India: A History. Revised and Updated (30 page)

But if the temple was meant to guarantee the dam’s future security, it failed. Not even a trace of the irrigation system which prompted this unique series of inscriptions beneath the crags of Girnar remains. The rulers of Saurashtra soon deserted Junagadh, perhaps after another disastrous flood, and by 500 a new capital had been established at Vallabhi in the east of the peninsula. Only the hump-backed rock, converted into a book ‘by the aid of the iron pen’, still mutely protests the majesty of Junagadh’s distinguished benefactors.

A similar fate, redeemed only by the tenacity of tradition, now overtook the Gupta empire. After the death of Skanda-Gupta in c467, his nephew Budha-Gupta, then another nephew, his son and then his grandson continued to claim world dominion well into the sixth century. But their reigns were mostly brief and it is clear that by 510 other Guptas, who may or may not have been related to them, operated as independent rulers within the core area of the erstwhile empire. In that year the Huns, led by a formidable leader called Toramana, were again on the move. They overran Kashmir and the Panjab and defeated a Gupta army near Gwalior, thus extending their rule to Malwa. In the face of such disarray, even the fiction of the Guptas’ universal sovereignty was unsustainable. Their golden reputation fades from history as the famous gold coinage, debased under Skanda-Gupta, becomes crudely cast, increasingly stereotyped, of rare occurrence, and then non-existent.

THE GUPTA UTOPIA

‘Perfection has been attained,’ declares the last of the three Junagadh inscriptions. ‘While he [Skanda-Gupta] is reigning, verily no man among his subjects falls away from
dharma
; there is no one who is distressed, in poverty, in misery, avaricious, or who, worthy of punishment, is over-much put to torture.’ Such a glowing depiction of Gupta society is to be expected from a royal panegyric. It is, however, corroborated by an alien and presumably impartial eye-witness.

The people are very well off, without poll tax or official restrictions … The kings govern without corporal punishment; criminals are fined according to circumstance, lightly or heavily. Even in cases of repeated rebellion they only cut off the right hand. The king’s personal attendants, who guard him on the right and the left, have fixed salaries. Throughout the country the people kill no living thing nor drink wine, nor do they eat garlic or onions, with the exception of the Chandalas only.
¹⁶

To Fa Hian (Fa-hsien, Faxian, etc.), a Buddhist pilgrim from China who visited India in c400–410, Chandra-Gupta II’s realm was indeed something of a utopia. Descending to India by the Karakoram trail, Fa Hian travelled the length of the Gangetic basin in perfect safety as he visited everywhere of note associated with the Buddha’s life. Only the lot of the Chandalas he found unenviable; outcastes by reason of their degrading work as disposers of the dead, they were universally shunned and had to give warning of their approach so that fastidious caste-members could take cover. But no other sections of the population were notably disadvantaged, no other caste distinctions attracted comment from the Chinese pilgrim, and no oppressive caste ‘system’ drew forth his surprised censure. Peace and order prevailed. And if the peace was the peace of past conquests and the order the rigid social hierarchy of
varna
and the professional exclusivity of
jati
, no one was complaining.

From other sources we glimpse a society industrious as well as contented. Those highly influential guilds (
sreni
) regulated elaborate systems of quality control, pricing, distribution and training for every craft and calling. They also acted as bankers, even to the royal court; and their
sresthin
, or aldermen, met regularly in a joint council that has been likened to a chamber of commerce. Trade continued to flourish, both within India and overseas. When Fa Hian returned to China he did so not by the long overland route but aboard an Indian vessel sailing from Tamralipti in
Bengal. After a near-shipwreck off the Burma coast he reached ‘Ye-po-ti’, which could be Java, Sumatra or Malaya. There, as also in Indo-China, he reported that ‘Brahmans flourish although the law of the Buddha is not much known.’ After more nautical mishaps, he regained China, again in the company of brahmans and so probably aboard an Indian ship.

In Fa Hian’s account of India, Magadha is made to sound especially impressive. Its towns were the largest and its people the richest and most prosperous as well as the most virtuous. True, some Buddhist sites already partook of the archaeological. Kapilavastu, the Sakyas’ ancient capital and the Enlightened One’s birthplace, was ‘like a great desert’ with ‘neither king nor people’; and of Ashoka’s palace in Pataliputra only the ruins remained. But for a Buddhist there was also much to celebrate. Stupas in their thousands, some manytiered and of gigantic proportions, dotted the landscape – much as they still do today at centres outside India like Pagan in Burma. But then, unlike now, Buddhism still enjoyed the support of large sections of Indian opinion. The monasteries were well-endowed; their monks could be numbered in thousands. Eight centuries after the Buddha, only Sri Lanka was more Buddhist. For Samudra-Gupta it had been particularly gratifying to receive a Sri Lankan embassy whose gifts, coupled with a request for permission to build a monastery on the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment at Buddh Gaya, he took to represent a form of tribute.

Not much concerned with political affairs, Fa Hian says nothing of the Gupta court nor of Chandra-Gupta II, its then
maharajadhiraja.
Perhaps, as was normal during the dry season, the court was on the move, receiving the obeisances and consuming the produce of its subject kings or conducting hostilities with the Satraps. In Pataliputra, which along with Ujjain seems to have served as the Gupta capital, the Chinese visitor was more impressed by an annual festival. It was marked by a magnificent procession of some twenty wheeled stupas whose bristling towers accommodated images of the gods decorated with gold and silver as well as sitting figures of the Buddha attended by standing Boddhisatvas. As the procession approached the city Fa Hian watched ‘the
brahmacharis
come forth to offer their invitations; the Buddhas then, one after another, enter the city’.
¹⁷

As between the orthodox and the heterodox sects ecumenism was still the norm. The Guptas, although identifying themselves with Lord Vishnu and performing Vedic sacrifices, encouraged endowments to both Buddhist and brahman establishments with even-handed munificence. Yet the physical separation of the two communities, as implied in Fa Hian’s account, may be significant. Buddhist monasteries were usually located outside the
main centres of population and influence, near enough for collecting alms and instructing the laity but far enough for tranquillity and seclusion. The ‘
brahmacharis
’, on the other hand, technically brahman students but here implying the whole brahman educational establishment, were now located within the city and close to the court.

Hinduism as a religion with specific doctrines and practices was still unrecognisable. Arguably it still is. The criteria of orthodoxy lay – and lie – in conduct rather than belief. Deference and support to brahmans, acceptance of one’s caste, public participation in traditional rituals, festivals and pilgrimages, and the propitiation of familial or local deities remained of the essence. As already noted, concepts like those of
dharma
,
karma
and the transmigration of souls, though originally aired in the
Upanisads
and nowadays considered quintessentially Hindu, had hitherto been more zealously championed by the Buddhists. To the Buddhist practice of erecting and adorning stupas of dressed stone have also been traced the first experiments in stone architecture and in the devotional use of sculptural iconography. Only after achieving remarkable expertise in the portrayal of the Buddha figure and of animal and human, mainly female, figures did the stonemasons of Mathura and elsewhere turn to producing images of the deities of the orthodox ‘Hindu’ pantheon.

How the personae of these deities, especially Vishnu, Shiva and various forms of the mother-goddess, emerged – or converged (for all were composites) – and how they eventually displaced most of the earlier Vedic deities is not well-documented. Vedic sacrifices like the
aswamedha
remained essential to kingship during and long after the Gupta age, but from about this time onwards ‘we do not come across the case of a single individual ascribing his greatness or luck to a Vedic deity’.
¹⁸
Personal seals found in Bihar and UP usually bear the emblems of either Shiva or Vishnu, and the inscriptions of nearly all the dynasties of the age protest their devotion to some form of these same two deities. Indeed the convergence of the various Shaiva and Vaishnava personae, as well as their growing popularity, may have been partly the outcome of dominant dynasties like the Guptas co-opting the resources, divine and supernatural as well as political and economic, of their conquered feudatories.

This certainly seems to have been the case with many of the legends, incarnations, consorts and relatives associated with Vishnu, including his identification with Krishna (the Yadava deity) and with Vasudeva and Narayana, all cults which seem to have originated in the Mathura region and western India. In Malwa and central India a more popular Vaishnava cult of the period was that of Vishnu in his
Varaha
incarnation as a colossal
wild boar who, not unlike King Kong, hoists to safety a small and naked nymph representing the earth. The famous fifth-century sculptural representations of this myth at Eran, Udayagiri and elsewhere in eastern Malwa may well celebrate the incorporation of a local boar cult into the Vishnu persona as a result of Chandra-Gupta II’s long sojourn in the region while he fought the Satraps.

Whatever their genesis, sanction for this accretion and fusion of cults was provided by the
Puranas
and the epics as they were recast, expanded and written down during and after the Guptas. Brahmanic authority was thus gradually accorded to the new composite deities, and the sculptor responded by giving them concrete form. Awesome figures of legend, obscure local deities, and various fertility and tutelary spirits were duly transformed into worshippable images. Their identity with the gods and goddesses of orthodox scripture conferred prestige on them; at the same time it brought them within the brahmanic mainstream of what is now called the ‘Great Tradition’ of Hinduism.

It remained only to refine the nature of man’s relationship to the new generation of deities and to develop forms of worship suitable to it. This process may also have been influenced by Buddhist precedent in that the new relationship assumed a degree of divine proximity and compassion which is not often evident in the Vedas but is fundamental to legends concerning the Buddhist Boddhisatvas. The supplicant’s more personalised response, with its emphasis on devotion rather than propitiation, is evident in the famous
Bhagavad Gita
whose interpolation into the
Mahabharata
probably dates from the third to fourth centuries
AD
. But it was the much later
Bhakti
movement, drawing its inspiration and fervour from devotional practices in the south of India and Bengal, which would eventually endow Hinduism with its public fervour and its private intimacy of communion. Though seemingly at odds both with the dangerous business of Vedic ritual and the mind-boggling subtleties of Upanishadic metaphysics, this new devotional emphasis would become the most distinctive and endearing characteristic of what we now call Hinduism.

Instead of ‘Hinduism’, scholars sometimes use the term ‘brahmanism’ to distinguish the pre-
Bhakti
orthodoxies of the post-Vedic era from the teachings of the heterodox sects like the Buddhists and Jains. ‘Brahmanism’ would have been as meaningless to its supposed adherents as ‘Hinduism’, but the term does have the advantage of accommodating a variety of orthodox traits, including the authority accorded to the brahman caste, the innumerable cults to which brahmanical acceptance was extended, and the complex philosophical notion of
brahman
as an impersonal monotheistic
entity which, like the Word in Christianity, subsumed all deities, the human soul as well as the divine, and indeed all creation.

In the Vedas
brahma(n)
denotes hymn, prayer, sacred word, formulation of truth, substratum etc., ideas that developed later to signify, on the practical level, the title brahman for the person who possessed the qualities conveyed by such ideas, and, on the conceptual level, their abstract summation as the immutable universal principle.
¹⁹

Thus we learn that ‘the
brahmanas
attributed
brahma
power to the brahmans’, an unassailable observation but one of such elliptical import that it deters further enquiry by anyone ignorant of Sanskrit – a category which then as now included most Indians as well as nearly all non-Indians. For as will already be apparent, abstract terms like
brahman
pose insurmountable problems of translation. Their connotations change over the centuries and their associations, ramifying through the literary canopy like lianas, defy the lexicographer’s search for equivalent words in other languages.
Dharma
(‘religion’, ‘duty’, ‘order’),
artha
(‘wealth’, ‘politics’, ‘motive’),
danda
(‘authority’, ‘coercion’, ‘government’) and many other such concepts of crucial importance prove no less elusive. Conversely, English words like ‘divinity’, ‘sovereignty’, or ‘power’ have no exact Sanskrit equivalents. Torchless, the cultural explorer feels his way as through an unlit cave whose sculpted figures, traced with the fingertips and not unfamiliar, yet remain unrecognisable.