Journey
Ruler and intellectual — five pairs
Indian political thought survives mostly as advice to particular rulers, and Indian court poetry mostly as eulogy of them, so the pairing of a king and a writer is the unit in which both are preserved. Five of them, from the Mauryas to the Paramaras, each of which produced a text that outlasted the reign.
Stops (11)
- Chanakya / Kautilya · the Mauryan pair
Traditionally the Brahmin who put Chandragupta on the Magadhan throne and the author of the Arthashastra, a manual of statecraft on revenue, espionage, war, famine relief and the management of guilds that assumes a bureaucracy of a kind no other ancient Indian text describes. The text's layers are later than his lifetime, and the repository keeps the attribution as tradition.
- Chandragupta Maurya · r. c. 321–297 BCE
The founder of the Mauryan empire, who took Magadha, then the Indus provinces Alexander's successors held, and fought Seleucus to a settlement that gave him everything as far as Gandhara in exchange for five hundred war elephants. Jain tradition has him abdicate, become a monk, and starve himself to death at Shravanabelagola.
- Pātaliputra · Pataliputra
The Magadhan capital under the Nandas, Mauryas and Guptas, at the Ganges and Son confluence, with a timber palisade that has been excavated. Megasthenes, who came as Seleucus's ambassador, said he had seen the great cities of the east, Susa and Ecbatana among them, and that this was the greatest of them.
- Samudragupta · r. c. 335–375
The Gupta emperor whose campaigns are listed on the Allahabad pillar in a Sanskrit eulogy — the single most important document for fourth-century Indian political geography, naming the kings he destroyed, those he defeated and reinstated, and those who sent tribute from as far as Lanka. His gold coins show him playing the vina, which no other Indian ruler put on a coinage, and others record the ashvamedha he revived after three centuries.
- Harisena · Harisena
Samudragupta's court poet and a high official, and the author of the Allahabad prashasti. He wrote a dynastic claim in a mixture of verse and prose and cut it onto a pillar Ashoka had already inscribed six centuries earlier, so two empires' statements about themselves share one shaft of stone.
- Prayāga / Prayagraj/ Allahabad · the confluence
Prayaga, where the Yamuna joins the Ganges, and the site of the pillar. It is also the Kumbh's principal ground and the place Harsha is recorded distributing his entire treasury every five years. Three kinds of authority — Mauryan, Gupta and the assembled pilgrimage — are staged at the same confluence.
- Harshavardhana · r. 606–647
The Pushyabhuti ruler who built the last great north Indian empire before the Turkish conquests, and the best documented early Indian king: a biography by his own court poet, years of observation by a Chinese monk who lived at his court, and three Sanskrit plays attributed to him personally. He was beaten once, by Pulakeshin II of the Chalukyas on the Narmada, and the frontier held there afterwards.
- Banabhatta · Harshacharita
Author of the Harshacharita, a Sanskrit prose biography of a living emperor, and of the Kadambari, which is among the first novels in any language. He opens the Harshacharita with an account of his own disreputable youth and of how he came to the court, which is the earliest first-person authorial self-description in Sanskrit literature.
- Kannauj · Kannauj
Harsha's capital on the Ganges, described at length by Xuanzang, and afterwards the prize in a two-century war between the Pratiharas, Palas and Rashtrakutas because whoever held it held the middle Ganges. Mahmud sacked it in 1018; by the nineteenth century it was a small town making attar of roses.
- Raja Bhoja of Dhar · r. c. 1010–1055
The Paramara king of Malwa under whose name some eighty Sanskrit works survive, on architecture, poetics, grammar, medicine, yoga and mechanical devices. The number is large enough that he probably ran a workshop rather than writing them all, which makes him the one ruler in this set who is his own intellectual.
- Dhār · Dhar
The Paramara capital and Bhoja's seat, where he is credited with founding a Sanskrit college — the building now called the Bhojshala, a contested site claimed as a Saraswati temple and as the Kamal Maula mosque and currently under litigation. The Samaranganasutradhara's chapters on temple planning and on machines were written here.