India: A History. Revised and Updated (29 page)

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 ‘Uprooted’ kings were reinstated, their territories restored, and the Gupta forces withdrawn.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.

In the fourth century
BC
the Mauryas had been able to extend their rule into politically virgin territories where state-formation, if it existed at all, had been in its infancy. Ashoka had carefully noted several foreign kings in his inscriptions but within India he found not one sovereign worthy of being so named; the ‘Cholas’ and ‘Keralaputras’ were families or clans; even Kalinga was just a place and a people. In such a vacuum, Mauryan empire had a pioneering quality and was necessarily one of agricultural settlement, administrative decree and fiscal organisation.

Six hundred years later the Guptas may have found a similar situation in Bengal and have pursued similar policies there. Elsewhere they faced more advanced opponents who were already administering their own states and taxing their own subjects. The submission of all these now carefully named and previously unconquered kings was, of course, most gratifying; ‘the Beloved of the Gods’ had been merely a
raja
, a ‘king’; the Guptas were
maharajadhirajas
, ‘kings of kings’. On the other hand they also recognised the difficulty of trying permanently to engross such distant and confident kingdoms. It was more expedient to content themselves with the rich pickings of conquest and to retain the option of perhaps repeating this feat when more such pickings had accumulated.

It also seems that the criteria associated with the status of
cakravartin
did not include sustained government or direct control. In the case of distant rulers a nominal submission looks to have been sufficient, while of those nearer at hand regular attendance on the
cakravartin
was also required. As will emerge, a world-ruler did not actually have to rule the world; it was enough that the world should acknowledge him as such; in fact his status as a
maharajadhiraja
was dependent on the survival of
rajas
, both within and beyond his
arya-varta
, who were powerful enough to justify the title. ‘The point here was not to do away with other kings as such and produce a single, absolute kingship, blessed by a monotheist deity, for all India.’ Tributary
rajas
, or kings, were essential as validating and magnifying agents. In the same way as local cults and lesser deities were harnessed to the personae of Lords Vishnu or Shiva, so lesser rulers were inducted into an enhancing relationship with the ‘world-ruler’. Precedence and paramountcy were what mattered, not governance or integration. ‘What distinguished an
imperial
court politically, and especially one whose king claimed to be the universal king of India, was that it was primarily a society of
kings
.’
¹⁴

Samudra-Gupta’s immediate successors maintained his elevated status and continued his policies. No inscription as detailed as the Allahabad testimonial is available for any of them, but from minor inscriptions, coins and literary sources it is clear that the Gupta ‘empire’ now climbed to its
ambiguous zenith. There were, however, setbacks and compromises. A sixth-century drama tells of a Rama-Gupta who is thought to have briefly succeeded Samudra-Gupta and who attempted to ‘uproot’ the Western Satraps in Malwa.
¹⁵
The attempt went badly wrong. Rama-Gupta was defeated and, when he tried to disengage, he was informed that the price of escape would be the surrender of his queen. According to a much later biography, the Shaka Satrap sorely coveted the lovely Queen Dhruvadevi. No doubt she had been represented to him as lotus-eyed, with thighs like banana stems, and all the other ripe attributes of desirable womanhood as detailed in textual tradition and epitomised in the
yaksi
temptresses of Mathura and Sanchi sculpture. Aflame with desire, ‘the lustful Shaka king’ was adamant; Rama-Gupta, hopelessly unworthy of such a desirable consort, conceded defeat and agreed to hand her over.

But the ignominy was too much for Rama-Gupta’s younger brother. The latter somehow disguised himself as the shapely Dhruvadevi, was duly given entry to the enemy camp, and promptly slew the Satrap. He must also have made his escape for, Rama-Gupta having been irrevocably disgraced by this affair, it was the righteous brother who now took over the reins of empire as Chandra-Gupta II. He may have had to kill Rama-Gupta in the process; more certainly it was he who eventually claimed the hand of Dhruvadevi.

Not surprisingly Chandra-Gupta II’s main offensive was a continuation of this struggle against the Shaka Satraps. Judging by inscriptions in and around Sanchi he seems to have been in eastern Malwa for some years, presumably while he conducted the necessary campaigns. Patience was eventually rewarded. By the year 409 Chandra-Gupta II was issuing silver coins to replace those of the Satraps. The Shaka territories in western India had been annexed to those of the Guptas, and of the Western Satraps no more is heard.

The Guptas thus secured their western frontier and inherited whatever remained of the cultural traditions established by the Sanskrit-loving Rudradaman and his successors. On the evidence of a Buddhist site in northern Gujarat (Devnimori) which may date to about 375, it has been suggested that Gupta sculpture and architecture owed several motifs and design features to western India. It may also be significant that the cultural achievements usually associated with the Guptas are little in evidence in the fourth century and only become established after Chandra-Gupta II’s conquest of the Satraps.

Success against the Satraps also gave the Guptas access to the ports of Gujarat and to the profits of its international maritime trade. There and
throughout central India, just as the Satraps had once become embroiled with their Shatavahana trading neighbours, so the Guptas became involved with the Vakatakas, the dynasty which had succeeded the Shatavahanas as the dominant power in the Deccan.

For once, war was not the outcome; perhaps the campaigns against the Satraps were taking their toll. Instead, the Guptas opted for a dynastic alliance whereby Chandra-Gupta II’s daughter was married to Rudrasena II, the Vakataka king. The latter soon died and during the ensuing regency (c390–410) it was Prabhavati, this Gupta queen, who as regent controlled the Vakataka state in accordance with Gupta policy. Thereafter the Vakatakas continued as allies and associates of the imperial Guptas.

Other dynastic pairings suggest that the Guptas often made intelligent use of the prestige which attached to the
maharajadhiraja
’s bed-chamber. Prabhavati was Chandra-Gupta II’s daughter not by the coveted Dhruvadevi but by a princess of the Naga dynasty. This was an ancient lineage which seems to have re-established itself in Mathura and other parts to the west and south of the Jamuna in the wake of Kushana retraction. Since Samudra-Gupta had earlier ‘violently exterminated’ the Naga king, it would seem that marriage was used to consolidate existing acquisitions as well as to neutralise external rivals.

Chandra-Gupta II, like his predecessor Samudra-Gupta and his successor Kumara-Gupta, reigned for about forty years. Such longevity over three generations is exceptional and must have been another important factor in the stability of Gupta rule. Of further Gupta feats there is little evidence, the only notable exceptions being a doubtful record of far-flung campaigns by Chandra-Gupta II and an important defensive role undertaken during the reign of Kumara-Gupta.

The former, the campaigns sometimes attributed to Chandra-Gupta II, are recorded in a short inscription engraved on a pillar located at Mehrauli, once a village on the outskirts of Delhi. The pillar, unlike the stone pillars, or
lats
, of Ashoka, is made of iron, and the village is better known as the site where Delhi’s twelfth-century sultans would build the renowned Qutb minar and mosque. It is in fact the famously rust-resistant ‘Iron Pillar’ which now stands in the main courtyard of the mosque and attracts hordes of visitors, many of them convinced that wish-fulfilment awaits those whose arms are long enough to embrace its trunk. Fortunately out of reach, as it might otherwise have been erased by this activity, the inscription commemorates the erection of the pillar as ‘a lofty standard of the divine Vishnu’. Its donor was one ‘Chandra’, supreme world conqueror ‘on whose arm fame was inscribed by the sword when in battle in the Vanga countries’
and who, having ‘crossed in warfare the seven mouths of the [river] Sindhu’ defeated the ‘Vahlikas’. He also perfumed the breezes of the southern ocean with his prowess. Unfortunately no date is mentioned and, worse still, there is no sign of the word ‘Gupta’. ‘Chandra’ could therefore as well have been a Chandra-sena or a Chandra-varman, both attested kings of the period. And if a Chandra-Gupta, which one? Straining for clarification, scholars, even long-armed epigraphists, find their wishes unfulfilled. The identity of this fragrant ‘Chandra’ remains a mystery, as does the technology which enabled Guptan smelters to cast an iron obelisk of such rust-resistant purity that sixteen hundred monsoons have scarcely pitted its surface or defaced its inscription.

There is also doubt about this Chandra’s listed conquests. ‘Vanga’, like Anga, was an ancient
janapada
in west Bengal; the ‘Sindhu’ is usually the Indus; and the ‘Vahlikas’ have been taken to be the Bactrians. But military successes at such distant poles of the subcontinent strain credulity. In the west no corroborative evidence of Gupta intervention beyond the Indus, let alone beyond the Hindu Kush, is available. However, most of Bengal definitely was within the Gupta ambit. In fact the Guptas were the first north Indian dynasty to extend their rule into and across the heavily forested maze of swamps and waterways that was the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta. Hitherto little exposed to Aryanising influences except along its western seaboard, nearly all of Bengal was now claimed by the Guptas, and it seems reasonable to suppose an accelerated process of drainage, clearance and settlement. From the ruins of the Gupta empire would emerge east and central Bengal’s first historical states, amongst which Vanga would be eminent.

Kumara-Gupta, who ruled from c415 to c455, faced a different challenge. In his reign there seems to have been a major uprising in Malwa by one Pushyamitra. Briefly, in the words of the only inscription which refers to it, it ‘ruined the fortunes of the Gupta family’. Soon after there first appeared on the Indian scene the
Hunas
, otherwise described as a new breed of
mlecchas
(incomprehensible foreigners). These newcomers were a branch of the Hiung-nu of Chinese history and the Huns of European history. In a new wave of central Asian displacement, an offshoot of this horde, the Ephthalites or White Huns, had established themselves in Bactria in the late fourth century (thus making a Gupta conquest there unlikely). In the mid-fifth they followed their Yueh-chi/Kushana predecessors across the Hindu Kush and into Gandhara, and thence they pushed east against the Guptas.

Fortunately the Guptas produced a champion worthy of the occasion.
In one inscription Skanda-Gupta, a son of Kumara-Gupta, is described as ‘subsisting like a bee on the wide-spreading water-lilies which were the feet of his father’. The bee, though, had a sting. It was Skanda-Gupta who took the field successfully against the upstart Pushyamitra. He then made good a doubtful claim to succeed his father. And finally, if only temporarily, he repulsed the Huns.

It was also during the reign of Skanda-Gupta, he who ‘made subject the whole earth bounded by the waters of the four oceans and full of thriving countries round the borders of it’, that the last major addition was made to the great rock outside Junagadh in the Saurashtra peninsula. Following the inscriptions of Ashoka and Rudradaman, this third inscription tells of Skanda-Gupta’s governor in Gujarat and of his son. Both paragons of virtue, they built a massive embankment when Rudradaman’s reservoir was in its turn overwhelmed by floodwaters, and they also added a temple.