Shunga Empire

A contracted throne

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)formation

Bana, writing at Harsha's court eight centuries later with access to records no longer known to survive, gives the coup its own line: "reviewing the whole army, under the pretext of showing him his forces, the mean general Pushpamitra crushed his master, Brihadratha the Maurya, who was weak of purpose." Pushyamitra imprisoned the dead emperor's minister, took the throne for himself, and founded the dynasty history knows as the Shungas.

What was left to inherit

The empire Pushyamitra took was not the one Ashoka had ruled. Pataliputra remained the capital, and the central Gangetic provinces — what would later be called Bihar, Tirhut, and the United Provinces around Agra and Oudh — still answered to it, with authority extending south as far as the Narmada river. The north-west, lost piece by piece since Ashoka's death, was gone; there is no evidence the Shungas, any more than the last weak Mauryas before them, ever exercised authority in the Punjab.

An epigraphic footnote and a literary witness

Almost nothing survives from the dynasty's own hand. A Barhut inscription opens with the formula "during the reign of the Sungas," which is the one contemporary epigraphic confirmation that the dynastic name itself was current at the time rather than a later label imposed by chroniclers. Beyond that single line, what is known of the Shungas comes overwhelmingly from later literature — the Puranas, and Bana's romance composed for an entirely different king's court centuries afterward — rather than from anything the dynasty inscribed about itself.

A general who had killed his own emperor took a kingdom already reduced from its Mauryan extent, kept the old capital, and left almost no record of his own reign except the word of the dramatist and the chronicler who came long after him.

Two invasions at once

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)peak

In the later years of Pushyamitra's reign, the dynasty he had founded by killing one emperor came close to being unmade from two directions at once.

From the west

Menander, a relative of the Bactrian king Eucratides and ruler of Kabul and the Punjab, set out to match Alexander's own exploits and advanced deep into Indian territory with a formidable army. He annexed the Indus delta and the peninsula of Kathiawar, occupied Mathura on the Jumna, besieged the town of Madhyamika near modern Chitor in Rajasthan, invested Saketa in southern Oudh — and, by the time his advance was finally checked, was threatening Pataliputra itself.

From the east

At close to the same moment, Kharavela, the Jain king of Kalinga on the Bay of Bengal coast, invaded Magadha from the other direction. His own inscription, cut into the rock of the Hathigumpha cave at Udayagiri and badly damaged but still legible in outline, claims he humbled the king of Magadha and advanced as far as the Ganges. Whatever ground he actually took, the advantage does not appear to have lasted, and the campaign reads, from what survives of the record, as a raid on the eastern frontier rather than a lasting conquest.

What held

Menander's was the graver threat, and it was repelled only after a severe struggle — Pataliputra's approaches fought over directly rather than a distant province being quietly ceded. The Greek king retired to his own territory, though he appears to have kept his western Indian conquests for some years afterward rather than surrendering them along with the eastern campaign. It was, as it turned out, the last time a European general would attempt to conquer India by land. Every invasion that followed, down to Vasco da Gama's arrival by sea in 1502, came from the water rather than across the passes — which makes the defence of Pataliputra in the 150s BC the final chapter of a story that had opened with Alexander at the Hyphasis a century and a half before, and the Shungas, for one campaign, the ones who closed it.

The horse

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)peak

Having survived a Greek army at his own gates, Pushyamitra — by now an old man, with a grown grandson already serving in the field — set out to make the survival formal. He revived the ashvamedha, the horse-sacrifice, an ancient rite that only a paramount sovereign was entitled to perform, and whose performance was itself the proof of the claim.

How the rite worked

A horse of a particular colour was consecrated and turned loose to wander for a year. Wherever it went, the ruler of that territory faced a choice: fight the army following behind it, or submit. If the horse's guardians secured submission everywhere it wandered, its owner returned in triumph with the defeated rulers in his train, and the horse was ceremonially sacrificed at a great festival marking the claim as proven. If they failed, the whole enterprise ended in humiliation rather than glory.

The grandson's part

Command of the guard following the horse was given, at least nominally, to Pushyamitra's young grandson Vasumitra — the same prince who had served in the field during his father Agnimitra's viceroyalty in the southern provinces. Vasumitra encountered and routed a band of Yavanas, western foreigners, who challenged the horse on the banks of the river Sindhu, between what is now Bundelkhand and the Rajputana states — quite possibly a detachment of the same Greek force that had besieged Madhyamika during Menander's invasion, still operating in the region rather than having withdrawn entirely.

What the rite settled, and for whom

With the Yavanas defeated and no other rival left standing, Pushyamitra carried out the sacrifice at his capital with the magnificence tradition demanded, and — at least in the account preserved through Bana's drama — was formally justified in his claim to rank as paramount power of northern India. It was a claim resting entirely on recent military success rather than on birth: a general who had killed his own emperor to take the throne proved his right to it, in the end, the same way he had taken it — by force, formally staged and ritually confirmed, with his own grandson doing the fighting that made the ceremony more than theatre.

A reputation on loan

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)aside?What aside means

Pushyamitra has a reputation, in a certain strand of later Buddhist writing, as a persecutor who destroyed monasteries and put a price on the head of every Buddhist monk in his kingdom. Smith, weighing the sources available to him, finds the specific charge against Pushyamitra himself unproven — but the reason it is worth examining at length is not that the individual claim is safe to dismiss. It is that the question of whether religious persecution happened at all in ancient India was, in his own day, a live scholarly argument, and Pushyamitra sits right at the middle of it.

A debate about the wrong default

Rhys Davids had argued that organised religious persecution was essentially foreign to Indian civilisation before the Muslim conquests — a claim Hodgson, Sewell and Watters all disputed with specific counter-examples. The case against Pushyamitra by name does not hold up well under that scrutiny. But the case that persecution never happened at all holds up considerably worse, once other well-attested instances are set beside it.

The instances that are not in doubt

Shashanka, the king of Bengal whose murder of Harsha's brother sits at the opening of the following century's history, is independently and repeatedly described as a Buddhist-persecuting king by Xuanzang — a near-contemporary witness with no obvious motive to invent the charge. Outside India entirely, Tibetan chronicles record a persecution of Buddhism under King Langdarma around 840 AD, and the Khotan annals preserve a comparable episode. In southern India, a documented persecution of Jainism is recorded independently of any of the northern material.

What that comparison is for

None of those cases makes the specific accusation against Pushyamitra any more credible on its own evidence. What it does is correct the shape of the question. The debate was never really about whether an Indian king could persecute a religious minority — plainly some did, in well-attested cases spanning six centuries and three regions. The debate is about whether this particular accusation, against this particular king, made by sources writing well after his death and with their own reasons to resent the dynasty that killed a Buddhist-tolerant emperor to found itself, is one of the true cases or one of the invented ones.

Pushyamitra's reputation for persecution turns out to be a live question precisely because the category it belongs to is real. That is a harder thing to settle than either "the Shungas never touched Buddhism" or "the Shungas destroyed it" — and it is the honest answer the evidence actually supports.

A queen who was not

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)end

Pushyamitra died about five years after Menander's retreat, having reigned long and eventfully, and was succeeded by his son Agnimitra — the same prince who had governed the southern provinces as viceroy throughout his father's wars. Agnimitra reigned only a few years. What followed was a sequence of short, disordered reigns that reads less like a dynasty than like a list of casualties.

The actor's death

Sujyeshtha, probably Agnimitra's brother, succeeded him and was followed seven years later by Vasumitra — the same grandson who had guarded the sacrificial horse against the Yavanas as a young man. After Vasumitra came four reigns so short that all four together total only seventeen years, strong evidence of a court in continual crisis. One incident from this period survives in specific enough detail to have been remembered on its own merits: Sumitra, another son of Agnimitra, "inordinately devoted to the stage," was surprised in the middle of a performance by his own attendants, absorbed among his favourite actors, when a man named Mitradeva "severed his head with a scimitar, as a lotus is shorn from its stalk."

The tenth king

The ninth king, Bhagavata, is credited with a long twenty-six-year reign about which nothing else is recorded. The tenth and last, Devabhuti — also given as Devabhumi — is remembered only for licentious habits and for the manner of his death: killed while engaged in what Bana's account calls a discreditable intrigue.

The plot that ended him had been arranged by his own Brahmin minister, Vasudeva Kanva, who by this point was already running the state in all but name behind a dissolute figurehead. Vasudeva had a slave-woman disguised as the queen sent to the king "in a frenzy of passion" — Bana's own phrase — and it was she, at the minister's instance, who took his life.

The name Mitradeva shares

The man who had beheaded Prince Sumitra mid-performance, years earlier, was very probably a member of the same family that now finished the dynasty off: Mitradeva and Vasudeva Kanva both belonging, on the evidence of the name, to the house of the Kanvas — meaning the same family had been positioned close enough to the Shunga throne to assassinate a prince and, a generation later, to murder the last king who sat on it and take the throne for themselves. Contemporary opinion, Smith notes, held that the later Shunga kings held little real power and were puppets in Brahmin ministers' hands — an arrangement not unlike the Maratha rajas' later relationship to their own Peshwas. The dynasty founded by an army commander who killed his emperor at a troop review ended a hundred and twelve years later, murdered in bed by the family that had been quietly running it for some time already.