Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

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Seleucid–Mauryan war
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 6/22/21



Image
Seleucid–Mauryan War
Alexander the Great's Satrapies in Northern India.
Date 305–303 BCE
Location
Northwestern India; Chiefly the Indus River Valley
Result: Mauryan victory[1][note 1]
Treaty of the Indus[4]; Seleucid Empire's eastern satrapies ceded to Mauryan Empire; Seleucus gives the hand of his daughter to Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!] , founding a dynastic alliance; Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!] gives 500 war elephants to Seleucus; Establishment of diplomatic relations

Belligerents:
Maurya Empire / Seleucid Empire
Commanders and leaders:
Chandragupta Maurya ; Chanakya / Seleucus I Nicator
Strength:
Unknown / Unknown
Casualties and losses:
unknown / unknown


The Seleucid–Mauryan War was fought between 305 and 303 BCE. It started when Seleucus I Nicator, of the Seleucid Empire, sought to retake the Indian satrapies of the Macedonian Empire which had been occupied by Emperor Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!], of the Maurya Empire.

The war ended in a settlement resulting in the annexation of the Indus Valley region and parts of Afghanistan and Iran to the Mauryan Empire, with Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!] securing control over the areas that he had sought, and a marriage alliance between the two powers. After the war, the Mauryan Empire emerged as the dominant power of the Indian Subcontinent, and the Seleucid Empire turned its attention toward defeating its rivals in the west.

Background

Main article: Conquest of the Nanda Empire

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Territorial evolution of Magadha and the Maurya Empire between 600 and 180 BCE, including territorial gains from Seleucid-Mauryan War, 303 BCE.

Chandragupta Maurya established himself as ruler of Magadha around 321 BCE. He decided to conquer the Nanda Dynasty, rulers at the time of the Gangetic Plain. He fought the empire for eleven years with successful guerrilla campaigns, and captured the Nanda capital of Pataliputra. This led to the fall of the empire and the eventual creation of the Maurya Empire under Emperor Chandragupta Maurya.

The Persian provinces in what is now modern Afghanistan, together with the wealthy kingdom of Gandhara and the states of the Indus Valley, had all submitted to Alexander the Great and become part of his empire. When Alexander died, the Wars of the Diadochi ("Successors") split his empire apart; as his generals fought for control of Alexander's empire. In the eastern territories one of these generals, Seleucus I Nicator, was taking control and was starting to establish what became known as the Seleucid Empire. According to the Roman historian Appian, Seleucus,

always lying in wait for the neighboring nations, strong in arms and persuasive in council, he acquired Mesopotamia, Armenia, 'Seleucid' Cappadocia, Persis, Parthia, Bactria, Arabia, Tapouria, Sogdia, Arachosia, Hyrcania, and other adjacent peoples that had been subdued by Alexander, as far as the river Indus, so that the boundaries of his empire were the most extensive in Asia after that of Alexander. The whole region from Phrygia to the Indus was subject to Seleucus.

— Appian, History of Rome, The Syrian Wars 55


Alexander had appointed satraps in control of his territories. Similarly satraps were appointed to govern the Indus Valley. The Mauryans had annexed the areas governed by four such satraps: Nicanor, Phillip, Eudemus and Peithon. This established Mauryan control to the banks of the Indus. Chandragupta's victories convinced Seleucus that he needed to secure his eastern flank. Seeking to hold the Macedonian territories there, Seleucus thus came into conflict with the emerging and expanding Mauryan Empire over the Indus Valley.[5]

War

Details of the conflict are lacking. Per Appian,

Seleucus crossed the Indus and waged war with Sandrocottus [Maurya], king of the Indians, who dwelt on the banks of that stream, until they came to an understanding with each other and contracted a marriage relationship. Some of these exploits were performed before the death of Antigonus and some afterward.

— Appian, History of Rome, The Syrian Wars 55


It is unknown if there was in fact a pitched battle.[4] Military historian John D. Grainger has argued that Seleucus, upon crossing the Indus, "would find himself in a trap, with a large river at his back and a hostile continent before him," and consequently could not have advanced much farther than the Indus. According to Grainger, the details of the conflict are unclear, but the outcome clearly must have been "a decisive Indian victory," with Chandragupta driving back Seleucus' forces as far as the Hindu Kush and consequently gaining large territories in modern-day Afghanistan.[6] According to Wheatley and Heckel, the level of friendly Maurya-Seleucid relations established after the war imply that the hostilities were probably "neither prolonged nor grievous".[3]

Consequences

Seleucus Nicator ceded the Hindu Kush, Punjab and parts of Afghanistan to Chandragupta Maurya.[7] In consequence of their arrangement, Seleucus received 500 war elephants from Chandragupta Maurya, which subsequently influenced the Wars of the Diadochi in the west.

The otherwise inexplicable silence of the classical writers, as well as the net result of the expedition, however, clearly indicate that Seleucus met with a miserable failure. For he had not only to finally abandon the idea of reconquering the Panjab, but had to buy peace by ceding Paropanisartai, Arachosia, and Aria, three rich provinces with the cities now known as Kabul, Kandahar and Herat respectively as their capitals, and also Gedrosia (Baluchistan), or at least a part of it. The victorious Maurya king probably married the daughter of his Greek rival, and made a present of five hundred elephants to his royal father-in-law. Some Greek writers have represented this gift as the price of the rich provinces ceded by Seleucus, which is of course absurd. It is difficult to believe that Seleucus would have readily agreed to part with his rich provinces for such paltry gifts unless he were forced to do so. It is therefore legitimate to hold that Seleucus was worsted in his fight with Chandragupta.[??]

-- Ancient India, by Ramesh Chandra Majumdar

Sovereigns, like Kutbu-d din Aibak and Shamsu-d din ...conquered Jhain, Malwa, Ujjain, Gujarat, and other distant countries, and carried off treasure and valuables, and elephants and horses from the Rais and Ranas...

The Sultan frequently observed to his associates that elephants and horses were the strength of Hindustan, and that one elephant was worth five hundred horsemen. *** In the first year of the reign, sixty-three elephants were sent by Tatar Khan, son of Arslan Khan, from Lakhnauti to Dehli, which greatly pleased the people, and was the occasion of great public rejoicing....

Tughril Khan, on being appointed to Lakhnauti, was successful in several enterprises. He attacked Jajnagar and carried off great spoil in valuables and elephants....The nobles of Hindustan had no leader, they were wanting in soldiers and retainers, in elephants and wealth, and they were quite incapable of marching to Lakhnauti and opposing Tughril....The spoil and elephants which he had captured at Jajnagar he kept for himself, and sent none to Dehli... Many people joined him through fear of the Sultan's vengeance; and he carried off with him treasure and elephants, a picked body of troops, his officers, relations, and adherents, with their wives and children...

'Alau-d din ... then entered Deogir. On the first day he took thirty elephants and some thousand horses...

'Alau-d din addressed a letter to the Sultan announcing his return with so much treasure and jewels and pearls, and thirty-one elephants, and horses, to be presented to his majesty...

'Alau-d din, in the pride of youth, prosperity, and boundless wealth, proud also of his army and his followers, his elephants and his horses, plunged into dissipation and pleasure....

'Alau-l Mulk, the author's uncle, was summoned from Karra, and came with the maliks and amirs and one elephant, bringing the treasure which 'Alau-d din had left there....

At the beginning of the third year of the reign, Ulugh Khan and Nusrat Khan, with their amirs, and generals, and a large army, marched against Gujarat. They took and plundered Nahrwala and all Gujarat. Kuran, Rai of Gujarat, fled from Nahrwala and went to Ram Deo of Deogir. The wives and daughters, the treasure and elephants of Rai Karan, fell into the hands of the Muhammadans....

His second project he used to unfold as follows: "I have wealth, and elephants, and forces, beyond all calculation. My wish is to place Dehli in charge of a vicegerent, and then I will go out myself into the world, like Alexander, in pursuit of conquest, and subdue the whole habitable world." Over-elated with the success of some few projects, he caused himself to be entitled "the second Alexander" in the khutba and on his coins. In his convivial parties he would vaunt, "Every region that I subdue I will intrust to one of my trusty nobles, and then proceed in quest of another. Who is he that shall stand against me?"...

In every division of the army, and in each line of entrenchment, there were five elephants fully armed, supported by a body of infantry....

Devoting his attention to political matters, he made ready his army for the destruction of the Rais and zamindars of other lands, and for the acquisition of elephants and treasure from the princes of the South....He made Ramdeo and his sons prisoners, and took his treasures, as well as seventeen elephants....

If the Rai consented to surrender his treasure and jewels, elephants and horses, and also to send treasure and elephants in the following year, Malik Naib Kafur was to accept these terms and not press the Rai too hard...

Laddar Deo perceived that all hope was gone, and that the fort was tottering to its fall. He therefore sent some great brahman and distinguished basiths, with presents to Malik Kafur, to beg for quarter, promising to give up all the treasures and elephants and horses, jewels and valuables, that he had, and to send regularly every year a certain amount of treasure and a certain number of elephants to Dehli. Malik Kafur agreed to these terms, and raised the siege of the fort. He took from Laddar Deo all the treasure which he had accumulated in the course of many years, — a hundred elephants, seven thousand horse, and large quantities of jewels and valuables. He also took from him a writing, engaging to send annually treasure and elephants....

Towards the end of the year 710 H. (1310 A.D.) the Sultan sent an army under Malik Naib Kafur against Dhur-samundar and Ma'bar. The Malik, with Khwaja Haji, Naib-i 'ariz, took leave of the Sultan and proceeded to Rabari, where the army collected. They then proceeded to Deogir, where they found that Ramdeo was dead, and from Deogir to the confines of Dhur-samundar. At the first onslaught Billal Rai fell into the hands of the Muhammadans, and Dhur-samundar was captured. Thirty-six elephants, and all the treasures of the place, fell into the hands of the victors....


A despatch of victory was sent to the Sultan, and in the early part of 711 H. (1311 A.D.) the army reached Dehli, bringing with it six hundred and twelve elephants, ninety-six thousand mans of gold, several boxes of jewels and pearls, and twenty thousand horses. Malik Naib Kafur presented the spoil to the Sultan in the palace at Siri on different occasions, and the Sultan made presents of four mans, or two mans, or one man, or half a man of gold to the maliks and amirs. The old inhabitants of Dehli remarked that so many elephants and so much gold had never before been brought into Dehli. No one could remember anything like it, nor was there anything like it recorded in history.

-- XV. Tarikhi Firoz Shahi of Ziaud Din Barni, Excerpt from The History of India As Told By Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period, edited from the posthumous papers of the Late Sir H.M. Elliot, K.C.B., East India Company's Bengal Civil Service, by Professor John Dowson, M.R.A.S., Staff college, Sandhurst, Vol. III, 1871

Seleucus and Chandragupta also agreed to a marriage alliance, probably the marriage of Seleucus' daughter to Chandragupta. According to Strabo, the ceded territories bordered the Indus:

The geographical position of the tribes is as follows: along the Indus are the Paropamisadae, above whom lies the Paropamisus mountain: then, towards the south, the Arachoti: then next, towards the south, the Gedroseni, with the other tribes that occupy the seaboard; and the Indus lies, latitudinally, alongside all these places; and of these places, in part, some that lie along the Indus are held by Indians, although they formerly belonged to the Persians. Alexander [III 'the Great' of Macedon] took these away from the Arians and established settlements of his own, but Seleucus Nicator gave them to Sandrocottus [Chandragupta], upon terms of intermarriage and of receiving in exchange five hundred elephants. — Strabo 15.2.9[8]


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Sophytes may have been the Mauryan Empire satrap of Arachosia, succeeding Sibyrtius, after Seleucus had ceded the Hellenistic territory of Arachosia to Chandragupta Maurya in the Seleucid–Mauryan war (305–303 BCE).[9]

From this, it seems that Seleucus surrendered the easternmost provinces of Arachosia, Gedrosia, Paropamisadae and perhaps also Aria. On the other hand, he was accepted by other satraps of the eastern provinces. His Iranian wife, Apama, may have helped him implement his rule in Bactria and Sogdiana .[10][11] This would tend to be corroborated archaeologically, as concrete indications of Mauryan influence, such as the inscriptions of the Edicts of Ashoka which are known to be located in, for example, Kandhahar in today's southern Afghanistan.

Some authors claim that the argument relating to Seleucus handing over more of what is now southern Afghanistan is an exaggeration originating in a statement by Pliny the Elder referring not specifically to the lands received by Chandragupta, but rather to the various opinions of geographers regarding the definition of the word "India":[12]

Most geographers, in fact, do not look upon India as bounded by the river Indus, but add to it the four satrapies of the Gedrose, the Arachotë, the Aria, and the Paropamisadë, the River Cophes thus forming the extreme boundary of India. According to other writers, however, all these territories, are reckoned as belonging to the country of the Aria. — Pliny, Natural History VI, 23[13]


The arrangement proved to be mutually beneficial.[14] The border between the Seleucid and Mauryan Empires remained stable in subsequent generations, and friendly diplomatic relations are reflected by the ambassador Megasthenes, and by the envoys sent westward by Chandragupta's grandson Ashoka. Chandragupta's gift of war elephants "may have alleviated the burden of fodder and the return march"[5] and allowed him to appropriately reduce the size and cost of his large army, since the major threats to his power had now all been removed.[15]

With the war elephants acquired from the Mauryas, Seleucus was able to defeat his rival, Antigonus, along with his allies at the Battle of Ipsus. Adding Antigonus's territories to his own, Seleucus would found the Seleucid Empire, which would endure as a great power in the Mediterranean and the Middle East until 64 BCE.

Mauryan control of territory in Afghanistan helped guard against invasion of India from the northwest.[16] Chandragupta Maurya went on to expand his rule in India southward into the Deccan.[7]

Notes

1. Hartmut Scharfe (1971) had argued that Seleucus had gained the upper hand and retained overlordship of the eastern satrapies, which were put under Chandragupta's charge in exchange for the elephants as tribute; but according to Trautmann,[2] no other scholars have agreed with this conclusion; Wheatley and Heckel state that Scharfe's argument "does not convince."[3]

References

1. Grainger 2014, pp. 108–109: "Such fighting as there was produced a decisive Indian victory. [...] There is little or no evidence for the [detailed] account [...] The career of Chandragupta is as unclear as that of Seleukos in the east."
2. Trautmann 2015, p. 235.
3. Wheatley and Heckel 2011, p. 296.
4. Kosmin 2014, p. 33.
5. Kosmin 2014, p. 34.
6. Grainger 2014, pp. 108–109
7. [R.G. Grant: Commanders pg. 49https://books.google.com/books?id=tFQcwH2StsMC&q=chandragupta#v=snippet&q=chandragupta&f=false]
8. Strabo, Geography, xv.2.9
9. Bernard, Paul; Pinault, Georges-Jean; Rougemont, Georges (2004). "Deux nouvelles inscriptions grecques de l'Asie centrale". Journal des Savants. 2 (1): 301 ff. doi:10.3406/jds.2004.1686.
10. Vincent A. Smith (1998). Ashoka. Asian Educational Services. ISBN 81-206-1303-1.
11. Walter Eugene Clark (1919). "The Importance of Hellenism from the Point of View of Indic-Philology", Classical Philology 14 (4), p. 297-313.
12. Debated by Tarn, "The Greeks in Bactria and India", p. 100
13. Pliny, Natural History VI, 23
14. Kosmin 2014, p. 33–34.
15. Grainger 2014, p. 110.
16. Grainger 2014, p. 108,110.

Sources

• Grainger, John D. (2014), Seleukos Nikator: Constructing a Hellenistic Kingdom, Routledge, ISBN 978-1-317-80099-6
• Kosmin, Paul J. (2014), The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in Seleucid Empire, Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-72882-0
• Majumdar, Ramesh Chandra (2003) [1952], Ancient India, Motilal Banarsidass, ISBN 81-208-0436-8
• Trautmann, Thomas (2015), Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-26453-0
• Wheatley, Pat; Heckel, Waldemar (2011), ""Commentary (Book 15)"", Justin: Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus: Volume II, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-927759-9
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Tue Nov 09, 2021 12:41 am

British identity and society: White mischief
The British weren't quite as standoffish in India as the history books may suggest - many married locals in the early 19th century, although their families later learned to keep quiet about it. When William Dalrymple began to research the subject, he was surprised to find he too had Indian blood
by William Dalrymple
The Guardian
Sun 8 Dec 2002 21.29 EST

Towards the end of the autumn of 1801, a major scandal broke out in Calcutta over the behaviour of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British resident (in effect, ambassador) at the court of Hyderabad. Some of the stories circulating about Kirkpatrick were harmless enough. It was said that he had given up wearing English clothes for all but the most formal of occasions, and now habitually swanned around the British residency in what one surprised visitor had described as "a Musselman's dress of the finest texture". Another noted that Kirkpatrick had hennaed his hands in the manner of a Mughal nobleman, and wore Indian "mustachios, though in most other respects he is like an Englishman".

These eccentricities were, in themselves, hardly a matter for alarm. The British in India - particularly those at some distance from the thoroughly Anglicised presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay - had long adapted themselves to Mughal customs, shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin, and wearing Indian dress, writing Urdu poetry, taking harems and adopting the ways of the Mughal governing class that they slowly came to replace, a process that Salman Rushdie, talking of modern multiculturalism, has called "chutnification". Although by 1801 this had become a little unfashionable, it was hardly something which could affect a man's career. But other charges against Kirkpatrick were of a much more serious nature.

First, there were consistent reports that Kirkpatrick had "connected himself with a female" of one of Hyderabad's leading noble families. The girl in question, Khair un-Nissa, was said to be little more than 14 years old at the time. Moreover, she was a Sayyeda, a descendant of the prophet, and thus, like all her clan, kept in the very strictest purdah. Despite these powerful taboos, the girl had somehow managed to become pregnant by Kirkpatrick and was said to have given birth to his child. Worse still, the girl's grandfather was said to have "expressed an indignation approaching to frenzy at the indignity offered to the honour of his family by such proceedings, and had declared his intention of proceeding to the Mecca Masjid [the principal mosque of the city]" where he threatened to raise the Muslims of the Deccan against the British.

Finally, and perhaps most alarmingly for the authorities in Bengal, it was said that Kirkpatrick had formally married the girl, which meant embracing Islam, and that he had become a practising Shi'a Muslim. These rumours had led some of his colleagues to wonder whether his political loyalties could still be depended on. More than a year earlier, the young Colonel Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, had written to Calcutta that he had heard that Kirkpatrick now seemed to be so solidly "under the influence" of the Hyderabadis that "it was to be expected that he would attend more to the objects of the Nizam's court than those of his own government"; that Kirkpatrick might, in other words, have gone over to the other side, to become, to some extent, a double-agent.

I first came across Kirkpatrick's story on a visit to Hyderabad in February 1997. I thought it was most extraordinary, and by the time I left the city I was captivated. It seemed so different from what one expected of the British in India. Little did I know then that it was to be the start of an obsession that would take over my life for the next five years.

I had been working in the India Office library on the papers of Kirkpatrick for several months before members of my own Scottish family started popping up in the story. At first they sounded a remarkably dour and unpromising lot. James Dalrymple was the first of my kinsmen to make an appearance, but entered stage left as the principal gooseberry of the plot, doing all he could to keep Kirkpatrick apart from his beloved, and scheming with Khair's grandfather to stop the two from seeing each other. Dalrymple's sister-in-law, Margaret, was an even less promising proposition, described by Kirkpatrick as "an affected, sour, supercilious woman".

My relations suddenly became a lot more interesting, however, with the appearance in the story of a Muslim princess with the somewhat unexpected name of Mooti Begum Dalrymple, a woman whose name had certainly been rigorously removed from all the family records I had seen at home. Mooti turned out to be the daughter of the Nawab of the nearby port of Masulipatam, and was married to James Dalrymple. It seems to have been a measure of the strangeness of their marriage that the two agreed to split the upbringing of their children according to sex: the boys were sent to Madras to be brought up as Christians, eventually to be sent back to East Lothian and reabsorbed into Scottish society, while the only girl from the marriage, Noor Jah Begum, was brought up as a Hyderabadi Muslim and remained in India, where she eventually married one of her father's sepoy officers.

Kirkpatrick's children, who were roughly the same age as my long-lost cousin Noor Jah Begum, also made a similarly strange journey across cultural frontiers: brought up as Muslims in Hyderabad with the names Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum, they were shipped off to London where they were baptised and took the names James and Kitty Kirkpatrick. There, Kitty's tutor fell in love with her, but was turned down; he was, after all, only a tutor. This, in retrospect, was a mistake on Kitty's part, as the heartbroken tutor was the young Thomas Carlyle, who later went on to immortalise her as Blumine, the Rose Goddess, in his novel, Sartor Resartus.

The period seemed to be full of unexpected collisions and intermixings. With brothers and sisters in cross-cultural marriages apparently routinely divided between Christianity and Islam, this was not an era when notions of clashing civilisations would have made sense to anyone. The world inhabited by Sahib Begum/Kitty Kirkpatrick was far more hybrid, and had far less clearly defined ethnic, national and religious borders, than we have all been conditioned to expect. It is certainly unfamiliar to anyone who accepts at face value the usual rigid caricature of the Englishman in India, presented over and over again in films and television dramas, of the imperialist incarnate: the narrow-minded sahib in a sola topee, dressing for dinner in the jungle while raising a disdainful nose at both the people and the culture of India.

As I progressed in my research, it was not long before I discovered that I had a direct Indian ancestor, was the product of a similar interracial liaison from this period, and had Indian blood in my veins. No one in my family seemed to know about this, though it should not have been a surprise: we had all heard the stories of how our beautiful, dark-eyed, Calcutta-born great-great-grandmother, Sophia Pattle, with whom the painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones had fallen in love, used to speak Hindustani with her sisters and was painted by Frederick Watts with a rakhi - a Hindu sacred thread - tied around her wrist. But it was only when I poked around in the archives that I discovered that she was descended from a Hindu Bengali woman from Chandernagore, who had converted to Catholicism, taken the name Marie Monica, and married a French officer. No wonder her contemporaries in Calcutta had made jokes about her name: Pattle was not a version of Patel, but it was easy to see from her appearance and behaviour why people thought it might be.

I am sure that I am hardly alone in making this sort of discovery. The wills of East India Company officials, now in the India Office library, clearly show that in the 1780s, more than one-third of the British men in India were leaving all their possessions to one or more Indian wives, or to Anglo-Indian children - a degree of cross-cultural mixing which has never made it into the history books. It suggests that, 200 years before Zadie Smith made it on to the telly and multiculturalism became a buzzword politically correct enough to wake Norman Tebbit and the Tory undead from their coffins at party conferences, the India of the East India Company was an infinitely more culturally, racially and religiously mixed place than modern Britain can even dream of being.

The wills of the period also suggest perhaps surprising ties of intense affection and loyalty on both sides, with British men asking their close friends to be executors and to care for their Indian partners, referring to them as "well beloved" or "worthy friend", and even - as Kirkpatrick's will has it - "the excellent and respectable Mother of my two children for whom I feel unbounded love and affection and esteem".

In the more loving relationships of this period, Indian wives often retired with their husbands to England. The Mughal travel writer, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who published in Persian an account of his journey to Europe in 1810, described meeting in London several completely Anglicised Indian women who had accompanied their husbands and children to Britain. One of them in particular, Mrs Ducarroll, surprised him every bit as much as Kirkpatrick tended to surprise his English visitors: "She is very fair," wrote Khan, "and so accomplished in all the English manners and language, that I was some time in her company before I could be convinced that she was a native of India." He added: "The lady introduced me to two or three of her children, from 16 to 19 years of age, who had every appearance of Europeans." A great many such mixed-blood children must have been quietly and successfully absorbed into the British establishment, some even attaining high office: Lord Liverpool, the early-19th-century prime minister, was of Anglo-Indian descent.

Much, however, depended on skin colour. As a Calcutta agent wrote to Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India, when discussing what to do with his Anglo-Indian step-grandchildren: "The two eldest - [who] are almost as fair as European children - should be sent to Europe. I could have made no distinction between the children if the youngest was of a complexion that could possibly escape detection; but as I daily see the injurious consequences resulting from bringing up certain [darker-skinned] native children at home, it has become a question in my own mind how far I should confer a service in recommending the third child" to proceed to England. It was decided, in the end, that the "dark" child should stay in India, while the others were shipped to Britain.

The future of such children depended very much on the whims of their parents. One of the most unashamedly enthusiastic British embracers of Mughal culture during this period was General Sir David Ochterlony: every evening, all 13 of his Indian wives went around Delhi in a procession behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant. But beneath this enviably carefree-sounding exterior seems to have lain the sort of tensions that affect anyone who straddles two very different and diverging worlds.

One of the most moving of Ochterlony's letters concerns his two daughters, and the question of whether he should bring them up as Muslim or Christian. If Christian, they would be constantly derided for their "dark blood", but Ochterlony also hesitated to bring them up as Muslims. A letter, written to another Scot in a similar position, who has opted to bring up his children as Muslim Indians, ends rather movingly: "In short my dear M[ajor] I have spent all the time since we were parted in revolving this matter in my mind but I have not yet been able to come to a positive decision."

This period of intermixing did not last: the rise of the Victorian Evangelicals in the 1830s and 40s slowly killed off the intermingling of Indian and British ideas, religions and ways of life. The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of marrying or cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly began to decline: from turning up in one-in-three wills between 1780 and 1785, they are present in only one-in-four between 1805 and 1810. By 1830, it is one-in-six; by the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared.

Biographies and memoirs of prominent 18th-century British Indian worthies that mentioned their Indian wives were re-edited in the mid-19th century so that the consorts were removed from later editions. The mutiny of 1857 merely finished off the process. Afterwards, nothing could ever be as it was. With the British victory, and the genocidal spate of hangings and executions that followed, the entire top rank of the Mughal elite was swept away and British culture was unapologetically imposed on India.

The story of mixed-race families such as my own and the Kirkpatricks seems to raise huge questions about Britishness and the nature of empire, faith and personal identity; indeed, about how far all of these matter, are fixed and immutable - and to what extent they were flexible, tractable and negotiable. It is significant, moreover, that all this surprises us as much as it does: it is as if the Victorians succeeded in colonising not just India but also, more permanently, our imaginations, to the exclusion of all other images of the Indo-British encounter. Yet at a time when east and west, Islam and Christianity, appear to be engaged in another major confrontation, this unlikely group of expatriates provides a timely reminder that it is very possible - and has always been possible - to reconcile the two worlds and build bridges across cultures. Only bigotry, prejudice, racism and fear drive them apart. But they have met and mingled in the past; and they will do so again.

· The White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India by William Dalrymple is published by HarperCollins. For more information, go to ww.williamdalrymple.uk.com
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Fri Nov 12, 2021 12:54 am

Jamshid
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 11/11/21

One day, Bughra Khan, after telling his son a story about Jamshid, said, "Oh, my dear son, how far wilt thou carry thy addiction to pleasure and dissipation, and how long wilt thou disregard the sayings of great and powerful kings?" *** When the Khan had finished his counsels he wept, and pressing his son to his bosom bade him farewell; and as he did so, he secretly whispered to him his advice that he should remove Nizamu-d din as soon as possible, otherwise that man would one day seize an opportunity to remove him from the throne. So saying, and shedding many tears, he parted from his son. * * * When he reached his own camp he said to his friends, "I have said farewell to my son and to the kingdom of Dehli; for I know full well that neither my son nor the throne of Dehli will long exist."

***

Insurrection followed upon insurrection. During the four or five days of Ramazan that the Sultan halted at Sultanpur, late one evening he sent for the author of this work, Zia Barni. When he arrived the Sultan said, "Thou seeest how many revolts spring up. I have no pleasure in them, although men will say that they have all been caused by my excessive severity. But I am not to be turned aside from punishment by observations and by revolts. You have read many histories; hast thou found that kings inflict punishments under certain circumstances?" I replied, "I have read in royal histories that a king cannot carry on his government without punishments, for if he were not an avenger God knows what evils would arise from the insurrections of the disaffected, and how many thousand crimes would be committed by his subjects. Jamshid was asked under what circumstances punishment is approved. He replied, 'under seven circumstances, and whatever goes beyond or in excess of these causes, produces disturbances, trouble, and insurrection, and inflicts injury on the country: 1. Apostasy from the true religion, and persistence therein; 2. Wilful murder; 3. Adultery of a married man with another's wife; 4. Conspiracy against the king; 5. Heading a revolt, or assisting rebels; 6. Joining the enemies or rivals of the king, conveying news to them, or aiding and abetting them in any way; 7. Disobedience, productive of injury to the State. But for no other disobedience, as detriment to the realm is an essential. The servants of God are disobedient to him when they are disobedient to the king, who is his vicegerent; and the State would go to ruin, if the king were to refrain from inflicting punishment in such cases of disobedience as are injurious to the realm.'" The Sultan then asked me if the Prophet had said anything about these seven offences in respect of their punishment by kings. I replied "that the Prophet had declared his opinion upon three offences out of these seven — viz., apostasy, murder of a Musulman, and adultery with a married woman. The punishment of the other four offences is a matter rather of policy and good government. Referring to the benefits derivable from the punishments prescribed by Jamshid, it has been remarked that kings appoint wazirs, advance them to high dignity, and place the management of their kingdoms in their hands in order that these wazirs may frame regulations and keep the country in such good order that the king may be saved from having to stain himself with the blood of any mortal." The Sultan replied, ''Those punishments which Jamshid prescribed were suited to the early ages of the world, but in these days many wicked and turbulent men are to be found. I visit them with chastisement upon the suspicion or presumption of their rebellious and treacherous designs, and I punish the most trifling act of contumacy with death. This I will do until I die, or until the people act honestly, and give up rebellion and contumacy. I have no such wazir as will make rules to obviate my shedding blood. I punish the people because they have all at once become my enemies and opponents. I have dispensed great wealth among them, but they have not become friendly and loyal. Their temper is well known to me, and I see that they are disaffected and inimical to me."

-- XV. Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, of Ziaud Din Barni [Ziauddin Barani], Excerpt from The History of India As Told By Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period, edited from the posthumous papers of the Late Sir H.M. Elliot, K.C.B., East India Company's Bengal Civil Service, by Professor John Dowson, M.R.A.S., Staff college, Sandhurst, Vol. III, P. 93-269, 1871


Image
Persian painting, depicting Jamshid halved before Zahhak

Jamshid is the fourth Shah of the mythological Pishdadian dynasty of Iran according to Shahnameh.

The Shahnameh or Shahnama ('The Book of Kings'') is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi for Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Consisting of some 50,000 "distichs" or couplets (two-line verses), the Shahnameh is one of the world's longest epic poems. It tells mainly the mythical and to some extent the historical past of the Persian Empire from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the seventh century.

-- Shahnameh, by Wikipedia

In Persian mythology and folklore, Jamshid is described as the fourth and greatest king of the epigraphically unattested Pishdadian Dynasty (before the Kayanian dynasty). This role is already alluded to in Zoroastrian scripture (e.g. Yasht 19, Vendidad 2), where the figure appears as Yima(-Kshaeta) "(radiant) Yima" and from which the name 'Jamshid' is derived.

Jamshid remains a common Iranian and Zoroastrian male name that is also popular in surrounding areas of Iran. Edward FitzGerald transliterated the name as Jamshyd. In the eastern regions of Greater Iran, Central Asia, and by the Zoroastrians of the Indian subcontinent it is rendered as Jamshed.

Etymology

The name Jamshid is originally a compound of two parts, Jam and shid, corresponding to the Avestan names Yima and Xšaēta, derived from the proto-Iranian *Yamah Xšaitah ('Yama, the brilliant/majestic').[1] Yamah and the related Sanskrit Yama are interpreted as "the twin," perhaps reflecting an Indo-Iranian belief in a primordial Yama and Yami pair. By regular sound changes (y → j, and the loss of the final syllable) an Old Persian form equivalent to Avestan Yima became Middle Persian Jam, which was subsequently continued into New Persian.

There are also a few functional parallels between Avestan Yima and Sanskrit Yama, for instance, Yima was the son of Vivaŋhat, who in turn corresponds to the Vedic Vivasvat, "he who shines out", a name for the sun-god Surya. Both Yamas in Iranian and Indian myth guard Hell with the help of two four-eyed dogs.[2][3]

Oettinger, when talking about how the story of Yima was originally a flood myth, and how original Sanskrit flood myths had their protagonist as yama, mentions that even the Norse had their own cognate of Yima and Yama, named Ymir, who was a primordial giant whose death caused a great flood and was a basis behind the formation of the world.[4] Ymir was still associated with a flood, as Snorri recorded that they believed that the death of Ymir caused a great flood killing all of the Frost Giants except one named Bergelmir, who floated on some wooden object with his wife and from him the Frost Giants come, although the Bergelmir Aspect may be due to Christianization. However, the myth still has Ymir connected to a flood.[5] Oettinger's main argument was on how Ymir's cognates Yama and Yima also related to the flood.[6]

*Xšaitah meant "bright, shining" or "radiant". By regular sound changes (initial xš → š (sh); ai → ē; t → d between vowels; and dropping of the final syllable) *xšaitah became Persian shēd. In Iranian Persian, the vowel /ē/ is pronounced as /i/. Consequently, Jamshēd (as it is still pronounced in Afghanistan and Tajikistan) is now pronounced Jamshid in Iran. The suffix -shid is the same as that found in other names such as khorshid ("the Sun" from Avestan hvarə-xšaēta "radiant Sun").

The modern Turkish name Cem is derived from Persian Jam.

One contributor[who?][where?] has posited that Persian jam is the root of Arabic ajam, assuming that this Arabic word for the Persian-speaking population was derived from a Persian endonym, meaning the people of Jam. However, this is incorrect. ʿAjam comes from the Arabic root ʿ(ʿayn) ج (jim) م (mim), meaning to speak incomprehensibly, and was used among Arabs, initially, for all peoples who spoke languages that were incomprehensible to Arabic speakers, whether they spoke Persian, Fulani, or a Turkic language. Later, Arabs used this word as a derogatory term for Persian speakers to distinguish them from Arabic speakers. The word ʿajam or ʿajami is still used in other parts of the Islamic world to denote languages other than Arabic, particularly in the Saharan and sub-Saharan regions.

In scripture

Source:[7]

In the second chapter of the Vendidad of the Avesta, the omniscient Creator Ahura Mazda asks Yima, a good shepherd, to receive his law and bring it to men. However, Yima refuses, and so Ahura Mazda charges him with a different mission: to rule over and nourish the earth, to see that the living things prosper. This Yima accepts, and Ahura Mazda presents him with a golden seal and a dagger inlaid with gold.

Yima rules as king for three hundred years, and soon the earth was full of men, flocks of birds and herds of animals. He deprived the daevas, who were demonic servants of the evil Ahriman, of wealth, herds and reputation during his reign. Good men, however, lived lives of plenty, and were neither sick nor aged. Father and son walked together, each appearing no older than fifteen. Ahura Mazda visits him once more, warning him of this overpopulation. Yima, shining with light, faced southwards and pressed the golden seal against the earth and boring into it with the poniard, says "O Spenta Armaiti, kindly open asunder and stretch thyself afar, to bear flocks and herds and men."

The earth swells and Yima rules for another six hundred years before the same problem occurred once more. Once again he pressed the seal and dagger to the earth and asked the ground to swell up to bear more men and beasts, and the earth swells again. Nine hundred years later, the earth was full again. The same solution is employed, the earth swelling again.

The next part of the story tells of a meeting of Ahura Mazda and the Yazatas in Airyanem Vaejah, the first of the "perfect lands". Yima attends with a group of "the best of mortals", where Ahura Mazda warns him of an upcoming catastrophe: "O fair Yima, son of Vivaŋhat! Upon the material world the evil winters are about to fall, that shall bring the fierce, deadly frost; upon the material world the evil winters are about to fall, that shall make snow-flakes fall thick, even an arədvi deep on the highest tops of mountains."

The Vedivdad mentions that Ahura Mazda warns Yima that there will come a harsh winter storm followed by melted snow.[8] Ahura Mazda advises Yima to construct a Vara (Avestan: enclosure) in the form of a multi-level cavern, two miles (3 km) long and two miles (3 km) wide. This he is to populate with the fittest of men and women; and with two of every animal, bird and plant; and supply with food and water gathered the previous summer. Yima creates the Vara by crushing the earth with a stamp of his foot, and kneading it into shape as a potter does clay. He creates streets and buildings, and brings nearly two thousand people to live therein. He creates artificial light, and finally seals the Vara with a golden ring.

Henry Corbin interprets this story as a spiritual event and describes it as follows: Yima "received the order to build the enclosure, the Var, where were gathered together the elect from among all beings, the fairest, the most gracious, that they might be preserved from the mortal winter unleashed by the demonic Powers, and some day repopulate a transfigured world. Indeed, the Var of Yima is, as it were, a city, including houses, storehouses, and ramparts. It has luminescent doors and windows that themselves secrete the light within, for it is illuminated both by uncreated and created lights."[9]

Norbert Oettinger argues that the story of Yima and the Vara was originally a flood myth, and the harsh winter was added in due to the dry nature of Eastern Iran, as flood myths didn't have as much of an effect as harsh winters. He has argued that the Videvdad 2.24's mention of melted water flowing is a remnant of the flood myth.[10]

In tradition and folklore

Image
Jamshid in the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp

Image
Ferdowsi Shahnameh

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;
And Bahrám, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass,
Stamps o'er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep.

—quatrain 18, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
1884 (2nd ed.) FitzGerald translation


Over time, the Avestan hero Yima Xšaēta became the world-ruling Shāh Jamshid of Persian legend and mythology.

According to the Shāhnāma of the poet Firdausī, Jamshid was the fourth king of the world. He had command over all the angels and demons of the world, and was both king and high priest of Hormozd (middle Persian for Ahura Mazda). He was responsible for a great many inventions that made life more secure for his people: the manufacture of armor and weapons, the weaving and dyeing of clothes of linen, silk and wool, the building of houses of brick, the mining of jewels and precious metals, the making of perfumes and wine, the art of medicine, the navigation of the waters of the world in sailing ships. The sudreh and kushti of the Zoroastrianism are also attributed to Jamshid. Traditional mythology also credits him with the invention of music.[11] From the skin-clad followers of Keyumars, humanity had risen to a great civilization in Jamshid's time.

Jamshid also divided the people into four groups:

1. Kātouzians: The priests who conducted the worship of Hormozd
2. Neysārians: The warriors who protected the people by the might of their arms
3. Nāsoudians: The farmers who grew the grain that fed the people
4. Hotokhoshians: The artisans, who produced goods for the ease and enjoyment of the people

Jamshid had now become the greatest monarch the world had ever known. He was endowed with the royal farr (Avestan: khvarena), a radiant splendor that burned about him by divine favor. One day he sat upon a jewel-studded throne and the divs who served him raised his throne up into the air and he flew through the sky. His subjects, all the peoples of the world, marvelled and praised him. On this day, which was the first of the month of Farvardin, they first celebrated the holiday of Nawrōz ("new day"). In the variant of the Zoroastrian calendar followed by the Zoroastrians of India, the first day of the month of Farvardin is still called Jamshēd-i Nawrōz.

Jamshid was said to have had a magical seven-ringed cup, the Jām-e Jam which was filled with the elixir of immortality and allowed him to observe the universe.

Jamshid's capital was erroneously believed to be at the site of the ruins of Persepolis, which for centuries (down to 1620 CE) was called Takht-i Jamshēd, the "Throne of Jamshid". However, Persepolis was actually the capital of the Achaemenid kings and was destroyed by Alexander. Similarly, the sculptured tombs of the Achaemenids and Sāsānians near Persepolis were believed to be images of the legendary hero Rostam, and so were called Naqsh-e Rustam.

Jamshid ruled well for three hundred years. During this time longevity increased, sicknesses were banished, and peace and prosperity reigned. But Jamshid's pride grew with his power, and he began to forget that all the blessings of his reign were due to God. He boasted to his people that all of the good things they had came from him alone, and demanded that he should be accorded divine honors, as if he were the Creator.

From this time the farr departed from Jamshid, and the people began to murmur and rebel against him. Jamshid repented in his heart, but his glory never returned to him. The vassal ruler of Arabia, Zahhāk, under the influence of Ahriman, made war upon Jamshid, and he was welcomed by many of Jamshid's dissatisfied subjects. Jamshid fled from his capital halfway across the world, but he was finally trapped by Zahhāk and brutally murdered. After a reign of seven hundred years, humanity descended from the heights of civilization back into a Dark Age.

Legend of the discovery of wine

King Jamshid is featured prominently in one apocryphal tale associated with the history of wine and its discovery. According to Persian legend, the king banished one of his harem ladies from his kingdom, causing her to become despondent and wishing to commit suicide. Going to the king's warehouse, the girl sought out a jar marked "poison" which contained the remnants of grapes that had spoiled and were deemed undrinkable. Unbeknownst to her, the "spoilage" was actually the result of fermentation caused by the breakdown of the grapes by yeast into alcohol. After drinking the so-called poison, the harem girl discovered its effects to be pleasant and her spirits were lifted. She took her discovery to the king, who became so enamored with this new "wine" beverage that he not only accepted the girl back into his harem but also decreed that all grapes grown in Persepolis would be devoted to winemaking. While most wine historians view this story as pure legend, there is archaeological evidence that wine was known and extensively traded by the early Persian kings.[12]

See also

• Arnavāz
• Yama—Hindu god

References

1. Daryaee, Touraj, and Soodabeh Malekzadeh. “King Huviška, Yima, and the Bird: Observations on a Paradisiacal State.” In: Central Asia and Iran - Greeks, Parthians, Kushans and Sasanians. Edited by Edward Dąbrowa. Jagiellonian University Press, 2015. p. 108.
2. "Indian Myth and Legend: Chapter III. Yama, the First Man, and King of the Dead".
3. Sherman, Josepha (August 2008). Storytelling: An Encyclopedia of Mythology and Folklore. Sharpe Reference. pp. 118–121. ISBN 978-0-7656-8047-1.
4. N. Oettinger, Before Noah: Possible Relics of the Flood myth in Proto-Indo-Iranian and Earlier, [in:] Proceedings of the 24th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, ed. S.W. Jamison, H.C. Melchert, B. Vine, Bremen 2013, p. 169–183
5. Lindow, John. Norse Mythology a Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. Oxford University Press, 2002
6. N. Oettinger, Before Noah: Possible Relics of the Flood myth in Proto-Indo-Iranian and Earlier, [in:] Proceedings of the 24th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, ed. S.W. Jamison, H.C. Melchert, B. Vine, Bremen 2013, p. 169–183
7. Quotations in the following section are from James Darmesteter's translation [1]of the Vendidad , as published in the 1898 American edition of Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East
8. Skjærvø, Prods Oktor. An Introduction to Zoroastrianism. 2006.
9. Corbin, Henry (1977). Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran. Princeton University Press. pp.22-23.
10. N. Oettinger, Before Noah: Possible Relics of the Flood myth in Proto-Indo-Iranian and Earlier, [in:] Proceedings of the 24th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, ed. S.W. Jamison, H.C. Melchert, B. Vine, Bremen 2013, p. 169–183
11. Farhat, Hormoz (2012). "An Introduction to Persian Music" (PDF). Catalogue of the Festival of Oriental Music. Durham: University of Durham.
12. T. Pellechia (2006). Wine: The 8,000-Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade. London: Running Press. ISBN 1-56025-871-3. pp. XI–XII.

Further reading

• 2nd Fargard of James Darmesteter's translation of the Vendidad
• The Heroic Age of Persia

External links

• A king's book of kings: the Shah-nameh of Shah Tahmasp, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Jamshid
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Islamic socialism
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 11/13/21

Thirteenth Mukaddama. — Arrival of Sultan Firoz Shah at Dehli.

When the Sultan reached Dehli, the drums of joy were beaten, and the citizens decked themselves out in their jewels and best clothes. Pavilions (kaba) were erected and were decorated according to the custom prevailing in the times of former kings. Six of these pavilions were raised, and for twenty-one days a continual festival was maintained. One lac of tankas was expended in each pavilion in food and sherbet, and no one was excluded....

Fourteenth Mukaddama. — The Sultan's fostering care of the people of Dehli and his remission of arrears.

*** In those days Khwaja Fakhr Shadi was accountant-general. After Sultan Muhammad returned from Daulatabad, he lent the people of Dehli property equivalent to two krors (of tankas?) for the purpose of restoring the land, villages, and quarters which had fallen into ruin during the days of the famine. This money remained in the hands of the people, and Khwaja-i Jahan, after the death of Sultan Mohammad, took the people of Dehli under his protection, and they in their greediness joined themselves to him. When Sultan Firoz ascended the throne at Thatta, the Khwaja distributed jewels and diamonds among them. All the money lent and the jewels stood against the names of the parties concerned in the government books. FakhrShadi, the accountant, brought the fact to the notice of Firoz Shah. After thinking over the matter, the Sultan consulted Kiwamu-l Mulk as to what ought to be done, * * * and that minister replied, "That Sultan Muhammad had deemed it expedient to make loans to the people, and that the Khwaja-i Jahan had squandered the jewels and wealth in prosecution of his projects and vain desires; therefore it would not be seemly to demand their restoration. The people were in great distress and poverty; if such a claim were made, they would be reduced to utter helplessness and ruin, and not one jot of the debt and jewels would be realized." *** The Sultan then asked him how he ought to proceed, and the Khan advised him to have all the accounts brought into the public court, and there to destroy them in the presence of all the people, so that they might be relieved from their great anxiety. The Sultan heartily approved of this advice, and by his direction the records of the debt and of the jewels were brought into his court, where they were publicly cancelled.*** At this time the Sultan appointed Kiwamu-l Mulk his wazir, and bestowed upon him the insignia of his office. * * * The revenues of Dehli, during the forty years which Sultan Firoz reigned, amounted to six krors and seventy-five lacs of tankas (67,500,000).

Fifteenth Mukaddama. — Sultan Firoz makes new rules for grants of revenue.

The Sultan showed great liberality in his grants of revenue, and excited the cupidity of a host of expectants. To some he gave 10,000 tankas, to others 5,000, and to others 2,000, according to the respective ranks and claims of the different office-bearers. This method (of paying officials) was introduced by Sultan Firoz, and remains as a memorial of him. In the reigns of former rulers of Dehli it had never been the rule to bestow villages as stipends upon office-bearers....

[D]uring the forty years of his reign he devoted himself to generosity and the benefit of Musulmans, by distributing villages and lands among his followers. In the whole of these forty years not one leaf of dominion was shaken in the palace of sovereignty. These facts are among the glories of his reign. ***

Another law made by Firoz Shah was this: If an officer of the army died, he was to be succeeded by his son; if he had no son, by his son-in-law; if he had no son-in-law, by his slave (ghulam); if he had no slave, by his nearest relation; and if he had no relations, by his wives. During the whole of his reign he made it a rule that, under all circumstances, the succession of every person should be clearly defined. ***


Sixteenth Mukaddama. — Sultan Firoz's fostering care of his subjects.

* * * Unwise regulations had been made in former reigns, and the raiyats and subjects were oppressed in the payment of the revenue. Several writers told the author of this work that it was the practice to leave the raiyat one cow and take away all the rest. Sultan Firoz made the laws of the Prophet his guide, acting zealously upon the principles they laid down, and prohibiting all that was inconsistent therewith.

No demand in excess of the regular government dues was to be made, and the officer who made any such exaction was to make full reparation. Brocades, silks, and goods required for the royal establishments were to be purchased at the market price, and the money paid. *** Such rules were made that the raiyats grow rich, and were satisfied. *** Their homes were replete with grain, property, horses, and furniture; every one had plenty of gold and silver; no woman was without her ornaments, and no house was wanting in excellent beds and coaches. Wealth abounded and comforts were general. The whole realm of Dehli was blessed with the bounties of the Almighty....

Second Mukaddama. — The Sultan's care to provide slaves (bandagan).

The Sultan was very diligent in providing slaves, and he carried his care so far as to command his great fief-holders and officers to capture slaves whenever they were at war, and to pick out and send the best for the service of the court. When the feudatories went to court, each one according to his ability took with him beautiful slaves, dressed and ornamented in the most splendid style. They also, when they paid their annual visit, brought other presents suited to their means and station — high-priced horses of the best breeds, fine elephants, valuable garments of every kind, vessels of gold and silver, arms, camels and mules,— each man according to the extent of his fief, some as many as a hundred, some fifty, some twenty, and some eleven. They also brought slaves. Under an edict of the Sultan, all the presents which the feudatories brought were valued, and the amount was deducted from the dues payable by them to the Government. This was a regulation established by Sultan Firoz. Before his time, in the reigns of his predecessors, the feudatories brought whatever they could, but no remission in their payments was made in consideration of their presents. Sultan Firoz saw that the expenses of his feudatories were very large, and decreed that they should not be required to make presents.

From this arrangement two advantages were expected — the chieftains' pride would be spared (the fear of being outdone), and the gifts themselves would be more worthy of the Sultan's notice. This regulation remained in force for forty years throughout the reign. Those chiefs who brought many slaves received the highest favour, and those who brought few received proportionately little consideration. When the chiefs perceived the Sultan's eagerness for slaves, and that their efforts to get them were highly appreciated, they exerted themselves in providing them, and the numbers brought every year exceed description. Great numbers of slaves were thus collected, and when they were found to be in excess, the Sultan sent them to Multan, Dipalpur, Hisar-Firozah, Samana, Gujarat, and all the other feudal dependencies. In all cases provision was made for their support in a liberal manner. In some places they were provided for in the army, and villages were granted to them; those who were placed in cities had ample allowances, varying from 100 down to 10 tankas, which was the lowest amount. These allowances were paid in full, without any deduction, at the treasury, every six, four, or three months.

Some of the slaves spent their time in reading and committing to memory the holy book, others in religious studies, others in copying books. Some, with the Sultan's leave, went to the temple at Mecca. Some were placed under tradesmen and were taught mechanical arts, so that about 12,000 slaves became artisans (kasib) of various kinds. Forty thousand were every day in readiness to attend as guards in the Sultan's equipage or at the palace.
Altogether, in the city and in the various fiefs there were 180,000 slaves, for whose maintenance and comfort the Sultan took especial care. The institution took root in the very centre of the land, and the Sultan looked upon its due regulation as one of his incumbent duties. To such an extent were matters carried that there was a distinct muster-master (majmu'-dar) of the slaves, a separate treasury for the payment of their allowances, a separate jao-shughuri, and deputy jao-shughuri
,1 [The signification of this is obscure, and the copyists seem to have so deemed it. The word by the majority is written [x]; but one varies, and gives it as [x].] and a distinct diwan, that is to say, the officers for administering the affairs of the slaves (ashab-i diwan-i bandagan), were entirely distinct from those under the Prime Minister (ashab-i diwan-i 'ala-e wizarat).

When the Sultan went out in state the slaves accompanied him in distinct corps — first the archers, fully armed, next the swordsmen, thousands in number (hazar hazar), the fighting men (bandagan-i award), the bandagan-i mahili1 [[x].] riding on male buffaloes, and slaves from the Hazara, mounted on Arab and Turki horses, bearing standards and axes. These all, thousands upon thousands, accompanied the royal retinue. The slaves increased to such a degree that they were employed in all sorts of domestic duties, as water coolers, butlers [etc., etc.]. In fact there was no occupation in which the slaves of Firoz Shah were not employed. None of the Sultan's predecessors had ever collected so many slaves. The late Sultan 'Alau-d din had drawn together about 50,000 slaves, but after him no Sultan had directed his attention to raising a body of them until Sultan Firoz adopted the practice. *** When the slaves under the great feudal chieftains became too numerous, some of them, by order of the Sultan, were given into the charge of amirs and maliks, that they might learn the duties of their respective employments.
These amirs and maliks treated them like children, providing them with food and raiment, lodging them and training them, and taking every care for their wants. Each year they took their slaves to court, and reported upon their merits and abilities. These reports were received by the Sultan with great interest. Such was the care and attention which Sultan Firoz devoted to his slaves; but after his death, the heads of these his favoured servants were cut off without mercy, and were made into heaps in front of the darbar, as I will describe in my chapter on the reign of Sultan Muhammad bin Firoz...


Fifth Mukaddama. — Prosperity and happiness of the nobles.

During the reign of Firoz Shah *** all men, high and low, bond and free, lived happily and free from care. *** When the Sultan went to the palace, at the "grand city" of Firozabad, the Khan-i Jahan used to make preparations some days beforehand for his reception, by having the palace whitewashed and ornamented with pictures. Every possible care was taken by the Khan for the proper reception of the Sultan. [Splendour and ceremonial of the Court. Easy condition of the people.] Things were so plentiful and cheap; and the people were so well to do, and enjoyed much ease, that the poorest married their daughters at a very early age. Nothing in the least degree unpleasant or disagreeable happened during his reign; how wonderful is it that, since his decease, the city of Dehli has been turned upside down. Those who survive will ever call to mind the reign of Firoz Shah, and exclaim, "The reign of Firoz will always dwell upon the memory, and can never be forgotten."

Sixth Mukaddama. -- The plenty and cheapness in the reign of Firoz Shah.

By the blessing of God favourable seasons and abundance of the necessaries of life prevailed in the reign of Firoz Shah, not only in the capital, but throughout his dominions. During the whole forty years of his reign there was no appearance of scarcity, and the times were so happy that the people of Dehli forgot the reign of 'Alau-d din, although no more prosperous times than his had ever fallen to the lot of any Muhammadan sovereign. 'Alau-d din took such pains to keep down the price of the necessaries of life, that his exertions have found a record in famous histories. To the merchants he gave wealth, and placed before them goods in abundance, and gold without measure. He showed them every kingly favour, and fixed on them regular salaries.1 [Mawajib, salaries, allowances, or pensions.]

In the reign of 'Alau-d din the necessaries of life were abundant through excellent management,1 [["Ba hikmat'i kibriyai." These words may be translated "by Divine wisdom," but they are evidently used antithetically to the ''baghair koshish," or "absence of effort" on the part of Firoz].] but through the favour of God grain continued cheap throughout the reign of Firoz Shah, without any effort on his part. Grain was so cheap that, in the city of Dehli, wheat was eight jitals a man, and gram and barley four jitals a man. A camp follower could give his horse a feed of ten sirs of corn (dalida) for one jital. Fabrics of all kinds were cheap, and silk goods, both white and coloured, were of moderate price. Orders were given for the reduction of the price of sweetmeats, in unison with the general fall of prices.

During the forty years of this sovereign's reign, cheapness prevailed. If occasionally prices rose from bad seasons, or from scarcity of rain, and reached one tanka per man, it was only for a short time. The good fortune of the Sultan prevailed, so that no dearth occurred. Such was the prosperity that, throughout the Doab, from the hill of Sakrudih and Kharla to Kol, not one village remained waste, even in name, nor one span of land uncultivated. In the Doab there were fifty-two parganas flourishing, and a similar (state of prosperity) prevailed elsewhere. The like prosperity prevailed in every fief (ikta'a) and district (shikk). Thus, in the district of Samana, there were four prosperous villages within one kos, and the inhabitants were happy and free from care. Such perfect happiness did the kingdom enjoy in those days.


Sultan Firoz had a great liking for the laying out of gardens, which he took great pains to embellish. He formed 1,200 gardens in the vicinity of Dehli. Such of them as were private property, or were religious endowments, after2 [Three of the MSS. have ''[x], without;" while the fourth (East India Library, No. 1002) says "[x], after" verification of titles. The latter is certainly most probable.] due investigation of the titles, he settled for with their owners. All gardens received abundant proofs of his care,1 [The text is a little confused here. I have ventured upon one emendation in reading [x], instead of [x], etc., etc. All the MSS. concur in the latter reading, although it seems to make nonsense.] and he restored thirty gardens which had been commenced by 'Alau-d din. In the neighbourhood of Salaura he made eighty gardens, and in Chitur forty-four gardens. In every garden there were white and black grapes, of seven [named] varieties. They were sold at the rate of one jital per sir. Of the various articles grown in the gardens, the government share of the produce amounted to 80,000 tankas, without taking into account the dues of the owners and gardeners.


The revenues of the Doab in this reign amounted to eighty lacs of tankas; and under the fostering care of this religious sovereign, the revenues of the territories of Dehli were six krors and eighty-five lacs of tankas (60,850,000). The Sultan, throughout his reign, in his great sagacity and prudence, endeavoured to circumscribe the extent of his dominions, but still the revenues amounted to the sum stated. All this large revenue was duly apportioned out; each Khan received a sum suitable to his exalted position, the amirs and maliks also obtained allowances according to their dignity, and the officials were paid enough to provide a comfortable living. The soldiers of the army received grants of land, enough to support them in comfort, and the irregulars (ghair wajh) received payment from the government treasury. Those soldiers who did not receive their pay in this manner were, according to necessity, supplied with assignments (itlak) upon the revenues. When these assignments of the soldiers (wajh-dars) arrived in the fiefs (ikta'at), the holders used to get about half of the total amount from the holders of the fiefs. It was the practice of certain persons in those days to buy up these assignments, which was an accommodation to both parties. They used to give one-third of the value for them in the city, and receive one half in the districts. The purchasers of these assignments carried on a traffic in them, and gaining a good profit, many of them got rich and made their fortunes.

Sultan Firoz, under Divine inspiration, spread all the revenues of his territories among his people.
The various districts of the fiefs were also divided. Khan-i Jahan, the wazir, exclusive of the allowances for his retainers, friends, and sons, received a sum of thirteen lacs of tankas, or instead of it sundry fies and districts. Other chiefs were similarly provided for, according to their merit; some receiving eight lacs of tankas, others six lacs, and others four lacs. All the khans and maliks grew rich in his reign, and had vast stores of wealth, and jewels and diamonds of great value. When Malik Shahin Shahna, who was naib-amir of the majlis-i khass, died, and his effects were examined, a sum of fifty lacs of tankas, in cash, was taken out of his house, besides horses, valuables, and jewels in abundance. The enormous wealth left by 'Imadu-l Mulk, Bashir-i Sultani, was well known, and is well remembered. An account of it will be given in the fifth book of this work. The Sultan being thus beneficent, all men, high and low, were devoted to him....

Twelfth Mukaddama. — Consideration of the Sultan for the unemployed.

*** The Sultan gave directions that when there were any workmen out of employ in the city they were to be sent to him. The kotwal used to call his district officers before him, and make enquiries of them. The most respectable people, out of shame, would not make their necessities known, and such gentlemen as these were brought to the kotwal by his officers.*** When they were brought before the Sultan they were all placed in employ. Men of the pen were sent into the Government establishments (kar-khana), intelligent men of business were placed under the Khan-i Jahan, if any one expressed a desire to be made the slave (banda) of any particular nobleman, the Sultan himself used to send a letter of recommendation to that noble; and if one desired to be made the slave (banda) of an amir who held a fief (ikta'), a farman was sent to that amir, and the applicant proceeded thither. So, few persons remained without employment, and wherever one of the unemployed was sent, there he found a comfortable settlement....

Fifteenth Mukaddama. — Establishment of a House of Charity and a Hospital.

Sultan Firoz founded an establishment (diwan-i khairat) for the promotion of marriages. Many needy Musulmans were distressed at having marriageable daughters, for whom they could provide no marriage portion. *** Notice was given that any man having a marriageable daughter might apply at the diwan-i khairat and state his case and his poverty to the officers of that establishment, *** who, after due enquiry, might fix an allowance of fifty tankas for the first class of recipients, thirty for the second, and twenty-five for the third. *** People, small and great, flocked to the city from all parts of the country, and received grants for purchasing housekeeping requisites for their daughters. ***

The Shifa-khana, or Hospital, also called, Sihhat-khana. *** The Sultan, in his great kindness and humanity, established a hospital for the relief of the sick and afflicted, whether natives (ashna) or strangers. Able physicians and doctors were appointed to superintend it, and provision was made for the supply of medicines. The poor afflicted went to the hospital and stated their cases. The doctors duly considered and applied their skill to the restoration of health. Medicines, food, and drinks were supplied at the expense of the treasury. ***

When the Sultan founded these institutions for the public benefit he settled some rich and well cultivated villages upon them, to provide for their expenses. Allowances were also granted to learned men and Kuran readers. The author has understood from the best authority that the sum of thirty-six lacs of tankas out of the revenues of the kingdom were appropriated to the payment of wages (idrar), and that 4,200 afflicted persons received these monthly allowances.


-- XVI. Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, of Shams-i Siraj 'Afif, Excerpt from The History of India As Told By Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period, edited from the posthumous papers of the Late Sir H.M. Elliot, K.C.B., East India Company's Bengal Civil Service, by Professor John Dowson, M.R.A.S., Staff college, Sandhurst, Vol. III, P. 269-364, 1871


Islamic socialism is a political philosophy that incorporates Islamic principles into socialism. As a term, it was coined by various Muslim leaders to describe a more spiritual form of socialism. Islamic Socialists also often use the Quran to defend their positions. A Turkish Islamic socialist organisation, Anti-capitalist Muslims, openly challenged right-wing Muslims to read the Quran and "try to disprove the fact that it is leftist".[1]

Muslim socialists believe that the teachings of the Quran and Muhammad—especially the zakat—are not only compatible with principles of socialism, but also very supportive of them. They draw inspiration from the early Medinan welfare state established by Muhammad. Muslim socialists found their roots in anti-imperialism. This can especially be seen in the writings of Salama Moussa [1887 – 4 August 1958], who wrote extensively both about socialism, and about Egyptian Nationalism against British rule.[2]

Muslim socialist leaders believe in the derivation of legitimacy from the public, and wish to implement a government based on social welfare and the concept of zakat. In practice, this has been seen through guaranteed incomes, pensions, and welfare. These practical applications of the idea of Islamic Socialism have a history going back to Muhammad and the first few Caliphates, to modern political parties founded in the 1970s.

Abū Dharr al-Ghifārī, a companion of Muhammad, is credited by some scholars, like Muhammad Sharqawi and Sami Ayad Hanna, as a principal antecedent of Islamic socialism.[3][4][5][6][7] He protested against the accumulation of wealth by the ruling class during Uthman's caliphate and urged the equitable redistribution of wealth. The first Muslim Caliph Abu Bakr introduced a guaranteed minimum standard of income, granting each man, woman and child ten dirhams annually—this was later increased to twenty dirhams.[8]


According to Sami A. Hanna and Hanif Ramay, one of the first expressions of Islamic socialism was the Wäisi movement in Tatarstan, Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Wäisi movement was a religious, social and political movement in Tatarstan and other Tatar-populated parts of Russia which took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It also incorporated elements of class struggle and nationalism. The primary founder of the movement was Bahawetdin Wäisev. It was related to other movements among Muslims in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, such as the Jadid movements.

This movement enjoyed widespread popularity and united Tatar farmers, craftsmen and petty bourgeoisie. After the arrest of Bahawetdin Wäisev in 1884, the number of members remained high. In 1908, there were nearly 15,000 followers in the Kazan Governorate (especially Kazan, Sviyajsk, Arsk uyezds), Orenburg, and other guberniyas, in Central Asia.

The main doctrines of Wäisi were disobedience to civil laws and administration, adherence to the Sharia and Qur'an rather than government regulations, evasion of service in the "kafir" army and of paying imposition, and refusal to obtain the Russian passport featuring a double-headed eagle. After the arrest of Bahawetdin Wäisev and some other leaders, the remaining membership switched to underground work. In 1897, 100 followers of Wäisi were arrested and exiled after they encouraged people not to participate in the population census. Bahawetdin Wäisev died in 1893 during his incarceration. At the beginning of the 20th century his son Gainan assumed the leadership of the movement.

After the First Russian revolution in 1905-1907 the Wäisi movement increased in size and was renovated and reconstituted as Islamic Socialism. After the October Revolution of 1917, Waisi followers supported the Soviet government. Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev and Mullanur Waxitov were among its most influential followers, organising the Muslim Socialist Committee of Kazan. During the Civil War in Russia, Wäisi followers organized a regiment in the Red Army. On February 28th, 1918, Ğainan Wäisev was assassinated by unknown assailants. In the 1920s, Wäisi movement followers founded the Yaña Bolğar (New Bolghar) commune in Chistopol canton in order to foster the growth of an autonomous Wäisi community. But in the 1930s during the Great Purge, the Wäisis were repressed and the movement faded away.

-- Wäisi movement, by Wikipedia

The movement opposed the rule of the Russian Empire and was supported by Muslim farmers, peasants and petite bourgeoisie. It suffered repression by the Russian authorities and went underground in the early 20th century, when it started cooperating with communists, socialists and social democrats in anti-government activity, and started identifying itself as an Islamic socialist movement in the wake of the 1905 Russian Revolution. The movement aligned with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of 1917,[9] during which the movement also established the first experimental Islamic commune. The Muslim Socialist Committee of Kazan was also active at this time. After the death of Lenin in 1924, the Wäisi movement asserted its independence from the Communist Party, however it was suppressed during the Great Purge in the 1930s.[9]

Soviet decision makers recognized that revolutionary activity along the Soviet Union's southern border would draw the attention of capitalist powers and invite them to intervene. It was this understanding which prompted the Russian representation at the Baku Congress in September 1920 to reject the arguments of the national communists as impractical and counterproductive to the revolution in general, without elaborating their fear that the safety of Russia lay in the balance. It was this understanding, coupled with the Russian Bolsheviks' displeasure at seeing another revolutionary center proposed in their own domain revolutionary, that galvanized them into action against the national communists.[10]

The Iranian intellectual Muhammed Nakhshab is credited with the first synthesis between Shi'ism and European socialism.[11] Nakhshab's movement was based on the tenet that Islam and socialism were not incompatible since both sought to accomplish social equality and justice. His theories had been expressed in his B.A. thesis on the laws of ethics.[12] In 1943, Nakhshab founded the Movement of God-Worshipping Socialists, one of six original member organizations of the National Front.[13]
The National Front of Iran is an opposition political organization in Iran, founded by Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1949. It is the oldest and arguably the largest pro-democracy group operating inside Iran despite having never been able to recover the prominence it had in the early 1950s.

Initially, the front was an umbrella organization for a broad spectrum of forces with nationalist, liberal-democratic, socialist, bazaari, secular and Islamic tendencies, that mobilized to successfully campaign for the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. In 1951, the Front formed a government which was deposed by the 1953 Iranian coup d'état and subsequently repressed. Members attempted to revive the Front in 1960, 1965 and 1977.

Before 1953 and throughout the 1960s, the Front was torn by strife between secular and religious elements; over time its coalition split into various squabbling factions, with the Front gradually emerging as the leading organization of secular liberals with nationalist members adhering to liberal democracy and social democracy.

During the Iranian Revolution, the Front supported the replacement of the old monarchy by an Islamic Republic and was the main symbol of the "nationalist" tendency in the early years of post-revolutionary government. It was banned in July 1981, and although it remains under constant surveillance and officially it is still illegal, it is still active inside Iran.


-- National Front (Iran), by Wikipedia

The organization was founded through the merger of two groupings, Nakhshab's circle of high school students at Dar al-Fanoun and Jalaleddin Ashtiyani's circle of about 25 students at the Faculty of Engineering at Tehran University. The organization was initially known as League of Patriotic Muslims. It combined religious sentiments, nationalism and socialist thoughts.[14] After the 1953 coup against the National Front-led government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, Islamic socialism in Iran took a more radical turn, with the People's Mujahedin of Iran formed in 1965 fusing Islamic imagery and language with Marxist ideas under the influence of Ali Shariati and engaging in armed struggle against the government of the Shah of Iran, culminating in its participation in the Iranian Revolution which overthrew the Shah in 1979. However the movement fell foul of the Islamic Republic established after the Revolution, and took up arms against the new government.[9]

In South Asia, the Deobandi scholar and Indian independence activist Ubaidullah Sindhi travelled to Russia via Afghanistan in the 1910s. He remained in post-revolution Russia until 1923, where he studied socialism and engaged in discussions with communist revolutionaries. From Russia he moved on to Turkey, where he developed his ideas on Islamic socialism, drawing parallels between Islam and communism in their emphasis on the fair distribution of wealth.[9]

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Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi

Buta Singh Uppal, later known as Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi, (10 March 1872 – 21 August 1944) was a political activist of the Indian independence movement and one of its vigorous leaders. According to Dawn, Karachi, Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi struggled for the independence of British India and for an exploitation-free society in India. He was also Home Minister of first Provisional Government of India established in Afghanistan in 1915.[4]

Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi was the Life Member of Jamia Millia Islamia, A Central University in New Delhi, India.

Jamia Millia Islamia is a central university located in New Delhi, India. Originally established at Aligarh, United Provinces (present day Uttar Pradesh, India) during the British Raj in 1920, it moved to its current location in Okhla in 1935....

Jamia Millia Islamia was established in Aligarh on 29 October 1920 by Mohammad Ali Jauhar, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, Abdul Majeed Khwaja, and Zakir Hussain under the presidency of Mahmud Hasan Deobandi. It was established mainly in response to the demand of some students of the Aligarh Muslim University for a new National Muslim University which would be free from government influence as they felt that the administration of Aligarh Muslim University was of pro-British stance.
It was Ahmed Khan who, with the help of Captain Nassau Lees and Maulvi Kabiruddin Ahmed, compiled the first printed edition of the Persian text of the Tarikh, using one complete manuscript and three incomplete manuscripts to finish what Ishtiyaq Ahmad Zilli tells us is the first Persian edited text. It was published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Calcutta) in 1862 and was one of the achievements which earned him his Fellowship of the Royal Asiatic Society.

-- Traces of the Great: A medieval history of the Delhi Sultanate, by Francis Robinson

It was conceived as a national institution that would offer progressive education and an emphasis on Indian nationalism to students from all communities, particularly Muslims. Zakir Hussain described "the movement of Jamia Millia Islamia as a struggle for education and cultural renaissance that aims to prepare a blueprint for Indian Muslims which may focus on Islam but simultaneously evolve a national culture for common Indian. It will lay the foundation of the thinking that true religious education will promote patriotism and national integration among Indian Muslims, who will be proud to take part in the future progress of India, which will play its part in the comity of nations for peace and development. The objective of establishment of Jamia Millia Islamia will be to lay down the common curriculum for Indian Muslims taking into account the future challenges and will prepare the children to be masters of future"[3] The emergence of Jamia was supported by Mahatma Gandhi[9][10][11][12] and Rabindranath Tagore who felt that Jamia Millia Islamia could shape lives of hundreds and thousands of students on the basis of a shared culture and worldview.

In 1925, Jamia Millia Islamia moved from Aligarh to Karol Bagh, New Delhi. On 1 March 1935, the foundation stone for a school building was laid at Okhla, then a nondescript village in the southern outskirts of Delhi. In 1936, all institutions of Jamia Millia Islamia except Jamia Press, the Maktaba, and the library moved to the new campus.

-- Jamia Millia Islamia, by Wikipedia

He served the Jamia Millia Islamia for a long period of time on a very low salary. A boys' hostel in Dr. Zakir Husain Hall of Boys' Residence in Jamia Millia Islamia has been named after him....

Buta Singh Uppal converted to Islam at age 15 and chose "Ubaidullah Sindhi" as his new name, and later enrolled in the Darul Uloom Deoband, where he was, at various times, associated with other noted Islamic scholars of the time, including Maulana Rasheed Gangohi and Maulana Mahmud al-Hasan. Maulana Sindhi returned to the Darul Uloom Deoband in 1909, and gradually involved himself in the Pan-Islamic movement. During World War I, he was among the leaders of the Deoband School, who, led by Maulana Mahmud al-Hasan, left India to seek support among other nations of the world for a Pan-Islamic revolution in India in what came to be known as the Silk Letter Conspiracy.

Ubaidullah had reached Kabul during the war to rally the Afghan Amir Habibullah Khan, and after a brief period there, he offered his support to Raja Mahendra Pratap's plans for revolution in British India with German support. He joined the Provisional Government of India formed in Kabul in December 1915, and remained in Afghanistan until the end of World War I, and then left for Russia. He subsequently spent two years in Turkey and, passing through many countries, eventually reached Hijaz (Saudi Arabia) where he spent about 14 years learning and pondering over the philosophy of Islam especially in the light of Shah Waliullah Dehlawi's works. In his career, he was a Pan-Islamic thinker....


When he was at school, a Hindu friend gave him the book Tufatul Hind to read. It was written by a converted scholar Maulana Ubaidullah of Malerkotla. After reading this book and some other books like Taqwiyatul Eeman and Ahwaal ul Aakhira, Ubaidullah's interest in Islam grew, leading eventually to his conversion to Islam. In 1887, the year of his conversion, he moved from Punjab to Sindh area where he was taken as a student by Hafiz Muhammad Siddique of Chawinda (Bhar Chandi Shareef). He subsequently studied at Deen Pur Shareef (a village near Khanpur, Distt Rahim Yar Khan) under Maulana Ghulam Muhammad R.A, Where he delved deeper into Islamic education and training in the mystical order. In 1888, Ubaidullah was admitted to Darul Uloom Deoband, where he studied various Islamic disciplines in depth under the tutelage of noted Islamic scholars of the time including Maulana Abu Siraj, Maulana Rasheed Ahmad Gangohi and Maulana Mahmud al Hasan. He took lessons in Sahih al-Bukhari and Tirmidhi from Maulana Nazeer Husain Dehalvi and read logic and philosophy with Maulana Ahmad Hasan Cawnpuri.

In 1891, Ubaidullah graduated from the Deoband school. He left for Sukkur area in Sindh province, and started teaching in Amrote Shareef under, or with, Maulana Taj Mohammad Amrothi, who became his mentor after the death of Hafiz Muhammad Siddique of Bhar Chandi. Ubaidullah married the daughter of Maulana Azeemullah Khan, a teacher at Islamiyah High School, at that time. In 1901, Ubaidullah established the Darul Irshaad in Goth Peer Jhanda village in Sindh. He worked on propagating his school for nearly seven years. In 1909, at the request of Mahmud Al Hasan, he returned to Deoband School in Uttar Pradesh. Here, he accomplished much for the student body, Jamiatul Ansaar. Ubaidullah was now very active in covert anti-British propaganda activities, which led to him alienating a large number of the Deoband School leaders. Subsequently, Ubaidullah moved his work to Delhi at Mahmud al Hasan's request. At Delhi, he worked with Hakim Ajmal Khan and Dr. Ansari. In 1912, he established a madrassah, Nazzaaratul Ma'arif, which was successful in propagating and spreading Islam among the people.

With the onset of World War I in 1914, efforts were made by the Darul Uloom Deoband to forward the cause of Pan-Islam in British India with the help of the other sympathetic nations of the world. Led by Mahmud al Hasan, plans were sketched out for an insurrection beginning in the tribal belt of North-West Frontier Province of British India. Mahmud al Hasan, left India to seek the help of Galib Pasha, the Turkish governor of Hijaz, while at Hasan's directions, Ubaidullah proceeded to Kabul to seek Emir Habibullah's support there. Initial plans were to raise an Islamic army (Hizb Allah) headquartered at Medina, with an Indian contingent at Kabul. Maulana Hasan was to be the General-in-chief of this army. Some of Ubaidullah's students went to Kabul to explore things before Ubaidullah arrived there. While at Kabul, Ubaidullah came to the conclusion that focusing on the Indian Freedom Movement would best serve the pan-Islamic cause. Ubaidullah had proposed to the Afghan Emir that he declare war against British India. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad is known to have been involved in the movement prior to his arrest in 1916.

Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi and Mahmud al Hasan (principal of the Darul Uloom Deoband) had proceeded to Kabul in October 1915 with plans to initiate a Muslim insurrection in the tribal belt of British India. For this purpose, Ubaid Allah was to propose that the Amir of Afghanistan declares war against Britain while Mahmud al Hasan sought German and Turkish help. Hasan proceeded to Hijaz. Ubaidullah, in the meantime, was able to establish friendly relations with Emir Habibullah of Afghanistan. At Kabul, Ubaidullah along with some of his students, were to make their way to Turkey to join the Caliph's "Jihad" against Britain. But it was eventually decided that the pan-Islamic cause was to be best served by focusing on the Indian Freedom Movement.

In late 1915, Sindhi was met in Kabul by the 'Niedermayer-Hentig Expedition' sent by the Indian Independence Committee in Berlin and the German war ministry. Nominally led by the exiled Indian prince Raja Mahendra Pratap, it had among its members the Islamic scholar Abdul Hafiz Mohamed Barakatullah, and the German officers Werner Otto von Hentig and Oskar Niedermayer, as well as a number of other notable individuals. The expedition tried to rally Emir Habibullah's support, and through him, begin a campaign into British India. It was hoped that it would initiate a rebellion in British India. On 1 December 1915, the Provisional Government of India was founded at Emir Habibullah's 'Bagh-e-Babur palace' in the presence of the Indian, German, and Turkish members of the expedition. It was declared a 'revolutionary government-in-exile' which was to take charge of independent India when British authority is overthrown. Mahendra Pratap was proclaimed its President, Barkatullah the Prime minister, Ubaidullah Sindhi the Minister for India, another Deobandi leader Moulavi Bashir its War Minister, and Champakaran Pillai was to be the Foreign Minister. The Provisional Government of India obtained support from Galib Pasha and proclaimed Jihad against Britain. Recognition was sought from the Russian Empire, Republican China and Japan. This provisional government would later attempt to obtain support from Soviet leadership. After the February Revolution in Russia in 1917, Pratap's government corresponded with the nascent Soviet government. In 1918, Mahendra Pratap met Trotsky in Petrograd before meeting the Kaiser in Berlin, urging both to mobilise against British India.

However, these plans faltered, Emir Habibullah remained steadfastly neutral while he awaited a concrete indication where the war was headed, even as his advisory council and family members indicated their support against Britain. The Germans withdrew their support in 1917, but the 'Provisional Government of India' stayed behind at Kabul. In 1919, this government was ultimately dissolved under British diplomatic pressure on Afghanistan. Ubaidullah had stayed in Kabul for nearly seven years. He even encouraged the young King Amanullah Khan, who took power in Afghanistan after Habibullah's assassination, in the Third Anglo-Afghan War. The conclusion of the war, ultimately, forced Ubaidullah Sindhi to leave Afghanistan as King Amanullah came under pressure from Britain.


Ubaidullah then proceeded from Afghanistan to Russia, where he spent seven months at the invitation of the Soviet leadership, and was officially treated as a guest of the state. During this period, he studied the ideology of socialism. According to an article in a major newspaper of Pakistan, titled 'Of socialism and Islam', "Islam showed not only deep sympathy for the poor and downtrodden but also condemned strongly the concentration of wealth in a number of Makkan surahs. Makkah, as an important centre of international trade, was home to the very rich (tribal chiefs) and the extremely poor." In Russia, however, he was unable to meet Lenin who was severely ill at the time. Some people, at that time, thought that Sindhi was impressed by Communist ideals during his stay in Russia, however that is not true at all. In 1923, Ubaidullah left Russia for Turkey where he initiated the third phase of the 'Shah Waliullah Movement' in 1924. He issued the 'Charter for the Independence of India' from Istanbul. Ubaidullah then left for Mecca, Arabia in 1927 and remained there until 1929. During this period, he brought the message of the rights of Muslims and other important religious issues to the people of Arabia. During his stay in Russia, he was not impressed by the Communist ideas but rather, after the Soviet revolution, he presented his belief to the Soviet government that: "Communism is not a natural law system but rather is a reaction to oppression, the natural law is offered by Islam". He attempted to convince them in a very systematic and logical manner. But he could not give an answer at that time, when he was asked to provide an example of a state which was being run according to the laws of Islam.

-- Ubaidullah Sindhi, by Wikipedia

Islamic socialism was also essential to the ideology of Pakistan, as its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to a crowd in Chittagong on March 26, 1948 declared that "you are only voicing my sentiments and the sentiments of millions of Musalmans when you say that Pakistan should be based on sure foundations of social justice and Islamic socialism which emphasizes equality and brotherhood of man", while Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, on 25 August 1949, said in the same vein that:

There are a number of 'isms' being talked about now-a-days, but we are convinced that for us there is only one 'ism', namely Islamic Socialism, which in a nutshell, means that every person in this land has equal rights to be provided with food, shelter, clothing, education and medical facilities. Countries which cannot ensure these for their people can never progress. The economic programme drawn up some 1,350 years back is still the best economic programme for us. In fact, whatever systems people may try out they all ultimately return to Islamic Socialism by whatever name they may choose to call it.


Jinnah's Muslim League, which was the first ruling party in Pakistan, contained a number of Islamic socialists, although they were relatively marginal in the party. Also influential in Pakistan was Ghulam Ahmed Perwez, an Islamic scholar who advocated Quranism and a focus on the study of modern sciences. Although he was criticised by more conservative scholars, he became aligned with Jinnah and Muhammad Iqbal, the former of whom appointed him as the editor of the magazine Talu-e-Islam, where he wrote and published articles espousing a socialistic interpretation of the Quran, arguing that "socialism best enforces Qur’anic dictums on property, justice and distribution of wealth", and advocating a progressive, non-theocratic government and the application of science and agrarian reform to further economic development.[9] Perwez, as a part of his application of qur'anic thought to political ideology, stated that hell was a "... society in which men, dominated by its evil socio-economic system, struggle to accumulate wealth."[17]

During the dictatorship of Ayub Khan in Pakistan in the 1960s, Hanif Ramay led a group of intellectuals in Lahore in developing Islamic socialist ideas, drawing on the thought of Perwez and Khalifa Abdul Hakim, along with Ba'athist thinkers such as Michel Aflaq. Ramay and his co-thinkers influenced Zulfikar Ali Bhutto when he founded the Pakistan Peoples Party with Jalaludin Abdur Rahim, and they were the primary ideological influence on the party's manifesto. Ramay outlined the priorities for the PPP's brand of Islamic socialism as including elimination of feudalism and uncontrolled capitalism, greater state regulation of the economy, nationalisation of major banks, industries and schools, encouraging participatory management in factories and building democratic institutions. They contextualised these policies as a modern extension of principles of equality and justice contained in the Quran and practiced under the authority of Muhammad in Medina and Mecca. However, during Bhutto's time in power during the 1970s, he scaled back his reform programme and deepened Pakistan's ties with the conservative, oil-rich Gulf monarchies following the 1973 oil crisis, and purged the PPP's radical left and made concessions to Islamist parties in an effort to appease them.[9]

In Indonesia, former Communist Tan Malaka was an influential Islamic socialist thinker during the country's independence struggle, arguing that communism and Islam were compatible and that they should form the foundation for Indonesia's national revolution, and believing that Islam could be used to unify the working classes across the Muslim world. Although Malaka died in 1949, the same year that Indonesia achieved independence, the nation's first president Sukarno drew upon his ideas: he espoused ideological concepts which incorporated both religious and socialistic ideas, such as Pancasila and Nasakom.[9]

Although it was Marxist, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan which took power after the country's Saur Revolution started utilising rhetoric stressing similarities between socialism and Islam after its reforms provoked opposition from religious conservatives and landowners.[9]

From the Quran itself, the quote "Man is entitled only to what is due to his effort" has been used to in argument for Islamic Socialism, as an argument against the accretion of wealth through the manipulation of capital.[18][19] Sura 7:128, "the land belongs to God," has also been used in a similar purpose.[18]
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

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Zakat

Main article: Zakat

One of the Five Pillars of Islam, zakāt is the practice of imposition (not charity) giving based on accumulated wealth (approximately 2.5% of all financial assets owned over the course of one lunar year). It is obligatory for all financially able Muslim adults and is considered to be an act of piety through which one expresses concern for the well-being of fellow Muslims as well as preserving social harmony between the wealthy and the poor.[20] The zakat promotes a more equitable redistribution of wealth and fosters a sense of solidarity amongst members of the ummah (meaning "community").[21]

Zakat is meant to discourage the hoarding of capital and stimulate investment. Because the individual must pay zakat on the net wealth, wealthy Muslims are compelled to invest in profitable ventures, or otherwise see their wealth slowly erode. Furthermore, means of production such as equipment, factories and tools are exempt from zakat, which further provides the incentive to invest wealth in productive businesses.[22] Personal assets such as clothing, household furniture and one residence are not considered zakatable assets.

According to the Quran, there are eight categories of people (asnaf) who qualify to receive zakat funds:[23][24]

1. Those living in absolute poverty (Al-Fuqarā').
2. Those restrained because they cannot meet their basic needs (Al-Masākīn).
3. The zakat collectors themselves (Al-Āmilīna 'Alaihā).
4. Non-Muslims who are sympathetic to Islam or wish to convert to Islam (Al-Mu'allafatu Qulūbuhum).
5. People whom one is attempting to free from slavery or bondage. Also includes paying ransom or blood money, i.e. diya (Fir-Riqāb).
6. Those who have incurred overwhelming debts while attempting to satisfy their basic needs (Al-Ghārimīn).
7. Those fighting for a religious cause or a cause of God (Fī Sabīlillāh)[25] or for the jihad in the way of Allah[26] or those not a part of salaried soldiers.[27][28]
8. Children of the street, or travellers (Ibnus-Sabīl).


According to the Hadith, the family of Muhammad should not consume any zakat. Zakat should not be given to one's own parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, or spouses. Also it is forbidden to disburse zakat funds into investments instead of being directly given to those who are in need.[29] Some scholars disagree whether the poor who qualify should include non-Muslims. Some state that zakat may be paid to non-Muslims, but only after the needs of Muslims have been met.[29] Fi Sabillillah is the most prominent asnaf in Southeast Asian Muslim societies, where it broadly construed to include funding missionary work, Quranic schools, and anything else that serves the community in general.[30] Zakat can be used to finance a jihad effort in the path of Allah. Zakat money should be used, provided the effort is to raise the banner of Islam.[31][32] Additionally, the zakat funds may be spent on the administration of a centralized zakat collection system.

Historically, Abul A'la Maududi championed the concept of Zakat.[19] According to Maududi, Zakat should be primarily in the form of taxation from a position called the exchequer, who would manage the Zakat collected and make sure that it was distributed correctly.[19] Should someone die with no family to pass on their wealth, then this wealth would be given to the exchequer for management.[19]

In the United Kingdom and according to a self-reported poll of 4000 people conducted by Zarine Kharas, Muslims today give more to charity than people of other religions.[33] Today, conservative estimates of annual zakat are estimated to be 15 times global humanitarian aid contributions.[34]

Welfare state

Main article: Bayt al-mal

The concepts of welfare and pension were introduced in early Islamic law as forms of zakat, or charity. Zakat is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, and was implemented under the Rashidun Caliphate in the 7th century. This practice continued well into the Abbasid era of the caliphate. The taxes (including zakat and jizya) collected in the treasury of an Islamic government were used to provide income for the needy, including the poor, elderly, orphans, widows and the disabled. According to the Islamic jurist Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), the government was also expected to stockpile food supplies in every region in case a disaster or famine occurred.[35][36]

During the Rashidun Caliphate, various welfare programs were introduced by Caliph Umar. Under his rule, equality was extended to all citizens, even to the caliph himself, as Umar believed that "no one, no matter how important, should live in a way that would distinguish him from the rest of the people." Umar himself lived "a simple life and detached himself from any of the worldly luxuries," like how he often wore "worn-out shoes and was usually clad in patched-up garments," or how he would sleep "on the bare floor of the mosque." Limitations on wealth were also set for governors and officials, who would often be "dismissed if they showed any outward signs of pride or wealth which might distinguish them from the people." This was an early attempt at erasing "class distinctions which might inevitably lead to conflict." Umar also made sure that the public treasury was not wasted on "unnecessary luxuries" as he believed that "the money would be better spent if it went towards the welfare of the people rather than towards lifeless bricks."[36]

Umar's innovative welfare reforms during the Rashidun Caliphate included the introduction of social security. This included unemployment insurance, which did not appear in the Western world until the 19th century. In the Rashidun Caliphate, whenever citizens were injured or lost their ability to work, it became the state's responsibility to make sure that their minimum needs were met, with the unemployed and their families receiving an allowance from the public treasury.[36] Retirement pensions were provided to elderly people,[35] who had retired and could "count on receiving a stipend from the public treasury." Babies who were abandoned were also taken care of, with one hundred dirhams spent annually on each orphan's development. Umar also introduced the concept of public trusteeship and public ownership when he implemented the Waqf, or charitable trust, system, which transferred "wealth from the individual or the few to a social collective ownership," in order to provide "services to the community at large." For example, Umar bought land from the Banu Harithah and converted it into a charitable trust, which meant that "profit and produce from the land went towards benefiting the poor, slaves, and travelers."[36]

During the great famine of 18 AH (638 CE), Umar introduced further reforms such as the introduction of food rationing using coupons, which were given to those in need and could be exchanged for wheat and flour. Another innovative concept that was introduced was that of a poverty threshold, with efforts made to ensure a minimum standard of living. This made sure that no citizen across the empire would suffer from hunger. In order to determine the poverty line, Umar ordered an experiment to test how many seers of flour would be required to feed a person for a month. He found that 25 seers of flour could feed 30 people and so he concluded that 50 seers of flour would be sufficient to feed a person for a month. As a result, he ordered that the poor each receive a food ration of 50 seers of flour per month. In addition, the poor and disabled were guaranteed cash stipends. However, in order to avoid some citizens taking advantage of government services "begging and laziness were not tolerated" and "those who received government benefits were expected to be contributing members in the community."[36]

Further reforms later took place under the Umayyad Caliphate. Registered soldiers who were disabled in service received an invalidity pension, while similar provisions were made for the disabled and poor in general. Caliph Al-Walid I assigned payments and services to the needy, which included money for the poor, guides for the blind, servants for the crippled, and pensions for all disabled people so that they would never need to beg. The caliphs Al-Walid II and Umar ibn Abdul-Aziz supplied money and clothes to the blind and crippled as well as servants for the latter. This continued with the Abbasid caliph Al-Mahdi.[37] Tahir ibn Husayn, governor of the Khurasan province of the Abbasid Caliphate, stated in a letter to his son that pensions from the treasury should be provided to the blind, to look after the poor and destitute in general, to make sure not to overlook victims of oppression who are unable to complain and are ignorant of how to claim their rights and that pensions should be assigned to victims of calamities and the widows and orphans they leave behind. The "ideal city" described by the Islamic philosophers, Al-Farabi and Avicenna, also assigns funds to the disabled.[38]

When communities were stricken by famine, rulers would often support them though measures such as the remission of taxes, importation of food and charitable payments, ensuring that everyone had enough to eat. However, private charity through the trust institution often played a greater role in the alleviation of famines than government measures did.[39] From the 9th century, funds from the treasury were also used towards the charitable trusts for the purpose of building and supporting public institutions, often Madrassah educational institutions and Bimaristan hospitals.[40]

Niqula Haddad, brother in law to Farah Antun, was a Syrian writer who arguably wrote the first book on socialism in Arabic called al-Ishtirakiyah.[2] Haddad believed in a welfare state where the government would supply employment, medicine, school, and old age pensions.[2] Haddad, along with Antun and Shibli Shumayyil, are credited with influencing the works of Salama Moussa, a well-known Egyptian writer that wrote about Egyptian Nationalism, and would later found a short-lived socialist party in Egypt.[2]


Guaranteed minimum income

Main article: Guaranteed minimum income

A guaranteed minimum income is a system[41] of social welfare provision that guarantees that all citizens or families have an income sufficient to live on, provided they meet certain conditions. Eligibility is typically determined by citizenship, a means test and either availability for the labour market or a willingness to perform community services. The primary goal of a guaranteed minimum income is to combat poverty. If citizenship is the only requirement, the system turns into a universal basic income. The first Muslim Caliph Abu Bakr introduced a guaranteed minimum standard of income, granting each man, woman and child ten dirhams annually—this was later increased to twenty dirhams.[42] Some, but not all Islamic socialists advocate the renewal and expansion of this policy.

Islamic socialist ideologies

Muslim socialists believe that socialism is compatible with Islamic teachings and usually embrace secular forms of socialism. However, some Muslim socialists believe that socialism should be applied within an Islamic framework and numerous Islamic socialist ideologies exist.

In the modern era, Islamic socialism can be divided into two: a left-wing and a right-wing form. The left wing (Siad Barre, Haji Misbach, Ali Shariati, Yasser Arafat, Abdullah al-Alayli, and Jalal Al-e Ahmad) advocated proletarian internationalism, the implementation of Islamic Sharia, whilst encouraging Muslims to join or collaborate with international socialist or Marxist movements. Right-wing socialists (Mohammed Iqbal, Agus Salim, Jamal ad-Din Asad-Abadi, Musa al-Sadr, and Mahmud Shaltut) are ideologically closer to third positionism, supporting not just social justice, egalitarian society and universal equality, but also Islamic revivalism and implementation of Sharia. They also reject a full adoption of a class struggle and keep a distance from other socialist movements.

Gaddafism

Main article: The Green Book (Muammar Gaddafi)

Muammar Gaddafi outlined his version of Islamic socialism in The Green Book, which was published in three parts (1975, 1977, 1978).[43][44] The Green Book was heavily influenced by the pan-Arab, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and served as the basis for the Islamic Legion.[45]

The Green Book rejects modern liberal democracy based on electing representatives as well as capitalism and instead it proposes a type of direct democracy overseen by the General People's Committee which allows direct political participation for all adult citizens.[46] The book states that "freedom of expression is the right of every natural person, even if a person chooses to behave irrationally, to express his or her insanity". The Green Book states that freedom of speech is based upon public ownership of book publishers, newspapers, television and radio stations on the grounds that private ownership would be undemocratic.

A paragraph in the book about abolishing money is similar to a paragraph in Frederick Engels' "Principles of Communism",[47] Gaddafi wrote: "The final step is when the new socialist society reaches the stage where profit and money disappear. "It is through transforming society into a fully productive society, and through reaching in production a level where the material needs of the members of society are satisfied. On that final stage, profit will automatically disappear and there will be no need for money".[48]

In practical terms, although Gaddafi opposed Islamist movements, he pursued socially conservative policies such as banning the sale and consumption of alcohol, closing nightclubs and suppressing Marxist activity in universities and colleges.[9]


According to Raymond D. Gastil, the RUF was influenced by Gaddafi's Islamic Socialist philosophy.[49]

Anatolian Socialism (Kuva-yi Seyyare)

Main article: Kuva-yi Seyyare

Anatolian Islamic Socialism was initially supported by Çerkes Ethem who was an Ottoman militia leader of Circassian origin who initially gained fame for fighting and gaining victories against the Allied powers invading Anatolia in the aftermath of World War I and afterwards during the Turkish War of Independence.[50][51][52]

The Kuvâ-yi Seyyâre was established a force of Circassian and Abkhazian volunteers led by Çerkes Ethem. The group saw themselves as a police force to fight against those who cause disturbance to the greater good of Anatolia.[53][54] In time, as Ethem's Islamic Socialist views grew larger, it distanced itself from Kemal Atatürk's Turkish National movement and eventually opposed it.[54][55][56]

Islamic economy

Wäisi movement


Main article: Wäisi movement

Founded by Bahawetdin Wäisev, the Wäisi movement was a religious, social, and political movement that took place in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Tatarstan and other Tatar-populated parts of Russia. Wäisi doctrines promoted disobedience to civil law and authority in favor of following the Quran and Sharia. Supporters of the movement evaded military service and refused to pay imposition or carry a Russian passport. The movement also incorporated elements of class struggle and nationalism. The Wäisi movement united Tatar farmers, craftsmen and petty bourgeoisie and enjoyed widespread popularity across the region.

Despite going underground in the aftermath of Bahawetdin Wäisev's arrest in 1884, the movement continued to maintain a strong following. Bahawetdin Wäisev's son Ğaynan Wäisev led the movement after his death in 1893. An estimated 100 members were arrested and exiled in 1897 after encouraging people not to participate in the population census. The Wäisi movement increased in size after the first Russian revolution in 1905–1907 and by 1908 there were nearly 15,000 followers in the Kazan Governorate, Orenburg and other guberniyas in Central Asia. Wäisi followers supported the Soviet government in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917 and organized a regiment in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. Members of the movement distanced themselves from the Russian Bolsheviks and founded the autonomous commune of Yaña Bolğar in Chistopol during the 1920s, but were persecuted and disbanded during the Great Purge of the 1930s.

Islamic Marxism

Islamic Marxism attempts to apply Marxist economic, political, and social teachings within an Islamic framework. Traditional forms of Marxism are anti-religious and promote state atheism, which has led many Muslims to reject Marxism. However, the affinity between Marxist and Islamic ideals of social control has led some Muslims to embrace their own forms of Marxism since the 1940s. Islamic Marxists believe that Islam meets the needs of society and can accommodate or guide the social changes Marxism hopes to accomplish. Islamic Marxists are also dismissive of traditional Marxist views on materialism and religion.[57]

As a term, it has been used to describe Ali Shariati (in Shariati and Marx: A Critique of an "Islamic" Critique of Marxism by Assef Bayat). It is also sometimes used in discussions of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, including parties such as the People's Mujahideen of Iran (MEK), a formerly designated terrorist organization by the United States, Canada, Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Iran that advocates of overthrow of the latter.

Somali revolutionary socialism

Main article: Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party

The Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party (SRSP) was created by the military regime of Siad Barre in the Somali Democratic Republic under Soviet guidance in 1976 as an attempt to reconcile the official state ideology with the official state religion by adapting Marxist–Leninist precepts to local circumstances. Emphasis was placed on the Muslim principles of social progress, equality and justice, which the government argued formed the core of scientific socialism and its own accent on self-sufficiency, public participation and popular control as well as direct ownership of the means of production. As part of Barre's socialist policies, major industries and farms were nationalized, including banks, insurance companies and oil distribution farms. While the SRSP encouraged private investment on a limited scale, the administration still considered itself to be essentially socialist.

Notable Muslim socialists

• Ethem Dipsheu
• Bagautdin Vaisov
• Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi
• Oemar Said Tjokroaminoto
• Haji Misbach
• Muhammad Iqbal
• Mullanur Waxitov
• Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev
• Tan Malaka
• Agus Salim
• Rafi Ahmed Kidwai
• Mustafa al-Siba'i
• Mahmud Shaltut
• Jalal Al-e-Ahmad
• Mohammad Nakhshab
• Ali Shariati
• Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani
• Mohammad Natsir
• Siad Barre
• Maslah Mohammed Siad Barre
• Muammar Gaddafi
• Kazem Sami
• Habibollah Peyman
• Yasser Arafat
• Ibrahim Shoukry
• Mohammad Najibullah
• Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri

Islamic socialist or leftist organisations

Sunni socialist groups


• Homeland Party
• Egyptian Arab Socialist Party
• Egyptian Islamic Labour Party
• Social Justice Party
• Umma Party
• Young Egypt Party
• Libyan Popular National Movement
• Mauritanian People's Party
• Pakistan Awami Tehreek
• Pakistan Peoples Party
• Qaumi Watan Party
• Jamaat-e-Islami
• Muslim Socialist Committee of Kazan
• Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party
• Islamic Socialist Party
• Socialist Cooperation Party
• Anti-capitalist Muslims
• Kuva-yi Seyyare
• Green Army Organisation
• Young Bukharians

Shia socialist groups

• Unity Party
• Muslim Social Democratic Party
• Islamic Labour Party
• Islamic Nations Party
• Liberation Movement of People of Iran
• Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution of Iran Organization
• Movement of God-Worshipping Socialists
• Movement of Militant Muslims
• Office for the Cooperation of the People with the President
• Party of the Iranian People
• People's Mujahedin of Iran
• Houthis

See also

• Islam portal
• Socialism portal
• Arab socialism
• Capitalism and Islam
• Christian communism
• Christian socialism
• Islamic economics
• Islamic feminism
• Islamo-leftism
• Jewish left
• Progressive Muslim vote
• Qarmatians
• Religious socialism
• Zanj Rebellion

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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Tue Nov 23, 2021 3:28 am

Part 1 of 5

Chapter IV: Demetrius and the Invasion of India, Excerpt from The Greeks in Bactria and India
by William Woodthorpe Tarn
2010

CHAPTER IV: DEMETRIUS AND THE INVASION OF INDIA

GREAT changes had taken place in India since Alexander's day. He had found a number of disconnected states and peoples in the North-West, and had had no relations with, even if he had heard of, the most powerful of the Indian kingdoms, that of Magadha on the Ganges. Soon after his death the Maurya Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!] had seized the crown of Magadha, and, perhaps by 311, had extended his rule to embrace all India north of the line of the Vindhya mountains and the Nerbudda river. He was succeeded first by his son Bindusara and then by his grandson Asoka, under whom the Mauryan empire was expanded to include a considerable part of peninsular India; but the southern conquests were only temporary and were apparently lost after Asoka died, and the empire was essentially a North Indian empire; the capital was Pataliputra on the Ganges. The Seleucids and the Mauryas were always on friendly terms, and Greeks knew a good deal about the Mauryan empire as it had been under Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!] through the account of it given by Megasthenes, Seleucus' ambassador at his Court; probably they knew as much about it as they had known about the Persian empire in Xenophon's day, while Indians in turn knew a certain amount about the Greeks of the Seleucid East, whom they called Yavanas or Yonas (p. 417). It is however of some importance to the subsequent story to note that the Mauryan empire as most Greeks knew it was that of Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!] and not that of Asoka, that is, it was an empire of Northern India. Asoka made one other very great change in India. He became a convert to Buddhism, and through his encouragement and missionary efforts that religion attained a position in India such as it never held again, though Brahmanism remained strong; in particular, he successfully evangelised a good deal of the North-West. Had the Mauryan empire continued powerful it might perhaps have done something to create a sense of Indian nationality in the loose complex of subordinate states and peoples which went to form it, but after Asoka's death it began to suffer the common lot of Oriental empires and gradually to decline; little however is really known of his successors, and it is not even certain whether the whole empire remained in one hand, or whether the two extant lists of names mean that the dynasty had divided into two lines,1 [CHI pp. 511-12; de la Vallee-Poussin, pp. 163-8.] one ruling in Pataliputra and one in the North-West, or merely reflect the fact that one list is Brahman and one Buddhist. Certainly the Sophagasenos whom Antiochus III met in the Paropamisadae (p. 101) was no local rajah but a Maurya,2 [Hemchandra Raychaudhuri, JASB 1920 pp. 305, 310. Polyb. XI, 34. II calls him [x], which on Greek usage (p. 154) ought to mean a Maurya.] a powerful ruler3 [Cf. J. Allan in Camb. Shorter Hist. of India 934 pp. 54, 63.] with whom he renewed the traditional friendship of the two houses. It was the ultimate break-down of the Mauryan empire which gave Demetrius his opportunity.

Demetrius, when he crossed the Hindu Kush, was the third foreign conqueror whom north-west India had in historical times, not counting the unrecorded tribes, proto-Bactrian and other, who prior to the Achaemenid period had made their way over the passes and settled in the country. Darius I had conquered Gandhara, Sind, and part of the Punjab; whether he had any plan beyond the enlargement of his empire is not known, but there seems to have been a good deal of Iranian blood in the North-West, which may have had some bearing on his actions. These Indian provinces were finally lost in the reign of Artaxerxes II; Artaxerxes III (Ochus) was very hazy about the geography of the Indus,4 [Aristot. Liber de inundacione Nili, Rose3 fr. 248.] and Alexander met no Persian officials east of the Hindu Kush. Alexander himself had a double plan: to conquer what Darius I had held, which he achieved, and to reach the Eastern Ocean which he thought quite close, a thing now known to have been impossible. His success was far more evanescent than that of Darius; a few years after his death the only traces left of his rule, not counting the Paropamisadae, were two or three of the cities he had founded, islands now in an Indian sea. Demetrius' invasion was a different matter. It followed a plan which neither Darius nor Alexander had known enough about India even to dream of, and employed methods which Alexander had indeed dreamt of but had only begun, very tentatively indeed, to practise when he died, and which might have provided possibilities of permanence in advance of previous attempts; in distances traversed, in territory acquired, the Bactrian Greeks far surpassed both the Persian and the Macedonian, and came near to success in an undertaking hardly less ambitious and far-reaching than had been Alexander's conquest of the Persian empire. What this plan was will have to be elucidated by events. But it was a plan which could only have originated in some definite man's brain, and that man was quite certainly Demetrius.

One thing however must be noticed here which will be elaborated later. The Greek 'conquest' of India was hardly a conquest in the ordinary sense of the word, the sense in which Alexander conquered Persia. But in the earlier part of this chapter I shall for convenience use the conventional language of conquest, and shall consider in the latter part what it was and what it meant.

That Demetrius was quite consciously (up to a point) copying Alexander -- that he regarded Alexander not merely as his supposed ancestor (App. 3) but as his model -- comes out clearly from his coins, and is of the first importance for the story. On his own coins1 [BMC pp. 6, 166), Pl. II, 9-12; see Plate no. 3.] he wears the elephant-scalp. As elephants live in India, it was inevitable that the elephant-scalp should have been taken to refer to his Indian conquests; but it is certain that it does not, for not only does it appear on his Bactrian coinage from the beginning of his reign, but it had been used as a head-dress for Alexander on early coins of both Ptolemy I 2 [BMC Ptolemies, pp. 1-3, Pl. I nos. 1, 2, 5, 6, 8.] and Seleucus I; 3 [On some anonymous double staters (Head2 756) and on a rare copper coin in the collection of E. T. Newell, figured by M. Rostovtzeff, Seleucid Babylonia Pl. VI, 3. ] yet Ptolemy I had no connection of any kind with India -- he neither ruled it nor aspired to rule it -- and Seleucus had ceded all his Indian possessions to Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!] . The tradition behind this portrayal of Alexander is unknown, but the elephant-scalp itself must be a symbol of power -- power far extended, as his had been; for both Ptolemy and Seleucus had every object in themselves as successors of the man who had reached the summit of human greatness. The representation of Demetrius in the elephant-scalp then means that he had himself portrayed in the guise of Alexander;4 [Cf. Rostovtzeff op. cit. p. 53.] and in fact, apart from the general resemblance of his portrait (features excepted) to that of Alexander on Ptolemy's coins, the elephant-scalp on the two is identically treated,5 [Best seen in BMC Ptolemies Pl. I no. I.] as opposed to its later treatment in art. There will be more to say about the elephant-scalp later (pp. 189, 206); but meanwhile this suffices. Again, Demetrius, presumably after crossing the Indus, took the title [x], 'the Invincible'; it has already been mentioned that he is so called on the bilingual Indian tetradrachm of Demetrius II and on the Demetrius coin of Agathocles' pedigree series, and the same title occurs on those rare bilingual copper coins of 'King Demetrius the Invincible' which have been supposed to be his copper coinage for India.1 [BMC p. 163 no. 3, Pl. XXX, 3.] No king anywhere before him had assumed this title. It is a poetical word, known in Hesiod and the tragedians, but it is occasionally used in prose and was so used in a famous story: when Alexander visited the oracle of Delphi, the Pythia hailed him [x];2 [Plut. Alex. 14, [x]. See Diod. XVII, 93, 4; Anth. Pal. VII, 239.] and this story must be the origin of Demetrius' title. He wore then the symbol of Alexander's power and used the title conferred upon him by Apollo; he was to be a second Alexander.

Before considering the course of the invasion, one must fix the chronology, as near as may be. It has been seen that Demetrius' conquest of the Seleucid provinces in eastern Iran, which naturally antedates the invasion of India, could not have been begun till after the battle of Magnesia, 187 being the most probable year; how long it took cannot be said, but Demetrius cannot have crossed the Hindu Kush till very distinctly later than 187. The other terminal point is given by the account in the Yuga-purana3 [Translations and discussion of the material sections of this work are given in App. 4. Being embedded in an astrological work, it is given in the form of a prophecy; but the Yavana sections appear to reproduce an older document of the nature of a chronicle.] of the Gargi Samhita, which says that, after the occupation of Pataliputra, the Greeks would not stay in the Middle Country (say roughly the district between Mathura and Pataliputra) because of a terrible civil war which would break out among themselves; the reference is of course to the invasion of Eucratides (Chap. V), because there is no other civil war to which the words 'an awful and supremely lamentable strife' can refer.

The Yuga Purana is a Sanskrit text and the last chapter of a Jyotisha (astrology) text Vriddhagargiya Samhita. It is also considered a minor text in the Puranic literature.

The Yuga Purana is structured as a chronicle, and is notable for historical information presented as a prophecy. It is the only surviving Indian text that includes a detailed description of Greeks who advanced into India after Alexander the Great, and the Indo-Greek conquest of Pataliputra, the capital of the Mauryan Empire. It includes mythology, but also chronicles the Magadha empire, Maurya emperor Shalishuka, the Shunga dynasty the Yavanas, and Sakas. The record is described in the style of a "prophecy" (future tense), as if the text was written before recorded human history began.

The invasion of the Yavanas (i.e., Indo-Greeks, under Demetrius I or Menander I, c. 180 BCE) is described in a rather detailed account:

"After having conquered Saketa, the country of the Panchala and the Mathuras, the Yavanas, wicked and valiant, will reach Kusumadhvaja ("The town of the flower-standard", Pataliputra). The thick mud-fortifications at Pataliputra being reached, all the provinces will be in disorder, without doubt. Ultimately, a great battle will follow, with tree-like engines (siege engines)." (Gargi-Samhita Paragraph 5, Yuga Purana.)

"The Yavanas (Greeks) will command, the Kings will disappear. (But ultimately) the Yavanas, intoxicated with fighting, will not stay in Madhyadesa (the Middle Country); there will be undoubtedly a civil war among them, arising in their own country (Bactria), there will be a terrible and ferocious war." (Gargi-Samhita, Yuga Purana chapter, No7).


The extant manuscripts of the Yuga Purana are in poor form and considered by scholars as highly corrupted over its history, although recent "research has [...] been concerned with establishing a more acceptable text". Its importance is contested, with claims ranging from possibly the "oldest surviving text" with Purana in its title, to "quite late and worthless" manuscript. The few manuscripts discovered are highly inconsistent, and early 20th-century translators reconstructed the manuscript by "liberally altering" proper names in the text to arrive at "guesses at truth" that these manuscripts might have intended. Scholars in the early 20th century (Fleet in 1912, and later William Tarn in 1938) stated that this text is a late text and dismissed the Yuga Purana as historically worthless, with Tarn adding that "naturally, I cannot be sure".

-- Yuga Purana, by Wikipedia


It was therefore Eucratides' invasion which caused the abandonment of Pataliputra. I must anticipate here what will be proved in the next chapter, that Eucratides' dates are certain within very narrow limits; he set out most probably in 169, though early in 168 may be possible, and had conquered everything west of the Hindu Kush by the end of 167; the most probable date for the evacuation of the Middle Country is therefore some time in 168, with a possible year's margin either way. The statement that the Greeks will not stay in the Middle Country means of course that they will not stay long; and reasons will be given later (p. 156) for supposing that a date of c. 175 for the occupation of Pataliputra cannot be far wrong.

That gives the end of the conquest; it remains to date the beginning a little more closely. The date given in the Puranas for the end of the Maurya dynasty, 184, has been generally accepted by historians of India;1 [There seems to be a variant, 185.] that is the year in which Pushyamitra the Sunga, hereditary ruler of Vidisa (East Malva) and general of the last Maurya king, assassinated his master and seized the vacant throne.

[List of all "Maurya Dynasty" fictional kings]

• 322–298 BCE: Chandragupta

Chandragupta's life and accomplishments are described in ancient... Hindu, Buddhist and Jain texts, but they vary significantly....

According to the Jain accounts dated to 800 years after his death, Chandragupta abdicated his throne and became a Jain monk, traveled away from his empire to South India and committed sallekhana or fasting to death....

His main biographical sources in chronological order are:...

• Hindu texts such as the Puranas and Arthashastra; later composed Hindu sources include legends in Vishakhadatta's Mudrarakshasa, Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara and Kshemendra's Brihatkathamanjari.
• Buddhist sources are those dated in 4th-century or after, including the Sri Lankan Pali texts Dipavamsa (Rajavamsa section), Mahavamsa, Mahavamsa tika and Mahabodhivamsa. • 7th to 10th century Jain inscriptions at Shravanabelgola; these are disputed by scholars as well as the Svetambara Jain tradition. The second Digambara text interpreted to be mentioning the Maurya emperor is dated to about the 10th-century such as in the Brhatkathakosa of Harisena (Jain monk), while the complete Jain legend about Chandragupta is found in the 12th-century Parisishtaparvan by Hemachandra.

-- Chandragupta Maurya, by Wikipedia


• 298–272 BCE: Bindusara

Bindusara's life is not documented as well as the lives of these two emperors: much of the information about him comes from legendary accounts written several hundred years after his death....

The 16th century Tibetan Buddhist author Taranatha credits his administration with extensive territorial conquests in southern India, but some historians doubt the historical authenticity of this claim.

Ancient and medieval sources have not documented Bindusara's life in detail. Much of the information about him comes from Jain legends focused on Chandragupta and the Buddhist legends focused on Ashoka. The Jain legends, such as Hemachandra's Parishishta-Parvan were written more than a thousand years after his death. Most of the Buddhist legends about Ashoka's early life also appear to have been composed by Buddhist writers who lived several hundred years after Ashoka's death, and are of little historical value. While these legends can be used to make several inferences about Bindusara's reign, they are not entirely reliable because of the close association between Ashoka and Buddhism.

Buddhist sources that provide information about Bindusara include Divyavadana (including Ashokavadana and Pamsupradanavadana), Dipavamsa, Mahavamsa, Vamsatthappakasini (also known as Mahvamsa Tika or "Mahavamsa commentary"), Samantapasadika, and the 16th century writings of Taranatha. The Jain sources include the 12th century Parishishta-Parvan by Hemachandra and the 19th century Rajavali-Katha by Devachandra. The Hindu Puranas also mention Bindusara in their genealogies of Mauryan rulers. Some Greek sources also mention him by the name "Amitrochates" or its variations.

-- Bindusara, by Wikipedia


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• 268–232 BCE: Ashoka

Beyond the Edicts of Ashoka, biographical information about him relies on legends written centuries later, such as the 2nd-century CE Ashokavadana ("Narrative of Ashoka", a part of the Divyavadana), and in the Sri Lankan text Mahavamsa ("Great Chronicle")….

Information about Ashoka comes from ... ancient literature, especially Buddhist texts. These sources often contradict each other… while Ashoka is often attributed with building many hospitals during his time, there is no clear evidence any hospitals existed in ancient India during the 3rd century BC or that Ashoka was responsible for commissioning the construction of any….

Much of the information about Ashoka comes from Buddhist legends, which present him as a great, ideal king. These legends appear in texts that are not contemporary to Ashoka, and were composed by Buddhist authors, who used various stories to illustrate the impact of their faith on Ashoka. This makes it necessary to exercise caution while relying on them for historical information. Among modern scholars, opinions range from downright dismissal of these legends as mythological to acceptance of all historical portions that seem plausible….

All these legends can be traced to two primary traditions:

• the North Indian tradition preserved in the Sanskrit-language texts such as Divyavadana (including its constituent Ashokavadana); and Chinese sources such as A-yü wang chuan and A-yü wang ching.

• the Sri Lankan tradition preserved in Pali-language texts, such as Dipavamsa, Mahavamsa, Vamsatthapakasini (a commentary on Mahavamsa), Buddhaghosha's commentary on the Vinaya, and Samanta-pasadika.

There are several major differences between the two traditions. For example, the Sri Lankan tradition emphasises Ashoka's role in convening the Third Buddhist council, and his dispatch of several missionaries to distant regions, including his son Mahinda to Sri Lanka. However, the North Indian tradition makes no mention of these events, and describes other events not found in the Sri Lankan tradition, such as a story about another son named Kunala.

Even while narrating the common stories, the two traditions diverge in several ways. For example, both Ashokavadana and Mahavamsa mention that Ashoka's queen Tishyarakshita had the Bodhi Tree destroyed. In Ashokavadana, the queen manages to have the tree healed after she realises her mistake. In the Mahavamsa, she permanently destroys the tree, but only after a branch of the tree has been transplanted in Sri Lanka. In another story, both the texts describe Ashoka's unsuccessful attempts to collect a relic of Gautama Buddha from Ramagrama. In Ashokavadana, he fails to do so because he cannot match the devotion of the Nagas who hold the relic; however, in the Mahavamsa, he fails to do so because the Buddha had destined the relic to be enshrined by king Dutthagamani of Sri Lanka. Using such stories, the Mahavamsa glorifies Sri Lanka as the new preserve of Buddhism….

Ashoka's name appears in the lists of Mauryan kings in the various Puranas, but these texts do not provide further details about him…

[Ashoka's] early life, and much of the information on this topic comes from apocryphal legends written hundreds of years after him.… these legends include obviously fictitious details such as narratives of Ashoka's past lives…

The exact date of Ashoka's birth is not certain, as the extant contemporary Indian texts did not record such details….

The Ashokavadana states that Bindusara provided Ashoka with a fourfold-army (comprising cavalry, elephants, chariots and infantry), but refused to provide any weapons for this army. Ashoka declared that weapons would appear before him if he was worthy of being a king, and then, the deities emerged from the earth, and provided weapons to the army…. the gods declared that he would go on to conquer the whole earth….

According to the Mahavamsa, Bindusara appointed Ashoka as the viceroy of present-day Ujjain… This tradition is corroborated by the Saru Maru inscription discovered in central India; this inscription states that he visited the place as a prince….

"The king, who (now after consecration) is called "Piyadasi", (once) came to this place for a pleasure tour while still a (ruling) prince, living together with his unwedded consort." – Saru Mara, by Wikipedia…

According to the Sri Lankan tradition, on his way to Ujjain, Ashoka visited Vidisha, where he fell in love with a beautiful woman. According to the Dipamvamsa and Mahamvamsa, the woman was Devi – the daughter of a merchant. According to the Mahabodhi-vamsa, she was Vidisha-Mahadevi, and belonged to the Shakya clan of Gautama Buddha. The Shakya connection may have been fabricated by the Buddhist chroniclers in an attempt to connect Ashoka's family to Buddha….

Ashoka declared that if the throne was rightfully his, the gods would crown him as the next king. At that instance, the gods did so, Bindusara died, and Ashoka's authority extended to the entire world, including the Yaksha territory located above the earth, and the Naga territory located below the earth….

The Mahavamsa… also states that Ashoka killed ninety-nine of his half-brothers, including Sumana. The Dipavamsa states that he killed a hundred of his brothers, and was crowned four years later….

The figures such as 99 and 100 are exaggerated, and seem to be a way of stating that Ashoka killed several of his brothers. Taranatha states that Ashoka, who was an illegitimate son of his predecessor, killed six legitimate princes to ascend the throne. It is possible that Ashoka was not the rightful heir to the throne, and killed a brother (or brothers) to acquire the throne. However, the story has obviously been exaggerated by the Buddhist sources, which attempt to portray him as an evil person before his conversion to Buddhism….

According to the Sri Lankan texts Mahavamsa and the Dipavamsa, Ashoka ascended the throne 218 years after the death of Gautama Buddha, and ruled for 37 years. The date of the Buddha's death is itself a matter of debate, and the North Indian tradition states that Ashoka ruled a hundred years after the Buddha's death, which has led to further debates about the date….

The Ashokavadana also calls [Ashoka] "Chandashoka", and describes several of his cruel acts:

• The ministers who had helped him ascend the throne started treating him with contempt after his ascension. To test their loyalty, Ashoka gave them the absurd order of cutting down every flower-and fruit-bearing tree. When they failed to carry out this order, Ashoka personally cut off the heads of 500 ministers.

• One day, during a stroll at a park, Ashoka and his concubines came across a beautiful Ashoka tree. The sight put him in a sensual mood, but the women did not enjoy caressing his rough skin. Sometime later, when Ashoka fell asleep, the resentful women chopped the flowers and the branches of his namesake tree. After Ashoka woke up, he burnt 500 of his concubines to death as a punishment….

The 5th century Chinese traveller Faxian states that Ashoka personally visited the underworld to study the methods of torture there, and then invented his own methods.…

Such descriptions of Ashoka as an evil person before his conversion to Buddhism appear to be a fabrication of the Buddhist authors, who attempted to present the change that Buddhism brought to him as a miracle. In an attempt to dramatise this change, such legends exaggerate Ashoka's past wickedness and his piousness after the conversion….

Ashoka's own inscriptions mention that he conquered the Kalinga region during his 8th regnal year…

On the other hand, the Sri Lankan tradition suggests that Ashoka was already a devoted Buddhist by his 8th regnal year, having converted to Buddhism during his 4th regnal year, and having constructed 84,000 viharas during his 5th–7th regnal years. The Buddhist legends make no mention of the Kalinga campaign….

According to Ashoka's Major Rock Edict 13, he conquered Kalinga 8 years after his ascension to the throne. The edict states that during his conquest of Kalinga, 100,000 men and animals were killed in action; many times that number "perished"; and 150,000 men and animals were carried away from Kalinga as captives. Ashoka states that the repentance of these sufferings caused him to devote himself to the practice and propagation of dharma. He proclaims that he now considered the slaughter, death and deportation caused during the conquest of a country painful and deplorable; and that he considered the suffering caused to the religious people and householders even more deplorable.

This edict has been found inscribed at several places, including Erragudi, Girnar, Kalsi, Maneshra, Shahbazgarhi and Kandahar. However, [it] is omitted in Ashoka's inscriptions found in the Kalinga region, where the Rock Edicts 13 and 14 have been replaced by two separate edicts that make no mention of Ashoka's remorse.

Taranatha claims that Ashoka conquered the entire Jambudvipa.

Different sources give different accounts of Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism….

The Dipavamsa states that Ashoka invited several non-Buddhist religious leaders to his palace, and bestowed great gifts upon them in hope that they would be able to answer a question posed by the king. The text does not state what the question was… he met the Buddhist monk Moggaliputta Tissa, and became more devoted to the Buddhist faith. The veracity of this story is not certain. This legend about Ashoka's search for a worthy teacher may be aimed at explaining why Ashoka did not adopt Jainism, another major contemporary faith that advocates non-violence and compassion. The legend suggests that Ashoka was not attracted to Buddhism because he was looking for such a faith, rather, for a competent spiritual teacher….

The A-yu-wang-chuan states that a 7-year-old Buddhist converted Ashoka. Another story claims that the young boy ate 500 Brahmanas who were harassing Ashoka for being interested in Buddhism; these Brahmanas later miraculously turned into Buddhist bhikkus at the Kukkutarama monastery, where Ashoka paid a visit….

Both Mahavamsa and Ashokavadana state that Ashoka constructed 84,000 stupas or viharas….

The Ashokavadana states that Ashoka collected seven out of the eight relics of Gautama Buddha, and had their portions kept in 84,000 boxes made of gold, silver, cat's eye, and crystal. He ordered the construction of 84,000 stupas throughout the earth, in towns that had a population of 100,000 or more. He told Elder Yashas, a monk at the Kukkutarama monastery, that he wanted these stupas to be completed on the same day. Yashas stated that he would signal the completion time by eclipsing the sun with his hand. When he did so, the 84,000 stupas were completed at once.

The Mahavamsa states that Ashoka ordered construction of 84,000 viharas (monasteries) rather than the stupas to house the relics. Like Ashokavadana, the Mahavamsa describes Ashoka's collection of the relics, but does not mention this episode in the context of the construction activities. It states that Ashoka decided to construct the 84,000 viharas when Moggaliputta Tissa told him that there were 84,000 sections of the Buddha's Dhamma. Ashoka himself began the construction of the Ashokarama vihara, and ordered subordinate kings to build the other viharas. Ashokarama was completed by the miraculous power of Thera Indagutta, and the news about the completion of the 84,000 viharas arrived from various cities on the same day.

The number 84,000 is an obvious exaggeration, and it appears that in the later period, the construction of almost every old stupa was attributed to Ashoka….

Ashoka's rock edicts suggest that during his 8th–9th regnal years, he made a pilgrimage to the Bodhi Tree, started propagating dhamma, and performed social welfare activities. The welfare activities included establishment of medical treatment facilities for humans and animals…

The Sri Lankan tradition presents a greater role for Ashoka in the Buddhist community. In this tradition, Ashoka starts feeding monks on a large scale. His lavish patronage to the state patronage leads to many fake monks joining the sangha. The true Buddhist monks refuse to co-operate with these fake monks, and therefore, no uposatha ceremony is held for seven years. The king attempts to eradicate the fake monks, but during this attempt, an over-zealous minister ends up killing some real monks. The king then invites the elder monk Moggaliputta-Tissa, to help him expel non-Buddhists from the monastery founded by him at Pataliputra. 60,000 monks (bhikkhus) convicted of being heretical are de-frocked in the ensuing process. The uposatha ceremony is then held, and Tissa subsequently organises the Third Buddhist council, during the 17th regnal year of Ashoka. Tissa compiles Kathavatthu, a text that reaffirms Theravadin orthodoxy on several points.

The North Indian tradition makes no mention of these events, which has led to doubts about the historicity of the Third Buddhist council….

in his Minor Rock Edict 3, Ashoka recommends the members of the Sangha to study certain texts (most of which remain unidentified)….

In the Sri Lankan tradition, Moggaliputta-Tissa –- who is patronised by Ashoka –- sends out nine Buddhist missions to spread Buddhism in the "border areas" in c. 250 BCE.…

The tradition adds that during his 19th regnal year, Ashoka's daughter Sanghamitta went to Sri Lanka to establish an order of nuns, taking a sapling of the sacred Bodhi Tree with her.

The North Indian tradition makes no mention of these events. Ashoka's own inscriptions also appear to omit any mention of these events…

The Rock Edict XIII states that Ashoka won a "dhamma victory" by sending messengers to five kings and several other kingdoms. Whether these missions correspond to the Buddhist missions recorded in the Buddhist chronicles is debated. Indologist Etienne Lamotte argues that the "dhamma" missionaries mentioned in Ashoka's inscriptions were probably not Buddhist monks, as this "dhamma" was not same as "Buddhism". Moreover, the lists of destinations of the missions and the dates of the missions mentioned in the inscriptions do not tally [with] the ones mentioned in the Buddhist legends….

According to the Ashokavadana, Ashoka resorted to violence even after converting to Buddhism. For example:

• He slowly tortured Chandagirika to death in the "hell" prison.

• He ordered a massacre of 18,000 heretics for a misdeed of one.

• He launched a pogrom against the Jains, announcing a bounty on the head of any heretic; this results in the beheading of his own brother -– Vitashoka.

According to the Ashokavadana, a non-Buddhist in Pundravardhana drew a picture showing the Buddha bowing at the feet of the Nirgrantha leader Jnatiputra. The term nirgrantha ("free from bonds") was originally used for a pre-Jaina ascetic order, but later came to be used for Jaina monks. "Jnatiputra" is identified with Mahavira, 24th Tirthankara of Jainism. The legend states that on complaint from a Buddhist devotee, Ashoka issued an order to arrest the non-Buddhist artist, and subsequently, another order to kill all the Ajivikas in Pundravardhana. Around 18,000 followers of the Ajivika sect were executed as a result of this order. Sometime later, another Nirgrantha follower in Pataliputra drew a similar picture. Ashoka burnt him and his entire family alive in their house…

[T]hese stories of persecutions of rival sects by Ashoka appear to be clear fabrications arising out of sectarian propaganda….

Ashoka's last dated inscription -- the Pillar Edict 4 is from his 26th regnal year. The only source of information about Ashoka's later years are the Buddhist legends….

Both Mahavamsa and Ashokavadana state that Ashoka extended favours and attention to the Bodhi Tree, and a jealous Tissarakkha mistook "Bodhi" to be a mistress of Ashoka. She then used black magic to make the tree wither. According to the Ashokavadana, she hired a sorceress to do the job, and when Ashoka explained that "Bodhi" was the name of a tree, she had the sorceress heal the tree. According to the Mahavamsa, she completely destroyed the tree, during Ashoka's 34th regnal year.

The Ashokavadana states that Tissarakkha (called "Tishyarakshita" here) made sexual advances towards Ashoka's son Kunala, but Kunala rejected her. Subsequently, Ashoka granted Tissarakkha kingship for seven days, and during this period, she tortured and blinded Kunala. Ashoka then threatened to "tear out her eyes, rip open her body with sharp rakes, impale her alive on a spit, cut off her nose with a saw, cut out her tongue with a razor." Kunala regained his eyesight miraculously, and pleaded for mercy on the queen, but Ashoka had her executed anyway. Kshemendra's Avadana-kalpa-lata also narrates this legend, but seeks to improve Ashoka's image by stating that he forgave the queen after Kunala regained his eyesight….

According to the Ashokavadana, the emperor fell severely ill during his last days. He started using state funds to make donations to the Buddhist sangha, prompting his ministers to deny him access to the state treasury. Ashoka then started donating his personal possessions, but was similarly restricted from doing so. On his deathbed, his only possession was the half of a myrobalan fruit, which he offered to the sangha as his final donation….

Various sources mention five consorts of Ashoka: Devi (or Vedisa-Mahadevi-Shakyakumari), Karuvaki, Asandhimitra (Pali: Asandhimitta), Padmavati, and Tishyarakshita (Pali: Tissarakkha).

Kaurvaki is the only queen of Ashoka known from his own inscriptions: she is mentioned in an edict inscribed on a pillar at Allahabad. The inscription names her as the mother of prince Tivara, and orders the royal officers (mahamattas) to record her religious and charitable donations….

According to the Mahavamsa, Ashoka's chief queen was Asandhimitta, who died four years before him. It states that she was born as Ashoka's queen because in a previous life, she directed a pratyekabuddha to a honey merchant (who was later reborn as Ashoka). Some later texts also state that she additionally gave the pratyekabuddha a piece of cloth made by her. These texts include the Dasavatthuppakarana, the so-called Cambodian or Extended Mahavamsa (possibly from 9th–10th centuries), and the Trai Bhumi Katha (15th century). These texts narrate another story: one day, Ashoka mocked Asandhamitta [as she] was enjoying a tasty piece of sugarcane without having earned it through her karma. Asandhamitta replied that all her enjoyments resulted from merit resulting from her own karma. Ashoka then challenged her to prove this by procuring 60,000 robes as an offering for monks. At night, the guardian gods informed her about her past gift to the pratyekabuddha, and next day, she was able to miraculously procure the 60,000 robes. An impressed Ashoka makes her his favourite queen, and even offers to make her a sovereign ruler. Asandhamitta refuses the offer, but still invokes the jealousy of Ashoka's 16,000 other wives. Ashoka proves her superiority by having 16,000 identical cakes baked with his royal seal hidden in only one of them. Each wife is asked to choose a cake, and only Asandhamitta gets the one with the royal seal. The Trai Bhumi Katha claims that it was Asandhamitta who encouraged her husband to become a Buddhist, and to construct 84,000 stupas and 84,000 viharas.

According to Mahavamsa, after Asandhamitta's death, Tissarakkha became the chief queen. The Ashokavadana does not mention Asandhamitta at all, but does mention Tissarakkha as Tishyarakshita. The Divyavadana mentions another queen called Padmavati, who was the mother of the crown-prince Kunala.

As mentioned above, according to the Sri Lankan tradition, Ashoka fell in love with Devi (or Vidisha-Mahadevi), as a prince in central India. After Ashoka's ascension to the throne, Devi chose to remain at Vidisha than move to the royal capital Pataliputra. According to the Mahavamsa, Ashoka's chief queen was Asandhamitta, not Devi: the text does not talk of any connection between the two women, so it is unlikely that Asandhamitta was another name for Devi….

Tivara, the son of Ashoka and Karuvaki, is the only of Ashoka's sons to be mentioned by name in the inscriptions.

According to North Indian tradition, Ashoka had a son named Kunala. Kunala had a son named Samprati.

The Sri Lankan tradition mentions a son called Mahinda, who was sent to Sri Lanka as a Buddhist missionary; this son is not mentioned at all in the North Indian tradition. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang states that Mahinda was Ashoka's younger brother (Vitashoka or Vigatashoka) rather than his illegitimate son.

The Divyavadana mentions the crown-prince Kunala alias Dharmavivardhana, who was a son of queen Padmavati. According to Faxian, Dharmavivardhana was appointed as the governor of Gandhara.

The Rajatarangini mentions Jalauka as a son of Ashoka.

According to Sri Lankan tradition, Ashoka had a daughter named Sanghamitta, who became a Buddhist nun. A section of historians, such as Romila Thapar, doubt the historicity of Sanghamitta, based on the following points:

• The name "Sanghamitta", which literally means the friend of the Buddhist Order (sangha), is unusual, and the story of her going to Ceylon so that the Ceylonese queen could be ordained appears to be an exaggeration.

• The Mahavamsa states that she married Ashoka's nephew Agnibrahma, and the couple had a son named Sumana. The contemporary laws regarding exogamy would have forbidden such a marriage between first cousins.

• According to the Mahavamsa, she was 18 years old when she was ordained as a nun. The narrative suggests that she was married two years earlier, and that her husband as well as her child were ordained. It is unlikely that she would have been allowed to become a nun with such a young child.

Another source mentions that Ashoka had a daughter named Charumati, who married a kshatriya named Devapala.

According to the Ashokavadana, Ashoka had an elder half-brother named Susima. According to the Sri Lankan tradition, Ashoka killed his 99 half-brothers.

Various sources mention that one of Ashoka's brothers survived his ascension, and narrate stories about his role in the Buddhist community.

• According to Sri Lankan tradition, this brother was Tissa, who initially lived a luxurious life, without worrying about the world. To teach him a lesson, Ashoka put him on the throne for a few days, then accused him of being an usurper, and sentenced him to die after seven days. During these seven days, Tissa realised that the Buddhist monks gave up pleasure because they were aware of the eventual death. He then left the palace, and became an arhat.

• The Theragatha commentary calls this brother Vitashoka. According to this legend, one day, Vitashoka saw a grey hair on his head, and realised that he had become old. He then retired to a monastery, and became an arhat.

• Faxian calls the younger brother Mahendra, and states that Ashoka shamed him for his immoral behaviour. The brother than retired to a dark cave, where he meditated, and became an arhat. Ashoka invited him to return to the family, but he preferred to live alone on a hill. So, Ashoka had a hill built for him within Pataliputra.

• The Ashoka-vadana states that Ashoka's brother was mistaken for a Nirgrantha, and killed during a massacre of the Nirgranthas ordered by Ashoka....

A legend in the Buddhist text Vamsatthapakasini states that an Ajivika ascetic invited to interpret a dream of Ashoka's mother had predicted that he would patronise Buddhism and destroy 96 heretical sects. However, such assertions are directly contradicted by Ashoka's own inscriptions. Ashoka's edicts, such as the Rock Edicts 6, 7, and 12, emphasise tolerance of all sects. Similarly, in his Rock Edict 12, Ashoka honours people of all faiths. In his inscriptions, Ashoka dedicates caves to non-Buddhist ascetics, and repeatedly states that both Brahmins and shramanas deserved respect. He also tells people "not to denigrate other sects, but to inform themselves about them".

In fact, there is no evidence that Buddhism was a state religion under Ashoka. None of Ashoka's extant edicts record his direct donations to the Buddhists….

Historically, the image of Ashoka in the global Buddhist circles was based on legends (such as those mentioned in the Ashokavadana) rather than his rock edicts. This was because the Brahmi script in which these edicts were written was forgotten soon and remained undeciphered until its study by James Prinsep in the 19th century. The writings of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims such as Faxian and Xuanzang suggest that Ashoka's inscriptions mark the important sites associated with Gautama Buddha. These writers attribute Buddhism-related content to Ashoka's edicts, but this content does not match with the actual text of the inscriptions as determined by modern scholars after the decipherment of the Brahmi script. It is likely that the script was forgotten by the time of Faxian, who probably relied on local guides; these guides may have made up some Buddhism-related interpretations to gratify him, or may have themselves relied on faulty translations based on oral traditions. Xuanzang may have encountered a similar situation, or may have taken the supposed content of the inscriptions from Faxian's writings. This theory is corroborated by the fact that some Brahmin scholars are known to have similarly come up with a fanciful interpretation of Ashoka pillar inscriptions, when requested to decipher them by the 14th century Muslim king Firuz Shah Tughlaq. According to Shams-i Siraj's Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, after the king had these pillars transported from Topra and Mirat to Delhi as war trophies, these Brahmins told him that the inscriptions prophesized that nobody would be able to remove the pillars except a king named Firuz. Moreover, by this time, there were local traditions that attributed the erection of these pillars to the legendary hero Bhima….

Buddhist legends mention stories about Ashoka's past lives. According to a Mahavamsa story, Ashoka, Nigrodha and Devnampiya Tissa were brothers in a previous life. In that life, a pratyekabuddha was looking for honey to cure another, sick pratyekabuddha. A woman directed him to a honey shop owned by the three brothers. Ashoka generously donated honey to the pratyekabuddha, and wished to become the sovereign ruler of Jambudvipa for this act of merit. The woman wished to become his queen, and was reborn as Ashoka's wife Asandhamitta….

According to an Ashokavadana story, Ashoka was born as Jaya… he gave the Gautama Buddha dirt imagining it to be food. The Buddha approved of the donation, and Jaya declared that he would become a king by this act of merit. The text also states that Jaya's companion Vijaya was reborn as Ashoka's prime-minister Radhagupta…. The Chinese writer Pao Ch'eng's Shih chia ju lai ying hua lu asserts that an insignificant act like gifting dirt could not have been meritorious enough to cause Ashoka's future greatness. Instead, the text claims that in another past life, Ashoka commissioned a large number of Buddha statues as a king, and this act of merit caused him to become a great emperor in the next life.

The 14th century Pali-language fairy tale Dasavatthuppakarana (possibly from c. 14th century) combines the stories about the merchant's gift of honey, and the boy's gift of dirt. It narrates a slightly different version of the Mahavamsa story, stating that it took place before the birth of the Gautama Buddha. It then states that the merchant was reborn as the boy who gifted dirt to the Buddha; however, in this case, the Buddha [gave it to] his attendant Ānanda to create plaster from the dirt, which is used [to] repair cracks in the monastery walls….

Ashoka's inscriptions have not been found at major cities of the Maurya empire, such as Pataliputra, Vidisha, Ujjayini, and Taxila…. the 7th century Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang refers to some of Ashoka's pillar edicts, which have not been discovered by modern researchers….

Ashoka had almost been forgotten, but in the 19th century James Prinsep contributed in the revelation of historical sources. After deciphering the Brahmi script, Prinsep had originally identified the "Priyadasi" of the inscriptions he found with the King of Ceylon Devanampiya Tissa. However, in 1837, George Turnour discovered an important Sri Lankan manuscript (Dipavamsa, or "Island Chronicle") associating Piyadasi with Ashoka:

"Two hundred and eighteen years after the beatitude of the Buddha, was the inauguration of Piyadassi, .... who, the grandson of Chandragupta, and the son of Bindusara, was at the time Governor of Ujjayani."— Dipavamsa....

After Ashoka's death, the Maurya empire declined rapidly. The various Puranas provide different details about Ashoka's successors, but all agree that they had relatively short reigns. The empire seems to have weakened, fragmented, and suffered an invasion from the Bactrian Greeks….

Romila Thapar, have suggested that the extent and impact of his pacifism have been "grossly exaggeratedf."

-- Ashoka, by Wikipedia


• 232–224 BCE: Dasharatha

Dasharatha was a grandson of the Mauryan ruler Ashoka and the son of Tivala. He is commonly held to have succeeded his grandfather as imperial ruler in India although some sources including the Vayu Purana have given different names and numbers of Mauryan Emperors after Ashoka. Of the grandsons of Ashoka, the two most frequently mentioned are Samprati and Dasharatha. The latter is described in the Vishnu Purana as the son and imperial successor of Suyashas (a son of Ashoka)....

The Vayu and Brahmanda Puranas mention three Mauryan rulers—Bandhupalita, Indrapalita and Dasona— whose identification is rather difficult....

The political unity of the Mauryan Empire did not long survive Ashoka's death....According to Taranatha, another Mauryan prince, Virasena declared himself king in Gandhara. Vidarbha also seceded....Epigraphic evidence indicates that Dasharatha retained imperial power in Magadha. [Kenneth Pletcher; The History of India. pg 70: "Ashoka ruled for 37 years. After his death a political decline set in, and half a century later the empire was reduced to the Ganges valley alone. Tradition asserts that Ashoka's son Kunala ruled in Gandhara. Epigraphic evidence indicates that his grandsom Dasharatha ruled in Magadha. [NO CITATION!]]...

According to a Jain text, the provinces of Surashtra, Maharashtra, Andhra, and the Mysore region broke away from the empire shortly after Ashoka's death, but were reconquered by Dasharatha's successor, Samprati (who supposedly deployed soldiers disguised as Jain monks)....

Samprati, who succeeded Dasharatha, was according to the Hindu Puranas, the latter's son and according to the Buddhist and Jain sources, Kunala's son (making him possibly a brother of Dasharatha). The familial relationship between the two is thus not clear although evidently they were closely related members of the imperial family.

-- Dasharatha Maurya, by Wikipedia


• 224–215 BCE: Samprati

According to the Jain tradition he ruled for 53 years. [citation needed] The Jaina text Pariśiṣṭaparvan mentions that he ruled both from Pataliputra and Ujjain. According to a Jain text, the provinces of Surashtra, Maharashtra, Andhra, and the Mysore region broke away from the empire shortly after Ashoka's death (i.e., during Dasharatha's reign), but were reconquered by Samprati, who later deployed soldiers disguised as Jain monks....

While in one source, he is described as nominally a Jain from birth (Sthaviravali 9.53), most accounts emphasize his conversion at the hands of the Jain monk Shri Suhastisuri, the eighth leader of the congregation established by Lord Mahavira Swami....

-- Samprati, by Wikipedia


• 215–202 BCE: Shalishuka

While the Yuga Purana section of the Gargi Samhita mentions him as a quarrelsome, unrighteous ruler, he is also noted as being of "righteous words".

According to the Puranas he was succeeded by Devavarman.

-- Shalishuka, by Wikipedia


• 202–195 BCE: Devavarman

According to the Puranas, he was the successor of Shalishuka Maurya and reigned for a short period of seven years. He was not unrighteous, quarrelsome, very weak, and cruel like his predecessor, Shalishuka. But he was a bit weak, like all the Mauryan emperors who reigned after Ashoka. He was succeeded by Shatadhanvan.

-- Devavarman, by Wikipedia


• 195–187 BCE: Shatadhanvan

According to the Puranas, he was the successor of Devavarman Maurya and reigned for eight years. He was succeeded by Brihadratha Maurya.

-- Shatadhanvan, by Wikipedia


• 187–180 BCE: Brihadratha

According to the Puranas, Brihadratha succeeded his father Shatadhanvan to the throne and ruled for seven years....

Bāṇabhaṭṭa's Harshacharita says that Pushyamitra, while parading the entire Mauryan army before Brihadratha on the pretext of showing him the strength of the army, crushed his master. Pushyamitra killed the former emperor in front of his military and established himself as the new ruler....

A key detail is mentioned by Ceylonese Buddhist monk Badra, pointing that Brihadratha married Demetrius' daughter, Berenisa (Suvarnnaksi in Pali texts)....

The hypothesized Yavana invasion of Pataliputra is based in the Yuga Purana.

-- Brihadratha Maurya, by Wikipedia


-- Maurya Empire, by Wikipedia


Whether the Maurya dynasty had split into two lines and, if so, what were their relationships is too obscure a matter to warrant any deductions; we can only take 184, the year of Pushyamitra's accession, as signifying the end of the Mauryan empire.2 [For later descendants of the Mauryas see CHI p. 513.] In the tradition (p. 177) Pushyamitra proceeded to make his power felt, first near the capital, and then at Sagala (Sialkot) in the eastern Punjab, subsequently Menander's capital, which must imply some intermediate steps; the Greeks then did not take Sagala for an unknown period after 184, say two or three years at the least. On the other hand, there are reasons, which need not be anticipated here, for connecting Demetrius' enterprise with the end of the Mauryan empire and the accession of a usurper in 184, a thing which fits very well with the dates already obtained for Demetrius; if then it be supposed that he crossed the Hindu Kush about 183 or 182, that date cannot be very far out. In any case, the whole of the events to be recorded down to the death of Demetrius (Chap. v) must lie between 184 and 167 as their terminal points.

The story has been rendered meaningless by the custom of dating Menander either in the second half of the second century or, even worse, about 125-95 B.C.3 [Von Gutschmid's date (Gesch. Irans p. 104), though he himself called it an unsafe calculation. He was going on the list in the Vayu-purana which gives eight Greek kings of India -- Demetrius, Eucratides, Apollodotus, Strato I, Strato II, Zoilus, Menander, Dionysius -- and puts Menander two generations after his great-grandson. The sooner this worthless list is allowed to die the better. Even later dates for Menander have been suggested; see Winternitz, Eng. Tr. II p. 174 n. 2. I need not consider them.] One of the many merits of the late E. J. Rapson's work in the Cambridge History of India was to place Menander in his correct period;1 [CHI pp. 543 sqq.: contemporary with Demetrius.] this has not been followed by subsequent writers,2 [The editor of V. A. Smith4 pp. 229, 239 (his invasion 156-3); Grousset p. 39 (155 B.C.); Przyluski, Acoka p. 166 (150 B.C.). No evidence exists for such a dating; see p. 146 on Patanjali.] but is so obviously right that it is needless to argue it afresh;3 [Apollodorus makes him contemporary with Demetrius, Trogus with Apollodotus, and some coin indications (CHI p. 551) with Eucratides.] everything that follows will bear it out. Menander's chronology, like that of the Victory of Samothrace, has been an instructive instance of the danger of dating historical events by considerations drawn from artistic style. Because his coins are much inferior in style to those of Demetrius and his successors in Bactria, who could be approximately dated from Polybius, it was concluded that he must be late, so as to give time for the art to become 'debased'; whereas in reality it means that the artists at his disposal in the rather remote eastern Punjab were inferior in skill to those who worked in Bactria. It is as though some historian in the distant future should place the reign of George V in the Aurignacian period on the strength of some of Epstein's sculpture.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

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Part 3 of 5

Demetrius had to make arrangements for the government of Bactria during his absence, and he left his eldest son Euthydemus II as king in Bactria-Sogdiana; Euthydemus II put his own name and portrait on his silver coins,4 [BMC p. 8, Pl. III, 3, 4; CHI pp. 447-8; J. N. Svoronos, J.I.d'A.N. xv, 1913, p. 186.] but on his nickel and bronze issues he used a Seleucid type, the head of Apollo and a tripod-lebes.5 [BMC p. 8, Pl. III, 5, 6.] The common Hellenistic practice when a king was absent had been to leave a son merely as governor (p. 218 n. 1), but a parallel to the kingship of Euthydemus II can be found later among the Ptolemies: when Ptolemy VI Philometor invaded Syria and expected to be in that country for some time he left his son Ptolemy Neos Philopator as king in Egypt.6 [Otto, Zeit d. 6. Ptolemaers p. 128 n. 4.] As Bactria was Demetrius' home kingdom, it is probable that Euthydemus II was not a sub-king -- that would hardly have suited the circumstances -- but a full joint-king with his father on the Seleucid model; this would agree with what happened later (p. 221). The western provinces of the empire in Iran, as already noticed, were under the rule of Antimachus in the north and Apollodotus in the south.

Demetrius took to India with him his second son Demetrius (II), and also his general Menander, of whom much will be heard later. It is just possible that the Paropamisadae were his already (p. 101); anyhow he took Gandhara, crossed the Indus, and occupied Taxila, which had been Alexander's advanced base and must have been his also. It may be taken as certain that he occupied Taxila himself, because the line of conquest there bifurcated, and had he left Taxila to be occupied by Menander, it and not Sagala must have become Menander's capital.

Gandhara,1 [In the Jatakas Gandhara includes Taxila; but in this book I use the term in its strict sense. On Gandhara see Foucher, Gandhara; R. Grousset, Sur les traces de Bouddha, 1929, chap. VI.] the country between the Kunar river and the Indus, comprising the modern Bajaur, Swat, Buner, the Yusufzai country, and the country south of the Kabul river about Peshawur, was to be one of the strongholds of Greek power; it has been called a kind of new Hellas.2 [Grousset ib. p. 96.] Asoka had converted much of the country, and it became to Buddhists a second Holy Land, where rose three of the four great stupas3 [A stupa was a Buddhist shrine, circular and domed, usually but not always enclosing a relic. Buildings, even of stupa form, which did not enclose a relic were usually called chaityas: de la Vallee-Poussin p. 149. See on stupas, archaeology apart, Foucher I chap. I, and the long study by P. Mus, 'Barabudur', BEFEO XXXII, 1932, pp. 269-439, XXXIII pp. 577-980, XXXIV pp. 175-400.] which recorded Buddha's charity with his own body in earlier incarnations, those of the Body-gift at Manikyala, the Flesh-gift at (probably) Girarai in the hills between Peshawur and Buner, and the Eye-gift; this last may have towered aloft on the acropolis of what was to be the Greek capital, Pushkalavati (Charsadda), rendering, as has been said, 'still more striking its resemblance to its more famous Athenian counterpart'.4 [Foucher, Gandhara p. 15.] But Pushkalavati, like Taxila, was only partially Buddhist; Siva was still powerful enough there for his humped bull to become the coin-type of the Greek mint,5 [This certain fact (CHI p. 557) is confirmed by Siva being known to Greeks as the god of Gandhara: Hesychius, [x].] while the Greeks were to worship Artemis as their city goddess.6 [Copper coins of Peucolaos, obv. Artemis, rev. the Fortune of some city with mural crown; Lahore Cat. p. 324 no. 10, see CHI p. 558. What identifies the city of these coins with Pushkalavati is Maues' coins (next note).] But she was not the Greek Artemis; she was Anaitis (Anahita) of Bactra, for Anaitis and her crown of rays appear as Artemis radiate on coins of the Saca king Maues7 [BMC Pl. XVI, 4; Lahore Cat. Pl. X, 10; AS1 1929-30 p. 89 nos. 24, 25.] which are shown by the humped bull on them to have been struck at Pushkalavati, just as in Bactra itself she had appeared as Artemis radiate on a coin of Demetrius (p. 115). Unfortunately it is not known whether the Greek invaders brought her with them from Bactra, which would throw light on Greek relations with Asiatic deities, or whether she had arrived long before with one of the earlier streams of invaders whom Indians comprehensively called Bahlikas, i.e. Bactrians (p. 169); the latter possibility would, if correct, imply an Iranian element at Pushkalavati, again as at Taxila. But, unlike Taxila, Pushkalavati became a Greek polis (doubtless somewhat of the type of Susa, p. 27), as is shown by the Fortune of the city on kings' coins;1 [Those of Peucolaos (above). On the Greek name of Pushkalavati see p. 237 n. 5. Many of the city Fortunes on the Saca coinage (p. 353 n. 1) are probably Pushkalavati.] the solitary coin of the city itself2 [CHI p. 587 and Pl. VI, 10.] which exists to prove that it was once for a time completely independent (p. 336) shows, beside Siva's bull, the Fortune of the 'city of lotuses' with her mural crown, holding in her hand the lotus of Lakshmi. Evidently Pushkalavati, when a Greek polis, was no less proud of her alien deities than was Ephesus of her alien Artemis, and Siva's bull is a parallel to Artemis' bee on the coins of the Ionian city. Pushkalavati stood at what was probably then the junction of the Swat and Kabul rivers,3 [Foucher, Gandhara p. 11.] and as it and not Purushapura (Peshawur) became the Greek capital, the regular Greek line of communication westward probably did not run through the Khyber pass but by the route which Alexander had followed more to the northward; it seems unlikely that the Khyber was in regular use till the Kushans made Peshawur their capital.4 [See Foucher, BSOS VI, 1930-1, pp. 344-5, and plan p. 343. A correspondent, however, sent me a sketch of the masonry of some old block-houses above and commanding the Khyber pass, which he suggested was Greek. It looks to me more like the Kushan masonry at Taxila; but it is a matter which requires investigation on the spot by an archaeologist.]

With Gandhara in his hands, Demetrius would be well informed of Buddhist feeling, a matter which was to be of great importance; but from the military and political point of view the acquisition of Taxila was of more moment. The great city was even more important than it had been in Alexander's day, for it had long been the seat of the Mauryan governor of the North-West; though near it stood the fourth great stupa, that of the Head-gift, it was only partially Buddhist5 [There are Buddhist inscriptions of the Saca period, CII nos. II, XIII, XXVII, XXXI, XXXII.] and Vishnu was strong there (p. 406); with its famous University, of which the buildings have been excavated,1 [Sir J. Marshall, A guide to Taxila 1918 p. 72.] sought by students from many quarters, its merchant guilds who struck their own city coinage,2 [E. J. Rapson, Indian coins 1897 p. 14; C. J. Brown, The Coins of India 1922 pp. 15-19; J. Allan, BMC India, pp. cxxv, cxxviii, and see post p. 161 n. 1.] the Iranian element in its population with their Towers of Silence,3 [Aristobulus saw there corpses exposed to vultures, which he saw nowhere else in India, Strabo xv, 714. The Aramaic inscription found there (L. D. Barnett, JRAS 1915 p. 340; A. Cowley, ib. p. 342), though much earlier, may support this; and a tutelary Yaksha in the region of Taxila had an Iranian name, S. Levi, JA 1915 p. 75.] its balance of religions, its feeling of independence which had led it to withstand Porus and to revolt against the Maurya, it seemed destined to be the capital of the foreign invaders. So Demetrius thought. The city he found is now represented by the latest stratum of ruins on the Bhir mound; he presently built a new city on Sirkap, now buried beneath the remains of the later Parthian city (p. 179). To it he transferred the population of Old Taxila, as Hellenistic kings in the West would transfer the population of some Greek town to one of their new foundations, and the city on Bhir came to an end;4 [Sir J. Marshall thinks that Bhir came to an end with the Greek conquest, the two latest strata being Mauryan, ASI 1930-4 p. 149. Sirkap was therefore certainly Demetrius' foundation, even if he did not finish it, for there is nothing beneath the two Hellenistic Strata.] the Taxila henceforth mentioned throughout this book is the city on Sirkap, which will be described later.

Demetrius left his son Demetrius II as his sub-king to govern the Paropamisadae and presumably Gandhara also, that is, all the country between the Hindu Kush and the Indus; his also must have been the task of securing and perhaps improving the communications with Bactria. That he had the royal title is shown by his putting his own portrait on the bilingual tetradrachm already referred to (p. 77). It is certain enough (p. 158) that his seat was Alexandria-Kapisa, the capital of the Paropamisadae (App. 6), from which Gandhara also could be governed, as it was from Kapisa in Hsuan Tsiang's day. Many reasons contributed to the importance of the capital beside its wonderfully fertile plain, which has led to it being called a little Kashmir without the lake.5 [Foucher, Afghanistan p. 266 (of Kapisa). But as he thought Kapisa is represented by Begram, I fancy that the plain he describes must be that of Alexandria.] It was near the silver mines of the Panjshir valley and was thus well suited to be the principal mint of the province; Kapisa was the outlet for Kafiristan, the land of the Kambojas, who were possibly a valuable support to the Greeks (p. 170) -- indeed it has been thought probable that Kapisa and Kamboja are the same word;1 [S. Levi, JA 1923 ii p. 52.] and the dual city was nearer to Bactra than any other important city and commanded the three routes. The reverse type on the bilingual tetradrachm of Demetrius II is Zeus holding a thunder-bolt. Zeus, one of the three deities of the Alexander coinage, had not before been used by any Bactrian king, and it is almost certain, from the types on the silver coinages of Pantaleon and Agathocles (p. 158), that the Zeus of this tetradrachm is meant for the elephant-god of Kapisa. A few years later the god of Kapisa began to be regularly represented as Zeus enthroned;2 [Eucratides' coin, see p. 212.] but the reason for representing him as enthroned (p. 213) was due to other circumstances which had not yet arisen, while the reason for representing him as Zeus was a compelling one. For the elephant-god had his abode on the mountain Pilusara;3 [CHI p. 556 (from Hsuan Tsiang). The mountain appears on Eucratides' coin.] and to Greeks a god who lived on a mountain-top could not well become anything but Zeus.4 [Zeus Kasios is perhaps the best-known instance, but there are many; see A. B. Cook, Zeus II, App. B, 'The mountain cults of Zeus'.]

Demetrius II then ruled and coined in Alexandria-Kapisa. But he coined for his father, not for himself, as Antiochus I had once done:5 [Coins with Antiochus' legend and Seleucus' head: E. H. Bunbury, NC 1883 pp. 67-71; Head2 p. 758.] this is shown by his putting his father's title 'Of King Demetrius the Invincible' on his tetradrachms, while on his square bilingual copper coins (which were struck by him and not by his father)6 [Because the reverse type (BMC p. 163 no. 3) is the winged thunder-bolt, which appears in Zeus' hand on the tetradrachm and symbolises Zeus, and is therefore the type of Demetrius II. not of his father.] he put not only his father's title but his father's head, the well-known head wearing the elephant-scalp. The tetradrachms would circulate principally among Greeks, who understood the position; hence his own head. But the copper coins would circulate, or so it was hoped, among Indians, who might not understand; hence his father's head. But the real matter was the introduction on the coinage of a Prakrit legend, written in Kharoshthi, beside the Greek legend. The great importance of this step will be considered later; here I need only say that this radical development in policy could only have been due to Demetrius himself, not to any sub-king, and proves yet again that Demetrius II was coining to his father's instructions. Demetrius himself struck no coins in India; his coins nearly all come from Iran, and are practically never found east of the Indus,1 [Cunningham, NC 1869 p. 141; BMC p. xxv; Whitehead, NNM p. 15.] though one has come from the excavations at Taxila.2 [One from Bhir, ASI 1920-1 Part 1 p. 21. Also one of Euthydemus from Sirkap, ib. 1927-8 p. 60. In the Pearse collection in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, is a silver coin ascribed to Demetrius, ASI 1928-9 p. 139 no. 4, Pl. LVI, no. 4: obv. youngish head of king, diademed and uncovered; rev. Apollo on omphalos, with legend [x]. It is obviously the Seleucid Demetrius I.]

One word as to Demetrius' communications. The Hindu Kush, which has never prevented anyone from invading India who had a mind to, is said to be a less formidable barrier than it seems; and it has been pointed out that the whole story of the Greeks in India presupposes fairly easy communication between Taxila and Bactra.3 [A. Foucher, CR Ac. Inscr. 1927 p. 117.] There were three routes across the Hindu Kush into Bactria,4 [Cunningham, Geog. p. 28. On the routes of the Paropamisadae see also E. Trinkler, Afghanistan, Petermanns Mitt. Supp. Bd. 196, 1928, pp. 57 sqq.] all of them commanded by Alexandria-Kapisa at the junction of the Panjshir and Ghorband rivers. The central route, over one of the lofty Kaoshan group of passes, does not come in question; it rises too high, though local tradition believes that Alexander used it for one of his crossings. The north-eastern route commanded by Kapisa, up the Panjshir and across the longer but lower Khawak pass, had been used by Alexander on his other crossing; but though it may have occasionally been used by the Greeks, it led primarily to Badakshan, and made the road to Bactra itself very long. The southwestern route commanded by Alexandria, generally used to-day, furnished the most direct road between the capital of the Paropamisadae and Bactra; it runs up the Ghorband by Bamyan and across the Kara Kotal pass to the Darrah, the river of Bactra, thus turning the Hindu Kush rather than crossing it; the road crosses three passes, but all are much lower than the Khawak.5 [On the Bamyan route see Foucher, Afghanistan p. 257 and his Map 3 facing p. 278.] This was the regular route in Hsuan Tsiang's day, though the pilgrim himself, perhaps for variety, went home by the Khawak; and the great Buddhist sculptures found at Bamyan attest the importance of the place subsequently to the Greek period.

The French archaeological mission had no doubt that the Bamyan route was the usual Greek route,1 [Foucher, Afghanistan pp. 180 sqq.; cf. CR Ac. Inscr. 1917 p. 117.] though apparently no archaeological remains, such as foundations of block-houses, were found. I do not know their reasons, but are two pieces of evidence which are very strong: one is the passage from Varro to be presently cited, and the other the fact that Pliny, speaking as though approaching from the north, names first the Bamyan-Ghorband eparchy and then Opiane (p. 97 n. 1), that is, he speaks from the point of view of someone approaching Alexandria by the Bamyan route. If this were the usual route, it would explain why Alexander founded Alexandria on the opposite bank of the river to Kapisa instead of utilising the latter city, and would explain two other things also: the small importance in Greek times of Kabul, cut off from this road by the Koh-i-baba range between Kabul and the Ghorband valley, and the tradition of the hardships endured by Alexander's army in crossing the Khawak; for though Persian armies had invaded India before him, if they had used the Bamyan route his crossing of the Khawak in force may have been pioneering work. It may be supposed that the Greek kings did all they could -- road improvement, shelters, depots of provisions suggest themselves -- to make the route between Alexandria and Bactra as easy as might be, and there is one curious bit of evidence that they succeeded. When Pompey called for a report on the feasibility of making a trade route from India via Bactria and the Caspian to the Cyrus river, Varro says that the report stated that goods could be brought in seven days from India (presumably Alexandria-Kapisa) to the river of Bactra;2 [ ] one need not insist on the seven days, but it shows that the transit was considered tolerably easy, and also that the regular route was that by Bamyan to the Darrah river.

Once in possession of Taxila, Demetrius had two possible lines of advance, on either side of the Indian desert: one south-eastward along the great road across the Punjab and by the Delhi passage to the Ganges and the Mauryan capital Pataliputra, the other southward (at first southwestward) down the Indus to its mouth and whatever might lie beyond. Alexander had attempted the two lines successively; Demetrius took them concurrently. His own sons, as their portraits show, were as yet too young to lead a great advance; but he was fortunate in commanding the services of two lieutenants who must have been very able men, his brother or kinsman Apollodotus and his general Menander. The two are twice coupled in the classical tradition,1 [Trogus Prol. XLI: Periplus 47.] which indicates some close connection between them,2 [As E. J. Rapson has noticed: Ancient India 1914 p. 128; CHI p. 547.] but in each case Apollodotus is named first, which suggests that he was the more important; doubtless the reason is that he was connected with the royal house, while Menander was not. Who Apollodotus was has already been considered (p. 76); for Menander I must refer to the Excursus (pp. 420 sq.). He was a Greek from the Paropamisadae, and certainly a commoner; his birth in a village might mean that his father was a great landowner, successor to one of those Iranian barons who figure so largely in the Alexander story,3 [See p. 32. It is not however known that this ever happened in the Farther East.] and that he was born in his father's stronghold to which the village was ancillary, but it more probably means that he was merely the son of a cleruch in a military settlement; in either case he had risen by his own abilities. As he died between 150 and 145 (p. 226), and as his latest coins (so far as portraiture can be relied on in Graeco-Indian coins) show a man of advanced years,4 [Lahore Cat. p. 59, n. 1.] he must have been nearer to the generation of Demetrius than to that of his sons; and he had certainly seen fighting, for Demetrius would not have put an unproved man in command of the advance to Pataliputra. His portraits,5 [Whitehead NNM Pl. VII. I is about the best.] for what they are worth, confirm the fact that he was not a Euthydemid; he has a different type of face, and the Euthydemid bull-neck is conspicuously absent. An Indian writer remarked later that among the Yavanas slaves could rise to be kings;6 [Levi, Quid de Graecis p. 23.] doubtless he used 'slaves' in the Persian sense of everyone not royal (p. 355 n. 6), and was thinking primarily of the career of the most famous of the Yavana monarchs. But it must be emphasised that at the time of the invasion Menander was only Demetrius' general, a fact, it would seem, better understood by Indian writers of the period (p.166) than by modern scholars.

Our two primary Greek sources, taken together, ascribe the conquest of Northern India to three men, Demetrius, Apollodotus, and Menander. At first sight indeed it looks as if Apollodorus ascribed the conquest to Demetrius and Menander,7 [Strabo XI. 516.] 'Trogus' source' to Apollodotus and Menander;8 [Trogus Prol. XLI: Indicae quoque res additae, gestae per Apollodotum et Menandrum reges eorum.] but these brief notices in a fragment of Apollodorus and in Trogus' prologue to a chapter which Justin did not excerpt are inclusive, not exclusive; they mean, not that Apollodorus excluded Apollodotus or 'Trogus' source' Demetrius, but that these were the three men who between them carried the conquest through. As however the secondary sources, Strabo and Trogus, while one selected Demetrius for mention and the other Apollodotus, both name Menander, and as there were certainly two lines of advance, we are justified in taking it to mean that one line of advance was Menander's and that the other was shared by Demetrius and Apollodotus; it will appear that the evidence agrees with this.

Demetrius himself was responsible for the conquest of Sind. A scholion to the grammarian Patanjali1 [Given by A. Weber, Indische Studien v p. 150 n.] (p. 146) mentions a town Dattamitri among the Sauviras and says that it was founded by Dattamitra, who is named in the Mahabharata as king of the Yavanas and Sauviras and is undoubtedly Demetrius; and the existence of this Demetrias in Sind is confirmed by an inscription.2 [No. 18 of the Nasik cave inscriptions (p. 257 n. 3). Weber ib. pointed out that the term Dattamitriya used in another scholion to Patanjali for an inhabitant of Dattamitri is only the Sanscrit form of the Prakrit Damtamitiyaka of the inscription, for which he suggested Datamitiyaka; since then E. Senart has in fact read the word in the inscription as Datamitiyaka, Ep. Ind. VIII, 1905-6, p. 90 no. 18. See also on the identification of the towns of the scholion and the inscription N. R. Ray, IHQ IV. 1928. p. 743. It seems free from doubt.] It was certainly not the Arachosian Demetrias between Seistan and Ghazni (see App. 9), for the Sauvira-Sindhus had nothing to do with Arachosia; at this time they were on the lower Indus and occupied its Delta (p. 171). This Demetrias is not likely to have been a completely new city. Alexander had begun to build great docks at Patala and must have left a colony there; what Demetrius found there is unknown, but Patala was the natural port and centre, and undoubtedly Demetrias was Patala refounded and renamed;3 [This will be confirmed by the section on the pepper trade in chap. IX (pp. 370 sqq.).] Demetrius may have had in mind the creation of a port on the Indus which should correspond to that of Seleuceia on the Tigris. Demetrius then followed Alexander's track down the Indus to the sea. Alexander had gone by water; Darius I before him had sent a fleet down the Indus; Demetrius too must have followed the easy and natural course of going by water, which would mean that on reaching the sea there was a fleet at his disposal. The trident on one of his coins4 [BMC p. 7 no. 14.] must imply naval power, but it is a Bactrian coin and not likely to refer to a fleet on the Indus; probably it is connected with the symbolism of Antimachus' coins (p. 90) and refers to the squadron which every Bactrian king must have maintained on the Oxus as part of the country's system of defence.

Demetrius himself can have gone no farther. Like the Antigonids, the Euthydemids were tied to their northern frontier; as Macedonia was the shield of Greece against the barbarism of the Balkans, so Bactria was the shield of Iran against the nomads who, as Euthydemus had told Antiochus III, were perpetually threatening her, and who were one day to overwhelm her; no Bactrian king, for his own safety, dare neglect this responsibility. Demetrius, even though he had left a young son to guard Bactria, had taken some risk in going himself to Sind. He had done what Alexander had done; he must now have handed over the command of the advance southward to Apollodotus and returned to Taxila. Apollodotus, coming from the Arachosian Demetrias, may have joined him on his way down the Indus, or may have been annexing eastern Gedrosia, which was seemingly governed from Sind (p. 94).

Menander's advance to the south-east is attested both from the Greek and the Indian side. Some writers indeed, with no clear idea of the two lines of advance, have ascribed all the Indian conquests to Menander, a thing which time, space, and Trogus' mention of Apollodotus alike forbid. It is a proof of Cunningham's penetration that he saw something of the truth as long ago as 1870,1 [NC 1870 p. 85.] when he said that the campaigns of Apollodotus and Menander were contemporary but distinct, that of Apollodotus being directed from Sind against Rajputana; but nothing came of his illuminating suggestion, because he put both kings much too late and numismatists subsequently saw that Apollodotus, who still coined on the Attic standard and some of whose coins were overstruck by Eucratides, must be a very early king. The first thing is to consider exactly what Apollodorus does say, before coming to the Indian account.

He says in one passage that the Greeks conquered more of India than the Macedonians (Alexander) had done,2 [Strabo xv, 686: [x] (the Greeks) [x].] and in another that they became (imperfect tense; that is, they were for a time) masters of 'the Indians'; they overthrew more peoples than Alexander had done (i.e. Alexander in India) and most of all Menander, some himself and some Demetrius.1 [Strabo XI, 516: [x].] As the words 'they overthrew' (aorist; that is, one point of time) apply to both men, we get two facts: that Demetrius and Menander were acting in concert, and that Menander went farther than Demetrius. Strabo adds to this excerpt a note of his own, showing that (like some moderns) he found it hard to believe: 'at least if Menander really crossed the Hypanis (Beas) toward the east and went as far as the Isamos',2 [Ib. [x].] which implies that Apollodorus had said he did, and incidentally implies that Demetrius did not go so far and did not cross the Hypanis. Most of the Alexander-historians call the Beas, where Alexander turned back, the Hyphasis; but one of them, Aristobulus, preferred the form Hypanis,3 [In xv, 686 Strabo contrasts Apollodorus with some unnamed writer who uses the form Hypanis and exaggerates city numbers in round thousands (Alexander had 5,000 cities between Hydaspes and Hypanis). In 693, a named fragment of Aristobulus (= F. Gr. Hist. fr. 35, 19), a similar exaggeration of city numbers in round thousands occurs (the shifting of the Indus made over 1,000 cities desert). Therefore the unnamed writer of 686, who uses the form Hypanis, is Aristobulus, though the passage is not given as his in F. Gr. Hist. It is morally certain that the Hypanis of 700 is from Aristobulus also. Strabo took the form from him.] and that is the form always used by Strabo. For the unknown name Isamos the most usual conjectures are the Iomanes (Jumna) or the Soamos (Son); if there really be a Prakrit name Issumai for the Jumna4 [K. H. Druva, JBORS XVI, 1930, p. 34 n. 25. But I cannot make out if Issumai be a real name or if the writer is only suggesting that it would be the Prakrit form of Isamos.] it settles the matter, but it is not very material. For there is one more passage of Apollodorus, or rather of Strabo paraphrasing Apollodorus in his own words, which has too often been overlooked:5 [It is not given among the fragments of Apollodorus in FHG IV, p. 308, but there can be no question about it. Apollodorus is not yet given in F. Gr. Hist.] it says that those who came after Alexander advanced beyond the Hypanis to the Ganges and Pataliputra.6 [Strabo xv, 698: we know India within the Hypanis [x]. The word [x] shows that a military expedition is meant and excludes the possibility of the reference being to Megasthenes, who anyhow could not be classified under Alexander's successors ([x]).] The language used imports a military expedition and imports also that Pataliputra was taken; Strabo could not have put it in that form had Apollodorus said that they had tried to take the capital and failed.

The advance of the Greeks to Pataliputra is recorded from the Indian side in the Yuga-purana (p. 132); translations of the material sections are given in full in Appendix 4, with such discussion as is necessary. It remains to take the outline (we cannot get more) of Menander's advance and see the way in which the Greek and Indian sources agree with and supplement each other, a conclusive proof that the story is true. [LC: !!!]

In the tradition (p. 177) Pushyamitra's power reached anyhow to Sagala (Sialkot between the Chenab and the Ravi); it is possible, as will be seen, that the halt at Taxila, while the ground won was being consolidated and Demetrius' fleet was being built, was used to prepare Menander's way with a little propaganda (p. 178). Menander first occupied Sagala, known from the Milindapanha to have been his capital later (see Excursus), and then, as Apollodorus says, crossed the Beas, where Alexander had turned back. The Yuga-purana then mentions the Yavanas at Mathura (Muttra) on the Jumna; here comes in Apollodorus' statement about the Isamos, if it be the Jumna. The Yuga-purana then records the Yavanas at Saketa (in Oude) and in the Panchala country (the Jumna-Ganges doab), which is followed by Apollodorus' statement that the Greeks reached the Ganges. Finally both Apollodorus and the Yuga-purana record the occupation of the capital. The latter document says that the Greeks first took Kusumadjava, which is Kusumapura, the old name of Pataliputra, but which at this time must have been separate from, or a suburb of, the Mauryan town, and then took the Mauryan capital itself, which was defended by a mud wall, necessitating the use of their siege train, as Alexander had had to use his siege train against the high mud wall of Cyropolis; it is said that the excavations at Pataliputra have brought to light a mud wall of the Mauryan period 14 feet thick and flanked with wooden palisades.1 [K. P. Jayaswal, JBORS XIV, 1928, p. 417.] The Yuga-purana subsequently treats the Greeks as masters of the country: they command, and the kings disappear.

One point in this account, the taking of Saeta, is further confirmed from the Indian side by a statement of the grammarian Patanjali (made merely to illustrate the right tense to use for an event which has just happened), 'The Yavana was besieging Saketa.'1 [Cited in many works: see Levi, Quid de Graecis p. 16; CHI p. 544. Weber, Ind. Stuien XIII p. 304, pointed out that the verb in the sentence, arunad, means 'besiege' and nothing else.] Patanjali's date has generally been put about 150 B.C. on the strength of his supposed reference to Pushyamitra's horse sacrifice as a contemporary event, and the dating so reached has been used to date Menander's advance to about 150. There is nothing in this, for it is generally admitted that Patanjali's grammatical examples are, or in any particular case may be, not necessarily his own composition but traditional examples, put together before his own time;2 [Weber op. cit. XIII pp. 312, 315, 319; de la Vallee-Poussin p. 200.] in fact a recent authority, I venture to think conclusively, puts him much later than 150.3 [De la Vallee-Poussin pp. 199-202, based on Patanjali's mention of the Sacas. See on these Sacas the theories of Bhandarkar, Indian Culture 1, 1934, p. 275, and Konow, ib. II, 1935, p. 189, with de la Vallee-Poussin's reply, ib. II, 1936, p. 584. His argument is unanswerable, unless the mention of Sacas in Patanjali be a later interpolation, which no one has suggested.] What Patanjali does show is that the Greek invasion produced such an impression that it could be used as a commonplace illustration in grammars.

Before passing on, one or two points in connection with the Greek advance to Pataliputra must be noticed. One need not waste time over the belief of some writers that the Greek kings were condottiere and their conquests raids, beyond hoping that such writers have clear ideas of what a 'raid' from Rawul Pindi upon Patna would mean; but the view held in defiance of Apollodorus, that it was Demetrius and not Menander who led the advance south-eastward, must be considered. It was first put forward as a guess in 1911 by Professor D. R. Bhandarkar,4 [Ind. Ant. XL, 1911, p. 11 n. 5.] because he very properly saw that the advance must have taken place much earlier than the late date which he believed to be that of Menander; his reasoning was sound, but now that Menander's true date is known it has no further application.5 [The same thing applies to the adoption of this theory by H. Raychaudhuri, The Political History of Ancient India 1923 pp. 204 sqq., 209. I have been unable to see this book, and take the information from L. D. Barnett, Calcutta Review X, 1924, p. 250.] Subsequently in 1923 Dr Sten Konow6 [Acta Orientalia 1, 1913. p. 27.] based a similar theory upon a passage in the Hathigumpha inscription of Kharavela, which is supposed to state that Demetrius withdrew (from Pataliputra) to Mathura, and this has found some acceptance. It been called a Yavana,1 [The Rudraman inscription, Ep. Ind. VIII, 1905-6, p. 46.] and Ceylonese tradition knows of a missionary, Dhammarakkita, sent by Asoka to Aparanta (Gujerat), who is called a Yona.2 [CHI pp. 499, 603, from the Mahavamsa.] The other kingdom, that of Sigerdis, is unknown, but can only mean the country between Patalene and Surastrene, including Cutch;3 [This, and Theophila, preclude the idea that Apollodotus might have gone by sea to Kathiawar; though he may have had a fleet cooperating.] the provinces however will be discussed later (pp. 233 sqq.) and I only want here to get the outline of the conquest.

The next notice of Apollodotus is in the anonymous Periplus Maris Erythraei (referred to throughout as the Periplus), in connection with the great seaport of Barygaza (Broach) in Gujerat, on the east coast of the Gulf of Cambaye facing Kathiawar. The merchant who wrote the Periplus in the middle of the first century A.D.4 [On the date of this work see now J. G. C. Anderson in CAH x, 1934, p. 882, whose reasoning is conclusive against the later date often adopted; equally conclusive against any date near the end of the first century A.D. is it that the Kushans are still in Bactria and have not yet occupied Gandhara (Periplus 47). Anderson's date, the early part of the reign of Malchus II of Nabataea, A.D. 40-71, may for practical purposes be called the middle of the first century A.D., as I have done throughout; it agrees fairly closely with the date, 50-65 A.D., taken by M. P. Charlesworth, C.Q. XXII, 1928, p. 92, who rightly said it could not be later.] is not always clear about the interior of India, which he did not know; but for the things he personally knew and had seen -- the coast and the ports -- he is good authority. He says that in the country about Barygaza there were still mementos of Alexander's expedition -- old shrines, foundations of permanent camps (or barracks), and very great wells.5 [Periplus 41: [x] On [x] see p. 86.] Alexander of course was never near Barygaza. Some of the Alexander-stories belong to Islam; but it has often been suspected that some are reminiscences of the Greeks, and this one, from its date, is certain: the objects referred to are mementos of the Greek (Apollodotus') conquest and of the subsequent Greek occupation. The camps are interesting, as showing that the troops were camped outside, and not in, a city, but more interesting are the wells. Few countries could exist without knowing how to dig wells; what the Periplus means is that Greek engineers could dig deeper wells than the people of India could. One recalls that Alexander had a well-digging expert with his army,1 [Gorgos [x] (Strabo xv, 700) was presumably not only a mining engineer but also a water engineer, like the [x] charged to open up the choked outlets! of Lake Copais, id. IX, 407. On Alexander's well-digging see Arr. Anab. VI, 18, I.] and that when the Chinese attacked Ir-shi in Ferghana in 101 B.C. the citadel was saved by a 'man from Ts'in 'who knew how to dig (deep) wells (see pp. 310 sq.).

The Periplus further shows that Apollodotus ruled Barygaza -- that is, it was in his realm -- for some years, in the statement that his coins and those of Menander were still circulating in that town in the first century A.D.2 [Periplus 47: [x]. This means that the writer had seen them.] This is of the first importance. One numismatist has indeed denied that the word in question means 'circulating' and thinks it means 'come to light',3 [Whitehead, NC p. 306 n. 16.] but fortunately there is exact evidence about the word which leaves no loophole for doubt;4 [Sext. Empir. adv. Math. I, 178: [x]. This is conclusive for the meaning of [x]. It never means 'come to light'.] it means circulating as current coin for buying and selling. One may dig up a king's coins in places where he did not rule, coins brought thither by merchants, changed at the money-changer's, and ultimately buried or lost; but if, long after a king's death, his money was still current in trade in some town -- which may mean that the town had gone on issuing copies of it5 [Old coins might also have been sent there; but the deduction would be the same.] -- then he must have ruled that town during his lifetime long enough to make his coinage a well-accepted medium of exchange.6 [Whitehead loc. cit. makes the objection that before the war Indian rupees were accepted in parts of the Levant, but that did not mean that the Levant was an appanage of the Indian empire. I see no connection between the two things. The rupees (if not taken merely to melt down) were accepted because behind them was the credit of the Government of India. But Apollodotus' kingdom was long extinct; the acceptance of his money was 'use and wont', and that could only have originated in his rule. I note as a curiosity that about 1841 H. H. Wilson found Kushan copper coins in circulation in various Indian cities (Ariana Antiqua p. 349); and the receipt among small change of a copper coin of Cleopatra VII has recently been recorded from the French Riviera.] Consequently Apollodotus' rule in Barygaza cannot be in doubt.

This is the known limit of Apollodotus' advance southward -- Kathiawar and part of Gujerat, i.e. Barygaza and presumably Surat. There are indeed the cave inscriptions from the country behind Bombay, which will be considered in their place, but they do not go to proving Greek rule. More important is the manner in which his advance is confirmed by the fragments of a list of the provinces (satrapies) of the Greek empire in India preserved by Ptolemy; but I want to deal with Ptolemy's invaluable evidence as a whole, and these fragments will be considered in Chapter VI. But one remark may be made here about Apollodorus' phrase, the 'kingdom called of Saraostos'. Greeks adopted from Indians the habit of calling a king by the name of his country or his capital: Saraostos is 'King Surashtra', the king of Kathiawar; Taxiles of the Alexander-historians is 'King Taxila', his personal name being Ambhi; the 'King Palibothros' of Strabo (xv, 702) is the Mauryan emperor for the time being, whose capital was Palibothra (Pataliputra); two fresh Indian instances, on coins of the Andhra dynasty, have recently been recorded.1 [J. Przyluski, JRAS 1929 p. 276.] The usage is notorious. But Patanjali's 'The Yavana' (p. 146) is not in this category, for Yavana is not a territorial designation; the phrase does not mean 'King Yavana', but merely 'the Yavana chief'. There is a similar use in English.2 [Cf. 'The Percy' and 'The Douglas' of the old ballads, or a title like 'The Mackintosh' to-day, which is said to be English, not Gaelic.]

With Barygaza Apollodotus had reached what must have been one of the Greek objectives, the great port which could give them good trade communication by sea with the West; but he had also reached something else, for Barygaza was the terminus of the main road which ran from west to east across India by Ujjain and Vidisa (Bhilsa) to Kosambi on the Jumna, and so to the Ganges and Pataliputra.3 [On this route and the Deccan route (p. 151) see T. W. Rhys Davids, Buddhist India 1903, pp. 36, 103; CHI p. 517; de la Vallee-Poussin p. 173.] It is known that he turned inland, for Patanjali gives one more notice, 'The Yavana was besieging Madhyamika',4 [P. 146 n. I. Confusion used to be caused by the Brihat Samhita mentioning a people called Madhyamikas in the Middle Country (Fleet, Ind. Ant. XXII, 1893, p. 170), but the coins have cleared that up.] a place identified by its coins with the strong fortress of Nagari near Chitor in southern Rajputana.5 [V. A. Smith4 p. 227 and refs., and see now BMC India p. cxxiv.] It seems certain that he not only besieged but took it, for its coins show that in the middle of the second century B.C. it was peopled by Sibi,1 [The coins (ib.), found at Nagari, bear the legend 'Of the Sibi people of Madhyamika city'. These must be the Sibi whom the list in the Brihat Samhita places in the south division, with Barygaza (Fleet ib. p. 171).] whose own country was about Jhang in the southern Punjab with their capital at Shorkot, 'Sibi-town',2 [Sivipura = Shorkot, V. A. Smith4 p. 97 n. 2, from an inscription, Ep. Ind. XVI pp. 15-17.] and who must, it seems, have been settled at Madhyamika by Apollodotus; there is no question of the whole people having moved, for the known coins come from a very circumscribed area, Nagari and Chitor.3 [BMC India pp. cxxiv-v.]

At Madhyamika he was only some 80 miles north of Ujjain, the capital of Avanti (West Malva), and at Barygaza he had been on the great road running eastward to Ujjain. He could no doubt have reached Madhyamika across country, leaving Ujjain on his flank; but Alexander had always followed the main routes where they existed, as no doubt any army in Asia normally did, and the common-sense of the matter is that Apollodotus would follow the main highway and occupy Ujjain; indeed one can go further and say that it is inconceivable that his principal objective can have been anything but that city.4 [Cunningham, who sometimes had flashes of intuition in advance of the knowledge of his day, actually made this suggestion (NC 1870 p. 85), but nothing came of it.] For Ujjain was in the west very much what Taxila was in the north, an important seat of learning and one of the chief commercial centres of India: situated at the junction of two main routes, the Barygaza-Kosambi road to the capital and the road that came north from the Deccan, it gathered up and forwarded the trade between the Ganges valley, Southern India, and the western sea. In one way it was more than Taxila, for it was one of the seven sacred cities of India, whose meridian was to be taken as the base for India by the astronomers of a later day;5 [V.A. Smith4 p. 163; E. J. Rapson, Ancient India 1914 p. 175; CHI p. 531.] and like Taxila it had been the seat of a Mauryan viceroy. That Apollodotus could have passed it by is impossible; but it must be emphasised that this is only a deduction. There is no direct evidence of his occupation. for though Ujjain appears in Ptolemy (VII, 62) with a Greek name, [x], this is only a rendering in Greek letters of the sound of the Indian name Ujjahini and might have been made at any time. But there is the indirect evidence of the rule there later of the Saca Western Satraps (pp. 243, 335); for the Sacas merely followed where the Greeks had led.


We can now see where we are going and what Demetrius was aiming at. The Mauryan empire proper, north of the line of the Nerbudda and the Vindhya mountains, had pivoted upon three great cities: Pataliputra the capital and seat of the emperor, Taxila the seat of the viceroy of the North-West, and Ujjain the seat of the viceroy of the West; these two viceroys had usually been princes of the blood, and Asoka himself had been viceroy in Ujjain under his father Bindusara. Certainly Asoka when king had given the empire a great extension southward;1 [He had two new viceroys for the southern conquests, one in Tosali over the Kalingas (Kalinga Borderers Edict, Dhauli version) and one in Savarnagiri for the south (Minor Rock Edict I, Brahmagiri version).] but the new possessions had been lost again after his death, and it must be remembered that Greek ideas of the empire were largely taken from Megasthenes' account of the empire of Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!], and that to Greeks the Mauryan empire essentially meant Northern India. Now, with Menander at Pataliputra, Apollodotus at Ujjain, and himself in occupation of Taxila, Demetrius held the three cardinal points of that empire, the three centres of the administration; the occupation of what remained might seem a mere matter of time and detail. One cannot, as will be seen later, call it the 'conquest' of the Mauryan empire; rather, Demetrius' aim was to restore that huge derelict empire, but under Greek rule and with himself on the throne of Asoka. That was his plan, a plan hardly inferior in scope and audacity to Alexander's plan of conquering the Persian empire. One may suppose that he meant to govern his empire from his new city of Taxila, with Apollodotus and Menander as his viceroys in Ujjain and Pataliputra, that is, to govern in a direction the reverse of the Mauryas; for from Taxila he could keep in touch with Bactria, which must necessarily have remained the basis of his power.

Perhaps one curious speculation may be permitted here. It has recently been suggested2 [J. Allan in The Cambridge Shorter History of India 1934 p. 33. that Asoka was grandson of the Seleucid princess, whoever she was, whom Seleucus gave in marriage to Chandragupta.[No, Sandrocottus!]3 [See p. 174 n. 3. The suggestion of K. H. Druva, JBORS XVI, 1930, p. 35 n. 28, that on the dates she was more probably married to Chandragupta's [No, Sandrocottus!] son Bindusara, Asoka's father, is worth considering.] Should this far-reaching suggestion be well founded, it would not only throw light on the good relations between the Seleucid and Maurya dynasties, but would mean that the Maurya dynasty was descended from, or anyhow connected with, Seleucus. But Demetrius was a Seleucid on the distaff side; and when the Mauryan line became extinct, he might well have himself, if not as the next heir, at any rate as the heir nearest at hand. His plan to revive the Mauryan empire would then really have meant that he proposed to enter upon his inheritance. Should this be true, then he must have crossed the Hindu Kush with his plan ready formed; otherwise one might conjecture that that plan only took final shape at Taxila, after he had learnt more about Indian feeling and the possibilities of the situation, just as it was not till after Issus that Alexander definitely envisaged the conquest of the whole Persian empire.

There are two other matters which bear out Demetrius' plan. The author of the original document or chronicle which must stand behind the Yavana sections of the Yuga-purana (App. 4), in recording the Greeks at Pataliputra, was thinking all the time about the Mauryan empire; 'all provinces will be in confusion', he says, meaning the provinces of that empire, and when the Yavanas command 'the kings will disappear'; as his story centres throughout on Pataliputra, he means that there will be no more Indian kings in the Mauryan capital as aforetime. But more important is the meaning at this time of the words 'India' and 'Indians' to Greeks of the East like Apollodorus and 'Trogus' source'. There is no direct evidence, but the evidence from analogy is too strong to be set aside. In Alexander's day the word 'Asia' was habitually used in the sense of the Persian empire,1 [By Alexander himself: Arr. Anab. I, 16, 7 (dedication in 334), 11, 14, 8 (political manifesto in 333, 'King of Asia'), Lindian Chronicle c. 103 (dedication in 330, 'Lord of Asia'), Arr. Anab. IV, 15 ,6 (in speaking, 329-8). By Nearchus: Arr. Ind. 35, 8 ('in possession of all Asia', 325). By others: Arr. Anab. III, 9, 6; 18, 11; 25, 3; Plut. Alex. 34; Ditt.3 303. Officially in 311: Diod. XIX, 105, I. In common parlance in 307-6: Ditt.3 326, I. 23.] that is, it was used as a political term and not merely as a geographical one. Some indeed knew that there were bits of the Asiatic continent, like the spice-land of Arabia, which were not within the Persian bounds; but such lands were shadowy things, outside the range of the politics of the day. When the Seleucid empire replaced the Persian, the word 'Asia' was transferred to signify that empire, though it was now well known that considerable sections of the continent were outside the Seleucid bounds: Seleucus was 'King of Asia',2 [App. Syr. [x].] and the term 'Stations of Asia'3 [Strabo xv, 723, [x]; see p. 55 n. 1.] applied to the Seleucid survey of their empire, and the title 'Saviour of Asia' given to Antiochus IV,1 [OGIS 253; see p. 195.] are sufficient proof. To Alexander, when he crossed the Hindu Kush, 'India' meant only the Indus country which Darius had ruled;2 [Tarn in CAH vi p. 402.] but since then Greek knowledge of India had been enormously enlarged by Megasthenes. But Megasthenes, though he knew of the existence of peninsular India, had only described the Mauryan empire of Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!], and the only part of India with which Greeks had been in contact since Alexander's death was the Mauryan empire, just as the only part of Asia with which they had been in contact before Alexander's birth was the Persian empire; Southern India was as shadowy a land as Southern Arabia had been. It is therefore inconceivable that 'India' should not also have had a political meaning, just as 'Asia' had always had; as 'Asia' was used in the sense first of the Persian and then of the Seleucid empires, so 'India' must have been used in the sense of the Mauryan empire. Consequently when Trogus' well-informed source called Demetrius (the Greek equivalent of) Rex Indorum,3 [Justin XLI, 6, 4, Demetrii regis Indorum. Cf. Apollodorus' phrase (Strabo XI, 516), [x].] 'King of the Indians', he meant exactly what Alexander meant when in 330 he called himself 'Lord of Asia':4 [Lindian Chronicle c. 103.] Demetrius was monarch of the Mauryan empire. Alexander in 330 had not completed the conquest of the Persian empire, but he held the great centres, and after Gaugamela what was to come seemed a foregone conclusion. Similarly, Demetrius had not yet completed the conquest of the Mauryan empire, but with the three great centres in his hand what was to come might well seem a foregone conclusion also; the one statement was as true as the other. Where Chaucer's 'grete Emetreus, the kyng of Inde' came from is unknown;5 [The Knight's Tale 1. 1298. The affinity of some of Chaucer's Tales with Indian stories is notorious: the last section of the Pardoner's Tale is the Vedabha Jataka, though Chaucer cannot have known the Indian story (see the ed. of 1929 by A.W. Pollard and M. M. Barber, Introduction pp. viii-xi; H.T. Francis, The Vedabha Jataka compared with the Pardoner's Tale 1884); for the literature on the Indian and Chinese analogies to the Franklin's Tale see J. Schick, Studia Indo-Iranica, Ehrengabe fur W. Geiger 1931 p. 89. But the lineage of The Knight's Tale (see A.W. Pollard's ed. of 1903) goes back through Boccaccio's Teseide to Statius, and Boccaccio does not mention Emetrius; and Chaucer's phrase in the preceding line, 1297, 'in stories as men fynde', is said to be his way of mystifying his readers as to his source. Seemingly he has succeeded.] but for a moment it had seemed true, and legend remembered where history has forgotten.

For a few brief years Demetrius was lord of a realm which in mere size probably surpassed that of the first Seleucus; he ruled from the Jaxartes to the Gulf of Cambaye, from the Persian desert to the middle Ganges. Put into modern terms, and speaking roughly, his kingdom included Afghanistan and something more, the northern and probably also the southern part of Baluchistan, most of Russian Turkestan with some extension into Chinese Turkestan, and in India part of the North-West Frontier, the Punjab with southern Kashmir, much of the United Provinces with a small slice of Bihar, Sind, Cutch, Kathiawar, and the northern part of Gujerat, with apparently some extension into Rajputana. What can be made out about the Indian provinces in detail will be considered later, when everything that remained after the abandonment of Pataliputra and Ujjain had passed into the hands of Menander; but it may be noticed here that the later legend which carried Alexander's victorious arms to the Ganges and Magadha (Pataliputra),1 [Strabo xv, 702.; Diod. II, 37, 3; XVII, 108, 3; Plut. Alex. 62.; Justin XII, 8, 9; see Tarn, JHS XLIII, 1923, p. 100.] and the saying attributed to Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!] that Alexander had all but secured for himself his (Chandragupta's) [No, Sandrocottus!] empire of Northern India,2 [Plut. Alex. 62., Chandragupta [No, Sandrocottus!] [x] (i.e. after he was king of Northern India) [x] where [x] means the Mauryan empire. The king who 'just missed' that empire was not Alexander but Demetrius.] alike spring from the victorious progress of Demetrius.

62. As for the Macedonians, however, their struggle with Porus blunted their courage and stayed their further advance into India. 1 For having had all they could do to repulse an enemy who mustered only twenty thousand infantry and two thousand horse, they violently opposed Alexander when he insisted on crossing the river Ganges also, the width of which, as they learned, was thirty-two furlongs, its depth a hundred fathoms, while its banks on the further side were covered with multitudes of men-at-arms and horsemen and elephants. [2] For they were told that the kings of the Ganderites and Praesii were awaiting them with eighty thousand horsemen, two hundred thousand footmen, eight thousand chariots, and six thousand fighting elephants. And there was no boasting in these reports. For Androcottus, who reigned there not long afterwards, made a present to Seleucus of five hundred elephants, and with an army of six hundred thousand men overran and subdued all India.

[3] At first, then, Alexander shut himself up in his tent from displeasure and wrath and lay there, feeling no gratitude for what he had already achieved unless he should cross the Ganges, nay, counting a retreat a confession of defeat. But his friends gave him fitting consolation, and his soldiers crowded about his door and besought him with loud cries and wailing, until at last he relented and began to break camp, resorting to many deceitful and fallacious devices for the enhancement of his fame. [4] For instance, he had armour prepared that was larger than usual, and mangers for horses that were higher, and bits that were heavier than those in common use, and left them scattered up and down. Moreover, he erected altars for the gods, which down to the present time are revered by the kings of the Praesii when they cross the river, and on them they offer sacrifices in the Hellenic manner. Androcottus, when he was a stripling, saw Alexander himself, and we are told that he often said in later times that Alexander narrowly missed making himself master of the country, since its king was hated and despised on account of his baseness and low birth.

-- Plut. Alex. 62, Bernadotte Perrin, Ed.


To return to Apollodotus. Whether he went beyond Madhyamika cannot be said. It is conceivable that he was aiming at Ajmer, the Eragassa Metropolis of Ptolemy, to secure the Ujjain-Mathura route; at Madhyamika he was more than half-way thither on the road from Ujjain, his coins have been found near Ajmer,3 [At Pushkar; Cunningham, NC 1870 p. 85.] and Cunningham, who knew India well, thought that any conqueror in that part of the country must try to take Ajmer.4 [The Saca Great Satrap Nahapana ruled in Ajmer (V. A. Smith4 p. 221), and the Sacas were usually copying the Greeks.] But in fact nothing is known about Rajputana except that the Greeks called the Aravalli mountains 'The vengeance of Heaven' (p. 253); Apollodotus at Madhyamika may only have been clearing his flank of an inconvenient garrison of Pushyamitra's, in preparation for the final move. For the final move must have been meant to be that Apollodotus from Ujjain and Menander from Pataliputra should join hands along the great road and complete the circuit of Northern India. Between them lay Pushyamitra's home kingdom of Vidisa, where they might expect some serious fighting. But, so far as is known, it was never attempted; though they held Vidisa as it were between the jaws of pincers, the pincers had no strength to close. Whatever fighting the Greek leaders had had or had not had, the wastage of their armies in garrisons and settlements must have been severe; for the time being both had shot their bolt. Doubtless Demetrius would presently have reinforced them with fresh troops for the final stage; he cannot yet have been fifty when he crossed the Hindu Kush, and there seemed plenty of time.

But at some period which cannot be precisely indicated he had to return to Bactria, and had among other things to carry out a reorganisation of his sub-kings. His return to Bactria seems certain from the coinage. His coins struck in India are rare and seem to have all been struck by Demetrius II west of the Indus (p. 138). But his great new empire in India needed an abundant coinage, and had he stayed in India he, as supreme ruler, must have supplied it; this he never did, and though India received a plentiful Greek coinage it was struck by Apollodotus and Menander. His reorganisation may not all have been done at once, but it can only be indicated as a whole. I suggested before that somewhere about 175 might be a likely date for the termination of the advance; it cannot well be put later, as ten to twelve years at least must be allowed for Apollodotus' money to establish itself in Barygaza (though it may have continued to be struck or copied long after his death); and it cannot well be put earlier, because a fair interval must be allowed between the appointments of Euthydemus II and Agathocles to allow for Agathocles' coin-portraits looking slightly older than those of his eldest brother.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Tue Nov 23, 2021 3:37 am

Part 4 of 5

It is unfortunate that the coinage of Taxila4 [BMC India pp. 214-38.] does not help us to understand the position of the great city under Greek rule. That coinage, though abundant, is thought only to have begun late in the third century B.C. and to have ended with the Greek conquest before the middle of the second century';5 [Ib. p. cxxxix.] that is, it belongs to the period when the Maurya power was failing and Taxila could assert itself. But it seems unlikely that Demetrius, who, apart from any views of his own, was bound by the circumstances of his conquest to be conciliatory where he could, should have begun by abolishing his own city's coinage, especially as his hands were too full at the time to put anything in its place; and the relationship between the coinages of Taxila and Agathocles may suggest that Taxila was still coining when Agathocles was governing the Paropamisadae,6 [For the possibility of some Taxila coins being later than Agathocles see ib. p. cxxviii. The stratification of the coins found at Taxila in 1928-9 would put the Taxila issues between the Indian punch-marked (Mauryan) coins and the Greek, ASI 1928-9 p. 64; but one is warned (ib.) not to rely too much on the stratification, and the coins have often been found together with those of Greek kings, even kings of the first century B.C.; see generally ASI 1929-30, p. 71.] that is, during the latter part of the reign of Demetrius (died 167). Indeed the end of the city's coinage might be connected with the invasion of Eucratides (165 or 164) or with the capture of the city by his son Heliocles; but the whole matter is too uncertain to enable any conclusions about the amount of autonomy which Taxila may or may not have possessed under different Greek rulers.

A peculiar feature of Agathocles' coinage is that the Prakrit legends are often written in Brahmi instead of Kharoshthi, which Demetrius II had already used and which was to be used by every subsequent Greek king; Agathocles and Pantaleon are the only two to use Brahmi. Brahmi, believed to have come by sea from Babylonia, would no doubt have become the universal writing of India, as it did later, but for the subsequent intrusion of Kharoshthi, a script derived from Aramaic, the common writing in Persia for official use in Achaemenid times, which is supposed to have reached India about 500 B.C. in the train of Darius' conquests; it drove like a wedge into the Achaemenid provinces of the North-West and became the usual writing in Gandhara and Taxila. But we hardly know the position in the Paropamisadae; for though Kharoshthi inscriptions have been found in abundance in Gandhara and the Taxila country, none have come from westward of the Panjkora river,1 [See a valuable map of the find-spots of Kharoshthi inscriptions in CII facing p. xiv.] though this may in part be due to lack of facilities for exploration. It is now believed that where Brahmi and Kharoshthi are both employed (as on Agathocles' coins) a dialectical difference is indicated,2 [BMC India p. cxxix, on the coins of the Audumbharas and Kunindas which have Brahmi on one side and Kharoshthi on the other.] and the natural explanation of the use of Brahmi by Pantaleon and Agathocles is that in the Paropamisadae there were districts whose dialects were normally written in Brahmi, as were the legends on the already mentioned Vatasvaka coinage from Swat, and on some of the coins of Taxila;3 [Ib. pp. cxxvi-cxxix.] but as no other Greek king in the Paropamisadae used Brahmi they must have overestimated its importance in relation to Kharoshthi, a mistake easy enough for strangers to make.

When Demetrius returned to Bactria he handed over to Apollodotus as his sub-king everything in India outside Menander's sphere except the Paropamisadae; this follows from the fact that Apollodotus, besides being king in Barygaza, was also king in Gandhara, and therefore must have ruled everything between the two. His rule in Gandhara is proved by the appearance of the humped bull of Siva on both his round and square silver coins,1 [BMC p. 34; Pl. IX, 8, 9.] for the two types which are certain are the Zeus of Kapisa and the humped bull of Pushkalavati, the capital of Gandhara.2 [CHI p. 557. Certainly the humped bull had long been a wide-spread emblem, and appears on the autonomous coins of several Indian cities, including Ujjain (see Rapson's list in Rhys Davids' Buddhist India pp. 321-2, and BMC India pp. cxliv, 258-60) and occasionally Taxila (ASI 1914-15 p. 28 no. 2; BMC India p. 235), but the imitation of Apollodotus' 'humped bull and elephant' type by Heliocles (p. 271 n. 2) shows that only Pushkalivati can be meant. See p. 135 n. 5. ] He must also have ruled Taxila and the kingdom between the Indus and the Jhelum of which Taxila was the capital, for Menander's sphere did not come west of the Jhelum, Bucephala being his most westerly town (p. 245). But one of the great difficulties in reconstruction has been that the coin-type used by the Greeks for Taxila was unknown. The modern view is that it was the pilei (caps) of the Dioscuri;3 [CHI pp. 556, 558, 591; H. K. Deb, IHQ x, 1934, p. 515.] but even if this be true -- it seems very conjectural -- it cannot apply to the period before Eucratides, whose coinage first introduced the Dioscuri and their pilei into India as coin-types. The Taxila type ought to be discoverable on Taxila's own coinage. That coinage uses several types, among them the lion and the humped bull, but infinitely the commonest type is the elephant;4 [See especially BMC India pp. 218 to 228 and 234, as compared with other types.] indeed the elephant, though a common type on early Indian coins, is so particularly associated with two towns, Eran and Taxila, that it has been thought to possess a local significance.5 [Ib. p. xxvi.] Now Apollodotus' round silver coins show on one side Siva's humped bull, with the 'footprint of Nandi' on its hump,6 [BMC p. 34 no. 10; see A. B. Cook Zeus I p. 637.] and on the other an elephant, and the conjunction of these two types is imitated by subsequent kings who ruled both Gandhara and Taxila-Heliocles and the Sacas Maues, Azes, and Azilises7 [Heliocles, BMC p. 24 nos. 30-1; Maues, ib. p. 71 no. 25; Azes, ib. p. 90 nos. 188-9; Azilises ib. p. 97 no. 41.] -- and I suggest that the elephant here is the missing type of Taxila on Greek coins and signifies that Apollodotus, as he must have done, ruled that kingdom as well as Gandhara.

There is indeed a difficulty about invoking the aid of the elephant, for any particular elephant might merely be the well-known elephant of the Seleucid coinage, as is certainly the case with the elephant on the unique copper coin of Antimachus (p. 90), and Apollodotus did use the Seleucid type of 'Apollo and tripod' on his bronze money; but the fact that Apollodotus' humped bull and elephant type became a regular type of the Saca kings may show that it had a local significance.1 [If this be correct, Apollodotus did not coin silver till he became king in Gandhara; if he coined at all when king in Seistan-Arachosia, it was his common 'Apollo and tripod' bronze. But very likely, in Seistan, he continued to strike Euthydemus' bronze, as did Agathocles after him; it was so common there (Cunningham, NC 1869 p. 138; CHI p. 442) that it was subsequently imitated by the Sacas of Seistan (Rapson, JRAS 1904 p. 75 no. 5).]

There is a story which may bear on the elephant of Taxila. It is now known that Philostratus, when he wrote the Life of Apollonius, had before him a pretty accurate description of Parthian Taxila by some one who had visited it (p. 360); and he says that at Taxila there was a very old elephant, once belonging to Porus, whom Alexander had dedicated in the temple of the Sun and had named Aias, and whom the people used to anoint with myrrh and adorn with fillets.2 [Life of Apollonius II, 20.] Philostratus attributes many things to Alexander and Porus, but the story might really be evidence for the existence at Taxila of a sacred elephant, the elephant of the coins; the bell round the elephant's neck on the elephant-head coin-types of Demetrius,3 [BMC Pl. III, 2.] Menander,4 [Ib. Pl. XII, 6.] and Maues5 [Ib. Pl. XVI, 1.] would support this. More than a suggestion it cannot of course be.

Apollodotus on his appointment must have returned to the north and fixed his seat at Pushkalavati or Taxila, probably the latter; presumably he governed the southern provinces through strategoi (p. 241). There is indeed an obscure Greek king Theophilus, whose coins are very rare indeed,6 [BMC p. 167 nos. 1, 2; also one found at Taxila, ASI 1915-16 p. 32 no. 6. He used the Euthydemid Heracles as type.] and whose name might suggest 'King Theophila' (cf. p. 150); but the square theta in his coin-legend shows that he is much later, and Theophilus is far too common a Greek name for any connection with Theophila to be postulated. What seems fairly certain is that, though the coastal provinces south of Patalene remained Greek, Apollodotus' inland conquests, including Ujjain, were soon lost, for Pushyamitra subsequently appears as ruler of Ujjain and Avanti generally;1 [CHI pp. 531-2, at some period Pushyamitra lost Ujjain to the Andhras; he had therefore recovered it from the Greeks. On the Andhra chronology, which is no obstacle to the view I have taken, see de la Vallee-Poussin pp. 210 sqq.] whether he reconquered them when Apollodotus went north, or whether like Pataliputra they were abandoned when Eucratides came, cannot be said; the latter alternative seems more probable, and would give time enough for Pushyamitra's rule there. They do not appear in the province-list in Ptolemy, but as we only possess fragments of that list that means nothing.

Apollodotus, like Demetrius, appears in the Mahabharata as a king of the Yavanas under the name Bhagadatta,2 [Von Gutschmid's identification. Endorsed by A. Weber, Berlin SB 1890 p. 906, and cf. p. 87 n. 2, above.] and the wide extent of his rule is attested in general terms by the wide diffusion of his abundant coinage; the range of find-spots is said far to exceed that of any other Greek king except Menander, and the number of monograms on his money suggests that he coined in other places beside Pushkalavati and Taxila. It is unfortunate that Cunningham, with his unrivalled knowledge of find-spots, a knowledge which no one now can ever acquire again, never drew up a complete list of the places in India where within his knowledge Apollodotus' coins had been found; putting together the indications he left3 [NC 1870 pp. 78, 85.] and omitting Seistan-Arachosia and the Paropamisadae, he refers to finds in the Lower Punjab, Sind, Gujerat, Kamal near Delhi, Roh, and Pushkar near Ajmer; add to these Amarkot near Dera Ghazi Khan,4 [W. Vost, JASB v 1909, Num. Supp. XI; 221 silver coins of Apollodotus I and II.] Bajaur,5 [M. F. C. Martin, ib. XXIII, 1927, Num. Supp. XL p. 18; 95 silver coins of Apollodotus I in the Bajaur hoard.] Mathura,6 [Whitehead NNM p. 45.] Bundelkhund south of the Jumna,7 [V. A. Smith, Ind. Ant. XXXIII, 1904, p. 217; 34 coins.] Dudial in Hazara,8 [Whitehead NC p. 342; a few coins.] and of course Taxila; apparently too they circulated among the Kunindas (p. 32.), and certainly in Barygaza. Probably this list is nowhere near complete, but it covers most of Greek India. The presence of his coins in Menander's sphere attests a lively trade; it can hardly be taken to mean that at the end of his life he was Menander's suzerain. Why, unlike every other Greek king except Antimachus II and Telephus, he never put his portrait on his coins is a mystery; that, and the great amount of power delegated to him by Demetrius, which implies complete confidence, may support the view that he really was Demetrius' youngest brother (p. 76) and that the relations between them were those between Antigonus Gonatas and his half-brother Craterus. But indeed one obvious feature of the whole story is the manner in which the early Euthydemids trusted one another; there is no hint anywhere, such as one overstriking another's coins, that that trust was ever misplaced, and we shall see the way in which they acted as a family against Eucratides. The phenomenon is a well-known feature of two other Hellenistic dynasties, the Antigonids and the Attalids; but clearly those two houses had no monopoly of family loyalty.

The amount of power delegated to Apollodotus may show that Demetrius did not expect to be able to return from Bactria to India for some time, and it is unfortunate that there is no hint to be got of what it was which kept him in Bactria. At the same time, the appointment of Demetrius II to take his brother's place as joint-king in Bactria itself is proof that Demetrius did intend to return to India sooner or later; it was obvious that he would have to, if his plan was to be carried out to its conclusion. Whether he really did return can hardly be said with any confidence; the question depends on the much defaced Hathigumpha inscription of Kharavela (App. 5), which throws an uncertain light. But if it says what some scholars claim that it says, then he did return and was somewhere in Menander's sphere in the south-east, perhaps at Mathura, when the news came of Eucratides' attack in 168; and certainly it would fit in very well with Eucratides' story if we suppose that Eucratides rather had things his own way at the start and that Demetrius did not come on the scene in Bactria till late in 168 or even 167, especially as it is just possible (p. 100) that he brought Indian troops. If so, what took Demetrius to the south-east was either that Menander was being attacked and needed reinforcements, or else he came to arrange the final campaign in which Apollodotus and Menander were to join hands; in either case he can have had no suspicion of the plans of Antiochus IV. But there is nothing certain except that, as the Yuga-purana shows, it was Eucratides' attack which caused the Greeks to abandon the Middle Country.

The fact has already been emphasised that Menander at this time was only Demetrius' general, as Indian writers well understood: in the Yuga-purana it is Demetrius who is supreme at Pataliputra, in the Hathigumpha inscription (if it really bears on the matter) it is Demetrius who orders the withdrawal, and in the Mahabharata, while Demetrius and Apollodotus appear as kings of the Yavanas, Menander is not mentioned. Doubtless Menander was meant to be, and was, governor or viceroy for Demetrius of all the conquests south-eastward of the Jhelum, the line of division between the spheres of Apollodotus and himself; but it is quite uncertain when he became king. It was one thing for Demetrius to confer the royal title and a great measure of power upon Apollodotus, who was his brother or kinsman, and quite another to confer that title upon a general, a thing as yet without any precedent anywhere.1 [But not impossible; Napoleon's Marshals.] It is unlikely that Menander's sphere was ever subject to Apollodotus, and it may be that Demetrius, from sheer necessity, made Menander king when he himself returned to fight Eucratides; though more probably Menander took the title himself when Demetrius was killed, in the usual form of a vote by his army. We simply do not know when the most famous of the Yavanas received, or assumed, the diadem.

So far I have used the conventional language of conquest; the attempt must now be made to show what the conquest really meant and how it happened that a not too numerous body of Greeks came into possession of a large part of Northern India and were apparently able to do so much more than Alexander had been able to do; for even if the armies of Apollodotus and Menander were, as they probably were, Indian armies with Iranian cavalry and only a nucleus of Greek infantry as a spear-head, you cannot lead a native army till you have raised it. As usual, one must start from Alexander.

Alexander, after much fighting west of the Indus, had reached Taxila and made it his advanced base for the conquest of the Punjab. He had a veteran and ever-victorious army; his infantry was of finer quality than anything Demetrius was likely to possess; he was drawing on the same regions of Iran as Demetrius for cavalry; he himself was among the greatest of known commanders. He fought his way across the Punjab as far as the Beas; by the time he reached that river half his remaining force was on his communications with Taxila and he was using Porus' troops for the necessary garrisons,2 [Tarn in CAH VI p. 410.] while the difficulty of the advance and the severity of the fighting had been such that the morale of his veterans broke at the Beas and they refused to go farther. If the reader will look at the distance on the map from Taxila to the Beas, and then at the distances from Taxila to Pataliputra on the one hand and to Kathiawar and Barygaza on the other, he will see at a glance that the Greeks were most certainly not fighting their way through a consistently hostile land, as Alexander had tried to do; whatever their conquest meant, it did not mean that.

It is unlikely that Alexander's own conquest was of much help to his Greek successors. Leaving out of account the Paropamisadae, as belonging rather to the Iranian than to the Indian system, almost everything he did in India was wiped off the map within seven years of his death; the last Macedonian satrap, Peithon, quitted Gandhara in 316,1 [Diod. XIX, 56, 4.] and the whole of his Indian dominions fell into the hands of Chandragupta. If Indian literature remembered him at all it was only in the form of a bogey called Skanda, used to frighten naughty children;2 [Weber, Berlin SB 1890 p. 903. A writer of the seventh century A.D. has a reference to the Alexander-Romance: S. Levi, IHQ XII, 1936, p. 131; but that is a different matter.] many stories about him are found in the North-West, but the majority, where not modern, are probably due to Islam, which made him one of its heroes, though a few may be real reminiscences of the Bactrian Greeks. Of the cities he founded, the two Alexandrias on the Indus3 [Arr. v, 29, 3; VI, 15, 4.] left no trace; it does not even follow that they were ever completed. Nicaea on the Jhelum may have weathered the storm, though that is purely conjectural (p. 328 n. 1). The only city which is recorded to have survived is Alexandria Bucephala on the east bank of the Jhelum,4 [Perhaps still a city as late as the first century A.D., Periplus 47. It is also named in the Peutinger Table and the Ravenna Cosmographia, but I do not know the date of their information.] though there is no reasonable doubt about the Alexandria at the junction of the Chenab and the Indus (p. 247). Demetrius may also have found a few Greeks at Patala, or at one or two places in Gandhara;5 [Arigaion (Arr. IV, 24, 7) and perhaps Nysa (Arr. v, I, I), which is not Ptolemy's Dionysopolis. The garrisons left in Swat-Massaga, Ora, Bazira, Orohatis (Arr. IV, 25, 4-5) -- did not necessarily become military colonies. (To V. Chapot, Melanges Glotz 1932 p. 173, all Alexander's foundations were essentially garrisons. The greater number were really military colonies; see pp. 6 sq.)] that is about all. But if some of Alexander's settlements did survive, we do not know in what shape they survived; clearly many of his Greek settlers must have quitted India with Eudamus and Peithon. What Alexander's career did give to the Greek kings was not so much material help as an inspiration, the same inspiration as it had given to Chandragupta.

Alexander had found a country divided between local kings and 'free peoples' (Aratta) under their own oligarchic rule. With the kings accommodation was possible to him, for he understood kings, but it was not common: Taxiles joined him and Porus became reconciled to him, but three others -- Sambos, Musicanus, and the second Paurava king, the 'bad Porus' -- were irreconcilable, and one, Abisares, held aloof. But the free peoples -- the Asvaka of Gandhara, the Cathaei between the Ravi and the Beas, the Malavas (Malli) of the lower Ravi -- all fought him desperately; he did not understand them and they did not understand him. Subsequently this whole complex of states became part of the Mauryan empire, but that empire was nothing organic, merely a covering framework; it functioned while the central power was strong, but easily fell back into its component parts when it became weak, though the component parts might have altered meanwhile. The Greeks met with local kings in Cutch and Surastrene, as has been seen, and at Mathura (p. 259); but though in the case of many of the Indian peoples to be mentioned it cannot be said whether there was a king or not, there are two districts, Taxila1 [The absence of kings on Taxila's coinage is conclusive.] and the Madras (p. 171), where the kingship which had existed in Alexander's day had certainly been lost, and it seems as if the relative importance of the free peoples may have increased. However that may be, it seems probable that the attitude of the free peoples to the Greeks and the Greek attitude to them was something quite other than it had been in Alexander's day.

Many of the peoples of the North-West had been immigrants, from Iran or elsewhere, and some were not yet fully Indianised; some north-Iranian names occur in the Alexander-story,2 [The hill ruler Arsaces, Arr. Anab. v, 29, 4, and the Sogdoi on the Indus, ib. VI, 15, 4.] traces of foreign words are found even in the Punjab, and Indian writers classed all these semi-foreign peoples together as Bahlikas (Bactrians),3 [J. Przyluski, JA 1926 pp. 11-13); de la Vallee-Poussin pp. 13-14.] a term which in a narrow sense meant the Bhallas west of the Jhelum.4 [Przyluski loc. cit. p. 11. ] I must run through the principal peoples; the difference in nomenclature since Alexander's day may sometimes be accounted for by migrations or by supposing that we hear of peoples instead of kings, though the important Aratta people Cathaei are not mentioned again. The most foreign of all, unless the Abhiras, were the Karnbojas1 [The relevant passages in Indian literature are collected by B. C. Law, Some Kshatriya tribes of Ancient India 1923 pp. 232 sqq. Levi, JA 1923 ii p. 54 n., suggested that they might be the Tambuzi of Ptol. VI, 11, 6.] of Kafiristan, the country behind Kapisa, which city perhaps bore their name (p. 138 n. 1); Asoka's Edicts class them definitely with Greeks,2 [Edicts 5 and 13. ] like the Greeks they were regarded as degenerate Kshatriyas, and they spoke a language which was either half Indian and half Iranian or anyhow had an infusion of Iranian words.3 [Sir G. Grierson, JRAS 1911 p. 802.] The importance of Kapisa as a Greek centre, and the legend, which like other Alexander-descents (p. 302 and App. 3) should really go back to the Greek period, that the 'White Kafirs' of Kafiristan were descended from Alexander's Macedonians, show that there was little hostility here. The Asvaka (Aspasii and Assaceni) of Bajaur and Lower Swat, who had fought hard against Alexander, had since been converted to Buddhism by Asoka; in his edicts he classes them, under the name of Gandharas, with Greeks and Kambojas,4 [Edict 5. Literature in Law op. cit. pp. 253 sqq.] and Gandhara became a Greek stronghold; there can have been little hostility here. The Sibi of the Lower Punjab had been spared by Alexander for sentimental reasons (he thought they were descended from followers of his ancestor Heracles); now they contributed troops to the Greek armies, for the only explanation of a settlement of Sibi at Madhyamika as early as the middle of the second century B.C. must be that it was made by Apollodotus (p. 151). Statements in some modern writers that the Sibi were a very primitive race are merely reproductions of a mistake in, or rather perhaps of a false impression given by, the Alexander-historians;5 [The Greek material in Wecker, Sibi in PW. Greek writers perhaps confused them with some backward tribe in their territory, as Herodotus and Strabo ascribed to the Saca clans of the Massagetae some of the customs of the primitive fish-eaters whom they ruled.] they were at least as civilised as their neighbours, as is shown by the Greek praise of their capital,6 [Diod. XVII, 96, 2, [x].] by their coinage at Madhyamika, and by the story in the Sibi-Jataka of the charitable Sibi king who was the hero of the Flesh-gift and was reincarnated as Buddha.

Most instructive of all are the Madras,7 [Law pp. 216 sqq. For their entry into India, Przyluski op. cit. p. 13.] a people between the Chenab and the Ravi who had entered India shortly before the Persian period; they are sometimes classed among 'barbarians' like the Yavanas, and there seems to be some evidence for non-Indian customs among them.1 [Law p. 249; he however thinks they had become 'barbarised,' which appears to reverse the facts.] The name of their principal town, Sagala (Sialkot), does not appear to be Indian; it has been suggested that it is 'Saka-town'2 [J. Przyluski, JA 214, 1929, pp. 315-17, who also discusses the Indian name of Sagala.] and that it points to some old invasion or infiltration of Sacas prior to Alexander, which would explain why Indians sometimes classed the Madras among 'barbarians'. They had been the people of the 'bad Porus', irreconcilable to Alexander. But now they were Buddhists3 [This is why the Mahabharata (see F1eet, JRAS 1913 p. 966) calls them irreligious and impure.] and had lost the kingship;4 [There could not have been an Indian vassal-king in Menander's capital Sagala.] and the best testimony we have to a change of attitude in these peoples is that Menander selected Sagala to be his capital instead of the Greek city Bucephala. The peoples between the Madras and Mathura will be noticed later (pp. 238 sqq.)
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

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Part 5 of 5

Two peoples on the Indus remain to be mentioned. The Sauviras or Sauvira-Sindhus5 [Best in H. Luders, Berlin SB 1920 pp. 54-6, who however has not seen that the different localities in which they are mentioned must mean that they were moving southward.] (the names are never separated) had entered India shortly before the Persian period and had worked southward. In the Mahabharata they are on the Upper Indus; by the beginning of the Maurya period they were on the Lower Indus, and their capital Roruka, supposed to be Alor, was in the tradition destroyed by natural forces about the time that Pataliputra became important, one man alone escaping to found Barygaza;6 [See, beside Luders, Levi, JA 1915 p. 75, and on the transference of the name Roruka to Chinese Turkestan Konow, Acta Orientalia XII, 1934, p. 136.] in the second century B.C. they were occupying the Indus Delta with an unknown extension eastwards, and the second part of the Milindapanha accordingly places them on the sea.7 [Rhys Davids 11, 269 (359).] Two Greek cities, Demetrias and Theophila, were founded among them, and in literature they were classed with the Bahlikas and the Yavanas;8 [Brihat Samhita (Fleet, Ind. Ant. XXII pp. 170-1).] we shall see that they supplied some citizens to Demetrias (p. 257). The Abhiras were the latest comers of all; it seems that they only entered India during the confusions after Alexander's death.1 [N. G. Majumdar, Ind. Ant. XLVII, 1918, p. 35: at least by 300 B.C. (It had been put much later.) A good deduction, seeing that he did not know Ptolemy. H. Jacobi, Festschrift Wackernagel 1923 p. 124, also says c. 300. \] There will be something to say about them later; at present they were on the Indus north of the Sauviras, where they gave their name to the Greek satrapy of Abiria (p. 235). Their advance down the Indus must have caused, or been made possible by, some displacement of peoples, and the Malli, so prominent in the Alexander story, are not heard of again; the likeliest of the theories about them is that they had gone, or been driven, southward and that they were the Malavas who gave their name, Malva, to Avanti.

It seems then that, speaking generally, these semi-foreign peoples were probably a help rather than a hindrance to the Greek advance. The Euthydemids had behind them, as Alexander had not, much experience of successful conciliation of the native Bactrians; doubtless they applied the same methods to the Bahlikas, and, it would seem, just as satisfactorily. But we require to find a much wider and deeper reason for the sweeping successes of the Greeks than anything so far indicated, and fortunately there can be little doubt what it was. It lies in the position of Buddhism with regard to the circumstances of the moment when the Greeks came; and it needs putting with some care, if it is to be rightly understood. Under Asoka Buddhism had become the official religion of the empire; the religion itself had been spreading along the two great roads north-westward and westward,2 [Przyluski, Acoka pp. 72-3.] and a great deal of the North and West had genuinely become Buddhist. But in the second century B.C. Buddhism was not quite the victorious faith which it had been under Asoka. More than one of his successors, in the tradition, had fallen away; Brahmanism had remained strong, though it was ceasing to be Vedic Brahmanism, for it had known how to assimilate the new forces which had been at work since c. 300 B.C. or earlier and which were making of Vishnu and Siva personal and all-embracing deities. The new Vishnuism and its effects will be noticed later.3 [See on all this Chap. IX p. 406.] But Siva, though he appears in the Vedas under the name Rudra, was pre-Vedic and pre-Aryan and immensely old, and his worship had been widely spread throughout the Indo-Iranian borderlands long before history began.4 [The discovery of Siva and his humped bull at Mohenjodaro is now famous. Sir A. Stein has found the humped bull and other emblems of Siva at various sites of the chalcolithic period in Gedrosia, Journ. R. Anthropological Inst. 1934 pp. 184-5, 190-2.] It is possible therefore that he appealed with special force to the half-foreign peoples of the North-West, one of the Buddhist strongholds; certainly in the Greek period he was firmly established in Pushkalavati, the capital of the Holy Land of Gandhara, and had apparently a footing in Taxila also.1 [Humped bull on a single-die coin of Taxila, ASI 1914-15 p. 28 no. 2.] What was going on may in one aspect be called a counter-reformation; that the Brahmans should have enlisted the aid of a non-Aryan deity like Siva is a fact of considerable interest.

Now the Brahman was the natural enemy of the Greek invader, not of course on religious but on patriotic grounds: no one who studies the history of Alexander can miss the fact that the Brahmans had been his most determined opponents.2 [Arr. VI, 7, 4-6; 16, 5; 17, 2; Diod. XVII, 103. The notice in Plutarch Alex. 59 is probably tendencious; see 64, and Excursus p. 429.] For the Brahman was under the necessity of proving himself. It is too early yet to talk of 'castes' in India, but the four 'colours' existed3 [T. W. Rhys Davids, Buddhist India 1903 p. 53; D. R. Bhandarkar, Ind. Ant. XL, 1911, p. 7 (all castes were mixed); E. Senart, Les castes dans l'Inde, 2nd ed. 1927; CHI p. 209.] -- warriors (Kshatriyas), priests (Brahmans); husbandmen (Vaisyu), proletariat (Sudras). The Kshatriyas, to whom the kings usually belonged, had long held the first place,4 [Rhys Davids ib. p. 61. Cf. de la Vallee-Poussin p. 147: a burial mound was higher for a Kshatriya than for a Brahman.] but a silent struggle was now in progress between warrior and priest for social primacy,5 [Rhys Davids ib. pp. 61, 151, 158-9.] a struggle to be settled centuries later in favour of the Brahmans. Now Indian writers assigned the Greeks, as they did many foreign invaders later, to the Kshatriya 'colour'; they could hardly do otherwise, for the Greeks carne as fighting men, not as priests or peasants or labourers. The assignment indeed was often qualified by saying that the Greek was an inferior sort of Kshatriya, half Kshatriya half Sudra by descent, or else a Kshatriya who had degenerated through neglect of the Brahmans,6 [The Indian references are given in Levi, Quid de Graecis pp. 20-1; Law op. cit. p. 239. Cf. N. R. Ray, IHQ IV, 1928, p. 740. Yavanas, Sacas, and Kambojas are all classed together.] obviously a Brahman definition; but a Kshatriya of some sort he was, and as such a member of the 'colour' opposed to the Brahmans. Greeks must have known this well enough, for the Sacas who came after them knew it, as is shown by their adopting Kshatriya name-endings like -varman and -datta;1 [CHI p. 577; Ray op, cit. p. 744.] indeed a theory has been put forward that the [x] included in the treaty between Seleucus and Chandragupta meant a grant by the Indian king to the Greeks of the right to intermarry in the Kshatriya 'colour', that is, that he formally recognised them as Kshatriyas.2 [Foucher II p. 450 (on the meaning of [x] he follows Bouche-Leclercq, Hist. des Seleucides I pp. 29-30). See de la Vallee-Poussin pp. 59 sq., and next note.] This theory cannot be supported, either from Strabo3 [Because [x] in Strabo xv, 724 is said of Seleucus, not of Chandragupta, which is conclusive. For the rest, Strabo certainly uses [x] elsewhere in both its meanings (XI, 523 matrimonial alliances; v, 231 jus connubii); but there was no jus connubii in India (next note) and it certainly means here a matrimonial alliance, as Appian understood the same original to mean (Syr. 55, Seleucus [x]). The objection that Seleucus' only recorded daughter Phila II was not yet born is idle; he could have had daughters by Apama or an earlier wife without our fragmentary sources mentioning them; we know very little about the daughters of any Seleucid, and this book alone has rescued from oblivion two Seleucid princesses unknown to the literary record (pp. 73, 196). Besides, it might have been a niece; Antiochus Sidetes on his Parthian expedition did take a niece with him, and Phraates II married her after his death. How scholars like Droysen and Beloch (see Stahelin, Seleukos I in PW col. 1216) can have persuaded themselves, against Strabo's text, that it means that Seleucus married a daughter of Chandragupta I cannot guess; when did a conqueror in the East ever give a daughter to the conquered?] or in substance, for there seems to have been no jus connubii in India or any difficulty at this time in the marriage of persons of different 'colours';4 [Rhys Davids op. cit. pp. 53 sqq.; CHI p. 209.] but the classification of Greeks as Kshatriyas was one more element in the opposition of Greek and Brahman, an opposition, it must be repeated, which had nothing to do with the Brahman religion. But it had something to do, indirectly, with the Buddhist religion; for that religion, though it cared nothing for race or 'colour', had in fact happened to make a special appeal to that Kshatriya 'colour' to which Gautama himself had belonged. Buddhism in fact at this time seems to have been something more than a monastic religion; it was also to some extent the creed of a warlike aristocracy,5 [Cf. the essay of R. Fick, Die Buddhistische Kultur und das Erbe Alexanders d. G., Morgenland 25, 1934, on the earlier Buddhist culture as that of the warrior. It has been pointed out that the mass of donations to Buddhism between c. 300 B.C.-A.D. 100, compared with the paucity of those to Brahmanism, show that Buddhism was the creed of the upper classes: Sir C. Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism II, 1921, p. 69.] and it is of some importance for what follows to note that one cannot apply, or can only apply with great caution, to the second century B.C. the view, drawn from later times, that Buddhism tends to render unwarlike the peoples who profess it.

Something of this sort was the position when a Brahman, the Sunga Pushyamitra,1 [For his history see CHI pp. 517 sqq.; V. A. Smith4 p. 208; R. C. Mazumdar, IHQ 1925 pp. 91, 214; Rai Bahadur Ramaprasad Chanda, IHQ 1929 p. 393; de la Vallee-Poussin pp. 172-82 (very full). Mazumdar p. 214 argues that he was not hereditary king of Vidisa; but he could hardly have recovered himself as he did without an assured kingdom of his own to fall back upon, so I follow the usual view.] murdered the last Maurya and seized the crown, as already related. But he was more than a Brahman; he was a convinced, perhaps even a fanatical, devotee of the Brahman religion, which he therefore naturally desired to see restored as the religion of his realm. The matter at once became of concern to every Buddhist in India; they had no desire to be under the rule of a very earnest Brahman. Probably too there were people who did not desire to be under his rule for more mundane reasons; there was no national feeling in India, and to many men Pushyamitra, the Sunga from the south, would seem hardly less a foreigner than Demetrius, the Yavana from the north. The Greek leaders saw that they could use these feelings. Of course they fought Pushyamitra, not because he was a Brahman, but because he wanted what they wanted and was in their way; both sought control of the huge derelict empire, and war between them was inevitable. Obviously therefore anyone who, for whatever cause, was an enemy of Pushyamitra might become a friend to the Greeks. Both Apollodotus and Menander on their coins, the former exclusively, the latter down to his latest issue, called themselves Soter, 'the saviour'. The title still had its full value in the Greek world. It had only been used twice before in history: Ptolemy I had been Soter because he had helped to save Rhodes from Demetrius the Besieger, and Antiochus I because he had saved Asia Minor from the Gauls; in the same way, Apollodotus and Menander were Soteres because they professed to come to Indians as saviours, to 'save' them from Pushyamitra. It was entirely a political matter; but it happened that the people to be 'saved' were in fact usually Buddhists, and the common enmity of Greek and Buddhist to the Sunga king threw them into each other's arms.

I want to be clear as to the meaning of this, lest anyone should suppose that I am talking of an alliance of the Greeks with Buddhism,1 [The converse, an alliance of the Buddhist religion with the Greeks, has been definitely suggested by Grousset p. S7. He may be right; but I do not see it like that myself.] the Buddhist religion. Such a thing is, to my mind, impossible. It would presuppose a state of war between Brahmanism and Buddhism which did not exist, though there may have been a good deal of tension;2 [Something of the sort is necessitated by Patanjali using sramana-brahmana as an instance of things in eternal opposition: Weber, Ind. Stud. XIII p. 340.] and it would run counter to the deepest feelings of Hellenism. No Hellenistic king would ever have supported one religion against another, for one of the cardinal tenets of Greeks in the Hellenistic centuries was that no man's religion was any one's business but his own, and except by Antiochus IV the rule never seems to have been broken; it seems certain enough now that we never find Buddhist symbolism on the coins of the Greek kings3 [For Agathocles see p. 160 and for Menander pp. 262 sq.] (that was left to Sacas and Kushans), or indeed any Indian religious symbolism except that relating to the god or gods of some particular city on the coins minted in that city. Naturally Hellenistic kings were clear enough as to the distinction between a religion and the temporal power of its priesthood: the early Ptolemies did not touch the Egyptian religion but they circumscribed the power of its priests; the early Seleucids did not touch the strange matriarchal religions of Asia Minor but they sometimes curtailed the territory ruled by the priest-kings. But in purely religious matters these kings never interfered; all the religions of India were safe enough in Greek hands, and indeed we shall meet Greeks later who were devotees of Brahmanism (p. 391). It must be remembered that reconstructing history from coins is like restoring a dinosaur from a fossil bone; the coin also was once clothed in flesh and blood-proclamations, speeches, acts of state. The word Soter on the coins of Apollodotus and Menander may really imply a manifesto issued by Demetrius to the peoples of India on the lines, though not in the sense, of the famous proclamation of Antigonus I that all Greeks should be free, a proclamation which for years was a main motive power of Hellenistic history. And if the Mauryas really had Seleucid blood (p. 152), he must also have proclaimed that he came as kinsman and heir of the extinct dynasty.

Pushyamitra himself may have played into the hands of the Greeks, if there be anything in the story of his persecution of Buddhists. A usual view among historians of India has been that, though the story is greatly exaggerated, it must have had some basis in fact; and indeed several other persecutions of Buddhists in India are known.1 [List in V. A. Smith4 p. 214 n. 1.] But the story comes from a source which, at best, is only quasi-historical: the Asoka-Avadana2 [This work, though extracts exist in Sanscrit and have been published, is only known in its entirety from a Chinese translation called A-yu-wang-tchouan made about A.D. 300 by the Parthian Fa-kin. A complete translation of the Chinese work is given by Przyluski, Acoka. For other Chinese versions see, beside this work, Demieville pp. 44 sqq.] or Acts of Asoka. An Avadana is the story of the doings of some great man -- Greeks might have said his a[x] -- and the Asoka-Avadana stands in much the same relation to the real history of Asoka as the Alexander-Romance does to the real history of Alexander. But it is much nearer in time it is supposed to have been written at Mathura about 150-100 B.C.,3 [Przyluski, Acoka p. 166.] which might make its author a younger contemporary of Pushyamitra; and even the late Alexander-Romance contains some truth. Putting together the different notices,4 [Ib. pp. 90, 93, 301-4; cf. Demieville p. 46.] the full story about Pushyamitra is that, as Asoka had built 84,000 stupas and he himself did not feel equal to doing so much, he resolved to rival him by destroying 84,000 stupas; he started at Pataliputra, where the great Kukkuta-arama monastery was saved by a miracle, and then went on to Sagala (represented as under his rule) where he massacred the members of the Buddhist Order, offering a gold piece for the head of each Arhat; but in the north-west he was checked, so he turned southward towards the southern ocean, where he was destroyed by supernatural agency. Naturally this is not history: there is said to be no trace of any destruction of stupas at this time, there were many Buddhists and Buddhist buildings in Pushyamitra's own kingdom of Vidisa, and he himself had a long reign.5 [In the usually accepted Purina chronology he reigned 36 years, from 184 to 148.]

But I have given the story for the sake of a strange feature which has never been noticed. Pushyamitra's route is from Pataliputra to Sagala, thence north-west, and thence to the southern ocean. But at the end of the Greek advance the Greek dominions lay as a great horse-shoe round the desert, from Pataliputra to Sagala, thence north-west, and thence to the southern ocean at Patalene and Surashtra; and what the story does is to take Pushyamitra right round the Greek horse-shoe, persecuting as he goes. This cannot be accidental coincidence. Greeks, i.e. Greek propaganda, had something to do with this story; and that becomes almost a certainty when it is noticed that the only town mentioned by name, after leaving Pataliputra, is Sagala, and Sagala was just about to become Menander's capital. One need not postulate religious persecution; but if some people who did not desire Pushyamitra's rule were killed at Sagala, that would have given Demetrius, whose general Menander was about to invade the eastern Punjab, an opportunity for propaganda among the Madras which he would indeed have been blind to neglect: Menander was coming to save them from the oppression of the Sunga king. But the Madras killed at Sagala had doubtless in actual fact been Buddhists, and, even if this were accidental, it might well be interpreted by Buddhists generally as religious persecution; the Greek leaders might think that they were helping Pushyamitra's enemies, but to the Buddhist world it meant that they were helping Buddhists;1 [A very similar misinterpretation had occurred in 225 in the story of Cleomenes III of Sparta; the peoples of the Peloponnesian cities believed that he was championing social revolution, while he saw in social revolution an opportunity to get them on to his side as against Aratus. See Tarn in CAH VII pp. 755-7. ] would they or would they not, the Greek kings, in Indian eyes, inevitably became champions of Buddhism.

A strange touch in the Yuga-purana, of great importance, bears this out. The late author of this Sanscrit document as we have it, of Brahman sympathies and disliking the foreigner, might say that the effect of the Greek conquest (if indeed he refers here to the Greek conquest) was to turn the world upside down, confound the castes, and make Jack as good as his master;2 [Whether §6 of the Yuga-purana really belongs where the MSS place it may be doubtful; see App. 4.] and doubtless the Greeks did take little account of the four 'colours' and made use of anyone willing to support them. But he has also preserved traces of a very different view, probably from the original Prakrit chronicle or document on which the sections of our Yuga-purana dealing with the Yavanas are based (see App.4). For Demetrius appears as Dharmamita,3 [The Prakrit termination. The Sanscrit Dharmamitra appears in another place as the name of Demetrias in Sogdiana, p. 118.] that is, the name has been 'adjusted' to bring in the word Dharma and to make it signify 'Friend of Justice', and one can hardly mistake the reason: it is meant to recall the traditional Dharmaraja, the ideal King of Justice of Indian literature (see p. 256). There were, then, Indians to whom Demetrius appeared, not as a foreign conqueror, but as the King of Justice.

In this connection must be noticed the new Taxila1 [Sir J. Marshall's excavations have been published yearly in ASI; see also his Guide to Taxila 1918. He is publishing an exhaustive monograph on Taxila.] which Demetrius built on Sirkap to be his capital and to which he transferred the population of Old Taxila (p. 137). It was a strange foundation to be made by a Greek king, for what Demetrius built was not a Greek city but an Indian one, and an Indian city it remained; there is no indication that it ever became a Greek polis or bore Demetrius' name. The ground plan was fairly regular, so far as the lie of the ground permitted, and may show Hellenistic influence;2 [ASI 1927-8 p. 63. ] one large and well-planned house has been uncovered,3 [Ib. 1929 p. 62.] and apparently some bare walls of other houses;4 [CHI p. 646.] but there is nothing typically Greek about the buildings, nor are there any remains of temples altars public monuments or statues such as the Greek fancy ordinarily delighted in'.5 [Marshall in ASI 1930-4 (pub. 1936) p. 151.] The city had not even that indispensable feature of a Greek city, a stone wall; it had only the mud wall of an Indian town, and a stone wall was first built by the Sacas.6 [ASI 1928-9, p. 62.] No trace was found of a distinctive Greek quarter, or of a palace; the 'palace' may just have been a large house, like the Attalid 'palace' at Pergamum. Even more noteworthy, there was no indication of a citadel, though Susa and Babylon have shown that Greeks liked to keep the citadel in their own hands; apparently it cannot be said if there was a citadel at Sirkap at all,7 [Marshall. A Guide to Taxila, p. 5.] though later the Parthians may have fortified an area within the wall, as was their custom. The transference of the population of Old Taxila, even to their University and their gods, seems to have been so complete that there was no real break in the continuity of the city's life, especially if it be the case that the Indian city coinage continued to be struck throughout the reign of Demetrius (p. 161). If there was no Greek quarter, Greek and Indian must have lived side by side; one may recall Demetrius' sons treating the Greek and Indian communities in another town as on a level (p. 160). Above all, the mud wall and the absence of a citadel show that the Greeks had no fear of an Indian attack, whether from without or within; they were among friends.

We can now, I think, see what the Greek 'conquest' meant1 [A once famous 'conquest' which was not a military conquest is that of Ptolemy III; but the reasons were very different. See Tarn in CAH VII, 717; W. Otto, Beitrage zur Seleukidengeschicte 1928 pp. 48 sqq.] and how the Greeks were able to traverse such extraordinary distances. To parts of India, perhaps to large parts, they came, not as conquerors, but as friends and 'saviours'; to the Buddhist world in particular they appeared to be its champions; some provinces must have welcomed them precisely as Egypt and Babylon, and in India Taxila, had welcomed Alexander. They may have had comparatively little fighting till their achievement was half finished; they may even have had none at all except with the actual troops of Pushyamitra and in districts in the South where he was strong; the places where fighting is recorded -- Mathura, Saketa, Pataliputra, Madhyamika -- are all places which he would be bound to try to hold. Whatever allowance be made for adventurers and mercenaries from the West (p. 251), the Greeks and Westerners actually engaged in the enterprise cannot have been too numerous, and in each province when occupied the Greeks must largely have retained whatever native organisation existed (Chap. VI), merely seeing that power was in the hands of their friends and probably leaving a handful of Greeks to help in administration. The instance of the Sibi at Madhyamika may show that points which had to be held for military reasons were settled with native troops from a distance, whose isolation might guarantee their loyalty. Questions of towns and settlements will be considered later; but it may be said here that the only districts in which Greeks really settled to any extent were Gandhara and the northern Punjab, and perhaps the western seaports and parts of Surashtra. Over large parts of Greek India we need not think of Seleucid analogies.

There is no doubt that the policy followed by the Greek leaders was the policy of Demetrius; his lieutenants, especially Menander, may have entered wholeheartedly into his scheme, but his was the brain which conceived it and his the will which so nearly carried it through. For there is one unmistakable piece of evidence. Whether we believe or disbelieve the stories of Asoka's conversions of Greeks to Buddhism,2 [The Ceylonese chronicles make Asoka convert great numbers of Yonas and also send a Yona missionary Dhammarakkita to Aparanta (coast of Gujerat); CHI p. 499.] he had at any rate converted Gandhara and preached to the Greeks of the Paropamisadae;3 [Rock Edicts 5 and 13.] and this means that Demetrius was well informed about the position by the time he reached Taxila, even if he had not been so when he crossed the Hindu Kush. And his first step, as has been noticed, was to cause his son Demetrius II, his governor west of the Indus, to issue in his name a bilingual coinage with a Greek legend on the obverse and a Prakrit legend written in Kharoshthi on the reverse. As every succeeding Greek king in India copied him, the bilingual coinage has become such a commonplace that the tremendous significance of its first introduction has been obscured. It was not, as is sometimes said, issued for the benefit of Indian subjects who knew no Greek. Many Hellenistic kings, both before and after Demetrius, ruled over subjects who knew no Greek; but no Seleucid ever put Iranian or Babylonian legends on his coinage, no Ptolemy ever put Egyptian; the Arsacids of Parthia did not enquire if their subjects could read their Greek legends, any more than any British Government has ever troubled itself about its Latin ones. What Demetrius was doing was expressing the very basis of the conquest he meditated, the policy which made some Indians see in him the traditional King of Justice, the policy which had led him to rebuild his destined capital as an Indian rather than a Greek city (p. 179), and had led him, contrary to what appears to have been the Seleucid practice with regard to Greek cities with dynastic names, to admit Indians as citizens of Demetrias in Sind (p. 257). His realm was to be a partnership of Greek and Indian; he was not to be a Greek king of Indian subjects, but an Indian king no less than a Greek one, head of both races. There will be more to be said about this when we come to Menander's kingdom; it may be the most important thing about the Greek empire in India. It has already been shown that Demetrius was consciously copying Alexander; but in this matter his inspiration was not the Alexander who had cut his bloodstained way to the Beas but the Alexander who had imagined something better, the man who had prayed at Opis for a joint rule of the Macedonian and the Persian, the man whom Eratosthenes had called 'reconciler of the world'1 [[x], Eratosthenes ap. Plut. Mor. 329c.] and who had dreamt of a union of peoples in a human brotherhood.2 [Tarn, Alexander the Great and the unity of mankind, Proc. Brit. Acad. XIX, 1933, p. 123; W. Kolbe, Die Weltreichsidee Alexanders des Grossen 1936 p. 18. Contra. M. H. Fisch. A. J. Phil. LVIII, i, 1937, pp. 59, 129.] It is to the lasting credit of the Euthydemids that they made an attempt to put this into practice; an attempt imperfect enough, no doubt, and one whose motive force may have been largely ambition; but still an attempt. And that was more than was done by any other Hellenistic dynasty.

It has already been argued that Demetrius must have meant to make a final effort, in which Apollodotus and Menander should join hands, settle with Pushyamitra, and complete the Greek circuit round Northern India. The Greek leaders now had command of large revenues,1 [Illustrated by the enormous coinages of Apollodotus and subsequently of Menander. The Yuga-purana may refer to Demetrius' tax-collectors, App. 4.] and were in a position, should they so desire, to raise native armies of overwhelming strength; they could not have failed. How long the Greeks with their scanty numbers could have continued to sit on the throne of the Mauryas; whether men who had done what Apollodotus and Menander had done would have been content to remain subordinates, as Agrippa was to be content to serve Augustus; these questions are unprofitable speculations, for the final effort was not destined to be made. Why it was not made will be told in the next chapter.
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