The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s9: The Gurjara-Pratīhāras and Kleinstaaterei
The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s9
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The Gurjara-Pratīhāras and Kleinstaaterei
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The Empire of the Gurjara-Pratīhāras, who may be described as the cognates and agnates of the latter-day so-called Rajputs (c. 800-1200), had their capital at Kanauj on the Ganges.²⁹ They were synchronous with the Kāśmīris, Rāṣṭrakūṭas, Cholas, Pālas and Senas among the great powers of India.
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²⁹ R. S. Tripathi: "The Pratīhāra Administration" in the *Indian Historical Quarterly* (Calcutta) March 1933.
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It is during this period of the Gurjara-Pratīhāra Empire that some of the oldest among the Rajput *Vaṁśāvalī* or genealogical chronicles owed their origin or rather in which the oldest dates for the establishment of certain Rajput dynasties, e.g. those of Jaipur, Jodhpur, Alwar etc., have been placed in subsequent years.³⁰ It should be observed also that in a study of Hindu states the continuity of Rajput principalities,—although with periods of submergence in Turkish and Moghul times,—from the days of the Gurjara-Pratīhāra Empire until today, i.e., for a period of nearly one thousand years has to be accepted as an item of major importance in Hindu cultural evolution.³¹ The Gurjara-Pratīhāra Empire comprised at times the western Punjab, Kāśmīr, Nepal, Kathiawar, the U.P., Bihar, North Bengal, Orissa, and Assam. Only Sind appears to have been outside the sphere of its sovereignty, which covered, as it did, virtually the whole of Northern India.
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³⁰ H. Goetz: *Die Stellung der indischen Chroniken im Rahmen der indischen Geschichte* (Munich, 1924), pp. 9-11.
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³¹ H. B. Sarda: *Maharana Kumbha* (Ajmer 1917), H. C. Ray: *The Dynastic History of Northern India* (Calcutta) Vol. I. (1931) pp. xxxvii, 10, 569-571, 579, 587-590, 608-09. The foreign origin of the Rajputs is disputed by C. V. Vaidya in the second volume of his *History of Mediæval Hindu India*, which is given over exclusively to the Rajputs (Poona 1924), as well as by G. S. Ojha in his *History of Rajputana*, Vol. I. (Ajmer, 1927), ch. II, in Hindi.
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The limits of the Gupta and the Vardhana Empires were evidently exceeded by the Empire of the Gurjara-Pratīhāras. According to contemporary Arab writers it was this Hindu power that proved a veritable stumbling block to the Arab satraps of Sind in their career of *digvijaya* (world-conquest) in Western and Northern India.
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For a long time 647 A.C., the year of Harṣavardhana's death, used to be taken as a landmark in Indian politics. We have already seen in connection with the Pālas, Senas and Cholas that as Harṣa's successors they were sovereigns of no mean order by any standard of polity or culture. The middle of the seventh century ought therefore to have no special value with historians.
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Recently the year 916 has been accepted as exhibiting a suitable landmark, for about this date the Pratīhāra Empire began to show signs of break-up. Besides, it is alleged that the tenth century of the Christian era which saw the dismemberment of the Gurjara-Pratīhāra Empire witnessed also the arrival of the Mohammedan Turk in India.³²
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³² V. A. Smith: *The Oxford History of India* (1919), p. xiii; H. C. Ray: *The Dynastic History of Northern India* (Calcutta) Vol. I. (1932), pp. xxxviii, xxxix, 596.
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To the student of Indian history the attempt to see a beginning or an end at 916 or for that matter in the tenth century should be as unwarrantable as that at 647 or in the middle of the seventh century. In the first place, disruptions, dynastic partitions, the system of pentarchies, heptarchies or centarchies, *Kleinstaaterei*, *émiettement* etc. ought to be treated as but certain normal phases of societal "metabolism" in the whirligig of politics. For vast continents like Europe, China, or India consolidations, concentrations, unifications or the like ought, inductively speaking, to be appraised more as the exceptions than as the rule. The eagerness to extol unification, imperial expansion, administration, centralization, whenever such phenomena happen to be encountered over extensive areas in India, is scientifically considered, rather senseless. European historians of modern and recent times, used as they are to appreciating unity in their little fatherlands have unscientifically projected the conditions of their petty states into the atmosphere of the Indian subcontinent, expecting or rather demanding unification of unwieldy areas as the test of political aptitudes or cultural efficiency. To those researchers who are not misled by such fallacies Bengal, Gujarat, Orissa, and so forth, nay, even parts of these areas should appear to be no insignificant territorial units. The maintenance of Hindu sovereignty over areas like these is no index to decay, degeneration or downfall. The words, "disruption," *Kleinstaaterei*, or *émiettement* should not be used at all,—or at any rate, in a derogatory sense,—even if India in the same manner as Europe should happen to be the theatre of several dozen independent states, arrayed as they might conceivably be in all sorts of *ententes cordiales*, armed neutralities or other relations known to the Kauṭalyan doctrine of *maṇḍala* ("geopolitical" complex of international relations).³³
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³³ B. K. Sarkar: "The Hindu Theory of International Relations" in the *Political Science Quarterly* (New York) August 1919; "Realities in the Relations between East and West" in *Prabuddha Bharata* (Calcutta, February, 1934).