History of India, c. 150 A.D. to 350 A.D.: Naga–Vakataka Imperial Period c14.s5.9

c14.s5.9

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.