The Development of Hindu Iconography c19.s6.4

Language: English

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Another important contributory factor to the growth of cult-syncretism was the mental attitude of the early foreign immigrants into India, the Śakas, the Pahlavas, the Kuṣāṇas and the Hūṇas. They were presumably less cultured than the Indians, and were very prone to be influenced by the latter, especially in matters of religion. But from the beginning they showed a proneness to pay equal homage to gods and goddesses of more than one creed. This eclectic tendency among them is very interestingly illustrated by the extant coins of these early alien rulers of India. The kings often used as devices on their coins the figures of deities belonging to different pantheons, and it can be presumed that they had some feelings of respect and veneration for at least some of the originals of these devices. At first most of the deities were recruited from the Greek pantheon, and this was natural, for the Saka-Pahlavas succeeded the Greeks in the sovereignty over parts of Northern and North-Western India, and imitated many of their coin devices. P.

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Gardner, while commenting on the devices appearing on the coins of these alien kings, observes, ‘When we reach the issues of king Maues, we find a wealth of most remarkable and original barbaro-Hellenic figures, a figure resembling Tyche, holding in one hand a patera, in the other a wheel, who seems to be the original of the still more outlandish figure of Azes’s coins.’¹ Another instance of syncretism is to be found on a coin-device of Azilises, successor of Azes. Whitehead, while describing it in the *Punjab Museum Catalogue* (Vol. I, p. 136, Pl. XIII, Fig. 336), draws our attention to the syncretic panoply of the deity and characterises it as ‘a decidedly pantheistic type’. The syncretism at first lay no doubt in the fusion of Hellenic and non-Hellenic elements (*cf.* the use of the word ‘barbaro-Hellenic’ by Gardner in the extract quoted above). A great part of the latter was undoubtedly Indian, though it is very difficult to sort it out. But from the time of the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares, in some of whose coins the Indian deity Śiva has been recognised (in Chapter IV it has been conclusively shown by the present writer that Śiva appears for the first time on some square copper coins of Maues), the Indian element came to predominate by stages.

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It has also been shown in Chapter IV that the great Kushan king Wema Kadphises was a votary of Śiva, for it was this god and his emblems, the bull and the trident-battleaxe, that were invariably present on his coins (in his Prākṛt coin-legends he is almost always described as *Mahīśvara*, i.e., Māheśvara, an exclusive worshipper of Śiva). His successors, Kanishka and Huvishka, introduced the somewhat novel feature of the extremely ‘varied reverse devices’ on their coins, the deities there being recruited from such widely divergent religious pantheon as Zoroastrian, Brahmanical Hindu, Buddhist, and rarely Greek. Kanishka’s affiliation with Buddhism is sufficiently established by Chinese literary data, but in this sort of medley of the devices on his coins, many scholars recognised his eclecticism in religious matters. But it can be proved with the help of some of the little known coins of Huvishka, that he paid his homage to more than one deity. Cunningham reproduced some copper coins of this king in his *Coins of the Indo-Scythians and Kushans* (Pl. XXII, Figs. 21-2), on one side of which he is shown standing in a suppliant attitude either before Nana or Umā (on a few of his coins Śiva is once shown accompanied by Nana and at other time by Umā). It is in one of the coins of this very king that the first attempt at cult syncretism may be clearly recognised, and the device may be the earliest representation of the composite cult-god Hari-Hara (*cf.* supra, pp. 123-24).

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The device on the seal of the Heptalite Huṇa chief has already been noticed and commented on by the present writer; it stands for a syncretistic deity, combining in it Viṣṇu, Śiva and Mihira, two of the constituents being Hindu, the third Zoroastrian by name, but very probably Indian in the present set-up (*cf.* pp. 124-25, Pl. XI, Fig. 2). Reference has already been made in Chapter XI to the introduction of the East Iranian Sun cult into India at a fairly early period, and here is a syncretistic figure containing in it the Indianised adaptation of the Iranian Mithra or Mihira. The period to which this intaglio belongs marks an age during which the three cults of Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva and Saura had developed to a great extent. Side by side with the growth of the separatist tendencies evidenced by their formation and systematisation, a substratum of rapprochement and reconciliation was present.