Читать книгу India: A History - John Keay - Страница 34

History, whatever its parameters, is said to repeat itself. Seldom, though, does it oblige so readily as with the creators of ancient India’s two greatest dynasties. A Chandragupta had founded the Mauryan empire in C320; just so did a Chandragupta found the Gupta dynasty in C320. It could be confusing. But the first date was, of course, BC, the second AD; and to clarify matters further, the Gupta Chandragupta is often phonetically dismembered as ‘Chandra-Gupta’ or ‘Chandra Gupta’. Unfortunately there would be another Gupta Chandra-Gupta. The founder of the Gupta dynasty is therefore designated as Chandra-Gupta I – which naturally brings to mind the Mauryan Chandragupta. (Here the Gupta founder will be called Chandra-Gupta I and his Mauryan counterpart Chandragupta Maurya.) Coincidence, however, continues. As well as a name, the Gupta founder shares with his Mauryan predecessor a shadowy profile, a reputation for important but doubtful conquests, and the misfortune of being hopelessly upstaged by a more illustrious successor – Ashoka in the case of Chandragupta Maurya, Samudra-Gupta in the case of Chandra-Gupta I.

Of earlier Guptas before Chandra-Gupta I, a Sri Gupta and a Ghatotkacha Gupta are listed in inscriptions. The former would be remembered solely for having endowed a place of worship in Bihar for Chinese Buddhists. By the third century AD the first Chinese monks had begun trickling back along the Karakoram route to tour the sites associated with the Buddha’s life. For these foreign pilgrims to the Buddhist ‘Holy Land’ Sri Gupta built a temple; when first noticed in the fifth century, it was already in ruins. Sri Gupta was probably not a Buddhist but was raja of some minor polity near or within erstwhile Magadha. He was succeeded by his son Ghatotkacha. Their origins are unknown; their caste may have been vaisya.

Chandra-Gupta I was Ghatotkacha’s son. He is regarded as founder of the dynasty partly because he assumed a new title, partly because later Gupta chronology is calculated from what is taken to be the date of his accession (320 or 321 AD), and partly because by marriage or conquest he acquired more territory and authority than he inherited. The new title was Maharajadhiraja, ‘great raja of rajas’, an Indian adaptation of the Persian ‘king of kings’ as previously adopted by the Kushanas. Its assumption seems premature, but lofty titles and epithets would be important to the Guptas. They would soon up the stakes to paramaharajadhiraja and even rajarajadhiraja, ‘king of kings-of-kings’.

Presumably the title reflected growing ambitions. Chandra-Gupta I was the first of his line to feature on coins. According to the Puranas, his territory stretched along the Ganga from Magadha (southern Bihar) to Prayaga (the later Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh). Whether he conquered this rich swathe of the Gangetic heartland and, if so, from whom, is not known. Magadha, for instance, or part of it, may have come to him as a marriage settlement. Kumaradevi, his chief queen, was a Licchavi and so a descendant of one of those 7707 Licchavi knights-raja who had been defeated by Ajatashatru seven hundred years previously. The Licchavis had a distinguished pedigree which was doubtless highly desirable to unknowns like the Guptas. But the importance the Guptas attached to this union was of an altogether higher order. Chandra-Gupta I’s successor would style himself not ‘son of a Gupta father’ but ‘son of a Licchavi daughter’. There are even coins showing king and queen together, an unprecedented development; they bear, as well as the king’s name, that of ‘Kumaradevi Licchavayah’. It is known that the Licchavis had acquired territory in Nepal and it may be that ‘they had taken possession of Pataliputra, the city which had been built and fortified many centuries earlier for the express purpose of curbing their restless spirit.’⁸ Certainly it is probable that the Guptas and the Licchavis ruled adjacent territories ‘and that the two kingdoms were united under Chandra-Gupta I by his marriage with Kumaradevi’.⁹

THE IMPERIAL GUPTAS Probable Succession

Only under their son Samudra-Gupta does the dynasty emerge from obscurity. Once again this is mostly thanks to the survival of a single inscription. Like Kharavela’s, it advances extravagant claims, but, like Rudradaman’s, these claims are substantiated by other epigraphic and numismatic evidence. The inscription is probably the most famous in all India. Written in a script known as Gupta Brahmi (more elaborate than Ashoka Brahmi), and composed in classical Sanskrit verse and prose, its translation is often credited to James Prinsep of Ashoka fame, although it had been known and partially translated by earlier scholars. Its idiom and language echo that of Rudradaman. So does Samudra-Gupta’s choice of site; for as if aspiring to Mauryan hegemony, his panegyric appears as an addition to the Edicts of Ashoka on one of those highly polished Ashokan pillars.

The pillar stands in the city of Allahabad where, soon after Prinsep’s death, another Ashokan pillar, or part of it, was found in the possession of a contractor who used it as a road-roller. British antiquarians were mortified. A similar fate had almost befallen the pillar with the Samudra-Gupta epigraph. It had been uprooted in the eighteenth century and was discovered by Prinsep’s colleagues lying half-buried in the ground. They re-erected it on a new pedestal and designed an Achaemenid-style replacement for its missing capital. Supposedly a lion, the capital ‘resembles nothing so much as a stuffed poodle on top of an inverted flower pot’, wrote Alexander Cunningham, the father of Indian archaeology in the nineteenth century.

Cunningham also deduced that the Allahabad column had been shifted once before. Evidently later Muslim rulers had come to see these spectacular monoliths as a challenge to the excellence both of their sovereignty and their transport. They had therefore attempted to relocate them as totemic embellishments to their palatial courts. The truncated pillar which now tops Feroz Shah’s palace in Delhi originally stood near Khizrabad higher up the Jamuna. A contemporary (thirteenth-century) account describes how it was toppled onto a capacious pillow, then manoeuvred onto a forty-two-wheeler cart and hauled to the river by 8400 men. Lashed to a fleet of river transports, it was finally brought to Delhi in triumph.

Just so, the Allahabad pillar had apparently been shifted downriver from its original site in Kaushambi. It was meant to enhance the pretensions of the Allahabad fort as rebuilt by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the late sixteenth century. Akbar’s son Jahangir would add his own inscription to those of Ashoka and Samudra-Gupta; and thus it is that scions of each of north India’s three greatest dynasties – Maurya, Gupta and Mughal – share adjacent column inches in the heart of Allahabad, a city whose further claim to fame is as the home of a fourth great dynasty, that of the Nehru-Gandhis.

Miraculously, all that shunting around of the Allahabad pillar little damaged its inscriptions. That of Samudra-Gupta, if not posthumous, dates from near the end of his reign, which was a long one. He is thought to have succeeded as maharajadhiraja, or been so nominated by his father, in C335, and to have died in C380. The inscription may therefore be of about 375 and, with forty years’ achievements to cover, it has much to tell. The most important sections consist of long lists of kings and regions subdued by ‘the prowess of his arm in battle’, otherwise ‘the arm that rose up so as to pass all bounds’; indeed the pillar itself ‘is, as it were, an arm of the earth’ extended in a gesture of command.¹⁰ Some historians take these strong-arm conquests to be arranged in chronological order and, on that basis, have divided them into separate ‘campaigns’. Thus the first campaign seems to have taken Samudra-Gupta west where, with the strength of his arm, he ‘uprooted’ kingdoms in the Bareilly and Mathura regions of what is now Uttar Pradesh and in neighbouring Rajasthan. These were incorporated into the Gupta kingdom.

Next he headed south down the eastern seaboard and, perhaps in the course of several campaigns, elbowed aside a dozen more rivals. He turned back only after capturing Vishnugopa, the Pallava king of Kanchipuram (near Madras). Further campaigns in the north saw Gupta forces overrunning most of Bengal, ‘exterminating’ independent republics like that of the Yaudheyas west of Delhi, and establishing Gupta rule throughout the ancient arya-varta (the Aryan homeland – roughly the modern states of West Bengal, Bihar, UP, Madhya Pradesh and the eastern parts of Rajastan and the Panjab). This became the core region of Gupta rule, within which numerous tribal peoples were also deprived of their autonomy and where most extant inscriptions of the early Guptas have been found. Further afield the Kushanas in Gandhara, Great Satrap Rudradaman’s descendants in Gujarat and Malwa, various rulers in Assam and Nepal, and the kings of Sri Lanka and ‘other islands’ (which could mean the Indianised kingdoms of south-east Asia) are all said to have acknowledged Samudra-Gupta’s sovereignty and to have solicited his favour with deferential missions, handsome gifts and desirable maidens.

Now indisputably ‘the unconquered conqueror of unconquered kings’, Samudra-Gupta stood on the threshold of a pan-Indian empire. Other favourite epithets describe him as ‘conqueror of the four quarters of the earth’ and ‘a god dwelling on earth’. He performed the horse-sacrifice; 100,000 cows were distributed as gifts, presumably to his brahman supporters. His coins reveal Vaishnavite leanings but, as a world conqueror, he was seen not just as a devotee of Vishnu but as an emanation or incarnation of that deity. Universal dominion was his. Besides the Garuda symbol of Vishnu, some of his coins feature the one-umbrella of a samrat. Its welcome shade was seen to engulf the political landscape as he turned the cakravartin’s wheel of world-rule.

But what kind of empire was this? Not, it seems, a continually intrusive one. Gupta rhetoric had perhaps outstripped reality; alternatively its richly allusive phrasing may simply have been misinterpreted. For a close scrutiny of Samudra-Gupta’s rule reveals little of the bureaucratic interventionism associated with Mauryan empire; and despite the best efforts of patriotic scholarship, the claims advanced by zealous nationalists about his ‘unifying India’ and arousing a nation are hard to sustain. He may indeed have been ‘a man of genius who may fairly claim the title of the Indian Napoleon’;¹¹ the Allahabad inscription certainly refutes the idea that only foreigners have conquered India. But it was a conquest to little lasting political purpose other than dynastic gratification. Just as the celebrity of the Guptas was only perceived after the translation of the Allahabad inscription in the nineteenth century, so a deeper design for their empire was only discovered in the twentieth century. ‘Far from the Guptas reviving nationalism it was nationalism that revived the Guptas,’ writes Kosambi.¹²

In such championship, Indian nationalism reveals as much about its own ambiguities as about those of the Guptas. Thus we learn that Samudra-Gupta ‘was not moved by a lust for conquest for its own sake. He worked for an international system of brotherhood and peace replacing that of violence, war and aggression.’¹³ A less likely candidate for the Gandhian mantle of non-aggressive satyagrahi it would be hard to find. Nor is this a very convincing explanation for Samudra-Gupta’s failure to consolidate his conquests. In the Deccan and elsewhere beyond the frontiers of his Gangetic arya-varta, he had made no attempt at annexation. ‘Uprooted’ kings were reinstated, their territories restored, and the Gupta forces withdrawn. A one-off tribute was exacted and on this the Gupta court waxed wealthy, with conspicuous patronage of the arts and a prolific output of the beautifully minted gold coins to which the Guptas first owed their ‘golden’ reputation. But unlike the directly administered empire of the Mauryas, this was at best a web of feudatory arrangements and one which, lacking an obvious bureaucratic structure, left the sovereignty of the feudatories largely intact.

In the fourth century BC the Mauryas had been able to extend their rule into politically virgin territories where state-formation, if it existed at all, had been in its infancy. Ashoka had carefully noted several foreign kings in his inscriptions but within India he found not one sovereign worthy of being so named; the ‘Cholas’ and ‘Keralaputras’ were families or clans; even Kalinga was just a place and a people. In such a vacuum, Mauryan empire had a pioneering quality and was necessarily one of agricultural settlement, administrative decree and fiscal organisation.

Six hundred years later the Guptas may have found a similar situation in Bengal and have pursued similar policies there. Elsewhere they faced more advanced opponents who were already administering their own states and taxing their own subjects. The submission of all these now carefully named and previously unconquered kings was, of course, most gratifying; ‘the Beloved of the Gods’ had been merely a raja, a ‘king’; the Guptas were maharajadhirajas, ‘kings of kings’. On the other hand they also recognised the difficulty of trying permanently to engross such distant and confident kingdoms. It was more expedient to content themselves with the rich pickings of conquest and to retain the option of perhaps repeating this feat when more such pickings had accumulated.

It also seems that the criteria associated with the status of cakravartin did not include sustained government or direct control. In the case of distant rulers a nominal submission looks to have been sufficient, while of those nearer at hand regular attendance on the cakravartin was also required. As will emerge, a world-ruler did not actually have to rule the world; it was enough that the world should acknowledge him as such; in fact his status as a maharajadhiraja was dependent on the survival of rajas, both within and beyond his arya-varta, who were powerful enough to justify the title. ‘The point here was not to do away with other kings as such and produce a single, absolute kingship, blessed by a monotheist deity, for all India.’ Tributary rajas, or kings, were essential as validating and magnifying agents. In the same way as local cults and lesser deities were harnessed to the personae of Lords Vishnu or Shiva, so lesser rulers were inducted into an enhancing relationship with the ‘world-ruler’. Precedence and paramountcy were what mattered, not governance or integration. ‘What distinguished an imperial court politically, and especially one whose king claimed to be the universal king of India, was that it was primarily a society of kings.’¹⁴

Samudra-Gupta’s immediate successors maintained his elevated status and continued his policies. No inscription as detailed as the Allahabad testimonial is available for any of them, but from minor inscriptions, coins and literary sources it is clear that the Gupta ‘empire’ now climbed to its ambiguous zenith. There were, however, setbacks and compromises. A sixth-century drama tells of a Rama-Gupta who is thought to have briefly succeeded Samudra-Gupta and who attempted to ‘uproot’ the Western Satraps in Malwa.¹⁵ The attempt went badly wrong. Rama-Gupta was defeated and, when he tried to disengage, he was informed that the price of escape would be the surrender of his queen. According to a much later biography, the Shaka Satrap sorely coveted the lovely Queen Dhruvadevi. No doubt she had been represented to him as lotus-eyed, with thighs like banana stems, and all the other ripe attributes of desirable womanhood as detailed in textual tradition and epitomised in the yaksi temptresses of Mathura and Sanchi sculpture. Aflame with desire, ‘the lustful Shaka king’ was adamant; Rama-Gupta, hopelessly unworthy of such a desirable consort, conceded defeat and agreed to hand her over.

But the ignominy was too much for Rama-Gupta’s younger brother. The latter somehow disguised himself as the shapely Dhruvadevi, was duly given entry to the enemy camp, and promptly slew the Satrap. He must also have made his escape for, Rama-Gupta having been irrevocably disgraced by this affair, it was the righteous brother who now took over the reins of empire as Chandra-Gupta II. He may have had to kill Rama-Gupta in the process; more certainly it was he who eventually claimed the hand of Dhruvadevi.

Not surprisingly Chandra-Gupta II’s main offensive was a continuation of this struggle against the Shaka Satraps. Judging by inscriptions in and around Sanchi he seems to have been in eastern Malwa for some years, presumably while he conducted the necessary campaigns. Patience was eventually rewarded. By the year 409 Chandra-Gupta II was issuing silver coins to replace those of the Satraps. The Shaka territories in western India had been annexed to those of the Guptas, and of the Western Satraps no more is heard.

The Guptas thus secured their western frontier and inherited whatever remained of the cultural traditions established by the Sanskrit-loving Rudradaman and his successors. On the evidence of a Buddhist site in northern Gujarat (Devnimori) which may date to about 375, it has been suggested that Gupta sculpture and architecture owed several motifs and design features to western India. It may also be significant that the cultural achievements usually associated with the Guptas are little in evidence in the fourth century and only become established after Chandra-Gupta II’s conquest of the Satraps.

Success against the Satraps also gave the Guptas access to the ports of Gujarat and to the profits of its international maritime trade. There and throughout central India, just as the Satraps had once become embroiled with their Shatavahana trading neighbours, so the Guptas became involved with the Vakatakas, the dynasty which had succeeded the Shatavahanas as the dominant power in the Deccan.

For once, war was not the outcome; perhaps the campaigns against the Satraps were taking their toll. Instead, the Guptas opted for a dynastic alliance whereby Chandra-Gupta II’s daughter was married to Rudrasena II, the Vakataka king. The latter soon died and during the ensuing regency (C390–410) it was Prabhavati, this Gupta queen, who as regent controlled the Vakataka state in accordance with Gupta policy. Thereafter the Vakatakas continued as allies and associates of the imperial Guptas.

Other dynastic pairings suggest that the Guptas often made intelligent use of the prestige which attached to the maharajadhiraja’s bed-chamber. Prabhavati was Chandra-Gupta II’s daughter not by the coveted Dhruvadevi but by a princess of the Naga dynasty. This was an ancient lineage which seems to have re-established itself in Mathura and other parts to the west and south of the Jamuna in the wake of Kushana retraction. Since Samudra-Gupta had earlier ‘violently exterminated’ the Naga king, it would seem that marriage was used to consolidate existing acquisitions as well as to neutralise external rivals.

Chandra-Gupta II, like his predecessor Samudra-Gupta and his successor Kumara-Gupta, reigned for about forty years. Such longevity over three generations is exceptional and must have been another important factor in the stability of Gupta rule. Of further Gupta feats there is little evidence, the only notable exceptions being a doubtful record of far-flung campaigns by Chandra-Gupta II and an important defensive role undertaken during the reign of Kumara-Gupta.

The former, the campaigns sometimes attributed to Chandra-Gupta II, are recorded in a short inscription engraved on a pillar located at Mehrauli, once a village on the outskirts of Delhi. The pillar, unlike the stone pillars, or lats, of Ashoka, is made of iron, and the village is better known as the site where Delhi’s twelfth-century sultans would build the renowned Qutb minar and mosque. It is in fact the famously rust-resistant ‘Iron Pillar’ which now stands in the main courtyard of the mosque and attracts hordes of visitors, many of them convinced that wish-fulfilment awaits those whose arms are long enough to embrace its trunk. Fortunately out of reach, as it might otherwise have been erased by this activity, the inscription commemorates the erection of the pillar as ‘a lofty standard of the divine Vishnu’. Its donor was one ‘Chandra’, supreme world conqueror ‘on whose arm fame was inscribed by the sword when in battle in the Vanga countries’ and who, having ‘crossed in warfare the seven mouths of the [river] Sindhu’ defeated the ‘Vahlikas’. He also perfumed the breezes of the southern ocean with his prowess. Unfortunately no date is mentioned and, worse still, there is no sign of the word ‘Gupta’. ‘Chandra’ could therefore as well have been a Chandra-sena or a Chandra-varman, both attested kings of the period. And if a Chandra-Gupta, which one? Straining for clarification, scholars, even long-armed epigraphists, find their wishes unfulfilled. The identity of this fragrant ‘Chandra’ remains a mystery, as does the technology which enabled Guptan smelters to cast an iron obelisk of such rust-resistant purity that sixteen hundred monsoons have scarcely pitted its surface or defaced its inscription.

There is also doubt about this Chandra’s listed conquests. ‘Vanga’, like Anga, was an ancient janapada in west Bengal; the ‘Sindhu’ is usually the Indus; and the ‘Vahlikas’ have been taken to be the Bactrians. But military successes at such distant poles of the subcontinent strain credulity. In the west no corroborative evidence of Gupta intervention beyond the Indus, let alone beyond the Hindu Kush, is available. However, most of Bengal definitely was within the Gupta ambit. In fact the Guptas were the first north Indian dynasty to extend their rule into and across the heavily forested maze of swamps and waterways that was the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta. Hitherto little exposed to Aryanising influences except along its western seaboard, nearly all of Bengal was now claimed by the Guptas, and it seems reasonable to suppose an accelerated process of drainage, clearance and settlement. From the ruins of the Gupta empire would emerge east and central Bengal’s first historical states, amongst which Vanga would be eminent.