BY
W. H. MORELAND, C.S.I., C.I.E.
AND
ATUL CHANDRA CHATTERJEE
G.C.I.E., K. C.S.I.
We have seen in Chapter X that when, in the second century B.C., the Yueh-chi pressed the Sakas out of Bactria, the Huns were behind them. The westward movement of the hordes had continued since those days, and, while the Guptas were reigning in northern India, the Huns had reached Europe, and were earning there the reputation for wanton brutality which still adheres to the name. At the same period a tribe, or group of tribes, known as the White Huns were settled on the Oxus the nature of their connection with the Huns proper is uncertain, but the fact that they are described in Sanskrit literature and inscriptions as Hūna suggests that, whatever their claim may have been, they must have brought the name of Hun with them to India. From the Oxus the White Huns came south by the regular route through Afghanistan, and just after the middle of the fifth century they were defeated by the Emperor Skandagupta, who re- corded his achievement on a pillar of victory. The locality of the battle is uncertain, but the position of the pillar, some distance east of Benares, suggests that the invaders may have penetrated to about this point.
So
far as is at present known, the White Huns did not become permanent masters of
the Gangetic plain, but soon after the year 465 they were overrunning the
north-west under a leader named Toramana, who before the end of the century was
reigning in the Punjab and as far south as Malwa, and had assumed an Indian
title. His son Mihiragula (or -kula) appears to have dominated these regions
from his capital of Sialkot; the Guptas continued to rule in Bihār and northern
Bengal, and possibly elsewhere, but their claim to the paramountcy of the north
had passed away. Of Mihiragula's activities we possess no direct evidence, but
concurrent traditions represent him as a ruthless and bloodthirsty oppressor,
and, while they are doubtless exag- gerated, they may be taken as having a
substantial basis of fact. The story of his fall is still obscure, and the
present position of the question may be summarised as an illustra- tion of the
state of our knowledge of this period, and a justification of the recurring
cautions which we have to inflict on our readers against assuming that
everything is known.
It
may be premised that soon after the middle of the sixth century the main power
of the White Huns in Central Asia was broken by the Turks, the next figures in
the long procession westwards, and from that time, if not earlier, the Indian
section was isolated and left to its own resources. The only literary account
we possess of the fate of Mihiragula was given by a Chinese pilgrim, Yuan
Chwang, whom we shall meet in the next chapter. According to him, Mihira- gula
decided on the extermination of Buddhism, and with this object invaded the
territory of the Gupta ruler Bālā- ditya, who was a zealous Buddhist. His
enterprise failed, and he himself was taken prisoner. Subsequently he was
released, but finding that his throne had been usurped, he sought a refuge in
Kashmir, where, a little later, he seized the kingdom, renewed his persecution
of the Buddhists, and died suddenly among portents of divine displeasure..
This
account, written by an enthusiastic Buddhist more than a century after the
event, presents many difficulties in regard to date and other details; and it
has usually been rejected by scholars since the discovery in Malwa of two
inscriptions, recording that about the year 530 one Yaso- dharman crushed the
White Huns, and made himself Emperor of northern India from sea to sea. Of the
position pre- viously occupied by this conqueror nothing definite is re-
corded, and he still remains a shadowy figure; but a phrase
DEFEAT
OF THE WHITE HUNS
in
one of the inscriptions suggests that he belonged, not to Malwa, where they
were inscribed, but to Thanesar, a town in the Punjab about 100 miles north of
Delhi.
It
is possible to bring the two stories into some sort of harmony if we assume
that, while the White Huns were dominating the north-west, Yasodharman
established him- self on their flank, and extended his power to the east over
the territories of the Guptas; then, with the aid of his new vassals, he drove
the White Huns south and west, until he had cleared the eastern Punjab and the
Malwa plateau, and thus made himself paramount, broadly speaking, over northern
India. A century later Yuan Chwang must have obtained from Buddhist sources a
distorted version of the story, in which the whole credit for the achievement
was given to the zealous Buddhist Baladitya instead of to the Emperor whom he
assisted the statement that Mihiragula himself found a refuge in Kashmir may
well be true, but it has not yet been confirmed by contemporary evidence. This
hypothetical account squares with the facts, so far as they are known, but it
is not established, and may have to be revised at any time in the light of
subsequent discoveries; all that can be said with confidence is that
Yasodharman's claim to have crushed the White Huns and obtained the paramountcy
of the north is justified in the present state of our knowledge.1
It seems to be certain that Yasodharman's empire did not last for long. In the middle of the century two dynasties named Maukhari became prominent in what is now the United Provinces, and claimed dominion as far as the Bay of Bengal; and a little later we meet a line of kings whose names end in -vardhana, ruling in Thanesar, and extending their power towards the north-west. The relation of this line to that of Yasodharman is at present unknown, and, speaking generally, the sixth century is still a dark period in history; but it is certain that the Vardhana dynasty of Thanesar developed into the empire of Kanauj, which forms the subject of the next chapter.
The
Turks did not at once follow the White Huns into India; they began to arrive
about five centuries later, and during this interval the country, so far as is
known, was not invaded in force by nomads from the north-west. When at last the
Turks came, they did not find Sakas, or Kushāns, or White Huns, recognisable as
such; they found only Hindus, and the question inevitably arises, What had
happened to the descendants of the earlier conquerors? At present this question
can be answered only in general terms. Absorption is much more probable than
extermination, and, having regard to the system of caste, it is more probable
that the invaders, in the course of their assimilation to Hinduism, became new
castes, or new sections of existing castes, than that they were absorbed
piecemeal by irregular unions of individuals. It is distinctly probable then
that the foreign tribes became Hindu castes: but many difficulties arise when
we ask the further question, Which of the existing castes represent these
foreign tribes?
The
most plausible case is that of the Gujars. In Sanskrit literature and
inscriptions we meet a tribe named Gurjara associated with the White Huns in
such a way as to suggest that, if they were not themselves Huns, they were
foreigners who entered India about the same time; and later on we find various
Gurjara kingdoms in the north and west of India. Now the everyday form of the
name Gurjara is Gūjar, and country formerly held by some of these king- doms
still bears the name of Gujarāt, which is found in the Punjab as well as in
Bombay; while at the present day the Gujar caste is represented in both
regions. Gujars are quite obviously Indians, and some of them are Hindus, while
others have been converted to Islam, but they have some characteristics of
their own, which distinguish them from the mass of Hindu peasants. It is thus
tempting to infer that we have here a caste which originated about the fifth
century as an invading tribe, enjoyed for a time the position
FATE
OF THE NOMAD INVADERS
of
a ruling race, lost its pre-eminence, and eventually settled down as one caste
among many; but the base of this infer- ential structure is still uncertain,
because the foreign origin of the Gurjaras has not been definitely proved.
Other
conjectural identifications are more uncertain, and, in particular, it may be
mentioned that the theory of the existence of a strong Saka element among the
Marathas, which was suggested on anthropometrical data in the Imperial
Gazetteer of India, has not won general acceptance, the facts being considered
explicable on other lines. The most interesting problem of the kind is
concerned with the great Rajput or Chhattri caste. The former name etymo-
logically denotes royalty, while the latter is the everyday form of Kshatriya,
the royal and warrior class of the early days; all Rajputs claim to derive
directly from Kshatriya stock, and those of any position cherish detailed
pedigrees which go back to one or other of the mythical ancestors of the race,
whether sun, or moon, or fire. Outside the Rājput circle, however, it is now
widely, though not universally, held that the modern caste is composite, and
that some of its most important subdivisions represent certain tribes or
families, some Indian and some foreign, which at one time or another attained
the status of royalty, were thereupon accepted as Rajputs, and were furnished
in due course with fictitious pedigrees by obsequious bards. From the nature of
the case, no precise record of such a process is likely to have been made, and
the inference that it operated has been drawn from the accumulation of a large
number of details regarding one subdivision or another of the caste, evidence
which cannot be examined adequately in a book like this, and the strength of
which may be variously estimated by different students. One point, however,
which has emerged in the course of this study may be mentioned here. For the
period before the sixth century Rajput traditions are vague and scanty, while
from the seventh century onwards they become more precise and detailed; there
are thus reasonable grounds for inferring that the invasion of the White Huns,
of which we know so few details, left a definite mark on northern India,
obliterating much of the older tradition,
and forming the starting-point of the later cycle, which has been so well
preserved. msuccessors.
We
must now turn to southern India, and see what had been happening there during
the three centuries which in the North are covered by the Guptas, the White
Huns, and their Our knowledge is still scanty and fragmentary, and all that can
be done is to sketch the general situation. In the first place, it must be
borne in mind that in the interior of the peninsula there were various
independent tribes, one or another of which might for a time rise to political
import- ance as an enemy, or an ally, of one of the larger kingdoms; these
tribes have to be considered by the historian of the South, but in a general
account of India they must be passed over. Neglecting the tribes, we have in
the south of the peninsula the Tamil kingdoms, occasionally fighting among themselves,
but retaining their identity and position during the three centuries under
review. North of the Tamils, the eastern portion of the peninsula was held by
the Pallava dynasty. The fact that its capital was Conjeeveram, which lies
inside the traditional Tamil country, indicates that the Chola kingdom had been
pressed back in this direction, and we get occasional glimpses of fighting
between Cholas and Pallavas. Of the Kalinga country, to the north of the
Pallavas, we hear practically nothing.
There
remains the north-western portion of the penin- sula, where, as we have seen,
the Sakas had for some time secured a footing after the withdrawal of the
Andhras. Here also our knowledge is fragmentary. We have glimpses of a tribe of
Abhiras ('cowherds') ruling near Bombay in the fourth century, and of other
tribes in other localities; the most important of these seem to have been the
Rashtra- kūtas, who come into prominence in a later period, but in the fourth
and fifth centuries they are still shadowy figures. It is only in the middle of
the sixth century that we reach firm ground, in the emergence in this region of
the Chalukya dynasty, which was destined to become a great power in the centre
of India.
CHANGES
IN SOUTHERN INDIA
The
traditions of this Rajput tribe derive their origin from Ajodhya, far away in
the north, but we first meet them on the uplands of the peninsula approximately
in the latitude of Goa, conquering the Rashtrakutas and various other tribes in
all directions. Their greatest ruler was Pulakesin II, who came to the throne
in 608, and whose dominions ex- tended right across India, from the coastal
strip known as the Konkan on the west to the mouth of the Godavari on the east,
while his armies were known as far north as Mālwa and as far south as the Tamil
country. As we shall see in the next chapter, it was the existence of this
great power which prevented Harsha, the Emperor of Kanauj, from extending his
dominions into southern India.
It
is possible then to form a general view of the political situation in the
South: of religious and social conditions we know scarcely anything, but we can
infer from the records of the next period that during these centuries Hinduism
was steadily advancing by absorption of the indigenous gods, while Buddhists
and Jains maintained their position in some regions. We can infer also that
Conjeeveram, under its Pallava rulers, continued to be a centre of Hinduism,
and it is known from inscriptions that an institution for the study of Vedic
and Sanskrit literature existed there in the fourth century. Some scholars
attribute the extension of Hinduism among the Tamils largely to the fact that,
somewhere about the year 400, this city was held for a time by the Cholas, so
that its culture could more easily spread south- ward; it is doubtful, however,
whether political frontiers offered a serious obstacle to that process, and, in
the absence of precise evidence, we must be content with the fact of the spread
of Hinduism, without assigning definite dates to the stages by which it spread.
Reference
1 A recently published inscription (Epigraphia Indica, January 1929, pp. 37 ff.) has been read as proving that Baladitya was in fact a vassal of Yasodharman, but the interpretation is still a matter of controversy. A somewhat different account of the events of this period will be found in Mr. K. P. Jayaswal's Imperial History of India (Lahore, 1934), pp. 35 ff.
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