The White Huns And Good King Harsha
A.D. 450 TO A.D. 648
The name Huns has quite a familiar sound. We think of Attila; we
remember the 350 pounds weight of gold which Theodosius of Byzantium
paid as an annual tribute to the victorious horde which swept into
Europe about the middle of the fifth century; finally, we hark back to
Gibbon's description of this race of reckless reiving riders; for the
Huns seem to have been born in
he saddle and never to have lived out
of it. This is what he says:--
"They were distinguished from the rest of the human species by their
broad shoulders, flat noses and small black eyes, deeply buried in the
head; and, as they were almost destitute of beards, they never enjoyed
either the manly graces of youth or the venerable aspect of age." (En
passant, we can but wonder what our poor Gibbon would have said to
the shaven chin of to-day!) "A fabulous origin was assigned worthy of
their form and manners--that the witches of Scythia, who for their
foul and deadly practices had been driven from society, had united in
the desert with infernal spirits, and that the Huns were the offspring
of this execrable conjunction."
Again, poor Huns! We do not need such legend to know that they were
utterly barbarian; that they rode like the devil, fought with
bone-tipped javelins, clothed themselves in skins, and ate herbs and
half-raw meat which they had first made tender by using it as their
saddle! It is a sufficiently black indictment, and, though it applies
only to the rolling swarm of savages which, on leaving that hive of
humanity, the wide Siberian Steppe, turned westward, we have no reason
to suppose that the swarm which turned eastward differed much from the
type. It is true they are called the White Huns, but that is most
likely because among the dark races of Hindustan, the yellow Mongolian
complexion showed fair.
India had been overrun many times before, but it needs small
consideration to see that this invasion must have been the worst, must
have brought with it a perfect horror of havoc. Far more so than the
Hun invasion in Europe. There the ultimate savage met, for the most
part, with Goths and Visigoths. In India they stood between a Brahman
and his salvation, between culture and comfort. For India was in these
days far more civilised than Europe; its people were refined, bound
hand and foot by ritual, curiously conventional in custom.
The long ages which had passed since the Vedic times had made religion
more complex, had multiplied ceremonial to such an extent that the
performance of the simplest duty was hedged about by the danger of
fateful commissions, and still more fateful omissions. The revival of
Hinduism during the paling days of the Gupta empire had vastly
increased the power of the Brahman. In brief, Puranic Hinduism--that
is, religion based on the Puranas, as distinct from the Vedas--with
all its hair-splitting, its overlay of ritual by ritual, was at its
zenith. From birth to death a man--even the meanest man--was in the
grip of innumerable petty commandments.
The very gods he worshipped had changed. The elemental deities of the
Rig-Veda--the Winds, the Fire, the Sun, the Dawn--behind which lay
ever (half recognised, wholly mysterious) the Unconditioned, the
Absolute, were lost; crowded out, as it were, by the three hundred and
thirty millions of Puranic godlings, which rumour says had replaced
the thirty-and-three of the Vedas. And beset by an Athanasian furore
for faith, the Puranas had defined the undefinable. The doctrine of a
Trinity seems about this era of the world's history to have been more
than usually in the air, and we find it here, hard and fast,
crystallised unchangeably.
Brahma the Creator, Siva the destroying Spirit, Vishn or Krishn the
Saviour, the Man-God, kind to the weaknesses of humanity. The three
hundred and thirty millions of little gods were contained in the
Three; they were emanations, attributes, as such imaged and
worshipped. A great change this from the singing of a hymn to Agni the
Fire-God, as the victim's flesh shrivelled in the flame, and the
cooling of the ashes with a libation of soma juice.
And the worshipping of images brought with it a veneration for
temples, a reverence for a paid priesthood, with its inevitable
corollary of cult and custom and ceremonial. This complexity of
religion naturally showed itself in the character of the people. As Mr
Dutt writes:--
"Pompous celebrations and gorgeous decorations arrested the
imagination and fostered the superstitions of the populace; poetry,
arts, architecture, sculpture, and music lent their aid, and within a
few centuries the nation's wealth was lavished on these gorgeous
edifices and ceremonials which were the outward manifestations of the
people's unlimited devotion and faith. Pilgrimages, which were rare or
unknown in very ancient times, were organised on a stupendous scale;
gifts in land and money poured in for the support of temples, and
religion gradually transformed itself to a blind veneration of images
and their custodians. The great towns of India were crowded with
temples, and new gods and new idols found sanctuaries in stone
edifices and in the hearts of ignorant worshippers."
Add to this the testimony of the literature of the period. The dramas
of Kalidasa, beautiful as they are, concern themselves entirely with
Love. The very descriptions of nature have reference to it, as when we
read:--
"The oleander bud
Shows like the painted fingers of the fair,
Red tinted on the tip and edged with ebony."
His very reflections also are tinged with the same soft note of
underlying passion:--
"Not seldom in our hours of ease,
When thought is still, the sight of some fair form
Or mournful fall of music breathing low
Will stir strange fancies thrilling all the soul
With a mysterious sadness."
And, leaving poetry alone, such knowledge as we have of social life in
these days points to a certain effeminacy. In fact, there is evidence
that woman played a larger part in society than she does in the India
of to-day. The perennial joke against learned ladies, indeed, appears
in the drama of the "Toy Cart," where the comic man says he always
laughs when he "hears a woman read Sanskrit, or a man sing a song!"
Then the heroine of this drama is frankly a courtesan, an Indian
Aspasia, who received her lovers in a public court furnished with
books, pictures, gambling-tables, etc., and who was
"Of courteous manners and unrivalled beauty,
The pride of all Ujjain."
Such, then, were the people who "felt, dreaded, and magnified" (as
Gibbon says of the Goths--a far less civilised nation--in like
predicament) "the numbers, the strength, the rapid motions and
implacable cruelty of the Huns; who beheld their fields and villages
consumed with flames and deluged with indiscriminate slaughter."
Perhaps it is as well, therefore, that history is for the most part
silent concerning the horror and the havoc of the century or so of
time during which the Huns ravaged India. We hear only of the greater
tragedies, of Toramava the Tyrant, and his son Mihiragula, who
out-Heroded his father in implacable cruelty towards the cultured,
caste-bound Hindus, to whom all things were sacred. Of him it is
written that his favourite amusement in Kashmir was watching elephants
goaded into impassable, precipitous hill-paths, so that he might laugh
like a fiend if they slipped and fell; fell with a wild shriek of
terror and anger, to be dashed to pieces thousands of feet below. An
unpleasing picture this! One cannot wonder at the criticism passed on
his death, when "the earth shook, thick darkness reigned, and a mighty
tempest raged." It was succinct, bald, but forcible: "He has now
fallen into the lowest hell, where he shall pass endless ages."
After his death, which must have occurred about the year A.D. 540, the
clouds gather darkly, and we are permitted few peeps as to what was
going on behind them. Certain it is that no trace of a paramount power
is to be found in the scant records of the last half of the sixth
century.
The beginning of the seventh, however, finds the historian in very
different case. He has first and foremost the detailed account of
Hiuen T'sang's travels with which to deal, and this is supplemented by
the "Harsha-charita," or "Deeds of Harsha," written by a learned
Brahman who lived at the court of the good king. That this latter book
partakes more of the character of a historical romance than a steady,
straightforward chronicle of events is true; but even so, the
information at disposal is fuller and more precise than that which has
been forthcoming hitherto, excepting, perhaps, in regard to the great
Maurya kings.
Harsha, then, was younger son of a Rajah of Thaneswar, in the Punjab.
His father dying in A.D. 606, his elder brother ascended the throne,
but was almost immediately most treacherously assassinated in
conference by the King of Bengal; the conference apparently being for
the purpose of arbitrating between the young Rajah of Thaneswar and
the King of Malwa, who had murdered the former's brother-in-law for
the sake of possessing his wife, and was keeping the Thaneswar
princess a prisoner, with "iron fetters kissing her feet."
The assassinated king being too young to have a son, his brother
Harsha was invited to take the throne. For some unknown reason he
hesitated, and his formal coronation did not take place until nearly
six years after he had assumed the actual responsibilities of
kingship.
The story of the recovery of his widowed sister from the hands of her
abductor is full of incident and romance. The rescue was but just in
time, for the Princess Raj-yasri--a most attractive and learned young
lady, and well versed in the Buddhistic schools, apparently--was about
to commit suttee amid the pathless forests, whither she had fled to
escape her persecutor, when her brother, led to her retreat by the
aboriginal chieftains, arrived upon the scene. The hurry was so great,
that in it the assassin-lover appears to have escaped.
It will be observed by this that the family of Harsha was of the
Buddhist faith. How, or why, we know not. The very name of his
kingdom, Than-eswar (S'thaneswara, or, The Place of God), is purely
Hindu; nevertheless, this, the last great King of Hindu India,
professed the religion of Gautama.
In fact, in many ways his reign is a poor imitation of that of Asoka.
He did not, however, follow that king's example as a peace prophet,
for he spent nearly thirty-six years out of his forty-two in bloody
warfare. And in all his long career of aggression he met with but one
check. He was unable to push his forces through the narrow defiles of
the Deccan passes, and had to confine himself to being Lord Paramount
of the North. So his empire, though extensive, never touched that of
Asoka; in truth, he did not touch that monarch in any way.
Nevertheless, his rule was excellent, and our Chinese pilgrim is loud
in praise of it. Harsha did not trust to officialdom; personal
supervision was his theory of government, and he was constantly on the
move inspecting, punishing, rewarding. His camp must have been quaint,
for in those days tents were unknown, and the "King's Palace" was
built at each halting-place of boughs and reeds, and solemnly burnt
after it had been used.
Like all these Eastern kings whose personalities have survived the
years, he appears to have been somewhat of a genius. Besides being a
most expert penman and draughtsmen, he wrote various learned books,
and in his salad days produced several plays which still remain part
of the literature of India. One, "The Necklace," is quite the
liveliest of all Indian plays, and with appropriate songs and dances
must have been rather like a Savoy comic opera. There is a legend that
Harsha spent so much money on poets, actors, dancers and artists of
all descriptions, that he had eventually to sell the gold and silver
ornaments of the Hindu temples in order to pay for his pleasures; but
this is pure legend. Following the example of Asoka, he established
rest-houses for travellers, hospitals for the sick, magistrates for
the regulation of morals; yet in all this, somehow, the sense of pose
is never absent. Asoka's voice is still to-day a cri du c[oe]ur;
Harsha's is--fin de siecle.
He could not help it. The curious religious eclecticism of the period
favoured it. His family showed keenly the general tendency to
self-consciousness, and it was written of his father:
"He offered daily to the Sun a bunch of red lotuses set in a pure
vessel of ruby, and tinged, like his own heart, with the same hue."
Could Oscar Wilde have done more? Strange, indeed, how the cycles of
culture come round and round.
It was in his later years that King Harsha became a pronounced
Buddhist. This was largely owing to the preachings and teachings of
Hiuen T'sang, in honour of whom a solemn assemblage was held at Kanauj
in the fresh spring-time of the year A.D. 644. The scene is admirably
given in Hiuen T'sang's Record, and is well worth a reading. We can
imagine the king carrying in person the canopy upheld over the golden
statuette of Buddha; we can see him "moving along, scattering golden
blossoms, pearls and other rare gems." We catch a glimpse of the
flaming monastery accidentally catching fire, to be extinguished by
the mere sight of the good Harsha. The rush of the mad Hindu fanatic
to slay this "favourer of Buddhists" comes as a startling incident, to
be followed by the immediate exile of five hundred Brahmans for high
treason.
Then we learn of the journey to Prag (Allahabad), where every five
years Harsha, in accordance with ancient custom, had held a
distribution of alms.[2]
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[Footnote 2: This assemblage, or fair, still exists, under the name of
the Magh-mela.]
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The description of this is even more entrancing, and we can take part
in all the ceremonials of the seventy-five days during which Buddha,
the Sun, and Siva were apparently worshipped indiscriminately. The
proceedings were opened by a magnificent procession of feudatory
princes, and ended with a forty-days' distribution of alms to all and
sundry.
After this, Hiuen T'sang writes,
"the royal accumulation of five years was exhausted. Except the
horses, elephants and military accoutrements ... nothing remained....
The king gave away his gems and goods, his clothing and neck-laces,
ear-rings, bracelets, chaplets, neck jewels, and bright head jewel;
all these he freely gave away without stint."
Was it a real gifting, we wonder, or, after duly worshipping in a
borrowed second-hand suit, did Harsha return to his palace to find his
wardrobe much the same as ever?
The hint of unreality in all things provokes the question.
King Harsha died in A.D. 648, shortly after his beloved Chinese
pilgrim had departed for his native land. Once again it has to be
written that the "withdrawal of the strong arm plunged the country
into disorder."
Arjuna, his minister, seized the throne, but drew down on himself the
wrath of China, and after a brief interval was carried thither as a
prisoner.
Meanwhile, no one appeared to take the reins. In truth, degeneration
had already set in. The people who had posed so long as a nation of
culture, of refinement, who had spent their lives in applauding
poetasters, who had laughed when the court wit said the
commander-in-chief's nose was as long as the king's pedigree, who had
been ready to worship any god if so be the ceremonial pleased their
aesthetic sense, who had given free pass to their emotions in all ways,
such people were not ready for action. And so once for all the clouds
cover Hindu supremacy.
The next four hundred years are the Dark Ages of Indian history. Even
the impressionist outlook of our case of coins is denied us. A
thousand names jostle each other in commonplace confusion. In the
chaos of conflicting claims, any attempt at classification is
hopeless.