North Indian Inscriptions

POLITICAL HISTORY

conquerors of whom Dharma-vijayin is doubtless one. He further tells us that of these conquerors Dharma-vijayin is the best, because he does despoil the vanquished ruler of his possessions, meaning that his object is neither money nor annexation, but rather obeisance, that is, the ambition of becoming a Chāturanta or Chakravartin, the goal placed before a king by the Arthaśāstra.¹ In Kālidāsa’s time, however, this goal seems to have undergone a slight change; for, the poet says that Raghu seized, if not the kingdom, at any rate, the wealth (śrī) of the ruler of the Mahēndra mountain. Mallinātha, the commentator, explains śriyaṁ jahāra by dharm-ārtham=iti bhāvaḥ. It is thus clear that in the Gupta period it was customary for the Dharma-vijayin to exact at least a tribute from the worsted enemy. The precious metal, so acquired, was most probably, used not so much to overstock the royal treasury as to celebrate some politico-religious ceremony at the end of the expedition and distribute it in largesses to the Brāhmaṇas. This point we will come to very shortly. Suffice it here to say that Samudragupta appears to have undertaken his campaign in South India with a view to establishing himself as a supreme ruler of India and that he could thus the afford to be a Dharma-vijayin for Dakshiṇāpatha.

       The nature of the fifth type of Samudragupta’s military achievements is revealed by the expression utsanna-rājavaṁśa-pratishṭhāpana ‘restoration of overthrown royal families’. This point we have already dwelt upon. This need not therefore occupy us here very long. It is true that Harishēṇa does not specify the names of these families. But we have already remarked that he must have very good reasons for refraining from this specification, especially as we know he has not spared himself from such enumerations elsewhere in describing the conquests of his lord and master. Although he has not thus thrown any light on this point, purposely we think, we have already surmised that one of these families was the Vākāṭaka, whose ancestral kingdom was practically co-extensive with the tableland of the Deccan. And when this extensive region is once taken into consideration, the enumeration of the twelve kings of South India vanquished and liberated by Samudragupta does not, after all, look a meagre and incomplete one so as to cast a reasonable doubt upon the wide extent of his dig-vijaya, so absolutely necessary for the position of the Paramount Sovereign to which he was aspiring. Who seized upon this Vākāṭaka territory between the time of Pravarasēna I and that of Samudragupta, we do not know definitely. We can only guess that it was not one king, but perhaps a combination of neighbouring rulers, that partitioned the Vākāṭaka kingdom. There was the ruler of Kōsala in the east, the Nāga confederacy in the north, the Kshatrapas in the west, and the Pallavas and others in the south. These must have conspired jointly and severally to pounce upon the Vākāṭaka empire and seize every one for himself a sumptuous morsel. When this whole array of formidable princes was confronted, singly and severally, and destroyed or subjugated by Samudragupta during the various types of conquests he carried out, it was not difficult at all to unify and restore the dismembered Vākāṭaka power, which, however, now in its regenerated form had to enter into a subordinate alliance with the Imperial Gupta House.

       The sixth and perhaps the last type of military achievements which stands to the credit of Samudragupta is the diplomatic relations which sprang up between him and the distant independent states on the frontiers and beyond. We have seen who they were. Here we are supplied with two lists by Harishēṇa, one consisting of foreign independent rulers settled on the west and north-west of India and the other of those situated beyond the extreme south of the country such as the princes of Siṁhala (Ceylon) and other island countries. The very fact that the rulers of Siṁhala and adjoining islands exchanged international courtesy with him shows that the dig-vijaya of Samudragupta was complete over the whole of Dakshiṇāpatha.
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¹ D. R. Bhandarkar, Some Aspects of Ancient Hindu Polity, pp. 95 ff.