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Chapter 13 – The Reign of Harsha

From 606 to 648 A.D.

The deficiency of material which embarrasses the historian when dealing with the latter half of the sixth century is no longer experienced when he enters upon the seventh. For this period he is fortunate enough to possess, in addition to the ordinary epigraphic and numismatic sources, two contemporary literary works, which shed much light upon the political condition of India generally, and supply, in particular, abundant and trustworthy information concerning the reign of Harsha, who ruled the North as paramount sovereign for more than forty years.

The first of these works is the invaluable book of travels compiled by the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang, who visited almost every part of India between 630 and 645 A.D. and recorded observations more or less minute about each state and province. The narrative in the Travels is supplemented by the pilgrim’s biography, written by his friend, Hwui-li, which supplies many additional details. The second work alluded to

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is the historical romance entitled the “Deeds of Harsha” (Harsha-charita), composed by Bana, a Brahman author who lived at the court and enjoyed the patronage of the hero of his tale. Further information of much interest and importance is given by the official Chinese histories, and when all sources are utilized, our knowledge of the events of the reign of Harsha far surpasses in precision that which we possess respecting any other early Indian king, except Chandragupta Maurya and Asoka.

From remote ages the country surrounding the city of Thanesar (Sthanvisvara) has been holy ground, known as the “Land of Kuru,” and famous as the battle-field of legendary heroes. In the latter part of the sixth century, the Raja of Thanesar, Prabhakaravardhana by name, had raised himself to considerable eminence by successful wars against his neighbours, including the Hun settlements in the North-western Panjab, and the clans of Gurjara, or the country of Gujarat, between the Chinab and Jihlam Rivers4. The fact that his mother was a princess of Gupta lineage no doubt both stimulated his ambition and aided its realization.

In the year 604, this energetic raja had despatched his elder son, Rajya-vardhana, a youth just entering upon manhood, with a large army to attack the Huns on the north-western frontier, while his younger and favourite son, Harsha, four years junior to the crown prince, followed his brother with a cavalry force at a

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Empire of Harsha, King of Northern India

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considerable interval. The elder prince advanced into the hills to seek the enemy, while the younger lingered in the forests at the foot of the mountains to enjoy the sport of all kinds which they offered in abundance.

While thus pleasantly employed, Harsha, who was then a lad fifteen years of age, received news that his father lay dangerously ill with a violent fever. He returned to the capital with all speed, where he found the king in a hopeless condition. The disease. quickly ran its course, and all was over long before the elder son, who had been victorious in his campaign, could return to claim his birthright. There are indications .that a party at court inclined to favour the succession of the younger prince, but all intrigues were frustrated by the return of Rajya-vardhana, who ascended the throne in due course. He had hardly seated himself when news arrived which compelled him again to take the field.

A courier brought the distressing intelligence that Grahavarman, King of Kanauj, and husband of Rajyasri, sister of the princes, had been slain by the King of Malwa, who cruelly misused the princess, “confining her like a brigand’s wife, with a pair of iron fetters kissing her feet.” The young king, resolute to avenge his sister’s wrongs, started at once with a mobile force of ten thousand cavalry, leaving the elephants and heavy troops behind in his brother’s charge. The King of Malwa was defeated with little effort, but the joy of victory was turned into sorrow when the victor was treacherously slain by an ally of the Malwan king,

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Sasanka, King of Central Bengal, who had inveigled Rajya-vardhana to a conference by fair promises, and had assassinated him when off his guard. Harsha was further informed that his widowed sister had escaped

Great temple, Madura

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from confinement and fled to the Vindhya forests for refuge, but no certain news of her hiding-place could be obtained.

The murdered king was too young to leave a son capable of assuming the cares of government, and the nobles seem to have hesitated before offering the crown to his youthful brother. Acting on the advice of Bhandi, a slightly senior cousin, who had been educated with the young princes, they ultimately resolved to invite Harsha to undertake the responsibilities of the royal office. For some reason which is not apparent on the face of the story, he hesitated to express his consent, and it is said that he consulted a Buddhist oracle before accepting the invitation. Even when his reluctance, whether sincere or pretended, had been overcome by the favourable response of the oracle, he still sought to propitiate Nemesis by abstaining at first from the assumption of the kingly style, modestly designating himself as Prince Siladitya. There is reason to suppose that Harsha did not boldly stand forth as avowed king until the spring of 612 A.D., when he had been five and a half years on the throne, and that his formal coronation, or consecration, took place in that year. The era called after his name, of which the year 1 was 606–7 A.D., dated from the time of his accession in October, 606.

The immediate duties incumbent upon him obviously were the pursuit of his brother’s murderer and the recovery of his widowed sister. The latter task, being the more urgent, was undertaken in all haste, even at

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the cost of permitting the assassin’s escape. The haste shown was none too great, for the princess, despairing of rescue, was on the point of burning herself alive with her attendants, when her brother, guided by aboriginal chiefs, succeeded in tracing her in the depths of the Vindhya jungles. The details of the campaign against Sasanka have not been recorded, and it seems clear that he escaped with little loss. He is known to have been still in power as late as the year 619, but his kingdom probably became subject to Harsha at a later date.

Harsha, having recovered his sister – a young lady of exceptional attainments, learned in the doctrines of the Sammitiya ,school of Buddhism – devoted his signal ability and energy to the prosecution of a methodical scheme of conquest, with the deliberate purpose of bringing all India “under one umbrella.” He possessed at this stage of his career a force of five thousand elephants, twenty thousand cavalry, and fifty thousand infantry. Apparently he discarded as useless the chariots, which constituted, according to ancient tradition, the fourth arm of a regularly organized Indian host.

With this mobile and formidable force Harsha overran Northern India, and, in the picturesque language of his contemporary, the Chinese pilgrim, “he went from east to west subduing all who were not obedient; the elephants were not unharnessed, nor the soldiers unhelmeted.” By the end of five and a half years the conquest of the north-western regions, and probably also of a large portion of Bengal, was completed, and his

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military resources were so increased that he was able to put in the field sixty thousand war elephants and one hundred thousand cavalry. But he continued fighting for thirty years longer, and, as late as 643 A.D., was engaged in his last campaign, an attack upon the sturdy inhabitants of Ganjam on the coast of the Bay of Bengal.

His long career of victory was broken by one failure. Pulikesin II, the greatest of the Chalukya dynasty, whose achievements will be noticed more fully in a later chapter, vied with Harsha in the extent of his conquests, and had raised himself to the rank of lord paramount of the south, as Harsha was of the north. The northern king could not willingly endure the existence of so powerful a rival, and essayed to overthrow him, advancing in person to the attack, with “troops from the five Indies and the best generals from all countries.” But the effort failed. The King of the Deccan guarded the passes oil the Narmada so effectually that Harsha was constrained to retire discomfited, and to accept that river as his frontier. This campaign may be dated about the year 620 A.D.

In the latter years of his reign the sway of Harsha over the whole of the basin of the Ganges (including Nepal), from the Himalaya to the Narmada, was undisputed. Detailed administration of course remained in the hands of the local rajas, but even the king of distant Assam (Kamarupa) in the east obeyed the orders of the suzerain, and the King of Valabhi in the extreme west attended in his train.

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For the control of his extensive empire, Harsha relied upon his personal supervision exercised with untiring energy ratlier than upon the services of a trained bureaucracy. Except during the rainy season, when travelling with a huge camp was impracticable, he was incessantly on the move, punishing evil-doers and rewarding the meritorious. Luxurious tents, such as were used by the Mogul emperors, and still form the movable habitations of high Anglo-Indian officials, had not then been invented, and Harsha was obliged to be content with a “travelling palace” made of boughs and reeds, which was erected at each halting-place and burned at his departure.

Hiuen Tsang, like his predecessor, Fa-hien, more than two centuries earlier, was favourably impressed by the character of the civil administration, which he considered to be founded on benign principles. The principal source of revenue was the rent of the Crown lands, amounting, in theory at all events, to one-sixth of the produce. The officials were remunerated by grants of land; compulsory labour upon public works was paid for; taxes were light; the personal services exacted from the subject were moderate in amount; and liberal provision was made for charity to various religious communities.

Violent crime was rare, but the roads and river routes were evidently less safe than in Fa-hien’s time, as linen Tsang was stopped and robbed by brigands more than once. Imprisonment was now the ordinary penalty, and it was of the cruel Tibetan type; the

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prisoners, we are told, “are simply left to live or die, and are not counted among men.” The other punishments were more sanguinary than in the Gupta period: mutilation of the nose, ears, hands, or feet being inflicted as the penalty of serious offences, and even for failure in filial piety; but this penalty was sometimes commuted for banishment. Minor offences were visited with fines. Ordeals by water, fire, weighment, or poison were much esteemed as efficient instruments for the ascertainment of truth and are described with approval by the Chinese pilgrim.

Official records of public events were kept in every province by special officers, whose duty it was to register “good and evil events, with calamities and fortunate occurrences.” Such records were, no doubt, consulted by the writers of the great historical inscriptions, but no specimen of them has survived.

Education evidently was diffused widely, especially among the Brahmans and numerous Buddhist monks, and learning was honoured by the government. King Harsha was not only a liberal patron of literary merit, but was himself an accomplished calligraphist and an author of reputation. Besides a grammatical work, three extant Sanskrit plays are ascribed to his pen, and there is no reason for hesitating to believe that he had at least a large share in their composition, for royal authors were not uncommon in ancient India. One of these plays, the Nagananda, which has an edifying Buddhist legend for its subject, is considered to rank among the best works of the Indian theatre, and

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the other dramas, the Ratnavali, or “NeCklace,” and the Priyadarsika, or “Gracious Lady,” although lacking in originality, are praised highly for their simplicity both of thought and expression.

The greatest ornament of the literary circle at Harsha’s court was the Brahman Bana, author of the historical romance devoted to a panegyrical account of the deeds of his patron, which is an amazingly clever, but irritating, performance, executed in the worst possible taste, and yet containing passages of admirable and vivid description. The man who attributes to the commander-in-chief, Skandagupta, “a nose as long as his sovereign’s pedigree,” may fairly be accused of having perpetrated the most grotesque simile in all literature. But the same man could do better, and shows no lack of power when depicting the death-agony of the king. “Helplessness had taken him in hand; pain had made him its province, wasting its domain, lassitude its lair. . . . He was on the confines of doom, on the verge of the last gasp, at the outset of the Great Undertaking, at the portal of the Long Sleep, on the tip of death’s tongue; broken in utterance, unhinged in mind, tortured in body, waning in life, babbling in speech, ceaseless in sighs; vanquished by yawning, swayed by suffering, in the bondage of racking pains.” Such writing, although not in perfect good taste, unmistakably bears the stamp of power.

One campaign sated Asoka’s thirst for blood; thirty-seven years of warfare were needed by Harsha before he could be content to sheathe the sword. His last

King Harsha’s Autograph on the Banskhera Inscription.

“My own hand. Sri Harsha, Lord Paramount.” (Svahasto mama maharajadhiraja sri Harshasya,) From Epigraphia Indica.

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campaign was fought against the people of Ganjam (Kongoda) in 643 A.D., and then at last this king of many wars doffed his armour and devoted himself to the arts of .peace and the practice of piety, as understood by an Indian despot. He obviously set himself to imitate Asoka, and the narrative of the doings in the latter years of Harsha’s reign reads like a copy of the history of the great Maurya.

At this period the king began to show marked favour to the quietist teachings of Buddhism, first in its Hinayana, and afterward in its Mahayana form. He led the life of a devotee, and enforced the Buddhist prohibitions against the destruction of animal life with the utmost strictness and scant regard for the sanctity of human life. “He sought,” we are told, “to plant the tree of religious merit to such an extent that he forgot to sleep and eat,” and forbade the slaughter of any living thing, or the use of flesh as food throughout the “Five Indies,” under pain of death without hope of pardon.

Benevolent institutions on the Asokan model, for the benefit of travellers, the poor, and the sick, were established throughout the empire. Rest-houses (dharmsala) were built in both the towns and rural parts, and provided with food and drink. Physicians were stationed at them to supply medicines without stint to those who needed them. The king also imitated his prototype in the foundation of numerous religious establishments devoted to the service both of the Hindu gods and the Buddhist ritual.

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In his closing years the latter received the chief share of the royal favour, and numerous monasteries were erected, as well as several thousand stupas, each about a hundred feet high, built along the banks of the sacred Ganges. These latter structures doubtless were of a flimsy character, built chiefly of timber and bamboo, and so have left no trace; but the mere multiplication of stupas, however perishable the materials might be, was always a work of merit. Although Buddhism was visibly waning in the days of Harsha and Hiuen Tsang, the monks of the order were still numerous, and the occupants of the monasteries enumerated by the pilgrims numbered nearly two hundred thousand. A monastic population of such magnitude offered abundant opportunities for the exercise of princely liberality.

The picture of the state of religious belief and practice in India during the seventh century, as drawn by the contemporary authors, is filled with curious and interesting details. The members of the royal family to which Harsha belonged freely acted on their individual preferences in the matter of religion. His remote ancestor, Pushyabhuti, is recorded to have entertained from boyhood an ardent devotion toward Siva, and to have turned away from all other gods. Harsha’s father was equally devoted to the worship of the Sun, and daily offered to that luminary “a bunch of red lotuses set in a pure vessel of ruby, and tinged, like his own heart, with the same hue.” The elder brother and sister of Harsha were faithful Buddhists, while Harsha himself distributed his devotions among the

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three deities of the family, Siva, the Sun, and Buddha, and erected costly temples for the service of all three. But, in his later years, the Buddhist doctrines held the chief place in his affections, and the eloquence of the Chinese Master of the Law induced him to prefer the advanced teaching of the Mahayana sect to the more primitive Hinayana doctrine of the Sammitiya school with which he had previously been familiar.

The religious eclecticism of the royal family was the reflection and result of the state of popular religion at the time. Buddhism, although it had certainly lost the dominant position in the Ganges plain which it had once held, was still a powerful force, and largely influenced the public mind. The Jain system, which had never been very widely spread or aggressive in the north, retained its hold on certain localities, especially at Vaisali and in Eastern Bengal, but could not pretend to rival the general popularity of either Buddhism or Puranic Hinduism.

The last-named modification of the Hindu system was now firmly established, and the earlier Puranas were already revered as ancient and sacred writings.

The bulk of the population in most provinces was then, as now, devoted to the service of the Puranic gods, each man and woman being, of course, free to select a particular deity, Siva, the Sun, Vishnu, or another, for special adoration according to personal predilection. As a rule, the followers of the various religions lived peaceably together, and no doubt many people besides the king sought to make certain of some divine support

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The sacred Bo-tree.

From the Buddhist Stupa at Sanchi. (After Hardy, Asoka.)

by doing honour to all the principal objects of popular worship in turn.

But, while toleration and concord were the rule, exceptions occurred. The King of Central Bengal, Sasanka, who has been mentioned as the treacherous murderer of Harsha’s brother, and who was probably a scion of the Gupta dynasty, was a worshipper of Siva, and hated Buddhism, which he did his best to destroy. He dug up and burned the holy Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, on which, according to legend, Asoka had lavished inordinate devotion; he broke the stone marked with the footprints of Buddha at Pataliputra; and he destroyed the convents, and scattered the monks, carrying his persecutions to the foot of the Nepalese hills. These events must have happened about 600 A.D. The Bodhi tree was replanted after a short time by Purnavarman, King of Magadha, who is described as being the last descendant of Asoka, and as such was specially bound to honour the object venerated by his great ancestor.

Harsha himself sometimes offended against the

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principle of perfect religious toleration and equality. Like Akbar, he was fond of listening to the expositions of rival doctors, and he heard with great pleasure the arguments adduced by the learned Chinese traveller in favour of the Mahayana form of Buddhism, with the doctrines of which he does not seem to have been familiar. An interesting illustration of the freedom of ancient Hindu society from the trammels of the system of female seclusion introduced by the Mohammedans is afforded by the fact that his widowed sister sat by the king’s side to hear the lecture by the Master of the Law, and frankly expressed the pleasure which she received from the discourse.

The king, however, was determined that his favourite should not be defeated in controversy, and when opponents were invited to dispute the propositions of the Chinese scholar, the terms of the contest were not quite fair. Harsha, having heard a report that Hiuen Tsang’s life was in danger at the hands of his theological rivals, issued a proclamation concluding with the announcement that “if any one should touch or hurt the Master of the Law, he shall be forthwith beheaded; and whoever speaks against him, his tongue shall be cut out; but all those who desire to profit by his instructions, relying on my good-will, need not fear this manifesto.”

The pilgrim’s biographer naively adds that “from this time the followers of error withdrew and disappeared, so that, when eighteen days had passed, there had been no one to enter on the discussion.”

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A curious legend, narrated by Taranath, the Tibetan historian of Buddhism, if founded on fact, as it may be, indicates that Harsha’s toleration did not extend to foreign religions. The story runs that the king built near Multan a great monastery constructed of timber after the foreign fashion, in which he entertained the strange teachers hospitably for several months, and that at the close of the entertainment he set fire to the building, and consumed along with it twelve thousand followers of the outlandish system, with all their books. This drastic measure is said to have reduced the religion of the Persians and Sakas to very narrow limits for a century, and it is alleged that their doctrine, presumably Zoroastrianism, was kept alive only by a single weaver in Khorasan.

King Harsha was so delighted with the discourse of Hiuen Tsang, whom he had met while in camp in Bengal, that he resolved to hold a special assembly at Kanauj, which was then his capital, for the purpose of giving the utmost publicity to the Master’s teaching. The king marched along the southern bank of the Ganges, attended by an enormous multitude, while his vassal Kumara, King of Kamarupa, with a large but less numerous following, kept pace with him on the opposite bank. Advancing slowly in this way, Harsha, Kumara, and the attendant host reached Kanauj in the course of ninety days, and there encamped, in February or March, 644 A.D. The sovereign was received by Kumara, the Raja of Kamarupa, who had accompanied him on the march, the Raja of Valabhi in Western

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India, who was connected with him by marriage, and eighteen other tributary rajas, as well as by four thoushsand learned Buddhist monks, including a thousand from the Nalanda monastery in Bihar, and some three thousand Jains and orthodox Brahmans.

The centre of attraction was a great monastery and shrine specially erected upon the bank of the Ganges, where a golden image of Buddha, equal to the king in stature, was kept in a tower a hundred feet high. A similar but smaller image, three feet in height, was carried daily in solemn procession, escorted by the twenty rajas and a train of three hundred elephants. The canopy was borne by Harsha in person, attired as the god Sakra, while his vassal, Raja Kumara, the most important of the princes in attendance, was clad as the god Brahma, and had the honour of waving a white fly-whisk. The sovereign, as he moved along, scattered on every side pearls, golden flowers, and other precious substances, in honour of the “Three Jewels,” – Buddha, the Religion, and the Order, – and having with his own hands washed the image at the altar prepared for the purpose, bore it on his shoulder to the western tower, and there offered to it thousands of silken robes embroidered with gems. Dinner was succeeded by a public disputation of the one-sided kind already described, and in the evening the monarch returned to his “travelling palace,” a mile distant.

These ceremonies, which lasted for many days, were terminated by startling incidents. The temporary monastery, which had been erected at vast cost, suddenly

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took fire, and was in great part destroyed; but when the king intervened in person, the flames were stayed, and pious hearts recognized a miracle.

Harsha, attended by his princely train, had ascended the great stupa to survey the scene, and was coming down the steps, when a fanatic, armed with a dagger, rushed upon him and attempted to stab him. The assassin, having been captured instantly, was closely interrogated by the king in person, and confessed that he had been instigated to commit the crime by certain “heretics,” who resented the excessive royal favour shown to the Buddhists. Five hundred Brahmans of note were then arrested, and, being “straitly questioned,” were induced to confess that, in order to gratify their jealousy, they had fired the tower by means of burning arrows, and had hoped to slay the king during the resulting confusion. This confession, which was no doubt extorted by torture, was probably wholly false; but, whether true or not, it was accepted, and on the strength of it the alleged principals in the plot were executed, and some five hundred Brahmans were sent into exile.

After the close of the proceedings at Kanauj, Harsha invited his Chinese guest to accompany him to Prayaga (Allahabad), at the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna, to witness another imposing ceremonial. The Master of the Law, although anxious to start on his toilsome homeward journey, could not refuse the invitation, and accompanied his royal host to the scene of the intended display. Harsha explained that it had

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been his practice for thirty years past, in accordance with the custom of his ancestors, to hold a great quinquennial assembly on the sands where the rivers meet, and there to distribute his accumulated treasures to the poor and needy, as well as to the religious of all denominations. The present occasion was the sixth of the series (644 A.D.), which evidently had not been begun until Harsha had consolidated his power in the north.

The assembly was attended by all the vassal kings and a vast concourse of humbler folk estimated to number half a million, including poor, orphans, and destitute persons, besides specially invited Brahmans and ascetics of every sect from all parts of Northern India. The proceedings lasted for seventy-five days, terminating apparently about the end of April, and were opened by an imposing procession of all the rajas with their retinues. The religious services were of the curiously eclectic kind characteristic of the times.

On the first day an image of Buddha was set up in one of the temporary thatched buildings upon the sands, and vast quantities of costly clothing and other articles of value were distributed. On the second and third days, respectively, the images of the Sun and Siva were similarly honoured, but the accompanying distribution in each case was only half the amount of that consecrated to Buddha. The fourth day was devoted to the bestowal of gifts on ten thousand selected religious persons of the Buddhist order, who each received one hundred gold coins, a pearl, and a cotton garment,

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besides choice food, drink, flowers, and perfumes. During the next following twenty days, the great multitude of Brahmans were the recipients of the royal bounty. They were succeeded by the people whom the Chinese author calls “heretics,” that is to say, Joins and members of sundry sects, who received gifts for the space of ten days. A like period was allotted for the bestowal of alms upon mendicants from distant regions, and a month was occupied in the distribution of charitable aid to poor, orphaned, and destitute persons.

“By this time the accumulation of five years was exhausted. Except the ‘horses, elephants, and military accoutrements, which were necessary for maintaining order and protecting the royal estate, nothing remained. Besides these the king freely gave away his gems and goods, his clothing and necklaces, ear-rings, bracelets, chaplets, neck-jewel, and bright head-jewel; all these he freely gave without stint. All being given away, he begged from his sister [Rajyasri] an ordinary second-hand garment, and, having put it on, he paid worship to the Buddhas of the ten regions,’ and rejoiced that his treasure had been bestowed in the field of religious merit.”

The strange assembly, which in general appearance must have much resembled the crowded fair still held annually on the same ground, then broke up, and, after a further detention of ten days, Hiuen Tsang was permitted to depart. The king and Kumara Raja offered him abundance of gold pieces and other precious things, none of which he would accept, save a fur-lined cape,

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the gift of Kumara. But although the Master of the Law uniformly declined gifts intended to serve his personal use, he did not disdain to accept money for the necessary expenses of his arduous journey overland to China. These were provided on a liberal scale by the grant of three thousand gold and ten thousand silver pieces carried on an elephant.

A raja named Udhita was placed in command of a mounted escort, and charged to conduct the pilgrim in safety to the frontier. In the course of about six months of leisurely progress, interrupted by frequent halts, the raja completed his task, and brought his sovereign’s guest in safety to Jalandhar in the north of the Panjab, where Hiuen Tsang stayed for a month. He then started with a fresh escort, and, penetrating with difficulty the defiles of the Salt Range, crossed the Indus, and ultimately reached his home in distant China by the route over the Pamirs and through Kilo-tan, in the spring of 646 A.D.

The pages of Hiuen Tsang and his biographer give the latest information about King Harsha, who died at the end of 647, or the beginning of 648, not long after his distinguished guest’s departure. During his lifetime he maintained diplomatic intercourse with the Chinese empire. A Brahman envoy, whom he had sent to the Emperor of China, returned in 643 A.D., accompanied by a Chinese mission bearing a reply to Harsha’s despatch. The mission remained for a considerable time in India, and did not go back to China until 645 A.D. The next year, Wang-hiuen-tse, who had been

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the second in command of the earlier embassy, was sent by his sovereign as head of a new _Indian mission, with an escort of thirty horsemen. Before the envoys reached Magadha in 648 A.D., King Harsha had died, and the withdrawal of his strong arm had plunged the country into disorder, which was aggravated by famine.

Arjuna, a minister of the late king, usurped the throne, and gave a hostile reception to the Chinese mission. The members of the escort were massacred, and the property of the mission thundered, but the envoys, Wang-hiuen-tse and his colleague, were fortunate enough to escape into Nepal by night.

The reigning King of Tibet, the famous Srong-tsan Gampo, who was married to a Chinese princess, succoured the fugitives, and supplied them with a force of a thousand horsemen, which co-operated with a Nepalese contingent of seven thousand men. With this small army Wang-hiuen-tse descended into the plains, and, after a three days’ siege, succeeded in storming the chief city of Tirhut. Three thousand of the garrison were beheaded, and ten thousand persons were drowned in the neighbouring river. Arjuna fled, and, having collected a fresh force, offered battle. He was again disastrously defeated and taken prisoner. The victor promptly beheaded a thousand prisoners, and in a later action captured the entire royal family, took twelve thousand prisoners, and obtained thirty thousand head of cattle. Five hundred and eighty walled towns made their submission, and K-umara, the King of Eastern India, who had attended Harsha’s assemblies

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a few years earlier, sent in abundant supplies of cattle, horses, and accoutrements for the victorious army. Wang-hiuen-tse brought the usurper Arjuna as a prisoner to China, and was promoted for his services. Thus ended this strange episode, which, although known to antiquaries for many years, has hitherto escaped the notice of the historians of India.

The observations of Hiuen Tsang throw considerable light upon the political arrangements of India in the regions beyond the limits of Harsha’s empire during the seventh century A.D. In the north, Kashmir was the predominant power, and had reduced the kingdoms of Taxila and the Salt Range (Simhapura), as well as the minor principalities of the lower hills, to the rank of dependencies.

The greater part of the Panjab between the Indus and the Bias Rivers was comprised in the kingdom called Tseh-kia by the pilgrim, the capital of which was an unnamed city situated close to Sakala, where the tyrant Mihiragula had held his court. The province of Multan, where the Sun-god was held in special honour, and a country called Po-fa-to, to the northeast of Multan, were dependencies of this kingdom.

Sind was remarkable for being under the government of a king belonging to the Sudra caste, and for the large number of Buddhist monks which the country supported, estimated at ten thousand. But the quality was not in proportion to the quantity, as most of the ten thousand were denounced as idle fellows given over to self-indulgence and debauchery. The Indus delta,

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to which the pilgrim gives the name of O-tien-pochi-lo, was a province of the kingdom of Sind.

The Kings of Ujjain in Central India and of Pundravardhana in Bengal, both of which kingdoms were more or less subject to Harsha’s control, belonged to the Brahman caste. The Ujjain country supported a dense population, which included few Buddhists. Most of the monasteries were in ruins, and only three or four, occupied by some three hundred monks, were in use. The early decay of Buddhism in this region, which was sanctified by the traditions of Asoka, and included the magnificent buildings at Sanchi, is a very curious fact.

Surya, the Sun

Bhaskara-varman, or Kumara Raja, the King of Kamarupa, or Assam, who played such a prominent part in Harsha’s ceremonials, was also by caste a Brahman, and without faith in Buddha, although well disposed toward learned men of all religions. He was so far subject to the sovereign of Northern India that he could not afford to disobey Harsha’s commands.

Kalinga, the conquest of which had cost Asoka such

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bitter remorse nine hundred years earlier, was depopulated, and mostly covered with jungle. The pilgrim observes in picturesque language that “in old days the kingdom of Kalinga had a very dense population. Their shoulders rubbed one with the other, and the axles of their chariot-wheels grided together, and when they raised their arm-sleeves a perfect tent was formed.” Legend sought to explain the change by the curse of an angry saint.

Harsha was the last native monarch prior to the Mohammedan conquest who held the position of paramount power in the North. His death loosened the bonds which restrained the disruptive forces always ready to operate in India, and allowed them to produce their normal result, a medley of petty states, with ever varying boundaries, and engaged in unceasing internecine war. Such was India when first disclosed to European observation in the fourth century B.C., and such it always has been, except during the comparatively brief periods in which a vigorous central government has compelled the mutually repellent molecules of the body politic to check their gyrations, and submit to the grasp of a superior controlling force.

Excepting the purely local incursions of the Arabs in Sind and Gujarat during the eighth century, India was exempt from foreign aggression for nearly five hundred years, from the defeat of Mihiragula in 528 A.D. until the raids of Mahmud of Ghazni at the beginning of the eleventh century, and was left free to work out her destiny in her own fashion. She cannot claim to

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have achieved success. The three following chapters, which attempt to give an outline of the salient features in the bewildering annals of Indian petty states when left to their own devices for several centuries, may perhaps serve to give the reader a notion of what India always has been when released from the control of a supreme authority.

Footnotes

4. Not to be confounded with the Western province of Gujarat.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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