating the Gurjara-Pratiharas under Nagabhata II somewhere near Gwalior and securing the submission of both Kanauj and the Pala ruler. As was normal the kingdoms of the south took advantage of his absence, but they too were soon favoured with a return visit. By 805 Govinda had brought the Gangas, Cheras and Pandyas to heel and had stormed and occupied Kanchipuram. The drums of the Deccan were heard, we are told, from the Himalaya’s caves to the shores of Malabar, and truly Govinda appeared invincible. Yet neither he nor his successors showed much interest in developing their empire. Retaining anything more than the nominal allegiance of distant dynasties was not the Rashtrakuta way.
The Rashtrakuta objective, it has been argued, was much more subtle. Instead of dominating arya-varta, their ambition was to appropriate and relocate it; not content with making history, the Rashtrakutas were about to make geography by transposing the sacred Aryan heartland to the Deccan. Their capital was eventually settled at Manyakheta (Malkhed), a place where the frontiers of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh now meet. To the Rashtrakutas its significance seems to have lain in its being between the Godavari and the Kistna, the two great rivers of the Deccan. A counterpart to the land between the Jamuna and the Ganga where Kurus and Pandavas had once fought their Mahabharata war, this was to be the new aryavarta, the Doab of the Deccan. Likewise Manyakheta was to be the new Hastinapura, or a Kanauj of the Deccan. There, in an enormous hall, the Rashtrakutas would enact before a larger-than-life image of the deity, itself cast in gold, the bejewelled ceremonials of a universal dominion by which the world-ruler asserted the triumph of dharma.
Before adopting Manyakheta, the Rashtrakutas had patronised today’s much better known site at Ellora, above a tributary of the Godavari in northern Maharashtra. Here, where an exposed rock-face, two kilometres long, had already been perforated with the most ambitious of India’s cave temples, they took over and rededicated a just-completed Buddhist foundation. This was the vast and airy ‘Do Thal’ vihara, three storeys high and with halls and courtyards of suitably palatial proportions. An inscription also credits Dantidurga with patronage of the nearby Dasavatara cave. Both were evidently stopgaps, for further along the ‘street of rock’ a new and more conventional-looking temple was begun by Krishna I. Although architecturally very similar to the Chalukyas’ later temples at Pattadakal, this was not, however, architecture; it was sculpture. For the Krishnesvara, or Kailasa as it was also called, is a free-standing excavation, a temple of cathedral proportions complete with precinct, cells, shrines, gateway and pillars all hewn from the same rock stratum. Seeing it, according to a contemporary copper plate, even the gods were moved to favourable comment, and marvelled that human art could produce such beauty. Its creator was no less amazed. ‘Oh, how was it that I created this,’ he rather touchingly exclaimed.
Indisputably the most elaborate and imposing rock-cut monument in the world, the Kailasa still triumphantly confirms the Balhara’s status as ‘one of the four great or principal kings of t
he world’. It also provides a further illustration of the Rashtrakutas’ attempt to appropriate the sacred geography of arya-varta. Mount Kailasa in the Himalayas is the earthly abode of Lord Shiva. The new Kailasa temple at Ellora, also wrought of rock and also dedicated to Shiva, was designed to reposition Mount Kailasa in the Deccan and so, by implication, to make of the gentle Vindhya hills a Himalayas-in-the-Deccan which would be the northern frontier of the new arya-varta. Similarly and symbolically, to the new Kailasa was added a shrine with images of Ganga, Jamuna and Saraswati, the three river deities of arya-varta. King Dhruva, we learn, on his invasion of the north had ‘taken from his enemies their rivers’, a reference which could apply to the deities but seems more probably to mean that the Rashtrakutas actually ‘brought the waters of these streams back with them in large jars’. ‘So it seems clear that the Rashtrakutas, who had made Mount Kailasa appear in the mountain range north of their domains, also caused the rivers which had originated there, the rivers which defined the middle region of India, to appear in their empire in the Deccan.’19
All empires, even those which would refashion the earth as well as rule it, must pass. Assailed in the south by the rising power of the Cholas and in the north by the Paramaras, erstwhile feudatories of the Gurjara-Pratiharas, the Rashtrakutas dwindled into insignificance in the late tenth century. The dream of a Deccan aryavarta died with them, although much further south something similar would imminently be attempted by the Cholas of Tanjore. They too would reach the Ganga, and they too would then laboriously haul its waters home to their own arya-varta at the mouth of the Kaveri river.
But in the interim northern India had been ravaged by the first Muslim incursions. Any attempt to transpose its sacred geography now looked less like sincere imitation and more like a desperate act of preservation. The real arya-varta had been violated, and the Cholas’ boast to have watered their horses in the mighty Ganga would merely echo that of a more formidable foe who cared nothing for the gilded fantasies and rock-cut conventions of early India’s imperial formations.
