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After the Guptas: Harsha and the north

The Guptas and after · Part 3 / 4 · Fact-checked on · how we check

Written with AI from the sources listed at the bottom of this page, then fact-checked by a separate AI.

The successor states of the north; the Pushyabhutis of Thanesar and Harsha's rise; his wars, Pulakeshin II and the Narmada; feudatories, land grants and the Banskhera and Madhuban plates; Hiuen Tsang and the Kannauj and Prayag assemblies; Harsha's plays, Banabhatta and Nalanda; Yashovarman and Lalitaditya; the tripartite struggle for Kannauj, the Palas and the Pratiharas; the Arab conquest of Sindh.

Part 2 closed with the Gupta empire breaking apart in the sixth century. This part follows north India through roughly the next three hundred years. For about four decades in the first half of the seventh century, Harsha of the Pushyabhuti dynasty family brought much of the Ganga valley back under one ruler, and his reign is unusually well documented because a court poet wrote his life in the Harshacharita and a Chinese monk, Hiuen Tsang, wrote down what he saw. After Harsha, the city of Kannauj on the Ganga became the prize that the strongest kings of the east, the west and the Deccan fought over, a contest called the tripartite struggle, while in the far west an Arab army took Sindh.

As Gupta power faded, its former governors and allies set up kingdoms of their own. The Maitrakas, founded by a general named Bhatarka, ruled from Valabhi in Saurashtra, a port town that was also a centre of learning. The Maukharis held Kannauj and the country around it, while a line known as the Later Guptas, whose link with the imperial family is unclear, ruled in Magadha and Malwa. In Bengal, Shashanka made himself king of Gauda, with his capital at Karnasuvarna. Buddhist writers, Hiuen Tsang among them, remembered Shashanka as a persecutor who had the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya cut down; since the charge comes from his enemies' side, historians treat it with caution.

The Pushyabhuti dynasty kings ruled from Thanesar (Sthanvishvara) in present-day Haryana. Prabhakaravardhana, the first of the family to take the title maharajadhiraja, fought the Hunas and gave his daughter Rajyashri in marriage to the Maukhari king Grahavarman of Kannauj. Soon after Prabhakaravardhana died, Devagupta of Malwa killed Grahavarman and threw Rajyashri into prison. Her elder brother Rajyavardhana marched out and defeated Devagupta, but was then killed by Shashanka, Devagupta's ally. The younger brother, Harshavardhana, came to the throne in 606 CE, the year from which the Harsha era is counted. According to Banabhatta, Harsha found his sister in the Vindhya forest just as she was about to throw herself into a fire. With no Maukhari heir left at Kannauj, Harsha took charge of that kingdom too and made Kannauj, rather than Thanesar, his capital.

Harsha spent much of his reign at war. To squeeze Shashanka from two sides he made an alliance with Bhaskaravarman, king of Kamarupa in Assam, though Gauda seems to have come fully under his control only after Shashanka's death. His attempt to expand south failed. The Chalukya king Pulakeshin II stopped him on the Narmada, and the Aihole inscription that the poet Ravikirti composed for Pulakeshin boasts that Harsha's joy (harsha) melted away when his war elephants fell. The Narmada remained the southern edge of his power. Harsha also exchanged envoys with the Tang emperor Taizong of China, a sign that distant courts now took Kannauj seriously as a capital.

Harsha governed much as the Guptas had, but feudatories were even more prominent. Many rulers inside his empire kept their own lands as samanta (feudatory)s and mahasamantas, sending him tribute and soldiers. Hiuen Tsang reports that taxes were light, the main one being a sixth of the crop, that officials were rewarded with grants of land rather than cash, and that the income of the crown lands was split four ways: for government business and worship, for paying high officers, for rewarding learned men and for gifts to religious bodies. Two copper plates of Harsha survive, from Banskhera (628 CE) and Madhuban (631 CE) in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Both record grants of villages to Brahmanas, and the Banskhera plate carries what is taken to be the king's own signature. The same pilgrim notes that the roads were not fully safe, since he was robbed more than once, and that punishments were harsher than the ones Fa-Hien had described two centuries earlier.

Hiuen Tsang (also written Xuanzang) was a Chinese Buddhist monk who left China in 629 CE, crossed Central Asia by land and spent more than ten years in India before returning home in 645 CE with a large load of manuscripts and relics. Like Fa-Hien before him, he came to collect Buddhist texts and visit the holy places, and his travels took him as far south as Kanchi. His account of the journey, the Si-yu-ki (Records of the Western Regions), describes one kingdom after another: its size, climate, people, customs and monasteries. A biography written by his pupil Hwui Li adds details of his time with Harsha. A devout monk naturally paid most attention to Buddhist matters, and he sometimes judged kings by how they treated Buddhism, so his praise and blame need to be read with that in mind.

Harsha met Hiuen Tsang near the end of the pilgrim's stay and became his patron. In 643 CE he called a great assembly at Kannauj, at which the monk explained the Mahayana teaching before kings, Brahmanas, Jains and Buddhists of rival schools. Harsha then took his guest to Prayag, where, once every five years, the king gave away the wealth piled up in his treasury to monks, Brahmanas, the poor and the helpless. Hiuen Tsang watched the sixth such gathering. Harsha's family worshipped Shiva and the Sun, and he went on honouring them alongside the Buddha, though in his later years he leaned towards Mahayana Buddhism.

Harsha was an author in his own right. Three Sanskrit plays are credited to him: Ratnavali and Priyadarshika, light court comedies about royal love affairs, and Nagananda, in which a Vidyadhara prince gives up his life to save the serpents, a story shaped by Buddhist ideals of compassion. His court poet Banabhatta wrote the Harshacharita, an ornate prose life of the king that is the main Indian source for his early years, and the prose romance Kadambari. Harsha also gave generously to the Nalanda mahavihara in Bihar, the monastery and centre of learning that Kumaragupta I had founded. Hiuen Tsang studied there for years under its head, Shilabhadra, and describes thousands of monks, constant debate and a great library, all supported by the revenue of villages granted to the institution. I-tsing, another Chinese monk, came by sea in the 670s and also studied there.

Harsha died in 647 CE without an heir, and his empire fell apart almost at once. In the early eighth century Yashovarman ruled from Kannauj; his court included the Sanskrit dramatist Bhavabhuti and the poet Vakpati, whose Prakrit poem Gaudavaho celebrates his patron's campaign against the king of Gauda. Yashovarman was in turn defeated by Lalitaditya Muktapida of the Karkota dynasty of Kashmir, a conqueror remembered for the Sun temple at Martand. From the late eighth century three powers fought over Kannauj for close to two hundred years: the Pala dynasty of Bengal and Bihar, the Gurjara-Pratiharas kings of western India and the Rashtrakutas kings of the Deccan. Historians call this the tripartite struggle. Kannauj mattered because whoever held it commanded the middle Ganga valley, with its fertile land and its trade routes, and could claim the prestige of Harsha's old capital.

The Pala dynasty began around the middle of the eighth century. A copper plate of his son Dharmapala says that after a long spell of disorder, likened to matsyanyaya (the law of the fish, where the big swallow the small), Gopala was chosen as king. Dharmapala turned the kingdom into a major power: he put his own nominee, Chakrayudha, on the throne of Kannauj, founded the Vikramashila mahavihara in Bihar and the great monastery at Somapura (Paharpur, now in Bangladesh), and supported Nalanda. A copper plate of Devapala found at Nalanda records that, at the request of the Shailendra king Balaputradeva of Suvarnadvipa (in present-day Indonesia), he granted villages for the upkeep of a monastery that the Shailendra king had built there. The Palas were Buddhist patrons of Mahayana and Vajrayana teaching, and scholars from their monasteries, among them Atisha Dipankara of Vikramashila, later carried Buddhism to Tibet.

In 712 CE an Arab force sent by the Umayyad governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, and led by Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh and killed its king, Dahir. Arab attempts to push further east in the eighth century were beaten back by the rulers of western India, of whom Nagabhata I, an early Gurjara-Pratiharas king, became the most celebrated. The Pratiharas went on to become the largest power in the north. Nagabhata II took Kannauj from Chakrayudha and defeated Dharmapala, but was himself beaten by the Rashtrakutas king Govinda III, who raided the north and then withdrew to the Deccan. In the ninth century Mihira Bhoja, who took the title Adivaraha, ruled a wide kingdom from Kannauj. The Arab merchant Sulaiman, writing in 851 CE, described the king of the Juzr (the Gurjaras) as having the finest cavalry in India and as the fiercest enemy of the Arabs.

The three powers of the tripartite struggle for Kannauj
DynastyBaseKey rulersRemember
PalasBengal and BiharGopala, Dharmapala, DevapalaGopala chosen after matsyanyaya; Vikramashila and Somapura founded by Dharmapala; Devapala's Nalanda grant for the Shailendra monastery
Gurjara-PratiharasWestern India (Rajasthan, Malwa), later KannaujNagabhata I, Nagabhata II, Mihira BhojaHeld back the Arabs; Nagabhata II took Kannauj; Mihira Bhoja (Adivaraha) praised by Sulaiman for his cavalry
RashtrakutasThe DeccanDhruva, Govinda IIIRaided the north and withdrew; Govinda III defeated Nagabhata II (more in Part 4)

Seen as a whole, the centuries after the Guptas follow one pattern. Kingdoms rose fast and fell fast because power rested on feudatories who could switch sides, and grants of land to Brahmanas, temples and monasteries kept spreading. Harsha's reign looks bright mainly because Banabhatta and Hiuen Tsang wrote about it, but his empire was a large federation of vassals rather than a centralised state, and it did not outlive him. After Harsha, Kannauj became the symbol of supremacy in the north, and the long tripartite struggle among the Palas, Pratiharas and Rashtrakutas exhausted all three without giving any of them lasting control. Part 4 turns south, to the home of the Rashtrakutas and to the Pallavas, the Chalukyas and the Cholas, who built kingdoms and temples of their own.

Exam traps

Recap

Practice questions

Q1. The era counted from the accession of Harshavardhana begins in which year?

  1. 78 CE
  2. 319 CE
  3. 606 CE
  4. 647 CE
Show answer

Answer: C. 606 CE

Answer (c). Harsha came to the throne in 606 CE, the starting year of the Harsha era. 78 CE begins the Shaka era; 319–320 CE begins the Gupta era; 647 CE is the year of Harsha's death, not the start of any era.

Q2. Consider the following statements:
1. The Harshacharita was written by Harsha himself.
2. The play Nagananda, with its Buddhist theme of self-sacrifice, is credited to Harsha.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

  1. 1 only
  2. 2 only
  3. Both 1 and 2
  4. Neither 1 nor 2
Show answer

Answer: B. 2 only

Answer (b). Statement 1 is wrong: the Harshacharita is the work of Harsha's court poet Banabhatta, who also wrote Kadambari. Statement 2 is right: Nagananda, along with Ratnavali and Priyadarshika, is credited to Harsha. So (a), (c) and (d) are wrong.

Q3. Match List I with List II:
List I (Ruler) — List II (Associated with)
A. Kumaragupta I — 1. Vikramashila mahavihara
B. Dharmapala — 2. Sun temple at Martand
C. Lalitaditya Muktapida — 3. Founding of Nalanda
D. Devapala — 4. Grant for a monastery built by the Shailendra king Balaputradeva
Select the correct answer using the code given below:

  1. A-3, B-1, C-2, D-4
  2. A-1, B-3, C-2, D-4
  3. A-3, B-1, C-4, D-2
  4. A-4, B-1, C-2, D-3
Show answer

Answer: A. A-3, B-1, C-2, D-4

Answer (a). Kumaragupta I founded Nalanda; the Pala king Dharmapala founded Vikramashila; Lalitaditya of Kashmir is remembered for the Martand Sun temple; Devapala granted villages for Balaputradeva's monastery at Nalanda. Option (b) swaps the founders of Nalanda and Vikramashila; (c) swaps Lalitaditya and Devapala; (d) gives Kumaragupta the Shailendra grant and Devapala the founding of Nalanda.

Q4. The southward expansion of Harsha was checked on the banks of the Narmada by

  1. Narasimhavarman I
  2. Pulakeshin II
  3. Shashanka
  4. Bhaskaravarman
Show answer

Answer: B. Pulakeshin II

Answer (b). The Chalukya king Pulakeshin II of Badami defeated Harsha on the Narmada, as his Aihole inscription records. Narasimhavarman I was the Pallava king who later defeated Pulakeshin II; Shashanka of Gauda was Harsha's enemy in the east, not the south; Bhaskaravarman of Kamarupa was Harsha's ally.

Q5. Which one of the following dynasties was NOT a party to the tripartite struggle for Kannauj?

  1. Palas
  2. Gurjara-Pratiharas
  3. Rashtrakutas
  4. Cholas
Show answer

Answer: D. Cholas

Answer (d). The struggle for Kannauj from the late eighth century was fought among the Palas of Bengal and Bihar, the Gurjara-Pratiharas of western India and the Rashtrakutas of the Deccan, so (a), (b) and (c) were all parties. The Cholas of the far south took no part in it.

Q6. With reference to Hiuen Tsang, consider the following statements:
1. He travelled to India overland through Central Asia.
2. He witnessed one of Harsha's five-yearly distributions of wealth at Prayag.
3. He visited India during the reign of Chandragupta II.
Which of the statements given above are correct?

  1. 1 and 2 only
  2. 2 and 3 only
  3. 1 and 3 only
  4. 1, 2 and 3
Show answer

Answer: A. 1 and 2 only

Answer (a). Statements 1 and 2 are correct: Hiuen Tsang crossed Central Asia by land and attended the sixth Prayag gathering with Harsha. Statement 3 is wrong: it was Fa-Hien who came under Chandragupta II; Hiuen Tsang came in the seventh century under Harsha. So (b), (c) and (d), which include statement 3, are wrong.

Q7. The ruler of Sindh who was defeated and killed by Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 CE was

  1. Dahir
  2. Devagupta
  3. Yashovarman
  4. Grahavarman
Show answer

Answer: A. Dahir

Answer (a). Dahir, king of Sindh, was killed when the Arabs took Sindh in 712 CE. Devagupta was the king of Malwa who killed Grahavarman; Yashovarman ruled Kannauj in the eighth century; Grahavarman was the Maukhari husband of Rajyashri.

Q8. Consider the following statements about Harsha's administration as described by Hiuen Tsang:
1. Officials were mostly rewarded with grants of land rather than cash.
2. The main tax was one-sixth of the produce.
3. The roads were so safe that travellers were never robbed.
Which of the statements given above are correct?

  1. 1 and 2 only
  2. 2 and 3 only
  3. 1 and 3 only
  4. 1, 2 and 3
Show answer

Answer: A. 1 and 2 only

Answer (a). Statements 1 and 2 match Hiuen Tsang's account. Statement 3 is wrong: the pilgrim himself was robbed more than once, so the roads were not fully safe. Options (b), (c) and (d) all include the wrong statement 3.

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