At the close of a century the Scythian power in India was broken and gradually thrust back to the territory whence it came, beyond the northern mountain-peaks and, in India itself, to the west and south of the Punjab as far as Guzerat. But the after effects of that power and of the century-long invasion still continued. A Scythian population, united with the aboriginal hill peoples who had been thrust back at an earlier period, remained, and in great part still remains, in those regions. The Jats and the wandering tribes of Sikhs which belong to them are believed to be of non-Aryan origin, and in religion, language, and customs differ from the Brahmans and are opposed to them. The Rajput families of the “king’s sons,” who afterwards founded independent kingdoms in the south, are also considered to be foreign importations into the caste system and as the successors to the Scythian power. The route of these migrations and conquests from the north to the southwest is marked by ruins, and it was on the sites of such ruins that the later Saracens erected their citadels, palaces, and mosques. These too are now nothing but magnificent remains. But we can here treat of older conditions alone, and of those only in brief.
LEGENDS OF THE EARLY HEROES
Legends have arisen concerning the immigration of Saka princes to Surashtra or Guzerat, and stories of an alleged liberation from foreign rule. A celebrated hero of such legends is Vikramaditya, a king of Ujjain in Malwa, and another, with whose birth the Saka era was connected, is Salivahana, the opponent of the first, who is not less renowned than he in legend, and defeated him in the struggle. But though legend has so much to say of these two, history has little or nothing to tell us of them.
On the western side of the Girnar rock near Junagarh, whose eastern side bears Asoka’s inscriptions, and on whose northern side is engraved that of one Skanda Gupta, we may read that of one Rudra Dama. It tells of the buildings erected by this king, or great satrap, for the protection of the country against the destructive power of the waters of the river Palasini, and another inscription, which extols his name in the midst of those of four others, his predecessors and successors, is found on a pillar at Jasdan in Kathiawar or Surashtra, a part of the present Guzerat. The names of the others are—on the one side of his, Chashtana and Jaya Dama—and on the other side Rudra Sinha and Rudra Sena, and the inscription belongs to the year 127 of the era of these princes.
These kings, or great satraps, of whom we possess both inscriptions and coins, beside many others whose names cannot here be given, have been called Sah or Saha or Sinha kings, from a termination added to many of their names. We should perhaps do best in accordance with a good precedent to designate them Xatrapa (Satrap) kings, as not only did they call themselves so, but also actually were, at least in name, governors for the Mauryas and their successors.
The series begins with a certain Nahapana, who with one or two others preceded Chashtana and his sons and grandsons, and ends with one Svami Rudra Sena, the twenty-sixth mentioned. They ruled, roughly speaking, three hundred years from the beginning of the Saka era (in which we may safely place Chashtana) down to somewhere between 284 and 272 of our era. In its best days (which seem to have been under Rudra Dama, as his inscription indicates), their dominions embraced the peninsula of Guzerat, Surashtra, and Malwa, reaching north as far as the middle of the Indus valley and so onward to the sea.
Inscriptions and coins are certainly safe authorities for history: but they are somewhat inadequate when, as here, little else and nothing certain is added to them. Thus we know but little of the history of this great western or Xatrapa kingdom, not much more than the legend which has grown up round its first beginnings and its final overthrow by the Gupta power.
The Sah or Xatrapa kings, so runs the legend, were overthrown by the Guptas, who ruled between the Jumna and the Ganges. That is, they had independent and viceregal honours, and the man who prepared their downfall is called Kamara Gupta, and was succeeded by his son Skanda Gupta, whose inscription we read on the north side of the Girnar rock.—But we must begin at the beginning.