The term ‘Bharat’ in today’s imagination conjures up a return to a pure, primarily ‘Hindu’ golden age — an image carefully curated by colonial historians and accepted rather unquestioningly today. Even to Indian scholars such as RG Bhandarkar, RC Majumdar, and AS Altekar, ‘ancient’ India, especially under the Gupta dynasty that ruled from the 4th to 6th centuries CE, was an era far ‘superior’ to the medieval period.
For decades, the Guptas have been held up as the exemplars of indigenous Hindu kingship, presiding over a ‘golden age’ defined by the expulsion of foreign rule. But historical evidence left by Guptas — and their Central Asian rivals and successors — reveal that even ancient India’s most ostensibly ‘indigenous’ rulers had more complex identities than we might think.
How did the Guptas see themselves?
Who were the Guptas? They appear to have been minor aristocrats from the Magadha region, formerly the seat of older Gangetic empires. The world into which they emerged was not that of ancient Magadha, though — it was an extraordinarily diverse one where peoples of Central Asian origin had already lived, killed, loved, and died across Northern India for centuries. The greatest among them were the Kushans who ruled in the Gandhara region in present-day northern Pakistan. Another power, the Shakas or Indo-Scythians, ruled in Gujarat.
By the 2nd century, both the Kushans and Shakas had developed modes of royal self-presentation that justified their rule in a diverse world. The Kushans, as we have seen in earlier editions of Thinking Medieval, had mastered inventing and reinventing gods. They presented themselves in their coins, chameleon-like, as the beloveds of Zoroastrian, Hellenic, Buddhist, and Hindu deities. Meanwhile, as studied by historian Andrew Ollett in Language of the Snakes: Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India, the Shakas had developed another innovation — the usage of Sanskrit, hitherto a language of myth and ritual, in courtly settings.
Both of these would become integral to Gupta power as it expanded through the Gangetic plains from the 4th century onwards. In her 2007 paper The Seated Lady and the Gupta King, art historian Ellen M Raven points to the Gupta appropriation of a popular Kushan coin design: A standing emperor wearing a mail coat and trousers, sacrificing at an altar and holding a sceptre, with a seated goddess on the reverse. This goddess, the Zoroastrian deity Ardokhsho, holds a cloth diadem in one hand and a cornucopia (a tapered basket full of vegetables and fruit, a Hellenic symbol of abundance). Neither the emperor’s costume nor the goddess’ attributes can be considered ‘Indic’ — and yet they appear profusely in Gupta coinage. Ardokhsho was quite seamlessly understood to be Lakshmi, the goddess of royal fortune to the Guptas.
According to Indologist Harry Falk in The Kaniska Era in Gupta Records, when the Guptas conquered Mathura (the great Kushan city that controlled the Gangetic Plains) they inaugurated the ‘Gupta Era’, a year-counting system based on Kushan models. They also followed the Shakas in using Sanskrit in their public inscriptions and self-presentation. Rather than expelling foreign ideas and peoples, the Guptas, it seemed, were attempting to portray themselves as Indian-cum-Central Asian kings, adopting the costume considered appropriate for elites at the time.
However, the Guptas were fairly catholic in their approach to claiming the mantle of older dynasties. As archaeologist Michael Willis notes in The Archaeology of Hindu Ritual, the Guptas also cultivated a ‘Neo-Mauryan’ aesthetic, conspicuously modelling some of their architecture on the remains of this older Gangetic empire, leaving inscriptions on Mauryan pillars, and even recycling the name ‘Chandragupta’ (This is similar in concept to the ‘Indo-Saracenic’ architecture of Lutyens’ Delhi as well as to modern politicians’ attempts to claim historical figures). The crucial element here is that the Guptas do not seem to have discriminated between Zoroastrian or Buddhist, Gangetic or Central Asian elements in their image of themselves. Even the most ‘indigenous’ of ancient Indian dynasties, then, did not limit their identities and were pragmatic in their approach to a heterogeneous subject populace.
The Hun who would be Indian
Though the Guptas occasionally raided elsewhere, by the mid-fifth century CE, their dominion consisted mostly of the Gangetic Plains, parts of present-day Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, and a large number of central Indian forest peoples. The rest of northern India, especially Punjab and even parts of Madhya Pradesh, gradually came under the power of the Kidarites and then the Alchon Huns—nomadic confederations that conquered the Kushans, absorbed their culture, and thrived between the Indian and Persian worlds.
One of the most interesting rulers of the 5th century was an individual known on his coins as ‘Prakashaditya’. Titles ending with ‘aditya’ were popular with Gupta monarchs, such as Chandragupta II Vikramaditya, who conquered the Shaka kingdom in Gujarat. As a result, through much of the 20th century, scholars considered Prakashaditya a Gupta king even though his coins have little in common with Gupta coins. They depict a king seated stiffly on a horse, facing the right, striking a lion below him with a sword. Although Gupta kings did depict themselves killing lions, they are usually rendered with lush fluidity, on foot or a prancing mount, wielding a bow. Yet, on the reverse of Prakashaditya’s coins, we see once again the goddess Ardokhsho-Lakshmi, still holding the cloth diadem.
This conundrum was resolved by numismatist Pankaj Tandon in his 2015 paper The Identity of Prakāśāditya. Looking at silver plates from Sassanian Persia, Tandon found that Prakashaditya’s depiction as a lion-killer was quite similar to these models. And, having reconstructed the letters on Prakashaditya’s coins, he found that they had a Gupta-style Sanskrit inscription with the name of a Hun king: Toramana. These spectacular objects then represented an Indian ruler of Central Asian descent, who took ideas both from the Iranian Plateau and the Gangetic Plains and must have ruled over a kingdom of some prosperity (going by his plentiful gold coins, at least). Though some literary sources decry Toramana as a barbarian, hard evidence complicates the picture. He was evidently a man of some sophistication who understood propaganda and whose self-image had influences from many places—just like the Gupta monarchs.
South Asian rulers of Central Asian descent were around before the Guptas, lived alongside them, and continued to thrive after the collapse of the dynasty. We have, on the one hand, Gupta monarchs who portrayed themselves as Central Asian lords, and, on the other, Hun monarchs who portrayed themselves as Gangetic rulers. Why is one more ‘Indian’ than the other? Indianness, past and present, cannot, and must not, be reduced blithely to a line in the sand.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval’ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)