BY
W. H. MORELAND, C.S.I., C.I.E.
AND
ATUL CHANDRA CHATTERJEE
G.C.I.E., K. C.S.I.
THE
GUPTA EMPIRE
The political history of northern India in the period following the Kushan power is at present in process of reconstruction,1 and cannot yet be told as a series of ascertained facts. We come to firm ground only in the opening years of the fourth century, when a conquering dynasty emerged in Bihār, which was to establish a great empire over northern India, and make its power felt far into the south. The name Gupta empire, which is ordinarily used, is drawn from the practice of its rulers. The founder bore, or possibly as- sumed, the name of Chandragupta, which, it will be recalled, had been borne six centuries before by the founder of the Maurya empire, and the termination -gupta (meaning protected') reappeared with each successive emperor, not as a surname in the modern sense, but as an integral part of the official title which he adopted.
Chandragupta
Chandragupta I appears to have been originally a petty king, or chief, in Bihar. An advantageous marriage gave him possession of Magadha with its capital, Patna; thence he extended his rule over the remainder of Bihar, the east of Oudh, and perhaps part of Bengal; and by the year 320 he considered himself justified in assuming a title denoting paramountcy, and in establishing a new era, dating from that year. His successor, Samudragupta, enjoyed a long reign, probably from about 330 to 375, and spent much of it in successful wars, for the facts of which we have to rely on
SAMUDRAGUPTA THE RULER
a
panegyric which he caused to be inscribed on one of Asoka's pillars now
standing in the fort at Allahabad. Before summarising his achievements it will
be convenient to explain a distinction, recurring frequently in Indian military
history, between two classes of operations, which may be labelled conquests and
raids. The material object of a conquest was to secure a regular revenue from
the conquered country; and this might be effected either by accepting tribute
from its ruler, or by setting him aside and undertak- ing the administration of
his territory. A conquest was thus intended to be lasting, but a raid had for
its object merely the attainment of military glory, and, usually, possession of
the wealth which had been accumulated by the enemy and could easily be carried
away. Using these terms, it may be said that Samudragupta conquered most of
northern India and successfully raided far into the south.
The
empire, as organised by him, extended on the east almost as far as the
Brahmaputra; it incorporated the greater part of Bengal, while kingdoms
covering the rest of Bengal and Assam are enumerated among the tributary
states. On the west his administration reached to the Jumna, and on the
south-west to the line of the Narbada, but in this direction it stopped short
of the dominions of the Western Satraps, and thus did not extend to the coast;
beyond the Jumna, he received tribute from portions of the Punjab and
Rajputāna, so that he may reasonably be styled Emperor of northern India.
The
laudatory account of Samudragupta's raid into the south is astonishing, and some
recent students hold that the inscription magnifies his actual achievement. It
is however certain that marching south from his capital through the jungles and
subduing the tribes on the way Samudragupta met and defeated a number of rulers
belonging to Kalinga, where it will be remembered Asoka had waged his last war.
It is uncertain whether Samudragupta was able to proceed further south than the
banks of the Kistna where he had a contest with the Pallavas. He then turned
back and marched north until he reached the frontier of his own dominions on
the Narbada. He must have carried back considerable booty including the hoarded
gold of the southern rulers which enabled him to introduce a gold coinage. He
had marched over eight hundred miles from his capital, and we must recognise
that such a march in those days called for exceptional powers of organisation
and leadership. His exploit was rivalled only after nearly a thousand years in
the reign of the Turkish ruler Alauddin.
Samudragupta
was succeeded by his son, Chandra- gupta II, who assumed the additional title
of Vikramaditya, and reigned until 413. He rounded off his dominions by
conquering the last of the Western Satraps, who now dis- appear from history,
and the annexation of their dominions gave free access to the ports on the
Arabian Sea. This appears to have been the last important extension of the
empire, which was enjoyed by his successors, apparently in peace, until the
invasion of the White Huns, recorded in the next chapter; then the empire seems
to have shrunk to small dimensions, and from about the year 500 onwards the
Gupta dynasty survived merely as a local power.2
GUPTA ADMINISTRATION
Some glimpses of the working of this great empire are furnished by inscriptions which have been recovered in recent years, relating mainly to Bengal. The chief terri- torial unit was the bhukti, or province, in charge of a governor; and under him in succession were districts, sub- divisions and villages, much as in modern times. The district administrator had some sort of council, containing representatives of financiers, merchants and craftsmen, but it is uncertain whether this body was merely advisory, or exercised any specific functions; and there was a staff of record-keepers concerned in particular with the registers of lands. The inscriptions give us some idea how these authori- ties worked. When, for instance, a man wanted to establish a religious endowment, he applied to the district, adminis- trator and his council to sell him the land he required: the record-keepers reported on the application; on their report the administrator fixed the terms of sale, directed the local officials to measure and demarcate the land, and exhorted them to give the purchaser peaceful possession, free from all further payments. It is an orderly bureau- cratic system, such as we meet all over India whenever we obtain a glimpse of the working of the administration.
Of
the effect of the administration on the people such records naturally tell us
nothing, but something can be gleaned from the narrative of a visit to India
made by a Chinese pilgrim between 399 and 414, that is to say, during the reign
of Chandragupta II. Fa-hien, or Fa-hsien, for the name is written in various
ways, came overland to India to visit the Buddhist holy places and obtain
authentic copies of the scriptures.3 Entering India at Peshawar, he made a
detour through the mountains to the north and west, re-entered the Indus plain
from the direction of Bannu, crossed the Punjab to Muttra, and passed on
through Kanauj and Ajodhya to the holy places in Bihar, and so to Patna. Here at
last he was able to obtain some of the scriptures for which he was searching,
and he stayed for three years, learning the language and copying the sacred
books. Thence he travelled to Tamluk, near the mouth of the Hooghly, where two
years were spent in similar occupations ; and then he sailed for Ceylon on his
journey homewards. He thus had ample opportunities for observing the life of
northern India, but, unfortunately for posterity, his concen- tration on the
object of his search seems to have left him little inclination to record his
observations on secular matters, and he is silent regarding much that we desire
to know. What he tells us is, however, consistent with the view that under
Chandragupta II the empire was prosperous and well administered,
Parts of the country indeed were desolate. The holy places in North Bihar were situated in a wilderness, peopled only by some priests and a few families living near the shrines; and the pilgrim heard of desert tracts towards the south, which he did not visit. The bulk of the Gangetic plain, however, from Muttra through Kanauj and Benares to Patna, was well populated and thriving. The subjects of the empire were free from most of the bureaucratic restric- tions with which the pilgrim was familiar in China: the land revenue of course had to be paid, but there was no 'regis- tration or official restriction,' and those who want to go away may go.' Judged by Chinese standards, the criminal law was lenient; fines were the usual penalties for mis- conduct, and even for a second attempt at rebellion the punishment is only the loss of the right hand.' The bulk of the population were abstemious and vegetarian: 'they do not keep pigs or fowls, there are no dealings in cattle, no butchers' shops or distilleries in their market-places'; but the outcast tribes went hunting, and dealt in flesh. These outcasts were segregated; and when they approach a city or market, they beat a piece of wood, in order to distinguish themselves. Then people know who they are, and avoid coming into contact with them.' These are glimpses only, but they enable us to form some sort of an idea of adminis- trative and social conditions in the empire.
It
is difficult to write with precision regarding the reli- gious situation at
this period. There is no doubt that during the great days of the dynasty the
emperors them- selves were definitely Hindu, not Buddhist; but they were
certainly not fanatical, there is no hint anywhere of official persecution, and
some of them on occasion patronised the latter faith. From the scanty facts on
record, some writers have inferred that the Gupta period was characterised by
the decay of Buddhism as a popular creed, and by a vigorous Hindu renascence;
but the record is too imperfect to justify confident deductions, and the facts
seem to be consistent with the view that the change was in the royal, rather
than the popular, attitude. Imperial or royal patronage left durable memorials,
some of which have survived; in its absence there is no record to which we can
appeal,
PREVALENCE OF BUDDHISM
Some idea of the extent to which Buddhism prevailed can be formed from the facts recorded by Fa-hien, if we remember that he travelled with a purpose, and presumably visited only those parts of the country where he had reason to hope that copies of the Buddhist scriptures could be obtained, neglecting the regions where the faith was not established. He found the faith 'very flourishing' in the Punjab, and becoming very popular ' in the country round Muttra; in Bengal, too, in the country near the mouth of the Hooghly, it was very flourishing'; but for the wide plains between these limits we have no similar appreciations, and can say only that the faith existed. There were twenty monasteries along the Jumna near Muttra, and a few were to be found in the wildernesses near the holy places; but there were only two establishments of the kind at Kanauj, none at Ajodhya, one at Kausāmbi, two at Benares, and two at Patna; if there were others between these points, the pilgrim failed to notice them, but his enumeration appears to be exhaustive, and his observation that the faith was spreading near Muttra shows, at least, that it was not pre- dominant in that region. Of the relations between Hindus and Buddhists, the pilgrim recorded very little; legends reproduced by him indicate that in the past there had been occasional bickerings with 'Brahman heretics' at Ajodhya and elsewhere, but there is no hint of persecution under Chandragupta II, and the statement that Brahmans took part in the annual Buddhist festival at Patna points to the existence of amicable relations at the imperial capital. The most probable conclusion to be drawn from his observations, taken as a whole, is that Hinduism predominated in the great bulk of the Gangetic plain: Buddhism had more adherents in the east and in the west than in the centre of the country, but there are not sufficient grounds for describ- ing it as predominant in either region.
When
we supplement the pilgrim's observations by the few scraps of information
available in other sources, the view appears to be justified that, while
Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism existed side by side, they were not ordinarily
in actual conflict. It would be a mistake to think of the period as one of
acute communal tension,' to use the phrase of the moment; and perhaps a more
enlightening analogy can be drawn from the position in England early in the
last century.
In
those days the Church was quiescent, the Dissenters were active bigots might
occasionally emerge on one side or the other; but the ordinary Anglican watched
the competing activities with a tolerant eye, disapproving some of the methods
employed, but recognising that good was being done, and prepared to allow that
there might be room for both. On the scanty evidence available it is
permissible to hold that the Hindu attitude under the Guptas was not very
different.
For
the development of Hinduism itself the Gupta period is of particular importance
in that it covers the production, substantially in their present form, of the
group of texts known collectively as the Puranas. The historical traditions
embedded in some of these texts have been men- tioned in Chapter IV; but about
this time the traditional matter was elaborated and enriched so as to produce
the moral and religious treatises now extant, the most striking feature of
which is the exaltation of one particular deity, in some cases Siva, in others
Vishnu, at the expense of all others. The Purānas thus take their place in the
history of India's secular struggle to get beyond polytheism, while their
practical influence has been very great, for, along with the epics, which have
been similarly enriched, they constitute the scriptures of the masses of the
people, and comprise much of the moral teaching which has gone to mould the
Indian character in its present form.
Apart
from the production of these, and other, texts, the Gupta period was a time of
great activity in art and literature, so much so that it has been compared by
European writers to the age of Pericles, or of Shakespeare. In litera- ture it
is dominated by the figure of Kālidāsa, who is regarded by western as well as
eastern critics as the greatest poet of India, and one of the great poets of
the world, known alike for his epic, lyric and dramatic work, but most familiar
for his romantic play Sakuntalā, which is usually accepted as the finest flower
of the Indian theatre. Kalidasa, however, does not stand alone, for there is a
large volume of good literature which can be attributed with some confidence to
the same period and which is distinguished by its compara- tive freedom from
the artificiality of later ages.
GUPTA
LITERATURE
The
language used in this literature was classical Sans- krit, which had now become
the regular medium of expression for lay as well as ecclesiastical writers.
Sanskrit developed from the original Aryan language used in the Rigveda, and
its classical forms had been fixed as early as the fourth, or fifth century
B.C., but at first its use was confined to Brahman scholars. The early Buddhist
and Jain literature was produced in Präkrit, the simpler speech of everyday
life; 4, and the same medium was employed in the edicts of Asoka and other early
inscriptions which have survived. As time went on, Sanskrit was adopted first
by Buddhist, and later by Jain writers, and it begins to appear in secular
inscrip- tions from about A.D. 150. In the Gupta period its literary use had
become general, and this was to remain true for several centuries-in fact,
until the emergence of vernacular literature in comparatively modern times;
but, by a conven- tion which nowadays seems curious, the plays were bilingual,
the speeches of kings and men of position being Sanskrit, while women and
uneducated men express themselves in Prakrit.
A
few words may be said here on the controversy regard- ing the debt of the
Indian theatre to Greek inspiration. Some scholars have traced the beginnings
of Indian dramatic representations back to the days of the Rigveda: others
attribute their origin to Greek actors performing before Alexander the Great
and his successors in India. The direct evidence in favour of either view is
scanty, and cannot be discussed here, but it may be said in a general way that
the theory of a Greek origin is not absolutely required to explain the few
facts which are known, and that there is no real difficulty in the way of the
alternative view that the Indian drama grew up independently, though some
details may have been borrowed from the practice of the Greek theatre.5
There are good grounds for holding that architecture also flourished under the Guptas, but survivals are so few that it is difficult to write with confidence on the subject. The imperfection of the record is sufficiently explained by a combination of causes. In the first place, the climate, with its torrential falls of rain and sudden changes of temperature and humidity, makes for rapid decay. In the second, the idea of preserving monuments of the past is quite modern in India, as in most other countries; and disused edifices have been commonly treated as convenient sources of building materials for the needs of the moment. In the third, some of the Moslem invaders were active iconoclasts: idols of any sort were repugnant to their religious feelings, while the wealth concealed, or supposed to be concealed, in the temples ensured the coincidence of interest with sentiment.6 There is no doubt that, along the tracks followed by some of the invaders, religious buildings were destroyed wholesale, and it must be remem- bered that in the Hindu view a temple which has once been desecrated cannot be restored; the historian of the art is therefore dependent on a small number of examples, which owe their preservation mainly to their remoteness.
These examples, again, are confined to buildings of a single class. We have no private houses, no palaces or other secular buildings; and it appears to be certain that wood was still the ordinary material for all general purposes, stone or burnt bricks being employed solely for religious edifices. Judging from the survivals of these, it would appear that about this time the types of permanent buildings which had been originally evolved for Buddhist use began to be adapted to Hindu worship. These types were two: the shrine with its covering, and the monastery, consisting of cells built round a quadrangular enclosure. The shrine, at first a receptacle for relics, was at once available as the resting-place of the image of the deity; the developments, which probably began in the Gupta age and culminated.
GUPTA
BUILDINGS
later,
consisted in the elaboration of the covering from a plain hemispherical mound
into the 'towered structures high which are so characteristic of the country,
and the addition of subsidiary buildings such as porches and enclo- sures. The
quadrangle of the monastery, too, was readily available as the type of
residence for holy men of any faith; and in southern India it was transmuted
later on into the ground plan of the enclosed temples which are found in that
region.
The
Buddhist shrine was not, however, always a building in the ordinary sense of
the word, for in some places, most of them in western India, both shrines and
monasteries were hewn and carved out of solid rock, giving the 'cave-' or, more
accurately, rock-temples which are among the greatest glories of Indian art.
The oldest of these go back beyond the Christian era, and the most famous of
all, those at Ajanta, in the extreme, north-west of the Hyderabad State,
contain a series of work ranging from the first to the sixth century. Other
remarkable examples are situated at Ellora, about fifty miles from Ajanta, and
at Bagh in the south of Gwalior. It is to these rock-temples, the older of
which are Buddhist and the later Hindu, that we owe almost all our knowledge of
early Indian painting, for in some cases the interiors were lavishly decorated
with frescoes,7 many of which can still be seen. They were also elaborately
carved, and furnish most of the materials for study of the sculpture of the
period-sculpture which has won the praise of connoisseurs throughout the world;
but these materials have of late been supplemented by the recovery of many
images, probably thrown down by iconoclasts, and buried in the debris of their
work, so that they have been preserved for the modern excavator.
The
study of such specimens as have survived suggests that for this period it would
be wrong to draw a sharp distinction between Buddhist and Hindu art. What we
have is a true indigenous art, employed in the service, first of Buddhism as
well as Jainism, and then of Hinduism:
the subjects change, but not the technique, nor, at first, the inspiration; and it was only by degrees that the influence of developed Hindu ideas reacted on the artists so as to produce the distinctive features recognisable in the later work known usually as Hindu. The Gupta period, then, seems to have been one of transition, in the limited sense that artists were turning from one set of subjects to another; but even this generalisation is subject to the caution that the record is very imperfect, and, while so many hopeful sites remain unexcavated, it is dangerous to write with confidence of the trend of art in India as a whole.
The
literary and artistic activity of the Gupta period has seemed to some scholars
to call for a precise explanation, which has been sought in foreign
contacts-with China in the East, and Rome, or rather Alexandria, in the West.
It may be agreed that such contacts existed, though the direct trade between
Egypt and India had come to an end a cen- tury before the first Gupta ruler came
to power'; but clear evidence of foreign influence is hard to find, and it is
doubt- ful whether the facts require such a theory. Some at least of the
emperors were men of culture: Samudragupta, the greatest conqueror of the line,
was also a poet, a musician, and a theologian; and possibly the facts may be
adequately explained by the existence of a wealthy and cultured court,
extending its patronage to the best talent that could be found, and thus
stimulating and bringing into the light of day energies which in less
favourable circumstances might have remained hidden, and possibly unfruitful.
We
have described the fourth and fifth centuries as the Gupta period, but it must
not be inferred that there were no other important powers in India, and,
indeed, there is definite evidence of a considerable kingdom, or even empire,
that of the Vākātaka dynasty, lying between the Guptas and the southern states,
and for a time dominating the centre of the country. We know the names of its
rulers, and the claims to conquests which some of them made; we have some
grounds for thinking that their culture was allied to that of their northern
neighbours; but as yet we possess no knowledge of the life of the people under
their rule.
Reference
1 A notable work on this period, Mr. K. P. Jayaswal's History of India, C. A.D. 150–350, published in the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, 1933, has not yet received the expert examination it deserves before a final verdict can be passed on its conclusions.
2 Dr. Basak has recently advanced reasons for holding that the empire, as such, lasted well into the sixth century (History of North Eastern India, ch, iv).
3 Several translations of his narrative have been published; we have used the latest of these-The Travels of Fa-hsien, re-translated by H. A. Giles, Cambridge, 1923.
4 Pali, the language in which the Buddhist canon was eventually formulated in Ceylon, is a form of Indian Prakrit, somewhat developed on the literary side.
5 Reference may be made to the summary of the discussion in India's Past, pp. 98 ff., and to the literature cited on p. 114 of that volume.
7. Frescoes, in the popular sense of mural paintings. Technically the work is in tempera, not fresco.
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