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BETWEEN THE DEATH of Ashoka in 231 BC and the advent of Gupta power in 320 AD, India’s ancient history plummets again to a murky obscurity. ‘Certainties are not many,’ bemoans a writer on the period.¹ Prior to the Mauryas our vision is blurred by the ambiguity of mainly literary sources whose purpose is suspect and whose dates are vague. After the Mauryas the source materials are more varied: coins furnish the names of a host of otherwise forgotten kings; other archaeological finds, plus inscriptions, provide additional information about guilds and religious establishments; and texts – Indian, Graeco-Roman and Chinese – hint at a wider historical context and testify to the importance of trade. Yet the sum total of these sources remains inadequate and, in respect of the successor states of the Mauryan empire, certainties are indeed ‘not many’. How far the writ of these states ran, whence came their rulers and when they reigned, even the order in which their dynasties succeeded one another, are matters of dispute. The Puranas continue to prove tantalisingly unreliable; and the greater variety of sources often serves only to introduce contradictions. A long period of political confusion is deduced and, pre-modern history necessarily being a reflection of such sources, this confusion is taken to indicate instability, fragmentation and turbulence. The five hundred years between the Mauryas and the Guptas become, in fact, ‘India’s Dark Age’.²

While Rome beamed its civilisation into three continents, handsomely documenting its conquests in the process, Pataliputra retreated into insignificance and silence. In India no king or dynasty would either scale the heights of Ashoka’s lofty universalism or cast such long imperial shadows across the subcontinent. Inscriptions claiming otherwise are usually couched in bombastic phrases which should be treated with caution. Ideals of legitimacy and empire would remain: Ayodhya’s utopian Ram-raj (the rule of Lord Rama) would continue to exercise a fascination; so would inclusive concepts of a ‘one umbrella’ sovereignty as claimed by the Nandas and of a world-ruling Cakravartin (literally ‘wheel-turner’) as featured in Buddhist teaching. But the reality was of many jostling umbrellas, of no consensus on legitimacy, and of no universal sovereignty.

Worse still from the viewpoint of latter-day nationalists, many of the dynasties credited with contributing to this turbulence would be of non-Indian origin. In some histories this ‘Dark Age’ thus also becomes an ‘Age of Invasions’ characterised by foreign hordes from Bactria, Parthia, and the wilds of Turkestan pouring across the north-west frontier. They would overrun all of what is now Pakistan and strike deep into the Gangetic heartland and central India. To orthodox minds such disasters were no worse than was to be expected of the dreaded Kali Yug. Vedic values and brahmanic authority had been undermined by the pushy teachings of the Buddha and his rivals. An earlier spirit of metaphysical enquiry had given way to an unnatural and populist egalitarianism. Fickle sources of royal patronage had been diverted; the neglect of ritual obligations had necessarily prejudiced political legitimacy. A disrespectful age got the discredited history it deserved.

Yet, politics apart, the half-millennium which straddles the birth of Christ was not all petty doom and patriotic gloom. On closer inspection the ‘Dark Age’ proves to be softly illuminated by the steady glow of cultural integration, especially in peninsular India. There and elsewhere the gloom was also fitfully dispelled by dazzling shafts of artistic, scientific and commercial innovation. Indeed, if an age be judged in terms of art and literature, the tag of ‘classical’ belongs less to the much-studied decades of the great Mauryas and more to the quickly dismissed centuries of their less distinguished and often non-Indian successors.

The Mauryas, for instance, had done little for India’s artistic heritage. If one excludes his pillars and their Achaemenid-style capitals, Ashoka’s numerous endowments, principally stupas and viharas, seem to have been modest affairs of brick and timber. It was only under his successors that stone became established as the supreme medium of artistic expression. To the first two centuries BC and AD may be attributed the magnificent sculptural reliefs of the Bharhut, Sanchi and Amaravati stupas. Typically crammed with scenes of popular devotion and, judging by their inscriptions, often paid for by commercial and religious benefactors, these were not manifestations of royal prestige nor products of courtly largesse. Ascribing them to a particular dynasty is thus misleading. Rather should they be attributed to a pious merchant class, proud of its skills and increasingly interested in the security and patronage afforded by religious centres in an age of political uncertainty.

Much the same applies to the first of a long succession of ‘rock-cut cathedrals’, now more prosaically known as ‘cave temples’, which date from the last century BC onward. They are found principally in western India, inland from Bombay, where sudden folds and gashes at the edge of the Deccan plateau expose long, snaking strata of sheer rock. No doubt here were already natural caves which, affording secluded shelter and yielding readily to the sculptor’s chisel, inspired the idea of more elaborate excavations. There followed entire monastic establishments with prayer chambers, deep pillared halls, lofty stupas, finely fretted façades, and airy meditation cells, all connected by galleries and staircases and all cut and carved into the solid rock.

The skills involved appear to have derived from a contemporary tradition of working in the hard timbers of India. In the north, in the first centuries AD, similar skills and similar mainly Buddhist patronage gave birth to two distinctive schools of more portable sculpture. One, deeply indebted to the aesthetic of the Graeco-Roman world, depicts figures from Indian tradition as Apollo Belvederes attended by a ‘classical’ repertoire of cherubs and acanthus leaves. Fashioned in stucco or carved from a hard grey-black schist, these figures and motifs are particularly associated with Taxila and the north-west frontier region (hence the ‘Gandhara school’). The other school is very different. A gloriously voluptuous celebration of nature’s mainly female charms, it uses a fleshy pink sandstone flecked with white spots from the region around the city of Mathura where, on the tourist highway from Delhi to Agra, a fine collection of both Gandhara and Mathura figures now languishes largely unseen in the city’s museum.

As for literature, in the second century BC Patanjali, a Sanskrit grammarian who wrote a commentary on Panini, compiled the standard text on yoga. Mighty compendia of other important human activities followed, with the Manusmriti (‘Manu’s code’ of law), the Kamasutra of Vatsyana, and Kautilya’s Arthasastra all datable in their final form to the second century AD. Meanwhile a Buddhist writer, Asvaghosha of Magadha, may be credited with the first Indian drama; he was a contemporary and protégé of King Kanishka, who would be the age’s nearest equivalent to an Ashoka. Subsequently the great tradition of Sanskrit drama got off to a more certain start with Bhasa, whose prolific output of plays probably dates from the third century AD. A debt to his work would be acknowledged by Kalidasa, the Sanskrit Shakespeare, who may have been a near-contemporary although he is usually assigned to the cultural efflorescence that awaited the Guptas after 320. Perhaps the ‘dark’ centuries on either side of the year zero should be seen more as a sprightly preface to this ‘golden age of the Guptas’ than as a dire postscript to that of the Mauryas.

The ‘Dark Age’ looks to have been one of enlightenment and, even more paradoxically, the ‘Age of Invasions’ looks to have been one of expansion. For every incursion by non-Indians from central Asia, there is good evidence for an excursion by Indians into south-east Asia – or even back into central Asia. Hellenised kingdoms on the upper Indus are matched by Indianised kingdoms on the lower Mekong, Roman trading stations on the Indian coast by Indian trading stations on the Malay peninsula. Just as the archaeology of northern India is being invaded by uncompromising images of Greek adventurers and booted warlords from beyond the Oxus, so that of Sumatra and Sinkiang is invaded by serene Buddhas and handsome stupas. That first Indian drama by Asvaghosa came to light not in some Magadhan archive but in a horde of manuscripts found in the oasis city of Turfan, between the Takla Makan and the Gobi desert on China’s silk route. For every inscription in Greek or Sogdian script that is chiselled into India’s rocks another in Brahmi or Kharosthi is etched in the cliffs of Afghanistan or echoed in a stele on the coast of Vietnam.

In short, the diaspora of India’s culture began just as India itself apparently buckled before a succession of intruders. Both processes would continue, with intermissions, for the next two thousand years. Indeed the great paradox of political vulnerability in the midst of commercial and cultural dynamism may be considered one of Indian history’s distinctive features. If for no other reason than to explore the genesis of such a phenomenon, the underrated interlude between the glorious Mauryas and the golden Guptas merits attention.