01Chandragupta I and Samudragupta
Chandragupta I married Kumaradevi, a princess of the Licchavis, and their joint coins show how much that alliance meant; the Gupta era counts from 319–320 CE. Their son Samudragupta made the family an empire.
His court poet Harishena wrote his praise on the old Ashoka pillar now in the Allahabad fort. It lists kings of Aryavarta uprooted outright, and twelve kings of the Dakshinapatha, as far south as Vishnugopa of Kanchi, who were captured and then released to rule as allies. Frontier kingdoms from Samatata to Nepal paid tribute, and the king of Simhala sent gifts. Samudragupta performed the ashvamedha and struck a coin of himself playing the veena.
02Chandragupta II Vikramaditya
Chandragupta II ended the rule of the Shaka satraps of Ujjayini and western India, which had lasted more than three centuries, and began striking silver coins in their style for Gujarat and Malwa. He married his daughter Prabhavatigupta to the Vakataka king Rudrasena II; when Rudrasena died young, she ruled the Deccan kingdom as regent for her sons.
The Chinese monk Faxian travelled through the Gupta lands in the first years of the fifth century. He found the people prosperous, punishments mostly fines, and in Pataliputra free hospitals kept by leading families, where the poor, the crippled and the sick were fed and treated until they recovered.
03Temples in stone
The Gupta kings called themselves parama-bhagavata, foremost devotees of Vishnu, and put Garuda on their seal. In their time the Hindu temple took the form it would keep: a square garbhagriha for the murti, a doorway carved with Ganga and Yamuna, and then a tower above.
At Sanchi a flat-roofed shrine, Temple 17, stands among the stupas. At Deogarh near Lalitpur, the Dashavatara temple of about 500 CE shows Vishnu reclining on Shesha, Gajendra saved from the crocodile, and Nara and Narayana in tapas. At Bhitargaon near Kanpur a brick temple with a tall tower still stands. Udayagiri’s caves, cut for Chandragupta II, hold Varaha, Vishnu on Shesha and the Saptamatrikas.
04The iron pillar
In the courtyard of the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque at Mehrauli in Delhi stands an iron pillar a little over 7 metres high and weighing about 6 tonnes, forged from wrought iron more than sixteen hundred years ago. Its Sanskrit inscription says it was raised as a standard of Vishnu on a hill called Vishnupada by a king named Chandra, generally identified as Chandragupta II.
It has stood in the open through Delhi’s monsoons without rusting away. Metallurgists at IIT Kanpur showed in the early 2000s that the high phosphorus in the iron forms a thin protective film of iron phosphate on the surface. It was carried to Delhi from its first site; when and by whom is not recorded with certainty.
05Aryabhata and the numbers
Aryabhata, writing at Kusumapura near Pataliputra, finished the Aryabhatiya in 499 CE when he was twenty-three. In 121 verses he gave a value of pi as 62,832 divided by 20,000, that is 3.1416, a table of sines, rules for square and cube roots, and the statement that the earth turns on its axis, so that the stars only seem to move west, as the shore seems to move to a man in a boat. He explained eclipses by the shadows of the earth and moon.
Varahamihira of Ujjayini, who died in 587, summed up five schools of astronomy in the Pancha-siddhantika and wrote the Brihat Samhita on everything from rain to temple building. Behind both lay the decimal place-value system.
06Kalidasa and the poets
Kalidasa wrote the Abhijnanashakuntalam, the play of Shakuntala and Dushyanta that Goethe praised when it reached Europe; the Meghaduta, in which an exiled yaksha sends a cloud as messenger across Bharat to his wife on Kailash; the Raghuvamsha on the kings of Shri Rama’s line; and the Kumarasambhava on the marriage of Shiva and Parvati. Tradition counts him among the nine gems of King Vikramaditya’s court at Ujjayini.
Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa follows Chanakya’s plots against the Nanda minister Rakshasa. Shudraka’s Mricchakatika, The Little Clay Cart, is set among gamblers, courtesans and thieves in Ujjayini. Amarasimha’s Amarakosha, a thesaurus in verse, was learnt by heart by Sanskrit students for fifteen centuries.
07Gold, guilds and land grants
The Guptas struck more gold coins than any Indian dynasty before them: the king as archer, as lion-slayer, as horseman, the queen with him, Lakshmi on a lotus on the back. At Vaishali, excavators found hundreds of clay seals of a corporation of bankers, caravan traders and craftsmen, the shreshthi-sarthavaha-kulika-nigama.
In 436 CE a guild of silk weavers who had moved from Lata in Gujarat to Dashapura, today’s Mandsaur, built a temple to Surya there; when they repaired it in 473 they had a long poem carved telling their own story. Kings and nobles gave villages to learned Brahmins and to temples on copper plates, and these agraharas spread learning into the countryside.
08Nalanda and Ajanta
Xuanzang, who studied at Nalanda two centuries later, was told that the mahavihara was founded by a king named Shakraditya, usually identified with Kumaragupta I, and enlarged by the Gupta kings after him. Its earliest seals and buildings belong to this age. It grew into the greatest residential university of Asia, teaching grammar, logic, medicine and the Vedas alongside Buddhist philosophy.
In the Deccan, the Vakataka king Harishena’s ministers and feudatories had the finest caves at Ajanta cut and painted in the later fifth century. The murals of the Jataka tales, with their princes, dancers, elephants and boats, are the best surviving painting of ancient India.
09The Hunas and the end
Skandagupta, who came to the throne around 455, met the Hunas, horsemen from Central Asia, and threw them back; his pillar at Bhitari near Ghazipur records the victory, and his Junagadh inscription records that his governor’s son Chakrapalita rebuilt the Sudarshana lake yet again in 456.
The Hunas returned. Their kings Toramana and Mihirakula seized the Punjab and Malwa, and the Chinese and Kashmiri records remember Mihirakula for his cruelty. Around 528, Yashodharman of Mandsaur defeated him, and boasted on his victory pillars that Mihirakula had bowed his head at his feet. By the middle of the sixth century the Gupta line had shrunk to Magadha, and the Maukharis, the Later Guptas and the Maitrakas of Valabhi divided the north.
What survives today
- The Udayagiri caves near Vidisha, with the great Varaha panel
- The Dashavatara temple at Deogarh, Lalitpur district
- The Mehrauli iron pillar in the Qutb complex, Delhi
- Samudragupta’s prashasti on the pillar in the Allahabad fort
- The Ajanta caves, a World Heritage Site
- The ruins of Nalanda, a World Heritage Site since 2016
- Kalidasa’s plays and poems, still staged and taught
- The Aryabhatiya, and India’s first satellite named after its author in 1975
