History of India, c. 150 A.D. to 350 A.D.: Naga–Vakataka Imperial Period c18.s1: XVIII. Effects of Gupta Imperialism

History of India, c. 150 A.D. to 350 A.D.: Nāga–Vākāṭaka Imperial Period c18.s1

Language: English

XVIII. Effects of Gupta Imperialism

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§ 205. The military achievements of Samudra Gupta are well known and need not be commented upon here. It should be noted that he did not over-do militarism. He was fully conscious of the value of a policy of peace. After his second campaign he never undertook any expedition, but gained his object through diplomacy and peace by bringing the Shāhānushāhi, the Hill States, the Republics, and the Colonies within the fold of his empire and the sphere of his imperial influence. His possession of an enormous quantity of gold which Northern India had not known before was the result of the inclusion of Southern India and the Colonies in his empire. The contact with the South was kept up through the Vākāṭaka House, which was soon restored, though in the Allahabad inscription the Vākāṭaka country is treated as being part of his Central Provinces and the survey of the Republics is made as if sitting at Gwalior or Eran. In line 23 of the Allahabad inscription he says that he was restoring old royal families and in line 26 he says that his officers were busy in restoring the wealth of various kings who had been conquered by the strength of his arms. Pṛithivīsheṇa I undoubtedly was one of those. Gold from the South and Further India kept on pouring in even in the next reign. If Samudra Gupta excelled Rāma and Pṛithu in giving gold coins as he says in his Eran inscription, his son certainly excelled all figures in past history in distributing gold amongst his subjects. There is no exaggeration in this. We have the testimony of Chandra Gupta II's daughter that her father gave away several thousands of crores of [Gupta] sovereigns¹, which is again confirmed by Yuan Chwang. Amoghavarsha in his inscription admits that the Gupta king was the greatest donor of the Kali Age. This became possible on account of the beneficial foresight of Samudra Gupta. His policy of peace and reconciliation turned Prithivishena I into a faithful ally who conquered back the Kuntala or Kadamba king. The latter had seriously threatened Samudra Gupta's supremacy in the South, which probably led to his putting off the Aśvamedha or to its repetition mentioned by Prabhāvati Guptā.¹ His colonial policy and the control of the port of Tāmralipti must have been a great source of revenue. The eastern trade with China and Indonesia was brisk at the time and was probably of greater importance than the Western trade. Both Samudra Gupta and his son Chandra Gupta emphasised their sea-frontiers, which alone they recognised on their three sides as they recognised the Himavat [Tibet] to be their northern frontier. The people were as lightly taxed as possible in both reigns, which Fa-Hien for the latter reign has particularly noticed. Samudra Gupta truly became Dhanada to his subjects. People could well afford to found big hospitals, and the peace of Samudra Gupta could very well enable Chandra Gupta to abolish capital punishment.

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¹ Poona Plates, E.I., Vol. XV, p. 41.

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¹ anek-aśvamedha-yājī Lichchhavi-dohitraḥ (E.I., XV, 41).

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§ 206. The psychology of the nation was entirely changed and the outlook became lofty and magnanimous. It was a psychology directly borrowed from the Emperor. The Hindus of his day thought of big undertakings. They contributed high, elegant and magnanimous literature. The literary people became literary Kuberas to their countrymen and literary empire-builders outside India. Kumārajīva made a literary conquest of China.² The Kauṇḍinya missionary established a social and cultural overlordship in a m b o d i a. Merchants and artists made India a wonderland for the foreign eyes. There was nothing feminine in art, literature, piety or politics. The chisel produced virile gods and martial goddesses. The pen portrayed handsome and masculine men, self-conscious and proud Hindu Prussians. Scholars and Brahmins wielded sword and pen with equal facility. Aristocracy of intellect and ability was raised to a height which was hardly repeated again in this land.

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² He, a contemporary of Samudra Gupta, left for China, where [405-412] he dictated Chinese commentaries on the Buddhist Canon. His translation of the Diamond Sūtra is a national classic in Chinese literature, from which 'Chinese poets and philosophers have drawn inspiration and instruction'. Cf. Giles, Chinese Literature, p. 114.

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§ 207. Sanskrit became the official language, and it became entirely a new language. Like the Gupta coin and Gupta sculpture, it reproduced the Emperor, it became majestic and musical, as it had never been before and as it never became after again.

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§ 208. The field, however, had been prepared by the Bhāraśivas and more so by the Vākāṭakas. Sanskrit had been employed by the Śuṅga kings in their official inscriptions. It was employed by Rudradāman, again, about 150 A.D., but the Kāvya style, as evidenced by the Champā (Cambodia) inscription which anticipates Samudra Gupta’s style, is referable to the Vākāṭaka period. The Vākāṭakas had already created an All-India Empire. They had driven the Kushans to a corner. They had raised the military tradition of the people. They had brought back the Śāstras to their rightful throne. Samudra Gupta took full advantage of it and kept up the continuity of history initiated by the Bhāraśivas and fostered by the Vākāṭakas. They had paved the road through which the Shāhānushāhis and the Śaka lords could be brought to Ajodhyā or Pāṭaliputra to bend their heads before the Hindu throne. The renaissance had begun before 248 A.D. The Hindus had freed themselves already from the Kushan social tyranny and their political rule. They had already rejected Buddhism as a system unfit for their society tending to make people weak and passive. It had been, however, left for Samudra Gupta to give a constructive faith, and he gave it in the form of his bhakti in Viṣṇu. The

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The Gupta emperor made a new language, and in fact a new nation.

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Bhāraśivas had adopted Gaṅgā and Yamunā as the symbols of freed Āryāvarta, and rightly hooded Nāgas were put over the figures of the river goddesses, translating politics into the language of the chisel. The Guptas duly took over those motifs though they removed the Nāgas from their heads. The sombre Śiva of the Bhāraśivas and the Vākāṭakas makes room for the constructive Viṣṇu who stands with His hands erect upholding Hindu society, with a vigour which knows no lessening. Solid, not elegant, become the homes of Hindu gods. Square-built, rock-cut and rock-like temples are preferred to pinnacles. Self-confidence is the breeding spirit of the time. The Hindu has faith in himself: the Vākāṭaka, the Gaṅga and the Gupta speak of their manly beauty moulded by swords and arrows; deities are compared with men and to the advantage of men. Faith in the great God Viṣṇu, to whom the Gupta dedicated all his deeds and in whom he merged himself, was transmitted to the whole nation and even to Further India. This unity of man and his God was reflected in the sculptures they wrought by fashioning them after the devotees. The lofty spiritual tone reached the very zenith. Vindhyaśakti whose strength grew in great battles and whose valour could not be overcome even by gods, was yet a man exerting himself to gain spiritual merit. Mādhav I of the Gaṅga kings, whose decorations were wounds received on battlefields, declared that kingship existed only for rendering good government to the people. Śiva Skandavarman, the performer of proud sacrifices, was after all a Dharma-Mahārājādhirāja. Samudra Gupta the rampart of religion, the path of the sacred hymns, worthy of study by others, was practising royalty and his duty in a way that gave him the satisfaction that he was winning his heaven and hereafter thereby. Man was made for society, and by performing his duties he was winning the kingdom of heaven. Revivalist piety thus spiritualized politics, even conquest, and left passive pietism and inert quietism of the pre-revival days to bury its past. Buddhist celibacy had lowered the position of woman. Now once more woman became the object of high honour and a political partner. In coins and inscriptions she is given equality. Wife was never so honoured as Samudra Gupta honoured Dattadevi. In the greatest moment of his triumph at Eran the Emperor of All-India proudly remembered his life-partner and the day of his marriage when her dowry consisted of only the manliness of her lord, and whose grandeur now consisted in being the ideal Hindu woman, the kula-vadhū and the Hindu mother surrounded by sons and grandsons.

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§ 209. We are thus dazzled by this atmosphere of full manhood and glory, of conquests and culture, of activity far and wide, at home and abroad, and we forget the unknown poets and patriots and teachers of the Bhāraśiva period who sowed the seed of which the Vākāṭaka and the Gupta reaped the harvest. The hundred years of the Bhāraśivas are the seed-period of this Hindu imperialism. Literary remains of that seed-period movement we have practically none. But we recognise the tree from its fruit. That ‘Dark Period’ brought light and illumination to Āryāvarta and India. The spiritual movement begun in that period assumed the form of intense bhakti in the heroic aspect of Vaishṇavism. Who were the preachers of that cult? We know not. But we can say this much that the bible of that cult was the Bhagavad-Gītā which is repeated in the inscription of Samudra Gupta. The cult is that Vishṇu comes in the form of statesmen and heroes and readjusts society, protects Dharma and His people.

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§ 210. Grand and pleasing is this picture and the mind gets so captivated that it becomes most reluctant to turn away from the vision of Samudra Gupta’s India. A present-day historian trained in Imperialism would naturally take delight in that picture, a picture of bold strokes, of Kiriṭa and Kuṇḍala, the picture of imperial Hinduism, of the revealed vision of the greatness of the Guptas. But does his duty end with reproducing on the fresco of the past of his race the picture of the Gupta superman? His duty does not conclude without giving the judgment of the post-Gupta Hindu who looked back on Gupta imperialism and coolly analysed it. The Hindu historian

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The Other Side.

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the Vishnu Purāṇa makes another appraisement of the matter. His concluding words¹ may be summed up thus:

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¹ See V.P., Bk. IV, c. 24, verses 64-77, cf. also 'the Verdic of India' (Prithivī-Gītā), verses 55-63.

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'I have given this history.² The existence of these kings will in future become a matter of debate and doubt as the very existence of Rāma and other Emperors has become to-day a matter of doubt and speculation. Emperors become mere legends in the current of time—the Emperors who thought and think "India is mine". Fie on Empires, fie on the Empire of the Emperor Rāghava.'³

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² इत्येषः कथितः सम्यक् मनोवंशो मया तव (64) श्रुत्वैतदखिलं वंशं प्रशस्तं पृथिवीपतेः (67). इक्ष्वाकु-अन्धु-साम्राट्-सगराविजितान् रघून् (68)

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³ यः कार्तवीर्यो भुवि समस्तान् द्वीपान् समाक्रम्य चतारिचक्रः; कथाप्रसङ्गे लभिधीयमानः स एव सङ्कल्पविकल्पहेतुः (72) दशाननाविजित-राघवामैश्वर्यमुद्घोषित-दिग्जयाभास् भक्ष्यापि जातं, न कथं वधेम ? शुभ्रपातेम विभन्नकस्य (73) [ 'ऐश्वर्यं धिक्' — Commentator.] कथाप्ररोरलमवाप यदै मान्धालनामा भुवि चक्रवर्ती । श्रुत्वापि तं कोऽपि करोति साधु ममत्यमात्मान्यपि मन्दचेतः । (74) भगीरथाद्याः सगरः ककुत्स्थो दशाननो राघवराक्षसो च युधिष्ठिराद्याश्च बभूवुरेते सत्यं न मिथ्या क नु ते न विद्माः । (75)

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The refrain of the historian is to rail at Emperors and Conquerors. They suffer, he says from mamatva,—'L'etat c'est moi'⁴.

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⁴ Cf. Prithivī-Gītā: पृथिवी समेय सकला समेया भसाम्यत्रापि च शास्त्रवेयम् यो यो मसो ध्याच बभूव राजा कुक्ष्बिराचौदिसि मस्य तस्य । (61) विहाय मां त्यत्यपथं व्रजन्तं तस्यान्यथास्य कथं ममत्यं क्षुद्रासदं अल्पभ्रं करोति । (62) 'पृथिवी समेया परित्याजैनम्' वदन्ति वे दूतमुखैः स्वयम् नराधिपास्तेषु ममातिहासः पुनश्च सुलेषु दथाभुपैति । (63) An oversea-Empire, characteristic of the Guptan, is particularly hit at: ततो भृत्यांश्च पौरांश्च जिगीषन्ते तथा रिपून् क्रमेणानैन जेध्याओ वयं पृथ्वों समागराम् । (57) समुद्रावरणं याति (58) द्वीपान् समाक्रम्य चतारिचक्रः (72).

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Against whom is this bitter criticism directed? Again and again the historian uses the word Rāghava. Did not Samudra Gupta try to revive the tradition of Rāma the Rāghava, from Ayodhyā? Did not Kālidāsa render Samudra Gupta's conquest in Raghu's Digvijaya? The hit is palpably against the builder of the last empire chronicled in the Purāṇa—the builder of the Gupta empire whom he has left unnamed in his chronicle. He means to say that a history which is worth remembering is a history of good deeds and just services; the deeds which trample upon the rights and liberties of others are not to be canonised by the historian. If he were alive to-day, he might have said—'Remember Vikramāditya, the son of Samudra Gupta, but forget Samudra Gupta. Note only virtue, give no countenance to vice in any form or shape.' Samudra Gupta, like Alexander, killed the free spirit of his country. He destroyed the Mālavas and the Yaudheyas, who were the nursery of freedom; and many others of their class. Once those free communities were wiped out, the recruiting ground for future heroes and patriots and statesmen disappeared. The Gupta themselves, both from their mother's side and their father's side, had descended from those republican communities. They themselves were crops of those seed-communities, but they totally destroyed them.

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§ 211. The social system of the republican communities was based on equality. They knew no caste. They consisted of one caste only. The orthodox system, on the other hand, was based on inequality and caste where mass patriotism could not be mobilised as it could easily be done amongst the Mālavas, the Yaudheyas, the Madrakas, the Pushyamitras, the Ābhiras and the Lichchhavis. They were the exercise-ground for state-making, for patriotism, for individual ambitions, capabilities and leadership. But under Samudra Gupta and his descendants they all merged into an organised, officialised, orthodox caste-system and an orthodox political system which recognised and fostered monarchy and imperialism. The seed-pod for the rise of a Krishna, the prophet of rightful war and the prophet of the cult of duty, the seed-pod to produce a Buddha, the prophet of a universal religion and universal

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equality, was consumed for ever; the seed-pod for the production of a future Bhāraśiva or a future Gupta was made extinct. And the Hindu sank. The Republics of Rajputana dissolved into the Rajputs who forgot all the traditions of their republican ancestors. And the Republics of the Punjab dissolved into the Jāts with all their past lost. The life-giving element was gone. The Hindus did not remember the name of Samudra Gupta with any gratitude, and when Alberūnī came to India he was told that the Guptas were a wicked people. This is another view of that picture. They were tyrants to Hindu constitutional freedom, though excellent rulers to the individual subject.

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§212. The only thing which could appeal to the Hindu mind represented by the historian of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, whose political ethics never gave countenance to force and coercion, was a system like that of the Bhāraśivas, uniting in a federation of states with full individuality and individual life. The Bhāraśiva Federation was an enlargement of the Saṅgha organisation of the Hindu republics. It was a league of equals with a recognised leading power. If the Guptas had experimented that, they would have been better remembered by the Purāṇic historian. Following the historian of my country I would say: Let us remember to-day only the good deeds of the Guptas and forget their imperialism.

Linked texts (5)

Viṣṇupurāṇa — Vyāsa, Sanskrit
تحقيق ما للهند من مقولة مقبولة في العقل أو مرذولة — Arabic
Raghuvaṃśa — Kālidāsa, Sanskrit
玄奘 — Classical Chinese
Bhagavadgītā — Vyāsa, Sanskrit