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History of India, c. 150 A.D. to 350 A.D.: Naga–Vakataka Imperial Period c14.s1: I. Introductory. Re-founders of the Imperial Hindu Throne

History of India, c. 150 A.D. to 350 A.D.: Nāga–Vākāṭaka Imperial Period c14.s1

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English

I. Introductory. Re-founders of the Imperial Hindu Throne

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1. Dr. Vincent Smith in the last edition (1924), as well as in the earlier editions, of his *Early History of India* declared:

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A. ‘So much, however, is clear, that Vāsudeva was the last Kushān king who continued to hold extensive territories in India. After his death there is no indication of the existence of a paramount power in Northern India’ (page 290);

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B. ‘Probably numerous Rājas asserted their independence and formed a number of short-lived states......... but historical materials for the third century is so completely lacking that it is impossible to say what or how many those states were’ (page 290);

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C. ‘The period between the extinction of the Kushān and Andhra dynasties, about A.D. 220 or 230, and the rise of the imperial Gupta dynasty, nearly a century later, is one of the darkest in the whole range of Indian history’ (page 292).

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In other words, the period is a ‘blank’ in the history of India as he put it at page 291. This hopelessness has been tacitly acquiesced in up to this time. After working at the materials available I find that none of the three statements cited above can be accepted and need be repeated in future. The materials are copious, as we shall see below, and for two sections of the period, scientifically arranged for us by Hindu historians.

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2. Revival of Imperial Power. The statement that there was no paramount power before the Imperial Guptas is thoroughly incorrect and cannot be maintained for a moment. The history of the Imperial Hindu revival is not to be dated in the fourth century with Samudra Gupta, not even with the Vākāṭakas nearly a century earlier, but with the Bhāra-Śivas half a century earlier still. There is not a line about the Vākāṭakas in the history of Dr. Vincent Smith, nor a line about the Bhāra-Śivas in any text-book. About the latter I have not seen even a paper written upon in any of the historical or archæological journals, although the main history of both these dynasties is contained in well-attested documents on copper or stone, and as we shall see, fully set out in the Purāṇas, which is supported by coins. The miss and neglect is due to the fact that the editors of those records, Fleet and others, did not read the facts contained in the inscriptions though they read the inscriptions. And as Vincent Smith who surveyed the history of India missed the period, following the lead of Fleet and Kielhorn, the period was declared to be blank. But as a matter of fact it is unusually full as compared with many periods of Indian history. Dr. Fleet while translating the Vākāṭaka inscriptions even missed the prominent expression *Samrāṭ*, ‘EMPEROR OF ALL-INDIA,’¹ the title of Pravarasena I, who assumed it after performing as many as four sacrifices of imperial sovereignty, that is, four *aśvamedhas*.

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¹ See Matsya Purāṇa, ch. 113, verse 15, on the definition of *Samrāṭ*; in vs. 9-14 the limits of India [as distinguished from Further India, § 149A] are given, and *Samrāṭ* is the emperor of ‘all’ (*kṛtsnam*) India.

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3. Vākāṭaka Emperor and the preceding Power. The Emperor Pravarasena I, of the dynasty of the Vākāṭakas, who was crowned, as we shall presently see, a generation before the Emperor Samudra Gupta, was the Emperor of Āryāvarta and also a large portion of the South, if not of the whole of the South, immediately before Samudra Gupta. And it was the position of that Brahmin Emperor, Pravarasena the Vākāṭaka, which Samudra Gupta took over from his grandson Rudrasena I, described as Rudra Deva,¹ the leading sovereign of Āryāvarta in the list given in the political biography of Samudra Gupta published on the Allahabad pillar.

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¹ See § 64, below.

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4. It was a continuation by Samudra Gupta of that imperial rule and paramount sovereignty which had been in the hands and the keeping of the Vākāṭakas for 60 years before Samudra Gupta, as is evident from the Vākāṭaka inscriptions and the Purāṇas. I say advisedly ‘in the hands and the keeping of the Vākāṭakas’, for they had inherited that paramountcy from the Bhāra Śivas whose dynasty had performed no less than Ten aśvamedhas on the Ganges—a repeated assertion of their imperial position in Āryāvarta. It is needless to state that the aśvamedhas were at the cost of the Kushan² Empire, that history written in the orthodox Hindu fashion of these imperial functions sums up the breaking-up of the Kushan Empire and the driving of the Kushans further and further north-west towards the confines of the Salt Range.

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² I have preferred the foreign form Kushan and have left it unpunctuated.

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5. The Emperor Pravarasena got his son Gautamī-putra married to the daughter of the Bhāra Śiva King, Mahārāja Bhava Nāga. This event was so important in the history of the Vākāṭaka dynasty that it was incorporated in their dynastic history and repeated in all the official deeds of the Vākāṭakas. There it is recorded that before this political marriage, the rājavaṃśa (dynasty) of the Bhāra Śivas had performed Ten Horse-Sacrifices on the Ganges which they had acquired by valour; that with the holy water of the Ganges they had been crowned kings. The Bhāra Śivas adopted Śiva as the presiding deity of their empire. The site of the daśāśvamedha of the Bhāra Śivas performed on the bank of the Ganges, seems to me to be the sacred site come down to us as Daśāśvamedha at Benares, the earthly home of Lord Śiva. The Bhāra Śivas issuing from Baghelkhand must have reached the Ganges through what we now call the Ancient Deccan Road terminating at the town of the Goddess Vindhyavāsinī [Mirzapur, U.P.]. The district of Benares was at one end of the Kushan Empire. It was far removed from its western seat. If a new power arising from the Vindhya hills were to reach the plains and if it went, not through Baghelkhand but through any part of Bundelkhand, it would reach the Jumna and not the Ganges. The site of the home of the Vākāṭakas also gives an indication: the ancient town of Vāgāṭ (=Vākāṭa) from which the Vākāṭaka family derived its name, I have discovered in the northern part of the Orchha State in Bundelkhand; and the Vākāṭakas were evidently the neighbours of the Bhāra Śivas¹. There are other indications which I shall discuss in their proper places, in the shape of monuments, place-names, and coins which fix the seat of the Bhāra Śivas between Kauśāmbi and Benares.

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¹ There is a pillar at Durehā (Jāso State, Baghelkhand) which bears the inscription Vākāṭakānām and below it their royal wheel-mark. See appendix at the end of the book.

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6. To perform ten aśvamedhas before or up to the time of Pravarasena I and his aśvamedhas, the dynasty of the Bhāra Śivas must have been in existence for about at least a century. To put it roughly here, their rise is to be dated about 150 A.D.

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Beginnings of the Bhāra Śivas.

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7. The real contribution of the Bhāra Śivas is the foundation of a new tradition—or rather the revival of an old tradition—the tradition of Hindu freedom and sovereignty. The national law-book, the Mānava Dharma Śāstra, had laid down that Āryāvarta was the God-given land of the Āryas and that the Mlechchhas must live beyond that and outside. This was their political and international birth-right² prescribed by the sacred law of the land. It had to be vindicated. The tradition initiated by the Bhāra Śivas was kept up by the Vākāṭakas and was taken over by the Guptas and fully maintained by the

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² For this ruling idea see the references cited under § 38.

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Contribution of the Bhāra Śivas.

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subsequent emperors from Chandra Gupta Vikramāditya to Bālāditya. If there had been no Bhāra Śivas there would not have come into existence a Gupta Empire and the Gupta Vikramādityas.

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8. The history of those Bhāra Śivas is set in lapidary by the Vākāṭaka historiographer. Never so shortly, yet so pregnantly, was a history in miniature set in, as in these three lines of the copper-plate¹:

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¹ Fleet, Gupta Inscriptions, pp. 245, 236.

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amsabhāra-sannivēśita-Śiva-lingôdvahana-Śiva-suparitushṭa-samutpādita-râjavamśānām parākram=âdhigata-Bhāgîrathy=amala-jala-mûrddhā-bhishiktānām daśāśvamēdh=āvabhṛitha-snānānām Bhāraśivānām
‘Of [the dynasty of] the Bhāra Śivas whose royal line owed its origin to the great satisfaction of Śiva on account of their carrying the load of the symbol of Śiva on their shoulders—the Bhāra Śivas who were anointed to sovereignty with the holy water of the Bhāgīrathī which had been obtained by their valour—the Bhāra Śivas who performed their sacred bath on the completion of their Ten Aśvamedhas’

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9. The last Kushan emperor was Vāsudeva who was ruling up to the year 98 of the Kushan era as evident from a Mathurā inscription.² Either in the last years of Vāsudeva (c. 165 A.D.) or on his death (176 A.D.) the imperial rule of the Kushans came to an end. The end of the Kushan rule synchronizes with the rise of the Aśvamedhin Bhāra Śivas. When they rise, the power they had to face and break was the imperial Kushan.

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² Lüders, List, No. 76 (Epigraphia Indica, vol. X, supplement).

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