India Through the Ages. Flora Annie Webster Steel
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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 Sâkas, who, driven from behind by the following tribe, the Yuehchi, overwhelmed Bactria, forced their way into the Punjâb, and penetrated as far south as Mathura, while another section founded a Sika dynasty at Kathiawâr. They seem to have owned allegiance to the Arsakian or Parthian kings of Persia, and bore the Persian title 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 Habbân, 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 multitudes 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 associated 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 Sâkas, and with two hundred thousand bowmen and a million persons of all ages and sexes 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 Asôka 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 Kalînga to revolt also. The capital of the Andhra kingdom appears to have been an unidentified city called Sri-Kâkulum, 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 Hâla, 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 entitled "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 Pusŷa-mitra, commander-in-chief to the last of the Mauryas, lost patience with his weak master, assassinated 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 space of one whole year. Hey presto! by beat of drum the fiat goes forth, as it grazes, that proprietors, principalities, 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 Pushŷa-mitra, like so many bloody usurpers, was dévote, 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 titular 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 pass 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 Vikramadîtya? Vikramadîtya the hero, the demigod, 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 Punjâb 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! Vikramadîtya 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! Vikramadîtya, 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 pass 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