India Through the Ages Part 7

What manner of man Asoka was outwardly, we have no means of knowing; but those who know of his life can picture him in his yellow monk's robe, wearied yet unwearied, pondering over his lifelong problem. "By what means can I lead my people into the path of peace?"

Unwearied because of the spirit which inspires the words, "Work I must for the public benefit"; wearied because, "Though I am ready at any hour and any place to receive pet.i.tions, I am never fully satisfied with my despatch of business."

He died in B.C. 231, leaving his empire intact, and was apparently succeeded by a grandson. After him came five kings, all mere names.

The duration of the dynasty was 137 years, and as 89 of these belonged to the combined reigns of Chandra-gupta, Bindu-sara, and Asoka, the remaining six kings have but eight years apiece. Long enough, however, to disintegrate, to dissipate the vast empire of Asoka. So much so, that before continuing the story of what may be called the central kings of India, it is necessary to give a side-glance at the outlying provinces where, on the removal of Asoka's firm grip on Government, various minor dynasties began to rise into a power superior to that of Magadha.

THE OUTLYING PROVINCES

B.C. 231 TO A.D. 45

A growing tide as it nears the springs claims more and more of the sh.o.r.e at each rise and fall. So it was with the tide which on Asoka's death set in around his throne.

On the north-western frontier, that battle-ground of India, there had been peace since Chandra-gupta wrested half Ariana from the grip of Seleukos Nikator. But the country itself had remained more or less under h.e.l.lenist influence. Antiochus, Demetrios Eukratides, such are the names of the pa.s.sing rulers of whose existence we know by the mult.i.tude of coins which form almost their only history.

Indeed, as in some museum we gaze with keen yet clouded interest at some case of coins labelled "Indo-Greek, Indo-Parthian _civ_: B.C.

250, A.D. 50," we are really gaining at a glance an impressionist picture of the strange welter of princ.i.p.alities and powers, of sudden diminutions and almost causeless exacerbations of influence, which marked the pa.s.sage of these few centuries upon the borderland of India. Here a big gold plaque arrests our eye, just as the name of Arsakes or Menander heaves into sight out of the confused medley of their more insignificant surroundings; or some quaint half-Aryan, half-Parthian inscription leaves us wondering of the why and the wherefore, just as some trivial incident which has survived Time in the pages of obscure Greek writers makes us pause to wish for more.

Strange, ghost-like personalities are those which live rudely hammered out on a rough ingot of bronze, or silver, or gold, telling their tale truly,--succinctly at times however, as when the name and portrait of one prince forms at first the obverse of another, then the name alone remains, and finally Hermaios disappears, and Kadphises rules supreme.

[Map: India to B.C. 231]

Who are they all? Historians peer and ponder; they add date to date, and divide the total by their own desires--for in no branch of knowledge is the personal equation more powerful than in history--yet still that glance at the case of coins gives to the uninitiated the best impression of the period.

One thing which militates against a concise pigeon-holing of such information as we can gather into this brief review of Indian history, is the fact that much of it has really nothing to do with India at all. The Hindoo Kush range of mountains may be taken as the western boundary of Asoka's empire, and the powers which encroached on that empire matured their plans, conquered and governed such provinces as they gained from beyond that boundary. The Bactrians, for instance, who appeared on the banks of the Indus, came from the valleys and fertile plains about the Oxus. They were a semi-civilised, semi-h.e.l.lenised race, who boasted the possession of a thousand cities.

The Parthians, on the other hand, hailed from the wide steppes about the Caspian Sea, and were barbarian utterly in the sense of not caring for either luxury or culture. Mounted shepherds, mere moss-troopers, they were a hardy race, and under the leadership of Arsakes, gripped at the crown of Central Asia, and so, inevitably, after a time reached out to the fat lands about the Indus; for the most part leaving the princelings who parcelled out the land in possession, as feudatories to the foreign power.

It will be remembered that Seleukos Nikator's attempt to recover India for Greece in Chandra-gupta's time failed. Thenceforward for a hundred years no other attempt was made. In B.C. 206, however, Antiochus the Bactrian made a sweep on Kandahar, and Demetrios, his son, in B.C.

190, following his example, captured both the Punjab and Sinde. To his own cost, however; for, weakened by these distant wars, he had to yield his throne to one Eukratides, and be content for a time with the t.i.tle of "King of the Indians." Not for long, however, for Eukratides, being bad to beat, eventually got a grip even on these eastern provinces.

Justin the historian gives a few personal details of this Eukratides.

How he and three hundred held a fort for five months against Demetrios and sixty thousand; and how he was killed in cold blood by his son and colleague, who drove his chariot wheels over his father's dead body and refused it burial. A poor return for trust, and honour, and devoted love! It is satisfactory to know that the monstrous crime brought its own punishment The dead hero's hold once gone, the successes he had gained drifted from the murderer's hands, and thereinafter ensued one of those confused welters of conflicting names, powers, princ.i.p.alities, which send us back to our outlook on the case of coins. Menander's name rises out of the obscure in B.C.

155, when he attempted to follow Alexander's footsteps. With a large army he marched on India, and crossing the Beas, which had defied his predecessor, actually threatened the capital of Paliputra itself. At that time, however, the sovereignty of Magadha lay with a strong man; the man who, ousting the degenerate Mauryas, had shown himself to have the qualities of both a soldier and general. So the Greek king had to beat a hasty retreat, thus ending the last attempt of Europe upon India until Vasco de Gama's, in A.D. 1502.

About this time two nomad tribes from the wide Roof-of-the-World began a march southward, which, like a flood, was eventually to sweep everything before it. The first were the Sakas, who, driven from behind by the following tribe, the Yuehchi, overwhelmed Bactria, forced their way into the Punjab, and penetrated as far south as Mathura, while another section founded a Sika dynasty at Kathiawar.

They seem to have owned allegiance to the Arsakian or Parthian kings of Persia, and bore the Persian t.i.tle of satrap.

Thus, from the pell-mell of petty princelings and wild, nomadic chieftains another name springs to notice. On the coins it runs: "_Maues basileus basileon_."

This king of kings, as he proudly calls himself, was Maues, the first, or nearly the first, of an Indo-Parthian dynasty replacing the Indo-Greek and Indo-Bactrian ones. As our eye runs over the coins--the only relics of dead kings--it is arrested by the name of Gondophares.

Now who was Gondophares? The question clamours vainly for answer, until a faint recollection of the early fathers brings Origen and the Acts of St Thomas back to memory. Yes! Gondophares was the King of India in the days when

"the twelve Apostles, having divided the countries of the world amongst themselves by lot, India fell to the share of Judas, surnamed Thomas or the Twin, who showed unwillingness to start on his mission."

Poor St Thomas! It was a far cry, but Habban, the Indian merchant, conveyed his saintly purchase (for the Lord sold the unwilling missioner to him in a vision for twenty pieces of silver) to King Gundephar in safety. And the king bade the apostle, who was an architect, build him a palace in six months.

"And St Thomas, commanded therefore by the Lord, promised to build him the palace within the six months, but spent all the monies in almsgiving. So when the time came, he explained that he was building the king a palace, not on earth, but in heaven, not made with hands--and mult.i.tudes of the people embraced the faith."

So runs the old Monkish story. Is it true? Who knows! Gondophares was a real man, he was a real Indian king, he is a.s.sociated in legend with a Christian mission, and the claim that St Thomas was the missioner is not at variance with known facts or chronology. With that we must be content.

And now the coins tell another tale. In their turn the Indo-Parthian princes were being driven southward. Their names disappear before those of the horde of Turki nomads called the Yuehchi, who about the middle of the second century B.C. followed the path taken years before by the Sakas, and with two hundred thousand bowmen and a million persons of all ages and s.e.xes poured themselves into India in search of pastures new.

So much for the north-western frontier. In the south-west, while Greek prince after Greek prince in the north was minting coins that were to carry his name idly, ineffectively, through the centuries, an aboriginal Dravidian people, driven, no doubt, thousands of years before from the fertile fields of the Gangetic plain by the steady advance of the Aryan immigrants, were as steadily regaining their hold upon Central India. The Andhra race was not slow to seize opportunity.

The death of Asoka gave them the chance of casting off their allegiance to the Maury a empire, and they took it. A few years later the King of the Andhras, self-styled the "Lord of the West," was able to send an army to the eastern sea-coast, and so help Kalinga to revolt also. The capital of the Andhra kingdom appears to have been an unidentified city called Sri-Kakulum, on the banks of the Krishna River; and the area of Andhra rule gradually increasing, crept closer and closer to that of Magadha. The memory of Hala, the seventeenth king, lives still by virtue of an anthology of love-songs called "The Seven Centuries," which he is said to have composed. That, a collection ent.i.tled "The Great Storybook," and a Sanskrit Grammar all belong by repute to the reign of this king. Finally, the inevitable collision occurred between the powerful Andhra dynasty and the degenerate, dissolute monarchy at Magadha, which resulted in the annihilation of the latter. But before turning to this, the course of the years since the Maurya kings disappeared from sheer inanition must be traced briefly. It was in B.C. 194 that Pus[^y]a-mitra, commander-in-chief to the last of the Mauryas, lost patience with his weak master, a.s.sa.s.sinated him, and founded the Sunga line. A strong, unscrupulous man evidently, he held his own, succeeded in stemming the steady tide of disintegration on both the south-east and the north-west, and drove back the Greek invasion of Menander.

Still unsatisfied, he revived, in order to strengthen his rule, the old traditional Horse-sacrifice, of which we read in the Vedas.

A quaint old ceremony without doubt. Imagine a grey horse, approved by lucky marks, sanctified by priests, turned loose to wander at its will. And behind it, following it from field to field as it ranges, a complete army ready to claim pasturage for it from all and sundry during the s.p.a.ce of one whole year. Hey presto! by beat of drum the fiat goes forth, as it grazes, that proprietors, princ.i.p.alities, powers, must submit or fight. So, if an unconquered army returned when the trial was ended, he who sent it forth had right to claim suzerainty, to call himself Lord-Paramount of all the others.

This particular "Asva-medha," as it is called, has a peculiar significance, in that it proves a determined return from Buddhism to Brahmanism on the part of the holders of the Magadha throne. It is said, indeed, that Push[^y]a-mitra, like so many b.l.o.o.d.y usurpers, was _devote_, and that his piety included persecution of the new faith.

One thing seems certain: his ten successors in the Sunga dynasty were all more or less in the hands of the Brahmans, who managed the state while the t.i.tular monarchs amused themselves in various discreditable ways, until in B.C. 75, one Vasu-deva, Brahman prime minister, lost patience with _his_ hereditary master, killed him while engaged in a dishonourable intrigue, and started a new dynasty--the Kanva--by mounting the throne himself! an idle proceeding, since it was soon to pa.s.s from the hands of his ineffectual successors to those of an Andhra prince.

But by this time--B.C. 75--another advancing flood--the Yuehchi migration--had appeared in the north-west, and for the first two centuries or so of our era was to claim equal share with the Dravidian kings in the Government of India.

And what of Vikramaditya? Vikramaditya the hero, the demiG.o.d, the king _par excellence_ of the Indian populace of to-day? The monarch whose victory over some Scythian invaders in B.C. 57 was celebrated by the introduction of the Samvat era, which dates from that year? Are all the stories of him that are told about the smoke-palled winter fires in the Punjab fields, the hundred and one tales of his munificence, his courage and his goodness--are all these mere legends?

So far as this early date is concerned, historians tell us that they are. More than five hundred years later one of the Gupta kings bore the name, and answers in some way to the description.

But how came he to be connected with the Samvat era which undoubtedly dates from B.C. 57? Who can say! Vikramaditya is a terrible loss to India. How can we bear to part with the king whose swans sang always:

"Glory be to Vikramajeet, He gave us pearls to eat!"

The king whose puppets of stone that bore aloft his throne refused to bear the weight of his successor, and wandered out into the wide world, each telling a tale of departed glory!

No! Vikramaditya, the beloved of every Indian school-boy for his valour, of every little Indian maiden for his gentleness, cannot be given up without a protest.

"The fiction which resembles truth is better than the truth which is dissevered from the imagination." Let us hark back to those words of wisdom, and search round for some faint foothold for blessed belief.

Let us turn to our case of coins in hope. Stay! What is this?

A nameless one. The date is close to the era we are seeking; the only inscription runs thus, "_Soter Megas_."

The "Great Saviour!" Is not that enough for the imagination? So let us pa.s.s by the cogitations of the historian as to what nameless king minted the coin, and listen with renewed confidence to the tale told by a childish voice of how King Vikramaditya slew the foul fiend.

What does it matter whether he was Vikramaditya or another? Foul fiends must always be killed; as well by a nameless king, provided he be a "Great Saviour."

But one point more requires a few words ere we pa.s.s on--the extent to which Greek culture influenced India.