India: A History. John Keay

      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.

      One other linguistic question remains. How was it that Rudradaman and his minister anticipated such a quintessentially classical trend as the triumph of Sanskrit by a couple of centuries, and in an inscription so remotely located that it can have been seen only by a literate few? The suggestion has been made that the Satrap’s use of Sanskrit was ‘a method followed to endear a ruler of foreign descent to the indigenous ruling class’; thus, in the case of Rudradaman, a Shaka, and his deputy Suvisakha, a Parthian, the adoption of Sanskrit and the patronage of those who held it dear was designed to reconcile brahman opinion to a foreign ruler – or as Kosambi puts it ‘to mitigate the lamentable choice of parents on the part of both Satrap and governor’.⁶ This seems plausible and is generally accepted in respect of the Sanskrit inscriptions soon to be composed by, or for, Indophil rulers in Sumatra, Java, Indo-China and other parts of Indianised south-east Asia. The employment of a prestige language lent distinction and authority even to non-Indic dynasties. One wonders why, though, if Sanskrit offered such ready legitimacy it was not also adopted by the earlier Shakas or the contemporary Kushanas.

      However objectionable to north Indian pride, the possibility must remain that in a little-regarded region of the subcontinent long-Indianised dynasts, albeit originally of foreign extraction, could actually have pioneered and popularised such a cardinal feature of the classical Indian tradition. Aryanisation was, as will appear, a two-way process; and many other cultural achievements associated with the Gupta age cannot readily be ascribed to Gupta rule. To the emerging ‘Great Tradition’ of Hinduism, borrowing from the subcontinent’s far-flung store of local custom and innovation was quite as natural as banking on the Indo-Aryan orthodoxies of the Gangetic heartland.

      But the history of India’s so-called ‘regions’ (Gujarat, Bengal, Tamil Nadu and so on) is still today in its infancy. Habitually disparaged as divisive, ‘regional’ history has few champions in the Senior Common Rooms of power. Untypical and brave are the scholars who insist that Rudradaman of Gujarat did himself write such ‘clear, agreeable, sweet, charming, beautiful’ and altogether excellent Sanskrit; or that under the Satraps’ patronage classical Sanskrit was actively promoted (as is further suggested by its appearance in the donative inscription of a Shatavahana queen who was of Satrapal birth); or that ‘the Shakas had shown the way by using Sanskrit in their inscriptions … [and] the Guptas only perpetuated the tradition when they came to power.’⁷

      THE ARM OF THE GUPTAS

      History, whatever its parameters, is said to repeat itself. Seldom, though, does it oblige so readily as with the creators of ancient India’s two greatest dynasties. A Chandragupta had founded the Mauryan empire in C320; just so did a Chandragupta found the Gupta dynasty in C320. It could be confusing. But the first date was, of course, BC, the second AD; and to clarify matters further, the Gupta Chandragupta is often phonetically dismembered as ‘Chandra-Gupta’ or ‘Chandra Gupta’. Unfortunately there would be another Gupta Chandra-Gupta. The founder of the Gupta dynasty is therefore designated as Chandra-Gupta I –