History of India, c. 150 A.D. to 350 A.D.: Naga–Vakataka Imperial Period c24: Appendix G. On Further India and Insulindia, 150 A.D.–350 A.D.
History of India, c. 150 A.D. to 350 A.D.: Nāga–Vākāṭaka Imperial Period c24
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Appendix G. On Further India and Insulindia, 150 A.D.–350 A.D.
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The subject of Further India and Indian Archipelago has been touched upon in pp. 154–158, ante. Here it is proposed to discuss the colonial history mainly with reference to the home-land for the period 150 A.D.–350 A.D.
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The State of Champā (Annam), according to Chinese authorities, was founded in 137 A.D.¹ Champā seems to have been mentioned under the name Aṅgadvīpa by the Vāyu Purāṇa [ch. 48]. The name Champā was adopted by sanskritizing the ethnic name of the local population Cham. The Kauṇḍinyas who founded the State were, as pointed out above, the Kauṇḍinyas brought from Northern India to the South by the Sātavāhanas. The Sātavāhanas were a naval power: they marked their coins with the figure of a ship, they were always anxious to keep the maritime provinces of the West-Coast and the East-Coast under them. The Kauṇḍinyas were intimately connected with the Chuṭu Sātakarṇis by ties of relationship. It may be assumed that their migration to Annam and foundation of a kingdom, which defied the Chinese empire and established its independence, must have been politically connected with the Sātavāhanas. Kin-lien, which seems to be the Chinese rendering of Kauṇḍinya, successfully attacked the southernmost districts of the Chinese empire, and in 138 A.D. the Emperor contracted peace with him under which Chinese territory was evacuated by him. The Sanskrit inscription of Vō-caṇh (now in the Hanoi Museum) lends confirmation to the Chinese data. It is in Sanskrit and resembles the script of Rudradāman. One of the descendants of Śrīmāra (whose name is lost in the inscription) records that in the Assembly he publicly declared that whatever moveables and immoveables he had given (visrishta) to his brothers and sons, etc., were to be respected as their personal properties after his death. The script of the inscription is of the Second or Third Century A.D. It seems that this king was not very far removed from Māra, the founder. The original Brahmin caste (Brahma-Kshatriya) and the family name Kauṇḍinya are given in two later inscriptions of the dynasty in which dates in the Śaka era are given: chaturshu varshaśateshu Śakānām vyatiteshu¹ and 579 respectively.² The employment of Sanskrit points to a contemporary revival of Sanskrit in the Mother-Country of the Kauṇḍinyas.
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¹ Chavannes, Les religieux éminents, p. 203; Vogel, Yūpa Inscriptions of Mūlavarman, p. 188; Majumdar, Champā, pp. 17, 21.
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¹ Miś'on stele. Finot, B.E.F.E.O., III (1903), 206-211; IV (1911), 264; Majumdar, Champā, No. 7.
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² Finot, B.E.F.E.O., IV, 918, Majumdar, No. 12.
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The Kauṇḍinyas kept up a continuous war of aggression against the Chinese empire from 248 A.D. They seem to gather strength about that year. In 248 A.D. they made a naval attack, defeated the Chinese fleet which had been sent against them, and took the capital of Hanoi, whereupon a treaty was concluded by the Han emperor who ceded the whole of Cheo-ling. The name of the Hindu king ended in Varmā (Chinese Fan). The next king spelt by the Chinese as Hiong (270-280 A.D.) extended his kingdom of Champā to the north at the cost of the Chinese emperor who concluded a treaty with him in 280 A.D. His successor Yi was again a powerful king; he died in 331 or 336 A.D. He sent an embassy to the imperial court of China (284 A.D.). The next king maintained the vigour, but about 359 A.D. there was a reverse and a period of depression up to 377 A.D. Bhadravarman revived the offensive in 380-413 A.D. He and evidently his family had borne the Pallava title Dharma-Mahārāja.³
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³ The Kauṇḍinyas established also a kingdom in Poli. Groeneveldt, Notes on the Malay Archipelago and Malacca, compiled from Chinese sources, Verh. v.h. Bat. Gen., xxxix, 1880, p. 81, cited by Dr. Vogel in his Yūpa inscriptions of King Mūlavarman, p. 194, n.
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It will be seen that the history of the colony of Champā follows the curves of the history of the Mother-Country. The Purāṇas mark a victorious point of time with 248 A.D. which is the beginning of the offensive and successes of Champā against China. The Vākāṭaka-Pallava dynasty had a set-back about 350 A.D. And then there is another imperial age in India about 370 A.D. under the consolidated power of the Guptas when we find that the colonies attorn to the Gupta House. It is impossible not to perceive the effects of the changing history of the Mother-Country on Champā during the period we are concerned with.
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The script of Bhadravarman's inscriptions is Pallava and his title is also Pallava. It seems that after 248 A.D. when the kings of Champā adopt the Pallava dynastic name ending in varman they come under the system of the Pallavas in accordance with the march of history in the main-land.
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From the Sanskrit Inscriptions of King Mūlavarman, found on four Yūpa (sacrificial) posts of stone at Koetei in East Borneo, edited by Dr. Vogel,¹ we find that before 400 A.D. a dynasty was founded in Borneo, the third king of which performed the Vedic Yajña bahusuvarṇaka,² and gifted lands, kine, a kalpa-vṛksha (gold-tree) and money to Brāhmaṇas in the island. His father's name was Aśvavarman and grandfather's name was Kuṇḍuṅga. Aśvavarman was the founder (vaṃśakartā) of the dynasty in Borneo. The verses are in anushtubh and āryā metres. The Yajña was performed at Vaprakeśvara, evidently a Śaiva sacred place in Borneo. The script of Mūlavarman is closely the Pallava script. The name Kuṇḍuṅga is a Southern Indian name, cf. Kuṇḍu-kūra in the Pikira grant. We have instances of Aryans in the South adopting Dravidian names. It is almost impossible to hold the theory advanced on the strength of this name by the Dutch Indologists that the family was probably native of Borneo and was Hinduized. To suppose that in the second generation they could be so much and so rapidly Hinduized as to perform Vedic sacrifices and make such intimate Hindu gifts is a hard demand on probability. Kuṇḍuṅga does not seem to have flourished in Borneo as the founder was Aśvavarman.
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¹ Brids. Kon. Inst., 1918, pp. 167-232 (with plates). Cf. IA., IV, 355; Dvivedi Commemoration Volume [Hindi, Benares, 1933], p. 220 (with good plates).
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² Śrī Mūlavarmma-rājendro yaṣṭavā bahusuvarṇakam tasya yajñasya yūpayaṃ dvijendrais samprakalpitaḥ (p. 213).
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The script at Koetei, after a very able and exhaustive treatment, has been dated by Dr. Vogel in the middle of the fourth century, ‘a somewhat earlier date than that proposed by M. Finot who has assigned them to approximately 400 A.D.’ Now a generation before 350 A.D. will bring us about 325 A.D. which is the time of the Pallava King Skandavarman II, the Conqueror (‘Vijaya’), whose date we have ascertained to be C. 297-332 A.D. (p. 195 above). The script agrees with the script of the time of this Pallava king and his successor Simhavarman I.¹ We know that in the time of Vijaya Skandavarman Sanskrit became the language of the Pallava inscriptions. It seems that the kingdom in Borneo was founded in or about the time of Vijaya Skandavarman, who firmly got established at Kāñchī and had a long and prosperous reign. The sacrifices of the orthodox Pallava type, and no performance of an aśvamedha, and the name-ending in imitation of the Pallava designation, would lead us to infer not a peaceful local venture of an individual, but an undertaking directed by the Pallava emperor or under his ægis.
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¹ The script should be compared with the inscriptions of Mayūraśarman on stone discussed above (pp. 167, 221).
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Similar is the case of the Hindu kingdom of Java. The earliest inscriptions in the island are of Pūrṇavarman, and they are in Sanskrit. They have been edited by Dr. Vogel in Oudheidkundigen Deienst in Nederlandsch-Indië, Deel I, 1925, pp. 15-35 (with plates) under the title “The Earliest Sanskrit Inscriptions of Java”. They are four in number and are all in the western part of Java, in the province of Batavia, inscribed on rocks. The Chi-Arutön (spelt also Tiaroeten or °teun) inscription is a dedication of two foot-marks (padadvaya) evidently as a memorial to the dead king. The capital of the king is called Tārūma-Nagara. It reads:
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(1) vikkrāntasyâvanipateḥ, (2) Śrīmataḥ Pūrṇṇavarmaṇaḥ,
(3) Tārūmanagarendrasya,
(4) Viṣṇoriva padadvayam.
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A similar record in Śragdharā with foot-prints is at Jambu, in the middle of a stream near a confluence, which is rightly explained by Dr. Vogel as the cremation place of the king. There the inscription mentions the king as having flourished before (purā) at Tārumā. The Chi-Arutön Inscription is in my opinion a similar funeral memorial, probably at the place of his Śrāddha. The Jambu foot-prints are called padavimba-dvayam, which reminds us of the custom still living amongst the Bengal Hindus of taking actual foot-prints of a dead elder before cremation. The third inscription is (at Kēbon Kopi) to commemorate a favourite elephant of the king which bore the name Jayaviśāla. Evidently on its death the memorial was given by the king, like the memorials to noted or favourite horses in the Mughal times. The fourth record is at Tugu (Békasih). It is in five stanzas of anuṣṭubh. It registers the excavation or deepening of two streams, one (nadī) called Chandrabhāgā which had been ‘dug’ first by the Guru, father of king Pūrṇavarman. This ancestor is called rājādhirāja:
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(1) purā rājādhirājena Guruṇā pīna-bāhunā, khātā khyātām purīm prāpya
(2) Chandrabhāgārṇṇavam yayau ||
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The Rājādhirāja had excavated the stream and brought it to the capital and thence it (the Chandrabhāgā) reached the ocean. The other stream was cut by King Pūrṇavarman in the 22nd year of his reign. Its name was Gomatī. To a length of 6,126 bows (dhanus), i.e. either 7 or 12 miles (Vogel, p. 33) it was cut or deepened (khātā) in 21 days (dinais siddhaikaviṁśakaiḥ)—from the 8th Krishna Phālguna to the 13th Śukla Chaitra (i.e. in amānta system). This stream had destroyed the camping-ground (śibirāvanim) of the king’s grandfather, a rājarshi (royal sage). The king made a gift of one thousand kine to Brāhmaṇas on the completion of the work. The inscription bears the mark of a triśūla on its top.
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The script of the three inscriptions is exactly Pallava, while that of Chi-Arutön is Vākāṭakan. The inscriptions have been executed with great skill, showing a practised hand in writing and a practised chisel familiar with Sanskrit lettering. In other words, they are the workmanship of Hindus. This remark equally applies to the Koetei Inscriptions and the Champā Inscriptions. Intimate affinity is noticed in the scripts of Bhadravarman (Champā), Mūlavarman (Borneo), and Pūrṇavarman (Java). They are all within a century or so amongst themselves. The system of amānta year-reckoning is South-Indian.
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The title of Pūrṇavarmana’s father, rājādhirāja, is comparable with the identical Gupta title and the Gaṅga title of Mahādhirāja. It is certain that the family of Java was Śaiva and had come into existence in the Pallava time, and that it knew the influence of the Guptas which is indicated by the title of the king’s father and the Vākāṭaka script at Chi-Arutön which is accompanied with a shell writing—an essentially northern writing—between the big toes of the foot prints. Taking the date of the inscription c. 450 A.D. as suggested by Dr. Vogel, the time of the grandfather of Pūrṇavarman will be about 375 A.D., and the time of the foundation of the family about the same as that of the Borneo dynasty of Aśvavarman. The names of northern rivers (Chandrabhāgā, Gomatī) should not be a matter of surprise, as the Pallavas themselves were northerners and their whole court and subordinate rulers were northerners.
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Hindu Colonial States in the Archipelago and Further India were thus established facts in the Vākāṭaka-Pallava period, and they seem to have been connected politically with the Mother-Country. With the advent of Samudra Gupta as the Indian Emperor having stepped into the shoes of the Vākāṭaka Emperor, those colonies in Insulindia and Further India—as an already organized system—transfer and render their allegiance to the Gupta Emperor, who notes the easy fact.
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The evidence of the Guptan influence has been already noticed. The reference to Viṣṇu (Vikrānta) at Chi-Arutön is probably another index of the new influence of the Guptas. We know the description of Sumatra from FaHien who found it almost a completely orthodox Hindu land like Guptan India.
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Insulindia was thus fully connected with the political and cultural changes in the mainland.
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Champā was probably the earliest colony, it being a key to the Chinese trade and the point from which the islands of Java and Borneo were easily accessible. The great naval activity and attainment in navigation by the Hindus in the Far Eastern Seas are attested by the Champā history in Chinese, by FaHien, and Champā inscriptions which mention her naval wars. The trade of the Far East seems to have been in the possession and control of Andhra, Kalinga, and Bengal (from where the Mahānāvika, the great sea-captain, Buddhagupta [from Raktam-rūtikā, Rakta-māṭi in Bengal] marked an inscription in Malay before 400 A.D.)¹
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¹ Vogel, Yūpa Inscriptions of K. Mūlavarman, p. 185.
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The Vāyu Purāṇa gives a full description of Simhapura, a capital in Further India, evidently in Malaya. It notes the fact of islets of very small dimensions and mentions their groups (anudvīpas) as attached to bigger islands. Its detailed knowledge of the islands proves the intimate connexion of the Insulindia with Samudra Gupta's India, which is borne out by his own inscription and the inscriptions noted above.
Linked texts (1)
- Vāyupurāṇa — Vyāsa, Sanskrit