India: A History. Revised and Updated (27 page)

Moreover, the link between trade and dominion was not just one of timing. ‘The prosperity ushered in by trade and the need to control the trade routes is apparent in the sites chosen by the Shatavahanas for their earliest inscriptions.’
¹⁸
Inland trade routes converged on the Shatavahanas’
west coast ports from Ujjain and the Gangetic states as well as from the Shatavahanas’ capital at Paithan in the Deccan. In both cases they had to thread their way down the rocky defiles of the Western Ghats. The Shatavahanas’ earliest inscriptions are at cave sites clearly related to these passes and defiles. Not without reason did one of the earliest Shatavahana kings describe himself as
daksinapatha-pati
, ‘the lord of the
daksinapatha
(the “southern route”)’.

The
Periplus
describes vast wagon trains heading down from Ujjain with the exotic produce of the Kushana domains and beyond – spikenard, saffron and costus (a medicinal root) from the Himalayas, ivory and bdellium (a resin), muslins and silks, agate and carnelian, ebony and teak. The trade may go back to Mauryan times since a fragment of an Ashokan Rock Edict has been found at the port of Sopara. But it was the Shatavahanas who were responsible for developing it. They not only controlled the trade routes but also encouraged the settlement of lands which would supply both the ports and the staging posts. It was to further this programme of settlement and strategic control that the Shatavahana dynasty, though orthodox in its adherence to Vedic sacrifice and deities, patronised and encouraged Buddhist establishments as well as making land grants to brahmans.

Buddhism, as noted, had become identified with commerce and manufacturing. Not only did Buddhist doctrine encourage the investment of resources which would otherwise be wasted on sacrifices; it also denied caste taboos on food and travel which made trade so hazardous for the orthodox. Monastic establishments thus became foci of inland trade. Beside and below the extant cave temples it is thought that there stretched bazaars and lodging houses, stables, holding pens and joinery shops, all of course built in long-since-perished timber. The monasteries thus served the functions of caravanserais. And, though initially recipients of royal grants, they soon attracted private donations and mercantile endowments. As guild-members or as individuals, weavers, grain merchants, basket makers, leather workers, shipping agents, ivory carvers, smiths, salt merchants and a host of other craftsmen and dealers are recorded as donors in the cave temple inscriptions. Many hailed from distant parts of India; some even described themselves as
Yavanas
; all clearly had a vested interest in the booming commerce and so in the religious establishments which made it possible.

The nature of Aryanisation within the subcontinent is still debated; so is that of India’s growing influence outside the subcontinent. Were Funan and all the later Indianised states in south-east Asia the result of trading
links, of missionary activities, of migration, or of conquest? Should they be called ‘colonies’? Or were their Indian credentials simply the result of local elites espousing imported ideas of kingship, cultural sophistication and social differentiation? Conquests like Rome’s contemporary triumphs in Gaul and Britain can be discounted. It is much more likely that the processes responsible for the diaspora of Indian ideas in south-east Asia mirrored those at work in the western Deccan where trade, religious institutions and royal authority operated in consort to promote security, extend agrarian settlement and stimulate state-formation.

7
Gupta Gold
c300–500 AD

REDEEMED BY RUDRADAMAN

J
UST OUTSIDE
the town of Junagadh in the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat an isolated massif rears abruptly from low-lying fields and pastures. This is Girnar, or ‘Giri-nagar’ (‘city-on-the-hill’), one of the most remarkable mountains in India,
¹
whose several peaks, some over a thousand metres high, are strung about with a garland of the precariously situated temples so beloved of the Jains. Throughout the year a trickle of Jain pilgrims from all over Gujarat and Rajasthan converges on Junagadh to climb the mountain and make a
parikrama
(meritorious circuit) of its craggy shrines.

Their route begins along a trail of deceptive ease which, issuing from the west gate of the town, quickly leads to a bridge. Thence, by the shortest of detours, the curious may inspect Girnar’s least-visited attraction. Roughly seven metres by ten, the hump-backed mass of granite that bears Ashoka’s Major Rock Edict can hardly compare with the beetling cliffs and the airy vistas that lie ahead. Wayfaring Jains usually give it a miss. Whether bent to their staves or dangling from doolies (seats for one, suspended from a pole borne by two), they press on to the ethereal heights of their local Olympus.

Isolated and ignored in this remote extremity of the subcontinent, the Ashoka rock, ‘converted by the aid of the iron pen … into a book’ (as James Tod put it), yet retains the capacity to stir an indologist’s dusty emotions. Its improbable location speaks volumes for the extent of ancient India’s empires, and it is vastly more impressive than the much-reduced replica which slumps, equally ignored, outside the main entrance of New Delhi’s National Museum. It is also rather more informative. On close inspection, the rain-blackened rock is found to be neatly etched not only with the ‘pin men’ script of the Ashoka Brahmi inscription but also with
two much later records. Both relate to repairs carried out on an irrigation system in the vicinity of Junagadh which has long since disappeared. One is of the reign of Skanda-Gupta, last of the five great Gupta emperors, and so dates from the mid-fifth century
AD
; an important and colourful piece of verse, it will be noticed later. The other is earlier (150
AD
) and even more informative. It tells of the history of the dam, how it was constructed by Chandragupta Maurya’s governor (hence, as noted, providing the only evidence for the first Maurya’s conquests in Gujarat), and how subsequently Ashoka’s provincial governor, evidently a
Yavana
, added new conduits or canals. Thanks to such improvements, more land was no doubt cleared and more settlers flocked to Junagadh, whose fine soil must have rewarded the engineers’ skills with double cropping and handsome yields.

Sadly, though, according to this second inscription the whole irrigation system had since suffered severe storm damage. In fact it was thought to be beyond repair. Then ‘Mahakshtrapa (‘Great Satrap’) Rudradaman’ decreed otherwise. Under the direction of his minister Suvisakha, a Pahlava (Parthian), the necessary rebuilding had been put in hand and the system was now, in 150
AD
, again in operation. According to the inscription, the Great Satrap Rudradaman had done all this ‘without oppressing the people of the town or the province by exacting taxes, forced labour, donations or the like’. It had been paid for entirely out of his own treasury. Not unreasonably he claimed to be the most undemanding of rulers.

This episode, although presented as testimony of Rudradaman’s indomitable character, may also be taken as symptomatic of his redemptive reign, both of which the inscription describes in fulsome detail. For Rudradaman had inherited a kingdom which was every bit as badly in need of repair as the Junagadh dam. He was in fact one of those, probably Scythian, ‘Western Satraps’ who were offshoots of the Shaka kingdom established by Maues, Azes and Spalirises in Gandhara and the Panjab and which succeeded that of the Bactrian Greeks. In the Panjab the Shakas had subsequently been eased out by the Kushana, but in Gujarat their Western Satraps had soldiered on. Throughout the late first century
AD
they ruled, initially as
kshtrapas
(satraps) of Kushana overlords like Kanishka, then as increasingly independent
maha-kshtrapas
(great satraps) of Kanishka’s less illustrious successors. To their domains in Gujarat were added parts of what is now Rajasthan, while a satellite satrapy was established north of the Narmada in Malwa (now in Madhya Pradesh). Thence, from Ujjain, Malwa’s ancient capital, the Satraps had become embroiled with their richly trading Shatavahana neighbours in the western Deccan. The
Periplus
records the Satraps’ occupation of Broach and their blockading of Kalyan under a
leader called Nahapana, while, inland, inscriptions in the cave temples of Nasik and Junnar further attest the Shaka presence in Shatavahana territory.

It seems, however, that the Shatavahanas did not long suffer this indignity. Under the great Gautamiputra Satakarni they successfully repelled the Satraps and completely ‘uprooted’ Shaka rule in Malwa. A large hoard of Shaka coins found near Nasik, most of which had been restruck by the Shatavahana king, would seem to confirm this victory. The Satraps were forced back into Gujarat and immediately began planning their revenge. A certain Chashtana, from his coins a wily-looking strategist, was chosen to lead the Shaka forces, and duly established his own satrapal dynasty. The task of restoring the power of the Western Satraps then started in earnest and, according to the Junagadh inscription, had now, in 150
AD
, been successfully completed by Chashtana’s grandson, the Great Satrap Rudradaman.

Rudradaman had actually done rather better than that. As well as twice defeating the Shatavahanas and reconquering the whole of Malwa, he claimed to have made extensive acquisitions in Rajasthan and Sind and to have routed the Yaudheyas. The latter were
ksatriyas
who still followed their hereditary calling as professional warriors and who retained a republican form of government in their territory to the west of Delhi. Presumably Rudradaman encountered them somewhere further south, perhaps in Rajasthan; certainly he did not occupy their homeland. Whereas the claimed conquests of, say, Kharavela of Kalinga positively invite suspicion, Rudradaman’s are generally plausible. He avoids the usual clichés about an empire reaching from the ocean to the Himalayas; not one of his elephants had ever been watered in the Ganga. His coins, mostly silver, describe him simply as ‘Mahakshtrapa’; their royal busts, if we may assume that they are portraits, have been taken to ‘show a man of vivacious and cheerful disposition’.
²

The Junagadh inscription, while failing to elaborate on this cheerful disposition, does add much personal detail. Rudradaman staunchly upheld
dharma
, possibly in imitation of Ashoka, with whose Edicts he was so happy to share rock-space. He was also a fine swordsman and boxer, an excellent horseman, charioteer and elephant-rider, universally praised for his generosity and bounty, and far-famed for his knowledge of grammar, music, logic and ‘other great sciences’. Clearly he aspired to what he took to be an essentially Indian ideal of kingship; and he succeeded so well that thereafter his name (which unlike ‘Maues’ and ‘Azes’ was a decidedly Indian one) was ‘repeated by the venerable … as if it was another Veda demanding assiduous study and devout veneration and yielding the most precious
fruit’.
³
He also, his inscription claims, wrote both prose and verse which were ‘clear, agreeable, sweet, charming, beautiful, excelling in the proper use of words, and adorned’. Moreover, as if to prove his point, he had taken the novel and perhaps presumptuous decision to have his memorial written in classical Sanskrit. Rudradaman’s Junagadh inscription is in fact ‘the earliest known classical Sanskrit inscription of any extent’.
⁴

The records of Ashoka, Kharavela and Kanishka and all those Shatavahana cave inscriptions are in some form of Prakrit, usually Magadhi or Pali. These were the languages of everyday use which, since their adoption by early Buddhist and Jain commentators, had become the normal medium of record. Much-simplified derivatives of classical Sanskrit, the Prakrit languages have sometimes been unfairly likened to pidgin; after a further stage of adaptation, they would spawn the Indo-Aryan regional languages of today – Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Panjabi,
etc.
Sanskrit, on the other hand, remained a prestige language, imbued with sacral powers, reserved mainly for religious and literary purposes, and jealously guarded as well as principally understood by brahmans. Its unexpected emergence as a language of contemporary record in the second century
AD
, and its subsequent acceptance as the medium of courtly and intellectual discourse throughout India, may be taken as a sure sign of a brahmanical renaissance.

Such would indeed prove to be the case under the Guptas. The great era of all that is deemed classical in Indian literature, art and science was now dawning. It was this crescendo of creativity and scholarship, as much as the unevenly documented political achievements of the Guptas, which would make their age so golden; and it was to the wider use of Sanskrit and the exploration of its myriad subtleties that this awakening owed most.

In the development of languages the classical phase usually precedes the proliferation of vernacular derivatives; thus the Latin of Cicero, Virgil and Horace precedes the vulgarised vernacular from which the Romance languages developed. Sanskrit somehow reversed the process; it was making its great comeback when it should have been dying. Why this happened remains a puzzle. ‘The answer cannot be given in purely cultural terms,’ wrote D.D. Kosambi. A Marxist as well as a brahman, Kosambi sought an explanation in ‘the development of India’s productive systems’ and ‘the emergence of a special position for the brahman caste’.
⁵
Behind the glittering façade of Gupta culture, society was about to undergo the profound changes associated with the Indian version of feudalism. A gradual process of unsensational devolution, it would give a new impetus to the Aryanising primacy of both the brahmans and their language.