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The Pallavas, whose origins are uncertain, had established themselves in the region known as Tondaimandalam, west of the later city of Madras. They had already elevated Kanchipuram into an important religious and intellectual centre but, on the evidence of these plates, they were having severe difficulties holding their own. Only after 375 would the Pallavas emerge as the first great south Indian dynasty, and not till the seventh to eighth centuries would they endow Kanchi and Mamallapuram (Mahabalipuram) with the reliefs and temples now associated with their greatness.
The rest of India was spared from the Hun perhaps thanks to one Yasodharman of Malwa. Evidently a very successful adventurer if not a noted dynast, Yasodharman claims to have inflicted a defeat on the Huns in C530. Under their leader Mihirakula, the son of Toramana, the Huns then retired to Kashmir, there in a land of sad but incomparable beauty to burnish their reputation for persecution, vandalism and unspeakable atrocities for another generation.
Victories over the Huns are also claimed by Baladitya, a later Gupta, and by the Maukharis and the Vardhanas.
This was the great Harsha of the Vardhana family from Thanesar near Delhi. The Vardhanas and the Maukharis were already closely allied and may have repelled the Huns in unison. Their territories, too, marched with one another; conjoined, they would soon form the nucleus of Harsha’s great empire.
dynasties, which like close-packed clouds had clustered over arya-varta ever since the great Guptas, began to thin. The monsoon, it seemed, had been delayed; northern India was about to experience a last searing glimpse of pre-Islamic empire. Of the no doubt many sasana issued by Harsha-Vardhana of Thanesar (and later Kanauj) few survive.
Of Bana’s two surviving works the most important is the Harsa-carita, a prose account of Harsha’s rise to power. Though more descriptive than explanatory, and though loaded with linguistic fancies and adjectival compounds of inordinate length, it rates as Sanskrit’s first historical biography as well as a masterpiece of literature.
As the Maukhari queen, she was vital to his plans since, through her, he in effect controlled the Maukhari kingdom. As a result of this identity of interest he would subsequently move his capital from Thanesar to the more central and significant city of Kanauj. Kanauj now became the rival of Pataliputra as the imperial capital of northern India and, through many vicissitudes and changes of ownership, would remain so until the twelfth century.
Harsha had indeed triumphed throughout much of north India, but his conquests were often tenuous and short-lived; they would take much longer than six years; and they certainly never included the Deccan or the south.
Sasanka’s ‘vileness’ seems to have had a lot to do with his having allegedly harassed Buddhists and cut down the sacred Boddhi tree under which the Buddha received enlightenment. Elsewhere in arya-varta it was the other way round, with orthodox opinion being antagonised by Harsha’s growing preference for, and generosity to, the Buddhist sangha.
How Harsha eventually died is not known. But when in 647 his long reign finally ended, so did his empire; it simply fell apart.
The Chalukyas hailed from Karnataka to the south, and in the course of a couple of generations had soared to prominence at the expense of various neighbours, including the Kadambas, their erstwhile suzerains.
Their capital, fortified by Pulakesin I, founder of the dynasty and the first to perform the horse-sacrifice (and also Pulakesin II’s grandfather), was situated at Vatapi, now Badami, a small town scrabbling up both sides of a cliff-stepped ravine in northern Karnataka.
But at Badami and its neighbouring sites (Aihole, Mahakuta and Pattadakal) the feast of architecture and sculpture heralds a new identity between dynasty and endowment in which temple-building becomes an expression and paradigm of a sovereign’s authority.
Ravikirti provides the earliest dated reference to ‘Sanskrit’s Shakespeare’; whenever Kalidasa lived, he must have been well dead by 636.
It has already been suggested that the sacred geography of the Sanskrit classics tended to get replicated as new regions became Sanskritised (e.g. Mathura, Madurai, and Madura in Indonesia).
As new Islamic challengers ventured across the deserts of Sind and over the Hindu Kush, India’s dynasties appeared to be woefully indifferent as they lavished all available resources not on forts and horsemen but on flights of architectural fantasy.
‘The dreadful conflict which followed was such as had never been heard of,’ reports al-Biladuri. It does, though, bring to mind Alexander’s titanic struggle with Poros; for again the Indian forces displayed exceptional bravery and again the outcome hung in the balance until decided by the ungovernable behaviour of panic-stricken elephants.
It was towards evening, according to al-Biladuri, and when Dahar ‘died and went to hell’, ‘the idolaters fled and the Mussulmans glutted themselves with massacre’.
Muhammad ibn Qasim then resumed his march upriver. Brahmanabad (the later Mansurah), then Alor (Rohri) and finally Multan, the three principal cities of Sind, were either captured or surrendered, probably during the years 710–13.
Al-Biladuri merely explains that Muhammad ibn Qasim was sent back to Iraq as a prisoner and there tortured to death because of a family feud with the new governor.
His like would be hard to find. The next Arab governor of the province died on arrival, and his successor seems to have made little impact on a situation which had already declined, with Brahmanabad back under the control of Dahar’s son.
In Multan the resentment of the still largely non-Muslim population was curbed only by their Muslim masters threatening to vandalise the city’s most revered temple whenever trouble stirred or invasion threatened.
If conquest had been difficult, conversion was proving even more so.
Clearly, when the subcontinent first faced the challenge of Islam, it was neither so irredeemably supine nor so hopelessly divided as British historians in the nineteenth century would suppose.
In contemporary Indian sources these first marauding disciples of Islam are occasionally identified as Yavanas (Greeks), Turuskas (Turks) or Tajikas (Tajiks or Persians), but more usually as mlecchas.
Like all mlecchas the Muslims were seen as essentially marginal, negative and destructive, just like the Huns. There is no evidence of an Indian appreciation of the global threat which they represented; and the peculiar nature of their mission – to impose a new monotheist orthodoxy by military conquest and political dominion – was so alien to Indian tradition that it went uncomprehended.
No doubt a certain complacency contributed to this indifference. As al-Biruni (Alberuni), the great Islamic scholar of the eleventh century, would put it, ‘the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no king like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs.’
While clearly disparaging eleventh-century attitudes, al-Biruni thus appears to confirm the impression given by earlier Muslim writers that in the eighth and ninth centuries India was considered anything but backward.
A further argument has it that caste assumed its passive and static connotations only after the Muslim conquest, when religious discrimination and oppressive taxation conspired to remove opportunities for political participation and economic advancement.
Once again one is reminded of Megasthenes’ description of agriculturalists ‘ploughing in perfect security’ while armies did battle in the next field.
Warriors fought with warriors; the ploughman’s dharma was to plough.
Distracted if not exhausted by their endless wars in the south with the Pallavas of Kanchi, the Chalukyas had allowed one of their northern officials to accumulate considerable territory on the upper Godavari river in Berar, a region as near the dead centre of India as anywhere and now dominated by the city of Nagpur. From C735–56 the senior member of this rising family was Dantidurga and, since his function within the Chalukyas’ empire was that of rastrakuta or ‘head of a region’, the dynasty he founded is known as that of the Rashtrakutas.
When Krishna I died in C773 the Rashtrakutas were undisputed masters of the entire Deccan.
No Deccan-based dynasty had yet tried its luck in the hallowed and hotly contested arya-varta but under Dhruva, who in C780 ended a short and chaotic reign by his brother, the Rashtrakutas did just that. Dhruva first secured his southern flank by again rubbishing the Gangas and rattling the Pallavas.
Indeed Buddhist icons of the Pala period are so anatomically exaggerated and so generously provided with extra heads and arms that only a trained eye would identify them as Buddhist.
the Gurjara-Pratiharas were ‘bulwarks of defence against the vanguards of Islam’17 and ‘protectors of dharma’.
In fact to the British the rajputs would come to represent the quintessence of all that was admirable in India’s martial traditions.
Legends common to some families of both Gurjaras and rajputs associate them with the region around Mount Abu.
Indisputably the most elaborate and imposing rock-cut monument in the world, the Kailasa still triumphantly confirms the Balhara’s status as ‘one of the four great or principal kings of the world’. It also provides a further illustration of the Rashtrakutas’ attempt to appropriate the sacred geography of arya-varta. Mount Kailasa in the Himalayas is the earthly abode of Lord Shiva. The new Kailasa temple at Ellora, also wrought of rock and also dedicated to Shiva, was designed to reposition Mount Kailasa in the Deccan and so, by implication, to make of the gentle Vindhya hills a
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Band after band of the defenders entered the temple of Somnath, and with their hands clasped round their necks, wept and passionately entreated him [the Shiva lingam]. Then again they issued forth until they were slain and but few were left alive … The number of the dead exceeded fifty thousand.
But what rankled even more than the loot and the appalling death-toll was the satisfaction which Mahmud took in destroying the great gilded lingam. After stripping it of its gold, he personally laid into it with his ‘sword’ – which must have been more like a sledgehammer.
The Indian forces, on the other hand, betrayed an understandable reluctance to engage. The most they could expect from battles with these rough-riding ghazis from the wilds of central Asia was perhaps a fleeter horse and a slim chance of survival. Victory, were it ever attained, promised only reprisals; and for Hindus no particular merit attached to the massacre of mlecchas.
The levelling of Mathura and Kanauj coincided precisely with the rise to architectural glory of other dynastic temple complexes. All this flatly contradicts the once popular notion that the Islamic invasions found India atrophied and supine. In fact ‘dynamic’ would seem better to describe a society so productive of soaring monuments, ambitious dynasties, dazzling wealth and buzzing devotion.
Later waves of iconoclasm under Muhammad of Ghor and the Delhi sultans will account for the disappearance of many other north Indian temple complexes of the tenth to twelfth centuries. Bhuvaneshwar and the other Orissan sites (Puri and Konarak) were spared only because they were sufficiently remote not to attract early Muslim attention.
Turning the supposed hegemony of north India on its head, the Cholas were in fact the most successful dynasty since the Guptas.
The classic expansion of Chola power began anew with the accession of Rajaraja I in 985.
Later still Rajaraja is said to have conquered ‘twelve thousand old islands’, a phrase which could mean anything but is supposed to indicate the Maldives.
At Varanasi, according to Ferishta, Muhammad of Ghor and Qutb-ud-din Aybak demolished the idols in a thousand temples and then rededicated these shrines ‘to the worship of the true God’. They also carted away treasure by the camel-load – fourteen hundred camel-loads according to one estimate.
Figures are not available but it seems probable that far more Muslims entered India as refugees from the Mongol invasions than as warriors in the Ghaznavid and Ghorid armies combined.
But if it was the near-naked Gandhi who alerted the world to India’s struggle, it was Jawaharlal Nehru, always impeccable even in homespun, who alerted India to world struggle.
