State and Government in Ancient India c23.s2.t1.2

c23.s2.t1.2

The doctrine of the divinity of the king became more popular in this period. Samudragupta is described as God come to live upon this earth,¹ and the Kadmaba and Sālaṅkyāyana rulers as fifth Lokapālas or divine protectors.² No king, however, could claim either infallibility or autocratic powers on account of their divinity. Smṛitis and inscriptions of this period emphasise that a king can become a successful ruler only if he waits upon the elders, studies the art of government and cultivates righteousness. Haughty, irreligious and tyrannical kings are held to public opprobrium in the records of our period.³ Gupta inscriptions are silent about the nature of the training given to the prince, but the Kadamba inscriptions tell us how an ideal king was expected to have his body well built by various military exercises including riding horses and elephants, and his intellect sharpened and view-point liberalised by the study of different science.⁴ The eldest son, trained on the above lines, was usually selected as Yuvarāja; on rare occasions the choice fell upon a younger son. Junior princes were usually appointed governors; thus Govindagupta, probably a younger brother of Kumāragupta I, was his governor in Mālwā. It was only on rare occasions that the kingdom was divided to accommodate the conflicting claims of contending princes. This probably happened in the case of the Gupta empire during the latter half of the 5th century and in the case of the Vākāṭaka kingdom after the death of emperor Pravarasena I *c.* 325 A. D. In both cases the consequences were far from beneficial.