Class 7 Social Science Chapter 15: Empires and Kingdoms: 6th to 10th Centuries

Six centuries, and several names

This chapter and the next survey India from about 600 CE, when the Gupta era ends, to about 1200 CE.

Historians have given those six centuries several labels. Early medieval. Late classical. Post-classical. The chapter declines to pick one, and asks only that the broad chronology be kept in mind.

Imagine you are travelling

Picture yourself in north India about 1,500 years ago, a young traveller setting out across the subcontinent. The mighty Gupta Empire has lost its dominance.

Your first stop is Kannauj, a city on the Ganga where a powerful king keeps poets and scholars about him. Weeks later comes the Deccan, and the Chalukya kingdom in it, with lively cities and magnificent temples.

What else you would see

Further south, whole temples are being carved out of rock by the Pallavas at Mamallapuram, which is also called Mahabalipuram. Over in Bengal, great universities are being supported by the Palas, Vikramashila among them.

What you do not see is a large empire. What you do see is a great many strong kingdoms.

The question the chapter asks

Some call this a time of political rivalry and disorder. A traveller would see something else: a land that buzzed with culture, with art and with new ideas, each region differing and all of it one India.

So the chapter puts its question plainly. Is an age of powerful empires ending here, or is a new era dawning?

A timeline to hang it on

Ten dates frame the six hundred years. The Chalukya dynasty rises in the sixth century. Harsha's rule begins at Kannauj in 606. Xuanzang travels India from 630 to 644. A first Arab naval attack is repulsed at Thana in 637.

The Bhakti tradition starts in south India about 650. The Pallavas and Chalukyas struggle from the sixth century to the eighth. The Arabs conquer Sindh in 712, after several attempts. The Pala dynasty rises in 750. The Tripartite Struggle over Kannauj runs through the eighth and ninth centuries. And the Cholas emerge as a dominant power in the ninth.

Harsha, and where he ruled from

Harshavardhana ruled from Kannauj, also spelt Kanauj and known anciently as Kanyakubja, in what is now Uttar Pradesh.

From there his empire spread across much of eastern and northern India. How far exactly, nobody knows with certainty, and the chapter says so rather than guessing.

A signature in stone

A copper plate found at Banskhera in Uttar Pradesh carries his own hand. It is written in Nagari script, which came before Devanagari.

What the line says is that the great king of kings, Shri Harsha, wrote it himself.

A king who wrote plays

Harsha was a fine poet and a dramatist. Three plays in classical Sanskrit are taken to be his, weaving love stories into courtly life, or turning on sacrifice and other high ethical values.

Now notice what historians do with such writing. These are stories, but scholars mine them for details of the time: how people were governed, how diverse society was, what technologies existed, what was eaten and what was worn.

The novelist at his court

Among the scholars Harsha patronised was Banabhatta, also called Bana, and Bana wrote Kadambari, reckoned one of the first novels in the world. He also composed a life of his patron, the Harshacharita.

Kadambari has an elaborate and complex plot. A prince of Ujjayini loves Kadambari, who is a celestial being, and their romance runs through dreams, across different births and into divine worlds, one story often told inside another. Along the way there are glimpses of courtly life, of nature, of philosophy and of aesthetics. Bana died before finishing it; his son completed it, and it is held a masterpiece of classical Indian literature.

Which religion was his?

Inscriptions show Harsha as a devotee of Shiva. Other sources have him deeply attached to Buddhism.

Both can be true at once, and that is the point to hold. He showed respect for every school of thought and belief, which was ordinary rather than remarkable in his time.

Another Chinese pilgrim

Besides inscriptions, the period's major source is a travelogue. Faxian had left an account of the Gupta era in the fifth century; two centuries later came Xuanzang, whose name was once transcribed as Hiuen Tsang or Hsuan Tsang.

He travelled the subcontinent between 630 and 644. His reason for so long and difficult a journey was the same as Faxian's: to see the sacred Buddhist sites, and to take doctrine from the teachers of India.

What he carried home

Back to China with him went Buddhist texts in Sanskrit, more than 600 manuscripts of them, and carrying the load took twenty horses. He then set himself to putting them into Chinese.

A meticulous account of the journey came from him as well, recording the religion and the culture, the diplomacy and the politics, of every kingdom he crossed. For historians of this period it is a major source.

Harsha and his guest

To Harsha court came this Chinese pilgrim, and two further ambassadors from China besides. An assembly was then held at Kannauj to honour Xuanzang, and kings attended it, with the leaders of many a religious sect.

Beautiful and prosperous was how Xuanzang found Kannauj, and he found Harsha a ruler both just and energetic, who kept a vast army and went often on campaign.

The assembly at Prayaga

Every five years Harsha held an assembly at Prayaga, which is Prayagraj today, where the Ganga meets the Yamuna.

There, after performing sacred rites, he gave away a great deal of his wealth. It went to Buddhists, to Brahmins, and to the poor.

What he could not do

Harsha attempted a push south beyond the Narmada, and it was checked. The man who checked it ruled the powerful Chalukya dynasty, and his name was Pulakeshin II.

He also dreamed of uniting northern India, and managed only mixed success. It helped that he allied with the Varmans, who ruled Kamarupa in what is Assam today, their capital Pragjyotisha lying near modern Guwahati. But conflicts with neighbouring kingdoms went on, and after his death in 647 north India fell into political turmoil.

Scenario:

A pupil is given three sources about Harsha and asked which to trust. The first is a copper plate with his signature, saying he wrote it in his own hand as the great king of kings. The second is a biography written by a poet he paid. The third is a travelogue by a foreign pilgrim he welcomed to court, who calls him just and energetic. The pupil says the first must be true, the second must be flattery, and the third cannot be trusted either, since a guest will praise his host.

Analysis:

Three sources, three different kinds of problem, and a judgement that throws away all three.

Activity:

Find out one thing about your own town that is known only from a single old record.

Title:

Build the century line

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Two of the ten dates are foreign arrivals, 637 and 712, and both are Arab. The rest are dynasties rising, struggles beginning, or a pilgrim travelling, which is the chapter point: this was a crowded, busy age rather than an empty one.

It took twenty horses to carry the manuscripts Xuanzang took back to China.

Kadambari was left unfinished and completed by Bana son.

Nagari script, on Harsha copper plate, came before Devanagari.

606 Harsha, 630 Xuanzang, 647 the turmoil.

Bana wrote the novel; Bana wrote the life.

Three powers, one city

Turmoil followed Harsha's death, and Kannauj became the centre of it. Around that city grew what is usually called the Tripartite Struggle, long-drawn and settling nothing.

Tripartite means involving three distinct parties. Here the three were the Rashtrakutas, who came out of the Deccan; out of the west the Gurjara-Pratiharas; and out of the east the Palas.

Two centuries, no victor

Through the eighth century and the ninth, war between these three went on repeatedly. Outcomes fluctuated.

Nobody won lastingly. That is worth stating as a fact about the period rather than a failure of it: three comparable powers held each other in place.

How the Palas began

Disorder had fallen on the Bengal region after Harsha died. An inscription has it that the choice of a king ended it: Gopala was picked out in 750 CE, to set things in order again.

He became the first king of the Pala dynasty, and before long much of eastern India was under it.

Dharmapala, and what he founded

Gopala's successor was Dharmapala, and the Pala Empire under him spread over much of northern and eastern India.

As a patron of Mahayana Buddhism he became famous, and he founded major monasteries: Somapura, in what is now Bangladesh, and Vikramashila, in what is now Bihar. Like Harsha before them, the Palas also went on patronising Nalanda. Universities of the age is what those large monasteries amounted to, and students came to them from far off, sometimes from outside India altogether.

Why the Palas were rich

Internal trade was only part of it. Brisk maritime trade went through their seaports on the east coast, and from there the pathways ran to Southeast Asia.

The empire declined later, and what it left behind in parts of eastern and northern India was a lasting legacy of learning and of strong governance.

Was Dharmapala a Buddhist?

Some historians say so, and Buddhist learning and institutions did certainly have his patronage. But the chapter asks for care here, and the reason is important.

Religion in ancient India was a more fluid thing than it is now. Except perhaps for monks and nuns, people were at ease with several belief systems, and more than one mode of worship could be practised at once. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism were often regarded not as separate things but as branches of one philosophical tree.

Rulers who backed everything

Pride, for a ruler, often lay in patronising several schools of thought at once. The Guptas did it. Harsha is another example of such broad-mindedness.

And several of Dharmapala's own successors, while Buddhist institutions still had their support, were said to worship Shiva.

A university with gatekeepers

Late in the eighth century Dharmapala founded Vikramashila, on the Ganga banks, and for more than four centuries a great centre of learning is what it stayed.

A vast library stood in it, with lecture halls, with temples and monasteries, and with six colleges. Nearly 3,000 scholars studied there. Their subjects were grammar and logic, rituals and learning, and the philosophies both Hindu and Buddhist.

How you got in

Admission was highly selective, and the method was unusual enough to be worth knowing. Each college had its own dvarapandita, which means scholar gatekeeper, and he tested a student before letting them enter.

Ties with Tibet were what Vikramashila was best known for. A famous teacher of the place went there, put Sanskrit works into Tibetan, and did much to shape Tibetan Buddhism, which is also called Vajrayana. Such centres numbered in the hundreds if not the thousands across India, and they kept India's knowledge traditions alive. Vikramashila itself was plundered and destroyed in the twelfth century, by Bakhtiyar Khilji.

The Gurjara-Pratiharas

Nagabhata I founded this dynasty in the middle of the eighth century CE, and its origin was probably western India, Gurjara being a name for the region between Gujarat and Rajasthan.

Fame came to it for something this chapter returns to later: pushing Arab invasions back out of northwest India. Bhillamala, which is modern Bhinmal in western Rajasthan, was the early capital, and it seems to have moved later to Ujjayini.

King Bhoja, and three names

The celebrated Pratihara ruler of the ninth century was King Bhoja, a devotee of Vishnu, and his empire reached as far east as Kannauj from Punjab and Kathiawar, also called Saurashtra, in the west. Most of north India was under his control.

He went by other names too. Mihira, a name belonging to the Sun. And Adi Varaha, since Varaha is the boar form that Vishnu takes as an avatar. A century later the Rashtrakutas destroyed Kannauj, which hastened the breaking up of the Pratihara empire, and the Ghaznavids finished it off early in the eleventh century.

The Rashtrakutas

Dantidurga became the first independent Rashtrakuta ruler in the middle of the eighth century, by overthrowing the Chalukyas in the Deccan.

The power centre then shifted to what is now Karnataka, the capital being Manyakheta, which is modern Malkheda. For nearly two centuries they were among the most dominant powers anywhere, their empire spanning much of the subcontinent, and north India saw successful campaigns by Dantidurga successors, who briefly held Kannauj.

Not always at war

Here the chapter stops to correct an impression. Constantly fighting is not what the kings of such dynasties were, and the chapter says so.

Time and resources for creating wonders is what in fact they found. At Ellora, in what is now Maharashtra, the Kailashanatha temple was cut straight out of a hillside, and the order came from Krishna I of the Rashtrakutas. It is the largest rock-cut temple in India, and the thing to grasp about it is that a gigantic sculpture is what it is, not a construction at all.

What else they patronised

Equal patronage went from the Rashtrakutas to the Jain, Buddhist and Hindu schools of thought, and learning and literature were encouraged in Kannada, in Prakrit and in Sanskrit.

One ruler stands out. Amoghavarsha I, in the ninth century, took the title Nripatunga, meaning peak of kings.

A reign of sixty-four years

Wars with neighbouring kingdoms were frequent, including with the other dynasties surveyed here, and he still managed peace and prosperity in his empire. Stability too, since his reign ran for sixty-four years.

He is sometimes called a Jain king, being strongly drawn to Jainism, and he patronised Hindu temples as well. He was a fine poet besides, composing in Kannada and in Sanskrit. A road in central Bengaluru carries his name, Nrupatunga Road, and several institutions and government buildings stand along it.

An Arab historian's verdict

Al-Masudi was a tenth-century Arab historian and traveller from Baghdad, and he praised a Rashtrakuta ruler highly.

What he reported is worth stating carefully. The troops and elephants were beyond counting. No ruler in all of Sindh and Hind respected Muslims as this one did. In his kingdom Islam was honoured and protected, and mosques had been built for them, including congregational mosques, always full, where prayers were offered five times.

Scenario:

A pupil is asked to make a two-column chronicle of the eighth and ninth centuries. The left column is for wars and the right for everything else. She fills the left column easily: three powers fighting over one city, outcomes going back and forth, nobody winning. Then she finds the right column fills up too, and faster. She concludes that her two columns must be about two different periods, since no age could be doing both of these things at once.

Analysis:

One pupil, two columns, and a conclusion that the columns cannot belong to the same two centuries.

Activity:

Find out what was being built in your region while a war was going on somewhere.

Title:

Three powers, three directions

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Every one of the three has something in its building column, which is the point. As for the city, its position on the Ganga is what the chapter asks you to look at: whoever held Kannauj held the centre of the plains.

Each college at Vikramashila had a scholar gatekeeper who tested students before entry.

Amoghavarsha I reigned for sixty-four years.

A road in central Bengaluru is named after him.

Palas east, Pratiharas west, Rashtrakutas Deccan.

Gopala chosen 750; Vikramashila four centuries on.

A power stirring in the north

Far to the north, in the middle of the eighth century, something new was stirring in Kashmira, that Himalayan kingdom which is Kashmir today.

Coins and inscriptions tell part of its story. The rest we owe to one man: Kalhana, who wrote the Rajatarangini, a title meaning the River of Kings.

Two rulers out of many

Kalhana describes many kings and a few queens. Two are worth holding on to.

Lalitaditya Muktapida, of the Karkota dynasty, comes across as a firm ruler. After him the political scene saw many internal conflicts and shifts of power, some rulers taking the throne by force.

Queen Didda

Late in the tenth century came Queen Didda, and the chapter gives both sides of her.

Strategic alliances were how she consolidated her power. So, by Kalhana's account, was the ruthless elimination of rivals, her own grandsons among them. A few towns were founded by her as well, several temples built, and many more restored.

How Kalhana worked

The Rajatarangini was composed in Sanskrit in the twelfth century, by a Kashmiri scholar and poet, and it narrates the ruling dynasties of Kashmir from the beginning down to his own day.

What makes him unusual is that he explains his method. Where the narratives of past events had become fragmentary, he aimed at a connected account. Eleven earlier works by former scholars, containing chronicles of kings, were examined. Inscriptions were consulted too, about temple consecrations, royal grants and laudatory records, and by that means many errors were got past.

And what he was for

Recording history as he understood it was not his only purpose. He meant also to bring out the ethical values of the rulers, or their absence, so that moral lessons could be drawn.

His own phrasing on this is blunt. Rulers bent on harassing their subjects perish along with their families; fortune, by contrast, attends even the descendants of those who put order back where there was chaos.

A teacher who crossed India

Tradition has Adi Shankaracharya visiting a hill above the Kashmir valley near Srinagar. He was an eighth-century scholar, and the advaita vedanta school had him for a teacher. It is called the Shankaracharya Hill now, anciently Gopadri, and the stone temple on top bears his name too.

His teaching was that the ultimate reality, or pure consciousness, is brahman, and that maya, illusion, is what the world amounts to as we perceive it. Four mathas, which are monasteries and centres of learning, were established by him: at Sringeri and Dwarka, at Puri and Badrinath. Four corners of India, and not a central spot among them.

Kashmir, well connected

Mountainous geography did not cut the kingdom off. Throughout history it stayed well connected to political and cultural developments elsewhere in India.

In the period this chapter covers, Sanskrit learning had a major centre here, and so did philosophy and the arts. Several great scholars came out of a school of thought called Kashmir Shaivism, Abhinavagupta among them, whose work on aesthetics and the arts, on poetry and philosophy, carried enormous influence across India.

A bridge, and a workforce

For Buddhist scholarship, Kashmir served as a crucial bridge besides. Texts, monks and scholars travelled between Kashmir and northern India, and between Kashmir and Tibet and Central Asia.

Its artisans were in demand too. Manuscript painters, sculptors and craftsmen from Kashmir worked across north India and beyond it. In short, the exchanges of art and intellect tied the region closely to the cultural life of the whole subcontinent.

Down in the Deccan

The Deccan Plateau, with the southernmost tip of the subcontinent, was as alive in this period as the north. Once the Vakataka dynasty ended, supremacy became a contest, and several mighty kingdoms were locked into it.

The Rashtrakutas we have already met. Now the dynasty they overthrew.

The Chalukyas, and their two capitals

Pulakeshin I founded the Chalukya dynasty in the middle of the sixth century CE. His grandson was Pulakeshin II, who blocked the southward ambitions Harsha had, and expanded the kingdom considerably besides.

Vatapi was his capital, which is Badami in Karnataka today, famous for its complex of cave temples, magnificent ones, Jain as well as Hindu. A little away lay the earlier capital, Aryapura, later called Ayyavole and now Aihole, where over a hundred temples stand, Hindu and Buddhist and Jain.

An inscription that exaggerates

One of those temples is Jain, from the seventh century, standing atop Meguti Hill, and a lengthy Sanskrit inscription runs along its east wall in praise of the Chalukyas, Pulakeshin II above all.

Ravikirti, a court poet, wrote it, and his king victories over Harsha and over several rival kingdoms are set down in it, in a style highly poetical. Now the caution: the inscription is not free from exaggeration, and other inscriptions contradict some of the facts set down in it.

A second opinion on the same king

Set beside it another source. On his way south Xuanzang called at the Chalukya kingdom, and what he says of Pulakeshin II is that his beneficent actions were felt over a great distance, and that his subjects obeyed him with perfect submission.

Two sources, then, both favourable, and one of them demonstrably unreliable. That is the ordinary condition of writing history.

Two powers, one subcontinent

There is no doubt, even so, about the shape of the early seventh century. Two great imperial powers had most of India between them.

Harshavardhana held the north of the Vindhyas; Pulakeshin II held the south of them.

How the Chalukyas ended, and continued

Defeat came to Pulakeshin II eventually, and the Pallavas of Kanchi dealt it. By the middle of the eighth century the Chalukyas in the Deccan had given way to the Rashtrakutas.

The dynasty revived in the west from the tenth century onward, and the Western Chalukyas of Kalyani is what that revival is called, their new capital being modern Basavakalyan, in northern Karnataka. Meanwhile, as the Badami empire declined, its eastern branch claimed independence and spread its power through the eastern Deccan. Those are the Eastern Chalukyas, ruling from Vengi in what is now Andhra Pradesh, clashing often with the Rashtrakutas in victories and defeats and occasional alliances, promoting Hindu and Jain sects and Buddhist centres alike, and seeing Kannada and Telugu literature flourish under them.

Scenario:

A student finds two sources about Pulakeshin II. The first is a long Sanskrit inscription on a temple wall. His own court poet wrote it in his lifetime, praising his victories in a style highly poetical. The second is a line in a foreign pilgrim travelogue. His good deeds were felt far off, it says, and his subjects obeyed him completely. The student argues that the first must be the better source. It is contemporary, it is local, and it is carved in stone where anyone could check it.

Analysis:

Two favourable sources about one king, and an argument that ranks them by how solid they look.

Activity:

Find two accounts of the same local event and note where they differ.

Title:

Grade a source

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Kalhana usually comes top, and the reason is not that he is neutral but that he tells you what he did: eleven works examined, inscriptions consulted. A source that shows its working can be checked, and that is worth more than a source that merely sounds certain.

Kalhana says he examined eleven earlier chronicles before writing.

Over a hundred temples stand at Aihole, Hindu and Buddhist and Jain.

The Aihole inscription facts are contradicted by other inscriptions.

Rajatarangini: the River of Kings.

Four mathas: Badrinath, Puri, Dwarka, Sringeri.

Kanchi, and its peak

Kanchi, also called Kanchipura and now Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, was the Pallava capital. The dynasty reached its height in the seventh century, under Mahendravarman I and then under his son Narasimhavarman I.

Mamalla was the son's other name, and it means a wrestler, or a warrior. That turns out to fit: Pulakeshin II was defeated by him, and Badami was captured after it.

A boundary nobody wrote down

Then he retreated. What he left behind was an understanding rather than a treaty: the Tungabhadra River served as a boundary between the two powers, and nobody set it down in writing.

A naval expedition went out from him too, to Sri Lanka, sent so that a Sinhalese prince might get back the throne he had lost.

What made Kanchipuram rich

A cultural centre it certainly was, and an economic hub besides. Through it passed silk and other textiles, and spices, and ivory, and further luxury goods besides.

Trade relations reached Sri Lanka and much of Southeast Asia, by way of several seaports. One of them was Mamallapuram, also called Mahabalipuram, and excavations there turned up coins that were Roman, Persian and Chinese.

Xuanzang at Kanchi

The Chinese pilgrim reaches Kanchi too, and his figures are worth both reporting and doubting. A hundred Buddhist monasteries, he says, with ten thousand priests in them, and the chapter notes that those numbers are likely exaggerated.

Eighty Hindu temples he also mentions, and many Jains present. His opinion of the people was that they held honesty and truth in deep attachment, and esteemed learning highly.

Temples cut from the rock

A great many temples and other structures were created by the Pallavas. At Mamallapuram the work was elaborate: rock-cut caves and monolithic temples, in a distinctive style.

Monolithic means made of a single stone or rock, mono for single and lithic for stone. What the carvings depict are deities, or scenes drawn from the Mahabharata. One granite relief shows the goddess Durga with her arm raised over Mahishasura, the buffalo demon.

What the Pallavas supported

Patronage went from them to the Shaivite, Vaishnavite and Jain schools of thought. Literature was promoted in Tamil and in Sanskrit both.

Great poets were hosted, Dandin among them, who wrote elaborate Sanskrit poetry. Mahendravarman I was himself a fine poet, and a satirical Sanskrit play survives from him.

And how they ended

Northern Tamil Nadu and southern Andhra Pradesh lay under Pallava rule until late in the ninth century.

Then they were overthrown, and the man who did it was a Chola king: Aditya I.

Three kingdoms that came back

Now step back a thousand years. The Pandya, Chola and Chera kingdoms are named in an edict of Ashoka, which calls them his neighbours to the south. They appear in the Sangam literature too, which is the earliest collection of Tamil poetry, has them too.

Then other powers eclipsed them, and they seemed to disappear. Now all three reemerge, shaping the political and cultural life of the South, and often at war with one another.

The Pandyas

Power came to the Pandyas by the sixth century. Alliances tied them to the Chalukyas and to the Pallavas, and much of southern Tamil Nadu was under them, with northern parts of Sri Lanka for brief periods.

Maritime trade with Southeast Asia is attested by their coins and inscriptions, through ports such as Korkai. Madurai was their capital, and a vibrant cultural centre.

What the Pandyas made

Temples were built by them in numbers, rock-cut temples created, and poets patronised.

One copper plate mentions something that would be precious if it had survived: a Tamil version of the Mahabharata which they had made. It has not survived. In the tenth century the mighty Cholas swept them aside, and some three centuries later they would re-emerge again.

The Cheras

Along the Kerala coast lay the Cheras, also known as the Chera Perumals.

Their neighbours had military power and they kept their independence regardless, which is the whole of what the chapter says about them, and enough to notice.

The Cholas, reborn

Then came the Cholas, reborn in the ninth century under Vijayalaya. Tanjavur, now spelt Thanjavur, was his new capital, and from there he laid the foundation of a strong and prosperous kingdom.

His son was Aditya I, who expanded it by defeating the Pallavas, which brought under Chola control most of what is Tamil Nadu today, and parts of Andhra Pradesh in the south.

What the Cholas built

What they ended up building was among the largest empires south India has had. Three things it was known for: grand temples, a powerful navy, and an administration both elaborate and efficient.

Arts such as sculpture and architecture had their patronage, and literature was promoted in Sanskrit as well as Tamil, their inscriptions using both languages.

Why the heartland prospered

Fertile land and good engineering together. The Kaveri delta is fertile, and irrigation techniques there were efficient.

Between them they ensured a steady agricultural output, and the prosperity of the empire's heartland followed from it. Until the thirteenth century the Cholas kept their dominance in south India.

Two languages on one plate

One practice of this period is worth a card to itself, because it shows how power and locality fitted together. Inscriptions began using Sanskrit and the regional languages at the same time.

In a land grant the ruler and his dynastic history would be praised in Sanskrit. The operative details of the grant itself went into the local language. Ask why, and the answer is in who each part was for: the praise was for posterity and prestige, the details for the people who had to live by them.

Scenario:

Archaeologists working at a southern seaport find three groups of coins in the same layer. One group carries Roman heads. One is Persian. One is Chinese. A visiting journalist writes that the site must have been a Roman colony, since Roman coins are the most famous of the three. He adds that the Chinese coins were probably brought along much later, by passing travellers. The archaeologist in charge is unimpressed. The journalist has drawn two conclusions, she says, and neither is supported by anything in the ground.

Analysis:

Three currencies in one layer, and a report that turns them into a colony and an accident.

Activity:

Find out whether any foreign coins have been found in your own state.

Title:

Three kingdoms, three fates

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The Cheras are the ones who simply held on, which is all the chapter says of them and more interesting than it looks. What the three have in common is that none of them ended when it stopped appearing in the record, and the Pandyas prove it twice over.

Roman, Persian and Chinese coins were dug up at Mamallapuram.

A Pandya copper plate mentions a Tamil Mahabharata that has not survived.

Chola inscriptions use Tamil and Sanskrit together.

Mamalla means wrestler, and he won at Badami.

Pandya, Chola, Chera: named, vanished, returned.

Smaller kingdoms, and the men who held them

Big unified empires fell, and what took their place was smaller and more decentralised. A king of this period often ruled only his core region directly.

Elsewhere he governed through subordinate rulers. Samanta was the word for one, and a samanta amounted to a tributary, or a vassal.

Armies he led. Local administration he managed. A king such as a Chalukya or a Rashtrakuta simply could not do without him.

The real strength of such a kingdom sat in the middle, then, with the men who held the provinces.

When a samanta stopped being loyal

Fragile is the word for that loyalty, and it grew most fragile when a samanta judged that central authority was weakening.

The Rashtrakutas prove it. Under the Chalukyas they had themselves been samantas once, and they grew powerful enough in the end to overthrow their own overlords.

Province, district, village

Territory held directly was divided downwards. Provinces came first, called bhuktis or rashtras. Districts came next, called mandalas. Villages came last.

Officials of a particular kind sat at every one of those levels.

Lowest of the units was the village, and it stayed largely self-governed. A headman oversaw it.

Working with him were accountants, and local committees. Very little of that depended on the king.

Assemblies, and a very old habit

South India saw assemblies rise at several levels by the ninth century.

At Uttaramerur the Cholas left elaborate inscriptions in the tenth century, and they set out how members of the village sabha were chosen. Democratic traditions in India have a long continuity, reaching fifteen hundred years back to the janapadas, and a record like that is how we know.

Land given away

Under the Guptas a system of land grants had already begun. In this period it expanded greatly.

Land went to individuals, to communities, and to religious establishments. The givers were kings, chiefs, members of royal families and vassals, and what they created between them was a new class of landholders.

Who actually tilled it

Many a landholder did not till his land himself.

Several texts and inscriptions allude to what followed: powerful intermediaries, standing between the holder and the peasant, often exploiting the peasant. A grant was a gift to one man and a burden to another.

Bringing new land under the plough

Many grants were aimed at land not yet cultivated. Agriculture expanded that way, and so did the variety of crops grown.

Irrigation works were undertaken too, mostly small, though some were large and state-supported. Many of the tanks the Pallavas built in Tamil Nadu still work today.

Sponsoring a tank, a pond or a well got itself recorded in an inscription, and the donor's social standing rose by it.

Better water meant cash crops thrived, and crafts and industries based on farm produce were supported in turn.

Two traders, two routes

Markets and trade flourished in regional centres, and two very different people were doing the trading.

Local trade was in the hands of small traders. Long-distance commerce belonged to merchants who owned their own ships.

From the eighth century onward the west coast of India saw brisk shipping. Ports in what is now Iran and Iraq received it, and so did the east coast of Africa.

Out of the east coast the routes ran differently: to Sri Lanka, to Southeast Asia, and as far as the ports of China.

Three faiths on a copper plate

One set of copper-plate inscriptions is worth a card to itself. Traders who were Jewish, or Muslim, or Christian are named in it, and they had come from West Asia.

India was a hub of international trade. A record naming three such communities, in one place, shows it again.

Did the cities decline?

Urban decline is what some historians have suggested for this period. A different picture comes out of the evidence, and a more complex one.

New cities emerged in north India, and most of the older ones stayed occupied. Xuanzang noted that Shravasti and Kaushambi had declined. He also described Kashi, Kanyakubja and Sthaneshvara as thriving.

The south, and what temples did

Cities in south India went on flourishing, as hubs at once religious, economic and political.

Commerce centred itself on the temples. Maritime trade was fuelled by the ports. Overall, though, this society stayed mostly rural through the period, and mostly agrarian.

Guilds

Local merchant guilds, or associations, kept playing a significant part. Moneylenders, artisans and traders made them up.

Charitable and religious activities had their support, and inscriptions set out how they were structured and what they did. Two major guilds operated prominently in south India: coastal and inland trade kept one of them busy, the other grew into the largest association of merchants working between regions.

Jatis multiply

Many new jatis appeared, some based on an occupation and some on a region, so the traditional jatis multiplied. Within such a community most people married inside the group.

The varna-jati system absorbed a good deal. Local tribes went into it, populations on the borders, migrants from abroad, and groups formed around an occupation or a religion.

Some communities stayed outside it instead, foreign traders among them.

Flexible, not rigid

Most of what we know about jatis comes out of texts, with some of it out of inscriptions, and the gaps and unanswered questions are many.

The system also varied widely from region to region, which is the evidence for calling jati and varna flexible rather than rigid. The Palas and the Kakatiyas, among other rulers, began as Shudras, the varna of labourers and craftspeople. With time they came to be regarded as Kshatriyas.

Shut out of the city

Discrimination is in the record too. Asprishya, a word meaning not to be touched, appears in a few texts, aimed at communities regarded as impure.

Xuanzang confirms it from outside. Scavengers, executioners, dancers, fishers and butchers had their homes beyond the city, he wrote, ringed by low walls and forming the suburbs.

Divided though they were, varnas and jatis often worked together, because each depended on what the others did, at least where the economy was concerned.

The Bhakti Movement went further and cut across every stratum of society. Several of the bhakti saints were themselves Shudras.

How a jati formed

Clerks and scribes is what the Kayasthas were known as, historically.

At first they were a professional group, and it was open to different varnas. A distinct jati is what they became in the tenth century. In parts of Bengal some Brahmana surnames came later to be linked with them, Dama and Datta, Ghosha and Vasu, which means Brahmana and non-Brahmana families had fused. Marriage inside the group did the rest.

Women at work

The position of women varied widely by region, and it varied by social layer too.

Banabhatta is interesting here. In his Harshacharita women take part in social and economic life of many kinds: they work in crafts and in agriculture, and at court they serve as attendants, storytellers, musicians and entertainers. Offerings made to temples by women are recorded in many inscriptions, and so is their getting water structures built.

A queen with a very long title

Male heirs, called yuvarajas, were what most dynasties favoured. Several queens came to the throne all the same.

More than one woman ruled among the Bhauma-Karas of what is now Odisha. The most notable was Tribhuvana Mahadevi I, in the ninth century. Rebellions she suppressed, the dynasty she strengthened, and strong administrative skill she showed. Temples and institutions both Hindu and Buddhist had her patronage, and the land grants she issued carried a title meaning supreme sovereign empress, and also great queen of the three worlds.

Scenario:

A copper plate arrives in a village. By it the king has given the surrounding fields to a man from the city, who has never been seen here. The village headman reads the plate aloud. The accountant notes that the fields are already under the plough, worked by families who have been here for generations. A young man says the king must have made a mistake, since a village with its own headman and its own committees surely cannot be given away. An elder answers that nothing has been taken from the village, because the grant is about who collects, not about who digs.

Analysis:

A land grant landing in a self-governed village, and two readings of what it means.

Activity:

Find out who keeps the land records in your own village or town.

Title:

Draw the four tiers

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Bhukti or rashtra for the province, mandala for the district. The king reached the village least of all, which is why it had its own headman, accountants and committees, and why it stayed largely self-governed.

Many Pallava tanks in Tamil Nadu are still in use.

Copper plates name Jewish, Muslim and Christian traders from West Asia.

Sponsoring a well or a pond raised the donor social standing.

Bhukti, mandala, village: big to small.

A samanta leads the army and may lead a revolt.

Rulers who patronised everyone

Rulers here patronise Jain, Buddhist and Hindu schools alike, regardless of their own inclinations.

Interaction between those traditions was complex. Shared were central concepts, dharma and karma among them, and sacred spaces, artistic motifs, sometimes deities. Coexistence was usually peaceful, though Jainas and Shaivites were rivals in the south. Around the sixth century Tantric schools of thought emerged, emphasising mantras, meditation, rituals, and the worship of powerful deities, with Shakti above all.

Buddhism, east and elsewhere

Buddhism, which Tantricism partly influenced, thrived in eastern India, and most of all under the Palas. Its monastic universities drew scholars from right across Asia.

Elsewhere, in these same centuries, it declined, while bhakti practices and temple-based Hinduism rose.

Jainism, and one rock

Jainism stayed popular in Karnataka and in western India, backed by rulers and by wealthy merchants.

Monumental work survives from it: the Jain cave temples at Badami and at Ellora, and the tenth-century monolithic Bahubali at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka.

What the Puranas did

The Puranas had elaborate mythology, and a sacred geography with it.

Regional myths and local deities were integrated by them into the broader pan-Indian cults: those of the various devis, and of Krishna, Vishnu and Shiva. Bhakti means personal devotion, and these traditions put it above Vedic sacrifice. Pilgrimage sites were their centre, with mathas and temples.

Not a movement, a spread

From the sixth century onward those traditions hardened into what now gets the name Bhakti Movement.

Devotion addressed to a deity had existed much earlier. What happened now was not an organised movement at all. It was a massive spread, across India and through every layer of society.

The Alvars and the Nayanars

The South supplied the initial spark. Two groups of poets and devotees there produced devotional literature in Tamil, and its impact was enormous.

Twelve Alvars, devotees of Vishnu, were one group, and Andal, a woman, was among them. Sixty-three Nayanars, also called Nayanmars, devotees of Shiva, were the other, with three women among them. Karaikal Ammaiyar was one of those three.

Why bhakti reshaped so much

More bhakti saints followed in other parts of India, out of diverse social backgrounds, composing mostly in regional languages.

A direct personal relationship with the divine is what their poetry invoked, open to anyone. It cut across social and gender divisions, and its impact lingers today.

Brahmagupta

Bhillamala was the first Gurjara-Pratihara capital, and Brahmagupta was born there in 598 CE.

Brahmasphutasiddhanta was his major work. Fractions, negative numbers, zero: for arithmetic with each of them he set out rules, and those are the rules taught in school now. New techniques for solving certain equations he pioneered as well, which makes him one of modern algebra's founders. Persian and then Latin translations carried the work onward, growing mathematics in the Arab world and later in Europe.

Three more names, and one reason

Bhaskara I wrote a lengthy commentary on the Aryabhatiya. His work in trigonometry was pioneering. Virahanka was the first to establish the sequence that now carries his name beside Fibonacci's. Mahavira was a Jain scholar, not the great Jain teacher of a millennium earlier, and he wrote at the Rashtrakuta court of Amoghavarsha Nripatunga. The first work of mathematics standing independent of astronomy was his.

Except for Mahavira, many here refined techniques of astronomical calculation, mostly to predict where a planet would stand at any chosen moment. Knowledge for its own sake was one motive. Practical ends were another: a reliable calendar, or an eclipse predicted precisely.

The Hunas arrive, and are stopped

Nomads out of Central Asia in the fourth century: those were the Huns, skilled at archery and horse-riding.

A branch of them is what the Hunas of Indian literature are thought to have been, and they helped weaken the mighty Gupta Empire. Early in the sixth century two Huna leaders pushed deep into the Ganga plains, one after the other. Defeat came from kings of the Aulikara dynasty, whose capital Dashapura is Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh today, and Huna power in India was effectively ended by it.

The Hunas become Indian

By the seventh century Indian society had absorbed them completely. Many did soldiering, and others took roles in local administration.

A goshthika is a temple's administration council, and one inscription records a Huna on one. Prakrit and Sanskrit they took up for their inscriptions, with Gupta royal titles, coin designs and religious symbols.

The Arabs on the coast

Muhammad, who founded Islam, died in 632 CE, and within a few years the new religion had spread far into Africa and Asia.

Naval raids by Muslim Arabs reached the western coast of India in 637. Debal, a port in the Indus delta, was one target; Bharukachchha, now Bharuch, another; Thana, now Thane, a third. Lasting territorial control they did not secure.

Sindh, and King Dahar

Then the governor of Iraq sent an army, commanded by Muhammad bin Qasim, who was nephew and son-in-law to him both.

Those forces swept into Sindh, and Debal fell first. Al-Baladhuri, a ninth-century historian, records three days of killing there, and a great temple housing images destroyed. From Debal bin Qasim moved east towards Aror, now Rohri in Sindh, where King Dahar had his capital. The Chachnama, a thirteenth-century Persian version of an older Arabic account, has him calling this religious war a duty. Dahar rode an elephant into a fierce battle, an arrow killed him, and his army was routed.

Why the Arabs got no further

Qasim died, and within two years Indian chiefs had taken back most of the conquered territory. Malwa and Rajputana were pushed into next, and the gains there were short-lived.

An inscription at Gwalior says that Nagabhata I, the Gurjara-Pratihara king, crushed a large army belonging to a powerful Mlechchha king. The Rajatarangini has Lalitaditya Muktapida of Kashmir defeating one Arab chief three separate times.

A changed policy in Sindh

Three centuries of unremitting effort had left Arab dominion in India confined to two petty states, one in Sindh and one in Punjab, says the geographer al-Istakhri.

Even there survival had a price: iconoclasm was given up, and native Hindus and Buddhists, called Budds together, were used for political ends. Rebuilding temples was allowed, worship was allowed to continue, and a temple priest kept his share of the revenue. Strategy or compulsion, either way the policy had changed.

What crossed anyway

Arabia and India were well connected by trade long before Islam rose, with ships going back and forth on the monsoon winds. Monsoon is itself a borrowed word: mawsim, Arabic for season.

In the ninth century especially, and at Baghdad above all, Sanskrit texts were translated into Arabic: texts of medicine, of astronomy, of mathematics. India's decimal numeral system, zero included, was adopted by the Arabs. Arab mathematicians acknowledged its Indian origin, Europe got it from them, and there the numerals came to be called Arabic.

Taking stock

Dynasties in numbers rose and fell, battling one another and sometimes allied with one another. Rarely did one cover a large part of India, or last beyond a couple of centuries, though a few of the stronger kingdoms rose to be empires. No single power kept lasting supremacy, because rival states matched each other in military strength, in administrative systems, and in strategic approach.

A historical void is what this period was not. New political and social groups were integrated dynamically. Literature flourished in regional languages and in Sanskrit, and sculpture and temple architecture advanced greatly. New schools of philosophy and new religious practices spread, enriching the subcontinent on the same ancient foundations. Resilience in the face of foreign invasion India showed, and a capacity for political renewal with it.

Scenario:

A debating team is given the motion that the sixth to tenth centuries were a dark age in India. The first speaker builds a strong case. No empire lasted, she says, and no power held a large part of the country for long. Kings fought one another continually. Invaders came from Central Asia and then from West Asia, and one of them killed a king and took his capital. Her conclusion is that nothing could grow in such a century. The second speaker has to answer her, and the chapter has given him everything he needs.

Analysis:

A motion that the period was a dark age, argued only from the political record.

Activity:

Find out which dynasty ruled your own region in these centuries.

Title:

Two invasions, one table

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The last row differs most. The Hunas were absorbed into Indian society within a century, serving as soldiers and officials. The Arabs were contained instead, holding two petty states after three centuries, and changing their policy to survive even there.

Bahubali is shown in a meditation that lasted twelve years.

The word monsoon comes from the Arabic mawsim, meaning season.

One inscription records a Huna on a temple administration council.

Twelve Alvars for Vishnu, sixty-three Nayanars for Shiva.

Brahmagupta gave zero its arithmetic.