Of earlier Guptas before Chandra-Gupta I, a Sri Gupta and a Ghatotkacha Gupta are listed in inscriptions. The former would be remembered solely for having endowed a place of worship in Bihar for Chinese Buddhists. By the third century AD the first Chinese monks had begun trickling back along the Karakoram route to tour the sites associated with the Buddha’s life. For these foreign pilgrims to the Buddhist ‘Holy Land’ Sri Gupta built a temple; when first noticed in the fifth century, it was already in ruins. Sri Gupta was probably not a Buddhist but was raja of some minor polity near or within erstwhile Magadha. He was succeeded by his son Ghatotkacha. Their origins are unknown; their caste may have been vaisya.
Chandra-Gupta I was Ghatotkacha’s son. He is regarded as founder of the dynasty partly because he assumed a new title, partly because later Gupta chronology is calculated from what is taken to be the date of his accession (320 or 321 AD), and partly because by marriage or conquest he acquired more territory and authority than he inherited. The new title was Maharajadhiraja, ‘great raja of rajas’, an Indian adaptation of the Persian ‘king of kings’ as previously adopted by the Kushanas. Its assumption seems premature, but lofty titles and epithets would be important to the Guptas. They would soon up the stakes to paramaharajadhiraja and even rajarajadhiraja, ‘king of kings-of-kings’.
Presumably the title reflected growing ambitions. Chandra-Gupta I was the first of his line to feature on coins. According to the Puranas, his territory stretched along the Ganga from Magadha (southern Bihar) to Prayaga (the later Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh). Whether he conquered this rich swathe of the Gangetic heartland and, if so, from whom, is not known. Magadha, for instance, or part of it, may have come to him as a marriage settlement. Kumaradevi, his chief queen, was a Licchavi and so a descendant of one of those 7707 Licchavi knights-raja who had been defeated by Ajatashatru seven hundred years previously. The Licchavis had a distinguished pedigree which was doubtless highly desirable to unknowns like the Guptas. But the importance the Guptas attached to this union was of an altogether higher order. Chandra-Gupta I’s successor would style himself not ‘son of a Gupta father’ but ‘son of a Licchavi daughter’. There are even coins showing king and queen together, an unprecedented development; they bear, as well as the king’s name, that of ‘Kumaradevi Licchavayah’. It is known that the Licchavis had acquired territory in Nepal and it may be that ‘they had taken possession of Pataliputra, the city which had been built and fortified many centuries earlier for the express purpose of curbing their restless spirit.’8 Certainly it is probable that the Guptas and the Licchavis ruled adjacent territories ‘and that the two kingdoms were united under Chandra-Gupta I by his marriage with Kumaradevi’.9
THE IMPERIAL GUPTAS Probable Succession
Only under their son Samudra-Gupta does the dynasty emerge from obscurity. Once again this is mostly thanks to the survival of a single inscription. Like Kharavela’s, it advances extravagant claims, but, like Rudradaman’s, these claims are substantiated by other epigraphic and numismatic evidence. The inscription is probably the most famous in all India. Written in a script known as Gupta Brahmi (more elaborate than Ashoka Brahmi), and composed in classical Sanskrit verse and prose, its translation is often credited to James Prinsep of Ashoka fame, although it had been known and partially translated by earlier scholars. Its idiom and language echo that of Rudradaman. So does Samudra-Gupta’s choice of site; for as if aspiring to Mauryan hegemony, his panegyric appears as an addition to the Edicts of Ashoka on one of those highly polished Ashokan pillars.
The pillar stands in the city of Allahabad where, soon after Prinsep’s death, another Ashokan pillar, or part of it, was found in the possession of a contractor who used it as a road-roller. British antiquarians were mortified. A similar fate had almost befallen the pillar with the Samudra-Gupta epigraph. It had been uprooted in the eighteenth century and was discovered by Prinsep’s colleagues lying half-buried in the ground. They re-erected it on a new pedestal and designed an Achaemenid-style replacement for its missing capital. Supposedly a lion, the capital ‘resembles nothing so much as a stuffed poodle on top of an inverted flower pot’, wrote Alexander Cunningham, the father of Indian archaeology in the nineteenth century.
Cunningham also deduced that the Allahabad column had been shifted once before. Evidently later Muslim rulers had come to see these spectacular monoliths as a challenge to the excellence both of their sovereignty and their transport. They had therefore attempted to relocate them as totemic embellishments to their palatial courts. The truncated pillar which now tops Feroz Shah’s palace in Delhi originally stood near Khizrabad higher up the Jamuna. A contemporary (thirteenth-century) account describes how it was toppled onto a capacious pillow, then manoeuvred onto a forty-two-wheeler cart and hauled to the river by 8400 men. Lashed to a fleet of river transports, it was finally brought to Delhi in triumph.
Just so, the Allahabad pillar had apparently been shifted downriver from its original site in Kaushambi. It was meant to enhance the pretensions of the Allahabad fort as rebuilt by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the late sixteenth century. Akbar’s son Jahangir would add his own inscription to those of Ashoka and Samudra-Gupta; and thus it is that scions of each of north India’s three greatest dynasties – Maurya, Gupta and Mughal – share adjacent column inches in the heart of Allahabad, a city whose further claim to fame is as the home of a fourth great dynasty, that of the Nehru-Gandhis.
Miraculously, all that shunting around of the Allahabad pillar little damaged its inscriptions. That of Samudra-Gupta, if not posthumous, dates from near the end of his reign, which was a long one. He is thought to have succeeded as maharajadhiraja, or been so nominated by his father, in C335, and to have died in C380. The inscription may therefore be of about 375 and, with forty years’ achievements to cover, it has much to tell. The most important sections consist of long lists of kings and regions subdued by ‘the prowess of his arm in battle’, otherwise ‘the arm that rose up so as to pass all bounds’; indeed the pillar itself ‘is, as it were, an arm of the earth’ extended in a gesture of command.10 Some historians take these strong-arm conquests to be arranged in chronological order and, on that basis, have divided them into separate ‘campaigns’. Thus the first campaign seems to have taken Samudra-Gupta west where, with the strength of his arm, he ‘uprooted’ kingdoms in the Bareilly and Mathura regions of what is now Uttar Pradesh and in neighbouring Rajasthan. These were incorporated into the Gupta kingdom.
Next he headed south down the eastern seaboard and, perhaps in the course of several campaigns, elbowed aside a dozen more rivals. He turned back only after capturing Vishnugopa, the Pallava king of Kanchipuram (near Madras). Further campaigns in the north saw Gupta forces overrunning most of Bengal, ‘exterminating’ independent republics like that of the Yaudheyas west of Delhi, and establishing Gupta rule throughout the ancient arya-varta (the Aryan homeland – roughly the modern states of West Bengal, Bihar, UP, Madhya Pradesh and the eastern parts of Rajastan and the Panjab). This became the core region of Gupta rule, within which numerous tribal peoples were also deprived of their autonomy and where most extant inscriptions of the early Guptas have been found. Further afield the Kushanas in Gandhara, Great Satrap Rudradaman’s descendants in Gujarat and Malwa, various rulers in Assam and Nepal, and the kings of Sri Lanka and ‘other islands’ (which could mean the Indianised kingdoms of south-east Asia) are all said to have acknowledged Samudra-Gupta’s sovereignty and to have solicited his favour with deferential missions, handsome gifts and desirable maidens.
Now indisputably ‘the unconquered conqueror of unconquered kings’, Samudra-Gupta stood on the threshold of a pan-Indian empire. Other favourite epithets describe him as ‘conqueror of the four quarters of the earth’ and