Class 7 Social Science Chapter 7: The Gupta Era

A gap opens in the north

The Kushanas had held the north and the northwest. Their grip was slipping by the 3rd century CE, and power does not stay missing for long.

Smaller kingdoms came up in the space, and out of that crowd one family worked its way to the top.

Where the Guptas came from

Here the honest answer is that nobody is certain. Several theories compete.

What most historians accept is modest: the family began as regional rulers somewhere near what is now Uttar Pradesh. They were not born to an empire. They built one.

Chandragupta I, and a coin with two people on it

The grandfather of the dynasty's most famous king is remembered for coins and for the matches he arranged.

One of his coins is worth pausing on. It shows him with his queen, Kumaradevi, and on the other face a seated goddess. A king who puts his wife on his money is saying something about where his claim comes from.

The II is a clue, not a decoration

Chandragupta II carries a number because there was an earlier Chandragupta in the family: his own grandfather.

Historians added the numbers to keep the two apart. The habit of naming a first son after his grandfather is still alive in Indian families today.

And a third Chandragupta to avoid

There is one more trap in the name. Chandragupta Maurya, from the last chapter, belongs to a different dynasty entirely and lived centuries earlier.

Three men, one name, two dynasties. Read the dynasty, not the name.

The pillar that will not rust

An iron pillar standing in Delhi names a king called simply Chandra, whom historians identify with Chandragupta II.

Leave a bicycle out in the rain for a year and it rusts. This pillar has stood in the open for centuries and has not. Scientists think a thin protective layer forms on it, from the particular iron used and the oxygen in the air.

A devotee, and his bird

Chandragupta II followed Vishnu, and he did not keep it private.

Garuda, the mount that carries Vishnu, turns up on inscription after inscription of his. His other name, Vikramaditya, is the one the stories remember.

The warrior king and his poet

Samudragupta, father of Chandragupta II, is known to us mainly through one inscription on a pillar at Prayagraj, the prayaga prashasti.

It was composed by Harisena, who was a poet at Samudragupta's own court. Keep that in mind for what follows.

An ambition in one word

Harisena gives the king a goal: dharani-bandha, to bind or unify the Earth.

It is a very large claim for one reign. It is also exactly the kind of phrase a court poet is employed to produce.

Two ways of dealing with a defeated king

The inscription describes many wars, and the interesting part is what happened afterwards.

Some beaten kings were put back on their own thrones and paid tribute instead. Others never fought at all, and submitted because of what they had heard. Both outcomes leave the local ruler in place.

Why that was the cheaper choice

Think about moving an army: soldiers, elephants, horses, cooks, and food for every one of them.

An occupying garrison in a distant province has to be fed for years. A tributary king feeds himself and sends a share. The tribute system is as much a supply decision as a political one.

A king with a musical instrument

Samudragupta also struck coins, and one of them shows him seated and playing the veena.

A conqueror choosing to appear as a musician is making a point about what kind of ruler he is. Harisena says the same thing in words: that the king backed art, learning and trade.

The horse on the coin

Another coin carries the sacrificial horse of the ashvamedha, the ritual we met in the last chapter.

Striking a coin for it turns a one-day ceremony into something that stays in circulation, passing through thousands of hands.

What a text says the empire was

Literary sources add their own picture. The Vishnu Purana lists the heartland as Anuganga in the middle Ganga basin, Prayaga, Saketa and Magadha, with the country around them.

That is four named regions and their surroundings.

And why the map is bigger than the text

At its height the empire covered a good deal more than that list. It reached across the north and the west of modern India, and into parts of the centre and the east.

So the text names a core rather than a boundary. A source can be accurate and still be incomplete.

Reading things kings paid for

Put the evidence together and a pattern shows. The pillar was commissioned for Samudragupta. The coins were issued by the kings they show.

None of that makes them false. It means each one tells us what a ruler wanted remembered, which is a fact about the ruler as well as about the reign.

Scenario:

A pupil is handed photographs of two Gupta coins. The first shows a king seated with a veena across his lap. The second shows the sacrificial horse of an ashvamedha. Neither photograph carries a date, a battle or a place. Her partner says coins are poor evidence because they are only money, and that the real history sits in the inscriptions instead. Their teacher asks them to settle the argument using what the chapter says about who made each source.

Analysis:

Two objects, one argument, and a question about authorship rather than about material.

Activity:

Pick any coin in your pocket, list every image and word on it, and write down what each one is trying to tell you.

Title:

A table of sources, and who paid for them

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Most rows name a ruler, and very few carry a dash. Nearly all the evidence for this reign was produced by the people it describes, which is why the chapter keeps asking who made each source.

An iron pillar in Delhi has stood outdoors for centuries without rusting, protected by a thin layer the iron itself forms.

One Gupta coin shows Samudragupta not in armour but seated with a veena across his lap.

Chandragupta II is numbered only because historians needed to tell him from his grandfather of the same name.

Three Chandraguptas: one Maurya, two Gupta.

The pillar praises; the poet was paid.

A visitor from China

In the early 5th century CE a Chinese monk named Faxian arrived in India. He had not come sightseeing.

He came to visit sacred Buddhist places, to study with Indian scholars, and to collect manuscripts he could carry home. The journey was long and hard.

He wrote it down, and it survived

Faxian travelled widely here and kept a record of what he saw: the culture, the government, the way people lived.

He wrote it for readers in his own country. It has lasted to our own day, which is a piece of luck, and it is why we can read a description of Gupta India by somebody who was not working for a Gupta king.

What he says he saw

His picture is a comfortable one. The people are many and happy. Nobody has to register a household or report to officials.

Farmers on royal land hand over a share of their grain. Guards and attendants draw salaries. The cities of the Ganga plains are the greatest he knows, and their people are rich and kind.

Charity as a system

One detail is worth noticing. He describes heads of Vaishya families setting up houses for charity and for medicine.

The poor, the orphaned and the sick are looked after there. Doctors treat them, and the needy are given food and medicine. Even the lanes, he says, are kept in good order.

The same author, a different page

Now the problem. Elsewhere in the very same travelogue, Faxian describes the chandalas.

They were treated as outcastes, considered too low to belong to the varna system at all, and they lived outside the city limits. That is the same journey, the same writer, and a very different India.

Why that matters for everything he wrote

An account like this is valuable and it is partial. Faxian saw one part of society, at one time, from one position.

So historians do not simply believe him or dismiss him. They read him against other evidence: inscriptions, land grants, coins. Several historians reading one source can also reach different conclusions.

New kings, and bigger titles

Turn to the government. Inscriptions and coins show what the Gupta rulers called themselves: maharajadhiraja, samrat, chakravartin.

Earlier rulers had used plainer words, rajan and maharaja. The new titles are a claim of supreme authority, and a claim to stand above those who came before.

Three tools, not one

How do you build an empire that size? The Guptas used military conquest, diplomacy, and alliances.

The third of those included marriage. We met matrimonial alliance in the last chapter, and here is the Gupta example of it.

Prabhavati Gupta

She was a daughter of Chandragupta II. Her husband was a Vakataka prince, from the kingdom lying immediately to their south.

Her husband died early. That made her regent ruler, governing in place of a monarch who could not. One of her inscriptions calls her a mother of two kings, because both her sons took the Vakataka throne.

What she did with the position

She kept the tie between the Vakatakas and the Guptas firm throughout her rule, which is precisely what the marriage had been arranged to do.

Like her father she followed Vishnu, and she is associated with seven temples built for that god and his avatars. Some of them stand at Ramagiri, the Ramtek hill, in present-day Maharashtra.

Not everything from the centre

The empire was well organised, but not tightly held. Rather than run everything from one capital, they split it into provinces.

They then granted land to local rulers, to priests and to chieftains. That left local leaders with real control over their own regions.

Written on copper

Those grants were recorded, and recorded carefully, inscribed on copper plates.

Archaeologists have been turning them up in recent times. A record on copper outlasts one on cloth or bark, which is why we still have them and why the tax system they describe can be studied at all.

Where the money came from

Land tax was the main revenue. Other income came from fines and from taxes on mines, on irrigation, on trade and on crafts.

Notice that the list taxes activity rather than wealth: digging, watering, selling, making.

Where the money went

Out again, to administration and to the army. Also to temples and other building, and to supporting scholars and artists.

That last item is the one to remember. The poetry and mathematics of this period were paid for out of tax.

Trade in both directions

An empire of this size needed lively trade inside and outside it. Indian goods went to the Mediterranean world, to Southeast Asia and to China.

Out went gemstones and ivory, spices and textiles. Joining our ports to markets that far away was the Indian Ocean network.

A small island in the middle

One stop on the Mediterranean route was Socotra, an island sitting in the Arabian Sea.

Dig there and potsherds come up, along with writing in the Brahmi script and a carved Buddhist stupa. Indian traders were present for centuries, alongside traders from Egypt, Arabia, Rome and Greece.

What the island proves

A stupa carved on a rock in the Arabian Sea is a stronger piece of evidence than a list of exports.

Goods can be carried by middlemen who never meet. A script and a shrine mean people stayed, long enough to write and to worship. Trade moved more than cargo.

Scenario:

A class is given two short passages and told only that both come from the same book. In the first, the people are numerous and happy, the cities are rich, and merchant families run houses where doctors treat the poor without charge. In the second, a group called the chandalas is kept outside the city walls and treated as too low to belong to the varna system. One pupil decides the second passage must be a later addition by somebody else. Another says the first passage must be flattery written for a king.

Analysis:

Two passages, one author, and two pupils each resolving the contradiction by throwing half of it away.

Activity:

Find two descriptions of your own town, one by a visitor and one by somebody who lives there, and list what each one leaves out.

Title:

Follow one rupee of land tax

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Most people circle the scholars and artists. The mathematics, astronomy and poetry this chapter is famous for were paid for out of tax, which is why they appear under a stable and prosperous government rather than at random.

Faxian wrote his travelogue for readers back in China, and it has survived to be read by us instead.

Gupta land grants were inscribed on copper plates, which is why archaeologists are still finding them.

A Buddhist stupa design on Socotra, an island in the Arabian Sea, records Indian traders staying there for centuries.

One traveller, one window: open another.

Land tax in, scholars out.

Why historians reach for the word classical

Some historians call this stretch the classical age of India. That is a strong word, and it needs a reason.

The reason given is not genius but conditions. Peace held for a long time and the state stayed stable, and under those conditions a great deal got done in a great many fields.

Gathering up what was already known

One thing this period did was collect. Knowledge from earlier eras was consolidated and written out into a large number of texts.

That is a different achievement from discovery, and an easy one to overlook. Somebody has to decide what is worth keeping and then set it in order.

Who could afford to think

Follow the money for a moment. A stable empire meant a strong economy, and a strong economy meant tax.

Out of that the state supported scholars, artists and scientists. Chandragupta II kept learned men, poets and artists about him, and his court was the richer for the mixture.

Supporting other traditions

The Gupta kings followed Vishnu, which their coins and inscriptions say plainly. They did not confine their support to their own faith.

They backed Buddhist institutions, among them the famous university at Nalanda and a number of viharas, which are monasteries. The approach was open.

Aryabhata, and where he worked

He lived around 500 CE at Kusumapura, near what is now Patna, which was a noted centre of learning.

His book was short. It is called the Aryabhatiya and it covers mathematics and astronomy together.

Day and night, explained

Aryabhata gave formulas for how the Sun, the Moon and the planets move.

He also proposed something that must have sounded very odd: that the Earth turns on its own axis. That single idea accounts for day following night, without anything else having to move.

How long is a year

He put the year at 365 days plus 6 hours, 12 minutes and 30 seconds.

The figure accepted now is 365 days plus 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds. He is out by a few minutes. Consider what he had to work with and that is a remarkable place to land.

Two more things he got right

He produced a sound estimate of how large the Earth is.

He also gave a correct explanation of eclipses, both solar and lunar. His work then became the foundation that later science in India, and outside it, was built on.

Mathematics you have already met

In mathematics he set out a number of methods of calculation and ways of solving equations.

Some of those you are taught at school. You will have used them without being told that they were first worked out about 1500 years ago.

Varahamihira of Ujjayini

From the same period came Varahamihira, who was a mathematician, an astronomer and an astrologer.

He lived at Ujjayini, a city with its own long tradition of learning and scholarship.

A book about nearly everything

His great work is the Brihat Samhita, and the word for it is encyclopedic.

It ranges across town planning and architecture, farming, weather forecasting, astronomy and astrology. One author, one book, that many subjects.

What made him a pioneer

Three habits are named: he observed the world closely, he reasoned logically about what he saw, and he set that beside the traditional knowledge he had inherited.

It is the combination that matters. Observation without the inherited learning would have started from nothing.

Kalidasa, about whom almost nothing is known

For the greatest poet of the age we have hardly any biography. Legends do the work instead.

One of them says he was mocked by those around him, and that the mockery is what drove him to work and to change his life.

The Cloud Messenger

His best known poem is the Meghadutam, which means the cloud messenger.

A yakshha, a minor deity, has been banished from his home by his master. He sends word to the woman he loves by way of a cloud that is passing.

What else is in that poem

The poem carries the many feelings of love, which is what anyone expects of it.

It also describes, in close detail, the landscapes and the weather of north India along the route the cloud takes. A love poem turns out to be a geography.

Medicine written down

Ayurveda is far older than the Guptas, with roots several centuries BCE. In this period it was codified, meaning arranged in an organised and systematic way.

The Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita were compiled and given their final shape now. They cover the cataloguing and diagnosis of diseases, treatments, the place of diet in staying well, how medicines are prepared, and surgery advanced for its time. Ayurveda stresses healing the whole person and the link between mind, body and nature.

And iron, and the point of all this

Metallurgy moved forward too, as the rust-resistant iron pillar shows.

Set the list side by side: literature, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, metal. One peaceful, well-funded century does not guarantee any of them. It does make all of them possible.

Scenario:

A pupil is asked why the Gupta period produced so much. She writes that it was simply fortunate in its people. Aryabhata happened to be born then. Kalidasa happened to write then. The doctors who finished the medical texts happened to live then. She adds a conclusion. Had those four or five people been born in another century, there would have been no classical age at all. Her teacher writes in the margin that the explanation runs the wrong way round. He asks her to try again using the chapter.

Analysis:

A confident answer that names the right people and misses the argument the chapter is actually making.

Activity:

Pick any invention you admire and find out who paid the inventor while the work was being done.

Title:

A two-column ledger of the age

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Nearly every line runs back to state support, because scholars, artists and scientists were kept out of revenue. The achievements are not independent of the government that funded them, which is the chapter whole argument for the word classical.

Aryabhata estimate of the length of a year is only a few minutes away from the value accepted today.

Some of the calculation methods taught in school were first set out about 1500 years ago.

The Meghadutam is a love poem that doubles as a close description of the landscapes and weather of north India.

Peace, revenue, patronage: then the poetry.

Aryabhata turned the Earth, not the sky.

Conditions for making things

The Gupta rulers built an environment in which craftsmanship and creativity could do well. Some of the most famous objects in Indian history come out of it.

Notice the shape of that sentence. The rulers did not carve anything. They made the conditions, and other people carved.

Where the art was made

Several centres came up. Sarnath lies near Varanasi, in the state we now call Uttar Pradesh, and its Buddha sculptures are the finest of the period.

The Ajanta caves are in present-day Maharashtra. At Udayagiri in Madhya Pradesh there are rock-cut caves with detailed carvings of deities.

What Gupta art did

The phrase Gupta art is sometimes used for the whole body of it. What it is credited with is setting a standard.

Those standards of beauty and proportion were high, and they went on influencing what came after. An influence that outlives its patrons is the strongest thing a style can achieve.

Two rivers, carved in clay

Among the surviving pieces are terracotta sculptures of Ganga and Yamuna, from Ahichchhatra in western Uttar Pradesh.

You can tell which is which by what each one stands on. Ganga has a makara, a mythical creature rather like a crocodile. Yamuna stands on a tortoise. Water runs over the head of each, and each carries a pot, because they are rivers as well as goddesses.

Reading a sculpture

That is worth pausing on as a method. The figures look similar.

The identification comes from the attributes: the mount, the water, the pot. A viewer who knows the conventions can name a figure the label has lost.

The caves two dynasties paid for

Ajanta was carved out in this period with support from both the Guptas and the Vakatakas, who were relations by marriage.

One cave copies a temple, with a central stupa out of which a seated Buddha emerges, and an arched roof cut to imitate wooden beams. Stone pretending to be timber, inside a cave pretending to be a building.

Decline, from outside

By the 6th century CE the empire was in trouble. The pressure came from beyond the frontier first.

The Huna tribe, from central Asia, attacked again and again. Those attacks wore away Gupta control over north India.

And from inside

At the same time powerful regional rulers were rising, and that produced internal conflict.

Two pressures at once, one from outside and one from within. The chapter leaves the obvious question open: was this an ending, or the start of something the next part of the book will describe?

Meanwhile, in the south

While all this went on in the north, the Pallavas were building a power of their own.

They consolidated gradually across parts of what are now Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Four present-day states, which is not a small kingdom.

Where the Pallavas came from

Their origins are not clearly known, which is becoming a familiar sentence in this book.

The likeliest account is that they had been a tributary power under the Satavahanas, from the previous chapter, and rose as the Satavahanas declined. One dynasty's fall is another's opportunity.

Pallava temples, and a city of them

They were great patrons of art and architecture too. Most of them followed Shiva.

They are credited with magnificent temples and with rock-cut caves. Their capital was Kanchipuram, in present-day Tamil Nadu, which is often called the city of a thousand temples.

A centre of learning in the south

Kanchipuram grew until it was among the great seats of learning in the south.

Part of the reason is the ghatikas, centres of learning that had first appeared under the Satavahanas. An institution outlasted the dynasty that started it.

And in the northeast

The Kamarupa kingdom was ruled by the Varman dynasty. Its territory was the Brahmaputra valley, which is broadly Assam today, reaching north into Bengal and Bangladesh.

An old name for that valley is Pragjyotisha. It appears in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the Mahabharata names a king of it, Bhagadatta, who fought on the Kaurava side in the great war.

What Kamarupa was

Later rulers claimed Bhagadatta among their ancestors, which may or may not be history.

What is not in doubt is that Kamarupa mattered, politically and culturally. Its temples and monasteries became centres of learning, as Kanchipuram did in the south.

The pattern, one more time

Both the Pallavas and Kamarupa appear in the prayaga prashasti. Samudragupta beat a Pallava ruler on his southern campaign and did not take the region.

He beat the ruler of Kamarupa in the northeast and did not take direct control there either. Local kings kept their thrones so long as they accepted his overlordship and paid tribute. The book observes that we have now seen this happen several times.

What the Guptas left

The influence of the period went well past the empire's own borders and lasted centuries.

Metallurgy and medicine, astronomy and mathematics all became foundations for the work that followed. The temples and the Sanskrit literature are still read and visited. The Guptas also left a model of a stable, prosperous state for later rulers to aim at.

Scenario:

Two terracotta figures stand in a case with one label between them, and the label has come loose. Both are women. Water flows over the head of each, and each holds a pot. The guide says they are the Ganga and the Yamuna from Ahichchhatra. A visitor asks how anyone can know which figure is which, since the two look so alike and nothing is written on either. Another visitor suggests that the museum should simply guess, because nobody could ever tell the difference.

Analysis:

Two similar figures, no label, and a question about how identification actually works.

Activity:

Find a picture of any Indian deity and list every object in the image, then look up what each object signifies.

Title:

A map with four names on it

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

A surprising amount of the map stays unshaded by the first colour. The Guptas were the largest power of the period and still only one power among several, which is why the chapter turns south and northeast before it ends.

One Ajanta cave is cut to imitate a building, with a stone roof made to look like wooden beams.

Kanchipuram is often called the city of a thousand temples.

The ghatikas, centres of learning in the south, had begun under the Satavahanas and outlasted them.

Makara for Ganga, tortoise for Yamuna.

Beaten, not taken: the tribute rule.