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History of India, c. 150 A.D. to 350 A.D.: Naga–Vakataka Imperial Period c14.s5: VI. The Achievements of the Bhāraśivas, and their Empire

History of India, c. 150 A.D. to 350 A.D.: Nāga–Vākāṭaka Imperial Period c14.s5

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VI. The Achievements of the Bhāraśivas, and their Empire

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37. The undertaking to deliver the country from such a national calamity (§ 36) was shouldered by the Bhāraśivas on the Ganges. Now, here we have to take note of the contemporary motive factor which rules national undertakings in every human community and in every age and clime. That factor is the spiritual sentiment and the faith for the time-being. If the historian misses to read that, and merely attempts to record the catalogue of facts, he misses the bird and counts the feathers. It is more than doubtful whether he can read his facts correctly without reading the curves of national thought and sentiment.

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38. Then, what was the National Cult and Faith with which the Bhāraśivas entered on their mission? We find in that period everywhere—Śiva. Śiva rules over the actions of the Bhāraśivas and continues to preside over the Vākāṭaka India. In their period even books on poetic sentiments, which ought to be devoted to love, were devoted to Lord Śiva. National service of Hindu state-makers was always a solemn dedication to the Supreme Force which presides over human destiny. The dedication was made to a particular aspect of Him, to a particular temperament of His, according to the national temperament of the time. The presiding God to whom political service was this time dedicated, was the God of Destruction. The Bhāraśivas called in Śiva who stood up in Yoga for a partial Tāṇḍava through his people of the Gangetic valley. We find Śiva everywhere in this period. The air is surcharged with the belief that the Destroyer Himself has founded the Bhāraśiva State, that He is the guarantor of the king and the people of the Bhāraśiva kingdom. He has stood up to see His people free—free to follow their dharma, free to be their own masters, free to be in Āryāvarta, the land of the Āryas, their God-given home. This politico-geographical idea of ‘legitimacy’ of the Hindu sovereign in Āryāvarta, which we may call Āryāvartism, is laid down in the Mānava Dharmaśāstra (II, 22-23), and is traceable from the time of Patañjali (180 B.C.)¹ down to Medhātithi [*ākramyākramya na chiram tatra Mlechchhāḥ sthalāro bhavanti*],² and to Visala-deva [1164 A.D.] as a living belief [*Āryāvartam yathārtham punarapi kritavān Mlechchha-vichchhe-danābhiḥ*].³ This sacred principle had been violated, and He must set the wrong right. He must do it by His own method, by His own process, the dance of destruction. The Nāga kings became Bhāraśiva. They undertook to execute and they successfully executed that national dance of destruction in the valley of the Ganges. The names assumed by the Bhāraśiva Nāgas—‘Virasena,’ ‘Skanda Nāga,’ ‘Bhīma Nāga,’

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¹ J.B.O.R.S., IV, p. 202.

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² Tagore Lectures, Manu and Yājñavalkya, pp. 31-32.

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³ Delhi Pillar, I.A., XIX, p. 212.

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‘Deva Nāga,’ ‘Bhava Nāga’—all prove that sense of Śaiva responsibility and necessity which the time required. Their repeated aśvamedhas, like the revival of the names of divine heroes, are records in themselves. A series of acts of valour continued, and repeated exertions resulted in progressive destruction of the Kushan power in Āryāvarta. Soon after the rise of Virasena we find the Kushans pushed back as far as the neighbourhood of Sirhind from the Gangetic valley. About 226-241 A.D., the Kushan king (Junāh=Yauvan)¹ had diplomatic dealings with Ardashir, the first Sassanian emperor, from Sirhind.² By that time North-Eastern India up to the confines of the Punjab had been freed. This is amply borne out by the coins of Virasena which are found all over the United Provinces, and parts of the Punjab. The Kushans were so pressed by the Bhārasivas that they ultimately sought the protection of the Sassanian Emperor Shapur (between 238 and 269 A.D.) whose effigy they had to stamp on their coins. Before Samudra Gupta, the greater portion of the Punjab as well had been liberated. The Mādrakas were striking their own coins once more and negotiated peace with and accepted the suzerainty of Samudra Gupta. The hills up to Kāṅgrā once more were under Hindu rulers when Samudra Gupta appeared on the scene. Most of this achievement is to be credited to the Bhārasiva Nāgas, performers of ten aśvamedhas; and the maintenance of that free inheritance for 50 years, with further progress, to the Vākāṭakas, who carried on the Bhārasiva policy.

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¹ J.B.O.R.S., XVIII, 201.

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² V. Smith, E.H.I., 4th, p. 289, n.

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39. To appraise the success of the Bhārasivas we have to imagine and visualize the immense prestige of the Bactrian Tukharas whom we call to-day the Kushans. Here was a power whose reserve forces were centred in their homeland in Central Asia and which was constantly fed from that centre—a power which had become firmly established from the banks of the Oxus up to the Bay of Bengal,¹ from the Jumna down to the Narbada,² and in the west, from Kashmir and the Punjab to Sindh and Kathiawād and to the sea beating against the coast of Gujarat, Sindh and Beluchistan—a power which for nearly one hundred years had insisted on its divine right as the Son of Heaven (Daiva-putra³) to rule over the Hindu humanity—a power which had the established fact of an iron rule in its favour. That power now to be challenged by a leader risen from obscurity, was a bigger fact than the challenge by the subject Greeks against the mammoth Persian Empire. The Greeks had not been under the direct administration of Persia, while the area now called the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh and Bihar had been under the direct imperial administration of the Kushans. It was not the question of merely throwing off a suzerainty, it was not the case of merely tearing off the veil of prestige hanging from a distance, but attacking directly a mighty power bodily installed in the country. The Bhārasivas did it and did it successfully. While the Sātavāhanas in the West were still struggling against the Śaka power—the Sātavāhanas who had been emperors of the South for three centuries—the Bhārasivas attained the result where the Emperors of Dakshināpatha failed.

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¹ Coins of Vāsudeva were found in Pāṭaliputra excavations. A.R.A.S., E.C., 1913-14, p. 74. The Kushan and Pūrī Kushan coins would indicate their influence up to the Bay of Bengal, though beyond Bihar they seem to be limited generally by the Rajmahal Hills. The Orissa tradition about a yavana invasion probably refers to the Kushan yaunas.

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² At Bherāghāṭ a Kushan inscription has been found.

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³ Cf. Alberūnī, II, 10, on the pretensions of the Barha-takīn, ancestor of Kanishka (J.B.O.R.S., XVIII, 225).

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40. The Bhārasiva rule was marked with Śiva’s asceticism. They have no grandeur, except the grandeur of their severe and austere undertaking. They ignore the imperial coinage of Kushans and revert to the old Hindu coinage. They assume no grandeur, unlike the Guptas. Like Śiva, they have a self-imposed non-richness. Like Śiva, they bestow and not partake. They give freedom to the Hindu Republics; they give them freedom to mint their own money and to live their own full life. Like Śiva’s domestic polity, they have a gaṇa, of Hindu States, around them. They are the true Śiva-made Nandi, the lord of the Gaṇas. They merely preside over a confederacy of states and foster freedom everywhere. They perform aśvamedhas, but do not become eka-rāṭ Emperors. They remain political Śaivas and international ascetics amongst their countrymen.

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41. A worshipper of Śiva is a worshipper of a symbol, a bindu. The Śaiva worshipper would have looked down upon the Buddhist idol-worshippers as followers of a low cult.¹ Whether the Bhāraśiva did so or not, we can be certain of one fact that Buddhism could not but have declined in the Nāga country, if for nothing else, at least for its political alliance with the enemy of the national civilization. It had become the foster-child of a tyrant and with the uprooting of the tyranny it must fall. This is the explanation of the decay of Buddhism which was so marked by the time of the early Guptas. The decay was in an advanced stage by the end of the Bhāraśiva period. Buddhism had become a denationalized system and assumed a non-Hindu character by its contact with the Kushans, in whose hands it had lost its spiritual independence and become a political instrument. The Buddhist Bhikshus in the Kushan period in Kashmir were felt, on the evidence of the Rāja-taraṅgiṇī, as a social nuisance and a load of oppression. They must have been so felt also in Āryāvarta. Śaiva asceticism became a necessary antidote for a readjustment of society. The Śakas had weakened the character of the Hindu population; Śaiva asceticism was a necessary factor of correction. The greedy imperialism of the Kushans was destroyed; the Hindu people were purged of deteriorated morals. And when the task was done, the Bhāraśivas retired. Śiva’s mission was complete, and in Lord Śiva the Bhāraśivas re-entered in spiritual triumph. Unconquered till the last, untainted by any material selfishness, the true servants of their Lord and His people exit from the stage of history—a rare, honourable and noble finis which the Bhāraśiva fully deserved. The Bhāraśivas re-established Hindu sovereignty in Āryāvarta. They restored the Hindu imperial throne and the national civilization and gave a new life to their country. They revived aśvamedha after a lapse of some four centuries. They restored the sanctity of the Mother Ganges, the river of Lord Śiva, throughout its length by freeing her from sin and crime, and made her worthy to be sculptured at the doors of the temples of the Vākāṭakas and the Guptas as a symbol of purity.¹ They did all this, and left no memorial to themselves. They left their deeds and obliterated themselves.

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¹ During the Nāga-Vākāṭaka period, the Ceylonese Buddhists transferred the tooth-relic from Andhra to Ceylon (§ 175). It indicates that Buddhist worship at the time stood discredited in India [cf. § 126].

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¹ The oldest form of Gaṅgā in stone is at Jānkhat (see Plate II herein). The next one, together with that of the sister-river Yamunā we find at Bhūmarā; then those at Deogarh, described by Cunningham in A.S.R., vol. X, p. 104, Temple No. 5, where the figures are ‘canopied by a five-hooded Nāga’. They are on the lower faces of the jambs, just as at Samudra Gupta’s Viṣṇu temple at Eran. The Nāga-canopy at Deogarh is unique, nowhere repeated. Nāga is unconnected with the mythology of Gaṅgā and Yamunā. The river motifs themselves are referable to the Bhāraśiva period (see § 30) and its association with Nāga lends strong support to that view. The Nāga-Gaṅgā and the Nāga-Yamunā signify the two sacred rivers of the Nāga territory freed by them. Cf. § 36 on the conscious, political significance of the river motifs.

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42. The Nāga performers of the ten aśvamedhas, to put it in modern phraseology, the Nāga emperors, fostered the republics which covered the whole of [ Eastern and Western ] Mālwā, and probably also Gujarat (Abhiras), the whole of Rajputana (Yaudheyas and Mālavas), and probably also a portion of the Eastern Punjab (Madras)—all connected territory, to the west of the valley of the Ganges. These were certainly free in the next, the Vākāṭaka period, when Samudra Gupta emerges on the stage. The Mālwā republics seem to have been formed by peoples and clans akin to the Nāgas. Those around Vidiśā were worshippers of Nāgas from early times, as the republican coins of Eran prove. Eran, the Airikiṇa town, is itself after the name Airaka, a Nāga, and the Eran coins bear a Nāga (serpent) figure. The Mālavas, near Jaipur, had founded their capital, Karkoṭa Nāgara, naming it after the Nāga Karkota, which now lies within the territory of the Raja of Uniyāra—a feudatory of the Mahārāja of Jaipur, about 25 miles E.-S. from Tonk. The word Nāgara itself in the capital Karkoṭa Nāgara is connected with the word Nāga. It is important to recognise this fact that the Nāga monarchs and the republican Mālavas were, by their civilization and also probably ethnically, connected. Rājaśekhara says that the Ṭakkas and the people of Maru used apabhraṃśa idioms. As we have already seen, the family of Gaṇapati Nāga of Padmāvatī was a Ṭaka-vaṃśa, which means that the family came from the Ṭakka-deśa. Thus we see that the Mālavas and the Nāgas spoke the same dialect. It seems that with the original migration of the republican Mālavas from the Punjab, the Ṭakka Nāgas had also migrated, and that the Nāgas themselves originally belonged to a republican community [the Five Karpaṭas] [§ 31], and that they were a Punjab people settled in Malwā.

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43. The Nāga emperors became the leaders of a movement for freedom from the Kushan rule. The Mālavas, the Yaudheyas, and the Kuṇindas (Madrakas) all re-strike their coins in the Nāga period. It may be possible to discern on a minute study their connection with the Nāga coinage disclosing the symbols of hegemony or suzerainty of the Nāgas.¹ The connection of the Mālava republican coins with those of Padmāvatī has been already realized and noticed. Dr. Vincent Smith says, 'they (Nāga coins) are closely related to some of the later Mālava coins'.² The Mālava coins re-appear, after a break, about the same time as the Nāga coins of Padmāvatī, about the second century A.D.³ The Yaudheya coinage revives about the second century A.D.,⁴ and the Kuṇinda coinage in the third century,⁵ who are, evidently, the last to be liberated. In other words, the re-rise of the Yaudheyas and the Mālavas is contemporaneous with the Nāgas.

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¹ The peculiar tree symbol with the side designs of the Bhāraśiva coins (§§ 26A, 26B) is met with on several republican coins of the period.

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² C.I.M., p. 164.

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³ Rapson, I.C., pp. 12-13; Cf. C.I.M., pp. 176-177.

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⁴ C.I.M., p. 165.

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⁵ Rapson, I.C., p. 12.

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44. The main blow to the Kushan power came from the Nāga emperors, but it is almost certain that on account of the confederate sovereignty enjoyed by these large republics the Nāgas must have been helped in their campaign by these republican communities. The Nāga empire was, what we may call, a Democratic Empire. In Magadha, the Kota dynasty seems to have arisen under them (Part III). The Gupta dynasty takes its root in the Nāga period, which the Purāṇas expressly mention (Part III, § 110). It should be noted here that the Guptas were also northern emigrants domiciled in the east (Part III, § 112). The Kotas of Magadha and the Guptas of Prayāga were evidently subordinate members of the Nāga Empire. In Bihar, Champāvatī is noted by the Vāyu and the Brahmāṇḍa, as a capital of the Nava Nāgas. The Nāgas extended their sway into the Central Provinces, a fact borne out by the subsequent Vākāṭaka history and the place-names like Nāgavardhana, Nandi-vardhana, and Nāgapura. At Purikā, they had a capital in the heart of the Vindhyan mountains, as a gateway to Malwā. We may take it that, speaking roughly, the empire of the Bhāraśivas included Bihar, the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, Bundelkhand, the Central Provinces, Malwa, Rajputana and the Madra republics in the E. Punjab. The Kushans accepted the suzerainty of Ardashir just in the middle of the Bhāraśiva period, 226-241 A.D., and they adopted Shapur's effigy on their coins between 238 and 269 A.D. This was the result of the Bhāraśiva pressure. Thus the ten aśvamedhas of the Bhāraśivas were not an empty rite.

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45. Apart from the aśvamedhas which are symbols both of a political revival and a revival of orthodox culture, there is independent evidence of a revival of orthodox culture which marks a new era. The word Nāgara as in Karkoṭa-Nāgara, is undoubtedly connected with the word Nāga and is a vernacular form, denoting a derivative from that word, just as in Nagar-dhana [= Nāgara-Vardhana] (§ 32). The architectural term ‘Nāgara style’ could not be explained on the basis of assuming its connection with the word nagara (city). This style-name is unknown to the Matsya Purāṇa which closes its historical data at about 243 A.D., i.e. before the close of the Nāga period. But it is known to the Māna-sāra, a Guptan or post-Guptan work. The style designated by the term Nāgara seems to be the style made popular by the Nāga kings. In this connection, we should notice the same term applied to Brahmins called Nāgar Brahmins of the Gangetic valley (Bulandshahar)¹ who became Muhammadan in Muhammadan times, and the term applied to the Jāts called Nāgrā Jāts near Ahi-chhatra.² The former were Nāga priests and ‘-r (a)’ is added to show their connection with Nāga. The ‘Vesara’ style, which again is a vernacular term taken, like the Nāgara, from the vocabulary of the mason, is distinguished by its being in the ‘ornamental’ style: Sanskrit veśa, ‘dress’, ‘make-up’, Pkt. Vesa, besa, or ‘ornamental’ [vide Śilpa-Ratna, ch. xvi. 50: ‘vesaram veśya uchyate’].³ In both Nāgara and Vesara, ra has been added to the base-word forming a vernacular derivative, as gaṭṭhar (‘bundle’) from ‘grantha’ (‘tie’). The base in Nāgara is thus Nāga. Vesara was the type of religious buildings which was ‘artificial’, ‘architectonic’. Nāgara was that in which we mostly find the Gupta square temples, and the Vākāṭaka temple of Pārvatī at Nachnā, and the Bhāraśiva temple of Bhūmarā (Bhūbharā, see App. A.). It was a griha (‘dwelling-house’) of one room (Matsya, 252. 51; 253. 2).

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¹ F. S. Growse, J.B.A.S., 1879, p. 271: ‘The principal residents of the town are Nāgar Brahmans by descent, though since the time of Aurangzeb, Muhammadan by religion, who believe that their ancestors were the priests employed by Janamejaya to conduct his sacrifice and that in return for their services they had a grant of the township and the surrounding villages.’

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² Rose, Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and the N.W.F. Province, 1919. Vol. I, p. 48.

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³ Compare Visika in the Hathigumpha inscription (E.I., XX, p. 80, line 13) for ‘architect’. Vesar (Besar) in Hindī is a nose ornament.

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The Nāga antiquities have not been explored, yet we know that at Karkoṭa Nāgara, the capital of the Mālava Republic, the true type of also the vesara style existed. Carlleyle, in vol. VI, A.S.R., at page 186, describes the temple which he excavated and calls ‘peculiarly-shaped’:

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Automatically Geography. Septuagenarian This small temple is remarkable for having been composed almost entirely of an exteriorly circular (or circularly many-sided) building, which probably once terminated upwards in a sikar [śikhara], and which contained within it a square chamber built of massive, rough-hewn stones; for the temple did not appear to have possessed either a pillared portico, or a vestibule, or antechamber.

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Chaunsaṭh Joginī Temples at Khajurāho.

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There is found in the period a śikhara style: on the square body [Nāgara plan] a four-sided śikhara.¹ Of this type, I have discovered a very small temple at Suraj Mau, which though dedicated to a lingam, now outside the temple, is called the Nāg Bābā Temple. The small temples of Karkoṭa Nāgara with śikharas, were out of a class. The temple which I discovered at Suraj Mau has in its lower square portion the perfect ‘Gupta’-body, while the śikhara part is a suggestion of so many storeys rising one on the other, tapering in imitation of a mountain peak. Such shrines at Khajurāho of Chauñsaṭh Joginis belong to that class. Cunningham rightly dates the latter before the grandfather of Dhaṅga, i.e. about 800 A.D. (A.S.R., XXI, 57). A glance at the two (the Suraj Mau Nāg Bābā)² and the Jogini shrines³ will at once convince one that the Nāga Bābā is much older. Cunningham found at Tigowa foundations of 34 such small temples,⁴ open on the east and closed on three sides, i.e. like the Suraj Mau Temple and of similar dimensions. He assigned them to the Gupta period, a date which he gave to the sculptures there. Smith after the publication of his History of Art, amended the date of the Tigowā remains by placing them in the Vākāṭaka period, contemporaneous with Samudra Gupta.⁵ I found there numerous four-sided śikhara pieces. The small śikhara temples at Karkoṭa Nāgara would also go back, at the latest, to 350 A.D., after which date the Mālavas disappeared, and the deserted town yields no coins subsequent to that date. These small temples, remains of which were found at Karkoṭa Nāgara and Tigowā, were Hindu votive temples after the fashion of the votive stūpas of the Kushan period. Architecturally thus they would follow immediately the Kushan period. A normal, as opposed to a ‘votive’, śikhara temple must have been large. Śikhara had been an old thing; ‘excellent śikharas with carved interior’ are noted in the Hathigumphā inscription (c. 160 B.C.); their artists, one hundred in number, received land-grants from the Emperor Khāravela (E.I., XX, p. 80, Insc. line, 13). The Nāgara śikhara was a particular, probably a new, variety, which arose in the time of the Nāgas, i.e. the Bhārasiva dynasty, and after their name received a permanent and wide name as ‘Nāgara’. The Vākāṭaka period, which follows the Nāga period, affords an example of the Nāgara śikhara in the shape of its Chaturmukha Śiva Temple at Nachnā. Its Pārvati Temple is an imitation of a mountain (parvata) with caves and wild animals; while the Śiva Temple has the śikhara (Kailāsa). Both are contemporary, and both styles existed contemporaneously. The age of both are fixed by what we call ‘Gupta’ sculptures, that is, the temples cannot be post-Guptan, yet they are not Guptan.¹ The figures and decorations on both were done by the same masons. The Chaturmukha Temple has a tall śikhara with slightly curved sides and having a height of about 40 feet. It stands on a raised platform. Pillars and halls it lacks [App. A].

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¹ Cf. Gopīnath Rao, Iconography, ii, 1, p. 99, on Nāgara plan: Nāgaram chaturasraṁ syāt. See Śilpa-Ratna, XVI, 58.

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² See Modern Review, August 1932. Suraj Mau is near Chhatarpur, C.I.

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³ I have not found them illustrated anywhere yet. [See plate II A.]

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⁴ A.S.R., IX, 41-44.

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⁵ J.R.A.S., 1914, p. 334. I agree; the details there are in line with Nachnā. The place-name is Tigawāñ.

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¹ Scholars have gone into wild guesses over the Chaturmukha Temple. They hold that the śikhara temple of Chaturmukha is probably a later building. They, however, forget that the two temples make one scheme, and sculptures in both are by the same chisel. The buildings are in their original shape and material. They are parts of the same scheme, to make Pārvati, the Goddess living in the Parvata which is imitated on the walls, while the Chaturmukha lingam is installed under a śikhara, denoting Kailāsa. They escaped the hand of the iconoclast, being in an out-of-the-way place. [See App. at the end.]

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§ 46A. The Bhūmarā Temple, discovered by the late Mr. R. D. Banerji, near Uch-harā (the Uchchakalpa of the inscriptions of the Gupta-Vākāṭaka period), Nagod State, Western Baghelkhand, has been assigned by him to the fifth century A.D.² This temple is surely a Bhāraśiva building. It is a Śaiva shrine. A large lingam, like the Chaturmukha at Nachnā, was established in the temple which is in the style followed in Samudra Gupta's time at Eran. What connects this temple with the Nāga traditions is the peculiar palm designs. Palm was the Nāga emblem, which has been also found at Padmāvatī, one of the Nāga capitals. At Bhumarā we have whole pillars (pilasters) carved in imitation of palm trees (Pl. IV), a feature nowhere else found. I shall designate it a Nāga (Bhāraśiva) motif. Scrolls of palm-leaf (fan) are used as decoration. Its human figures stand out classically. They express a fullness of life where nothing of the primitive or the decadent is traceable. They are entirely of a different technique, conception and execution, to what we are accustomed at Mathurā. Here we have the real, old Hindu Art, practically come down direct from the art of Bhārahut which is within a few miles of Bhūmarā. To Bhūmarā, Bhārahut is primitive, although in itself Bhārahut marks a decadent close of a preceding line of Hindu Art. Bhūmarā supplies a missing link connecting the Guptan Udaygiri-Deogarh with the past of the national orthodox art. The national orthodox art seems to have survived only in Baghelkhand and Bundelkhand where the Kushan rule could not be sufficiently destructive. As there is very little difference between the Bhāraśiva and the Vākāṭaka culture—the latter being a continuation of the former, we may, with some confidence, assume that the national plastic art did revive under the Bhāraśivas, which is attested by the Jānkhaṭ fragments for its early and independent existence. The śikhara before the Bhāraśivas was a four-cornered spire, as evidenced from the ‘Bodh-Gaya’ plaque found at Pāṭaliputra with a Kharosthi inscription of the first or the second century A.D., and the two sculptured replicas of śikhara temples found at Mathurā of about 150 A.D., to which Dr. Coomaraswamy has drawn attention.¹ The Bhāraśiva and Vākāṭaka śikhara, on the other hand, is a four-cornered spire over a four-cornered the remains, some of which have now been removed to the Indian Museum, Calcutta. [See App. A. at the end here on the date.]

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² Archæological Memoir, No. 16, pp. 3, 7. The Memoir illustrates

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¹ History of Indian and Indonesian Art, Pl. XIX.

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sanctum, with a bulge in the spire. This post-Kushan new type of śikhara is definitely datable in the Bhāraśiva period, and we may call this style the Nāgara śikhara.

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47. The śikhara style goes out of fashion in the Gupta times in stone temples. But the Nāgara type asserts itself in the Gupta period itself more in brick.¹ In mediæval architecture, there is a combination of the pillar and the śikhara, of the square and the round plans, i.e. of the Nāgara and the Vesara types, the Nāgara type predominating.

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¹ Cf. Cunningham, on Gupta brick-temple at Konch, A.S.R. XVI, plate 17, p. 52.

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48. There was a Nāgara style of painting. That was also evidently connected with the Nāga period, but we are not in a position to distinguish it yet. I should not, however, be surprised if one day it is discovered in some distinctive style amongst our old frescoes of Ajaṇṭā. Ajaṇṭā became part of the Nāga Empire about 250 A.D.

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49. It is certain that the Nāgas did not discourage Prakrit. On their coins they use Prakrit. Rājaśekhara, though later, noted the Takkas for using apabhraṁśisms. The official language, as before the Kushans, remained Prakrit. They were democratic in politics, and they remained so in the matter of language.

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49A. In the same way the script name Nāgarī is to be explained. I think, the origin of this name lies in the Nāga dynasty under whom originated the headed type of writing, evidence of the existence of which we get from the time of Pṛthivīsheṇa I in the inscriptions of Nachnā and Ganj.² In the Vākāṭaka inscriptions the letters are bound with a box-like heading which was reduced to a line in the Nāgarī script beginning from about 800 A.D. The name Nāgarī seems to have been applied to what is called the box-headed script of the fourth and early fifth centuries. It is significant that the box-headed writing is found exactly where the Nāga government was most prominent, viz. in Bundelkhand and the Central Provinces. In the Central Provinces before the Nāga period, we have a Kushan inscription found at Bherāghāṭ which is in the ordinary Brāhmī script. The peculiar box-headed writing, therefore, came into existence after the Kushans and before the Vākāṭakas. We can confidently date it in the Nāga period.

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² I emphatically disagree with the new view propounded in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. XVII, p. 362, that the Nachnā and Ganj inscriptions belonged to Pṛthivīsheṇa II. I have carefully compared the scripts, and it is impossible to hold that they can be later than the fourth century A.D. The view of Fleet on the age of these inscriptions was perfectly right. Pṛthivīsheṇa II's plates clearly show that the Nachnā Pṛthivīsheṇa flourished long before. [See 61A for the Vākāṭaka inscriptions.]

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50. The Gaṅgā and Yamunā motifs and their connexion with the Nāga period have been noticed above. The motifs continue in the Vākāṭaka period (§ 86) and are carried down to the Gupta art and further down to the Chandel art.¹

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¹ Cunningham, A.S.R. XXI, 59. The gate mentioned by Cunningham is now at the Museum gate, Khajurāho.

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51. In the next big period, i.e. the Guptan, we find a sudden change in a social matter. Bull and cow are declared in Gupta inscriptions to be sacred and not to be killed. The beginning of this cult is probably to be dated in the Nāga period. The Kushans used to kill bulls and cows.² The Bhāraśivas had the bull as their sacred symbol, with which they identified themselves. With them the sacredness of the bull probably became universal in their empire, punctuating the difference of their age from the last political period when the bull was freely slaughtered for the kitchen of the Kushans. In the Gupta period, the kings take pride in being protectors of the bull and cow, emphasizing the character of their own rule as contrasted with that of the Kushans. The foundations of modern Hinduism were laid by the Nāga Emperors and that edifice was reared by the Vākāṭakas and elaborated by the Guptas.

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² See below on Kushan rule in the Gupta Section (§ 146 B).

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