India is curiously fruitful in them, and, so far as we have come in Indian history, their individualities stand forth all the stronger in contrast with the mists and shadows which surround them. Bhishma, Chandra-gûpta, Asôka, Kanîshka, Samûdra-gupta--we gauge our admiring interest by our desire to know what manner of men these were in feature and form. But Fate, for the most part, denies us even the scant suggestion of a rude coin. She does so here. Whether Samûdra inherited his mother's beauty is for the present an unanswerable question. We do not know even the year of his passing, still less the manner of it: the story goes on without a pause to Chandra-gûpta-Vikramadîtya, his son, whose fame, until lately, quite overwhelmed all memory of his father; that father who conquered India, who allied himself with foreign powers, who made the subsequent achievements of his son possible.
The question which besets us now is the extent to which Chandra-gûpta-Vikramadîtya's fame is really his own; how much of it is due to the fact that we possess of his reign and administration an almost unique record in the account given of his travels and sojourn in India by the Buddhist pilgrim from China, Fa-Hien? This gives us information which fails us in the reigns of other kings. How much, again, of this Vikramadîtya's fame belongs by right to that other mythical Vikramadîtya of before-Christ days? That nameless king who flits like a Will-o'-the-Wisp through the mists of early Indian history?
How much, again, is rightfully due to his father--that striking personality which historians have forgotten, but which now comes surging through the shadows, a veritable man indeed?
Who can say? All we know is that the Gûpta dynasty was a mighty one; that it still serves the modern Hindu as a model of good government, just as the Mahomedan still points with pride to Akbar's rule.
What, then, were the salient points of this beloved control? Judging by Fa-Hien's account they may be summed up in personal liberty. The subject was left largely to follow his own intentions, and the criminal law was singularly lenient. This was rendered possible by the wide acceptation amongst the masses of Buddha's gospel of good-will; for although Brahmanical Hinduism had ousted Buddhist dogma, it had scarcely touched its ethics. Capital punishment was unknown; there was no need for an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. "Throughout the country," we read, "no one kills any living thing."
An easy kingdom in good sooth to rule! According to our traveller, the people seem to have vied with each other in virtue. All sorts of charitable institutions existed, and the description of a free hospital, endowed by benevolence, is worth quoting:--
"Hither come all poor or helpless patients suffering from every sort of infirmity. They are well taken care of, and a doctor attends to them, food and medicine being given according to their wants. Thus they are made quite comfortable, and when they are well they may go away."
Thus, once more, the East saw light sooner than the West; for the first hospital in Europe only struggled into existence more than five hundred years after this one at Magâdha.
But the chief glory of the Gûpta empire was its patronage of the arts and sciences. Every pundit in India knows the verse which names the "nine gems of Vikramadîtya's court"; those learned men amongst whom Kâlidâsa, the author of "Sakûntala" (so far as fame goes, the Shakspeare of India), stood foremost. Poets, astronomers, grammarians, physicians, helped to make up the nawa-ratani, as it is called, and the extraordinary literary activity of the century and a quarter (from A.D. 330 to 455), during which long period Samûdra, Chandra, and his son, Kumâra, reigned, is most remarkable. The revival of Sanskrit, the sacred language of the Brahmans, points to an upheaval of Hindu religious thought, and so does the almost endless sacred literature, which, still surviving, is referred to the golden age of the Gûptas. The Purânas in their present form, the metrical version of the Code of Manu, some of the Dharm-shâstras, and, in fact, most of the classical Sanskrit literature, belong to this period.
Architecture was also revolutionised. As Buddhism slipped from the grip of the people under pressure from the ever-growing power of the Brahmans, the very forms of its sacred buildings gave way to something which, more ornate, less self-evident, served to reflect the new and elaborate pretensions of the priesthood. Mr Cunningham gives us somewhere the seven characteristics of the Gûpta style of architecture; but it is more easily summed up for the average beholder in the words "cucumber and gourd." These names serve well to recall the tall, curved vimanas, or towers, exactly like two-thirds of a cucumber stuck in the ground, and surmounted by a flat, gourd-like "Amalika," so called because of its resemblance to the fruit of that name.