Chapter 18

HISTORY--PRE-MUHAMMADAN PERIOD, 500 B.C.--1000 A.D.

~In Hindu period relations of Panjáb were with western kingdoms.~--The large tract included in the British province of the Panjáb which lies between the Jamna and the Ghagar is, having regard to race, language, and past history, a part of Hindustán. Where "Panjáb" is used without qualification in this section the territories west of the Ghagar and south of Kashmír are intended. The true relations of the Panjáb and Kashmír during the Hindu period were, except for brief intervals, with Persia, Afghánistán, and Turkistán rather than with the great kingdoms founded in the valley of the Ganges and the Jamna.

~Normal division into petty kingdoms and tribal confederacies.~--The normal state of the Panjáb in early times was to be divided into a number of small kingdoms and tribal republics. Their names and the areas which they occupied varied from time to time. Names of kingdoms that have been rescued from oblivion are Gandhára, corresponding to Pesháwar and the valley of the Kábul river, Urasa or Hazára, where the name is still preserved in the Orash plain, Táxila, which may have corresponded roughly to the present districts of Ráwalpindí and Attock with a small part of Hazára, Abhisara or the low hills of Jammu, Kashmír, and Trigartta, with its capital Jalandhara, which occupied most of the Jalandhar division north of the Sutlej and the states of Chamba, Suket, and Mandí. The historians of Alexander's campaigns introduce us also to the kingdoms of the elder Poros on both banks of the Jhelam, of the younger Poros east of the Chenáb, and of Sophytés (Saubhutí) in the neighbourhood of the Salt Range. We meet also with tribal confederacies, such as in Alexander's time those of the Kathaioi on the upper, and of the Malloi on the lower, Ráví.

~Invasion by Alexander, 327-325 B.C.~--The great Persian king, Darius, in 512 B.C. pushed out the boundary of his empire to the Indus, then running in a more easternly course than to-day[4]. The army with which Xerxes invaded Greece included a contingent of Indian bowmen[5]. When Alexander overthrew the Persian Empire and started on the conquest of India, the Indus was the boundary of the former. His remarkable campaign lasted from April, 327 B.C., when he led an army of 50,000 or 60,000 Europeans across the Hindu Kush into the Kábul valley, to October, 325, when he started from Sindh on his march to Persia through Makrán. Having cleared his left flank by a campaign in the hills of Buner and Swát, he crossed the Indus sixteen miles above Attock near Torbela. The King of Táxila, whose capital was near the Margalla pass on the north border of the present Ráwalpindí district, had prudently submitted as soon as the Macedonian army appeared in the Kábul valley. From the Indus Alexander marched to Táxila, and thence to the Jhelam (Hydaspes), forming a camp near the site now occupied by the town of that name in the country of Poros. The great army of the Indian king was drawn up to dispute the passage probably not very far from the eastern end of the present railway bridge. Favoured by night and a monsoon rain-storm--it was the month of July, 326 B.C.--Alexander succeeded in crossing some miles higher up into the Karrí plain under the low hills of Gujrát. Here, somewhere near the line now occupied by the upper Jhelam Canal, the Greek soldiers gave the first example of a feat often repeated since, the rout of a large and unwieldy Indian army by a small, but mobile and well-led, European force. Having defeated Poros, Alexander crossed the Chenáb (Akesines), stormed Sángala, a fort of the Kathaioi on the upper Ráví (Hydraotes) and advanced as far as the Biás (Hyphasis). But the weary soldiers insisted that this should be the bourn of their eastward march, and, after setting up twelve stone altars on the farther side, Alexander in September, 326 B.C., reluctantly turned back. Before he left the Panjáb he had hard fighting with the Malloi on the lower Ráví, and was nearly killed in the storm of one of their forts. Alexander intended that his conquests should be permanent, and made careful arrangements for their administration. But his death in June, 323 B.C., put an end to Greek rule in India. Chandra Gupta Maurya expelled the Macedonian garrisons, and some twenty years later Seleukos Nicator had to cede to him Afghánistán.

~Maurya Dominion and Empire of Asoka, 323-231 B.C.~--Chandra Gupta is the Sandrakottos, to whose capital at Pataliputra (Patna) Seleukos sent Megasthenes in 303 B.C. The Greek ambassador was a diligent and truthful observer, and his notes give a picture of a civilized and complex system of administration. If Chandra Gupta was the David, his grandson, Asoka, was the Solomon of the first Hindu Empire. His long reign, lasting from 273 to 231 B.C., was with one exception a period of profound peace deliberately maintained by an emperor who, after his conversion to the teaching of Gautama Buddha, thought war a sin. Asoka strove to lead his people into the right path by means of pithy abstracts of the moral law of his master graven on rocks and pillars. It is curious to remember that this missionary king was peacefully ruling a great empire in India during the twenty-four years of the struggle between Rome and Carthage, which we call the first Punic War. Of the four Viceroys who governed the outlying provinces of the empire one had his headquarters at Táxila. One of the rock edicts is at Mansehra in Hazára and another at Sháhbázgarhí in Pesháwar. From this time and for many centuries the dominant religion in the Panjáb was Buddhism, but the religion of the villages may then have been as remote from the State creed as it is to-day from orthodox Brahmanism.

~Graeco-Bactrian and Graeco-Parthian Rule.~--The Panjáb slipped from the feeble grasp of Asoka's successors, and for four centuries it looked not to the Ganges, but to the Kábul and the Oxus rivers.

Up to the middle of the first century of our era it was first under Graeco-Bactrian, and later under Graeco-Parthian, rule directly, or indirectly through local rulers with Greek names or Sáka Satraps. The Sákas, one of the central Asian shepherd hordes, were pushed out of their pastures on the upper Jaxartes by another horde, the Yuechí. Shadowy Hellenist Princes have left ~us~ only their names on coins; one Menander, who ruled about 150 B.C., is an exception. He anticipated the feats of later rulers of Kábul by a temporary conquest of North-Western India, westwards to the Jamna and southwards to the sea.

~The Kushán Dynasty.~--The Yuechí in turn were driven southward to the Oxus and the Kábul valley and under the Kushán dynasty established their authority in the Panjáb about the middle of the first century. The most famous name is that of Kanishka, who wrested from China Kashgár, Yarkand, and Khotan, and assembled ~a~ notable council of sages of the law in Kashmír. His reign may be dated from 120 to 150 A.D. His capital was at Purushapura (Pesháwar), near which he built the famous relic tower of Buddha, 400 feet high. Beside the tower was a large monastery still renowned in the ninth and tenth centuries as a home of sacred learning. The rule of Kushán kings in the Panjáb lasted till the end of the first quarter of the third century. To their time belong the Buddhist sculptures found in the tracts near their Pesháwar capital (see also page 204).

~The Gupta Empire.~--Of the century preceding the establishment in 320 B.C. of the Gupta dynasty at Patna we know nothing. The Panjáb probably again fell under the sway of petty rájas and tribal confederacies, though the Kushán rule was maintained in Pesháwar till 465 A.D., when it was finally blotted out by the White Huns. These savage invaders soon after defeated Skanda Gupta, and from this blow the Gupta Empire never recovered. At the height of its power in 400 A.D. under Chandra Gupta II, known as Vikramaditya, who is probably the original of the Bikramajít of Indian legends, it may have reached as far west as the Chenáb.

~The White Huns or Ephthalites.~--In the beginning of the sixth century the White Hun, Mahirakula, ruled the Panjáb from Sakala, the modern Siálkot. He was a worshipper of Siva, and a deadly foe of the Buddhist cult, and has been described as a monster of cruelty.

The short-lived dominion of the White Huns was destroyed by the Turks and Persians about the year 565 A.D.

~Panjáb in seventh century A.D.~--From various sources, one of the most valuable being the Memoirs of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hiuen Tsang, who travelled in India from 630 to 644 A.D., we know something of Northern India in the first half of the seventh century. Hiuen Tsang was at Kanauj as a guest of a powerful king named Harsha, whose first capital was at Thanesar, and who held a suzerainty over all the rájas from the Brahmaputra to the Biás. West of that river the king of Kashmír was also overlord of Táxila, Urasa, Parnotsa (Punch), Rájapurí (Rajaurí) and Sinhapura, which seems to have included the Salt Range. The Pesháwar valley was probably ruled by the Turkí Shahiya kings of Kábul. The rest of the Panjáb was divided between a kingdom called by Hiuen Tsang Tsekhia, whose capital was somewhere near Siálkot, and the important kingdom of Sindh, in which the Indus valley as far north as the Salt Range was included. Harsha died in 647 A.D. and his empire collapsed.

~Kashmír under Hindu Kings.~--For the next century China was at the height of its power. It established a suzerainty over Kashmír, Udyána (Swát), Yasín, and Chitrál. The first was at this period a powerful Hindu kingdom. Its annals, as recorded in Kalhana's Rájataranginí, bear henceforward a real relation to history. In 733 A.D. King Muktapida Lálitáditya received investiture from the Chinese Emperor. Seven years later he defeated the King of Kanauj on the Ganges. A ruler who carried his arms so far afield must have been very powerful in the Northern Panjáb. The remains of the wonderful Mártand temple, which he built in honour of the Sun God, are a standing memorial of his greatness. The history of Kashmír under its Hindu kings for the next 400 years is for the most part that of a wretched people ground down by cruel tyrants. A notable exception was Avantidharman--855-883 A.D.--whose minister, Suyya, carried out very useful drainage and irrigation works.

~The Panjáb, 650-1000 A.D.~--We know little of Panjáb history in the 340 years which elapsed between the death of Harsha and the beginning of the Indian raids of the Sultans of Ghazní in 986-7 A.D. The conquest of the kingdom of Sindh by the Arab general, Muhammad Kásim, occurred some centuries earlier, in 712 A.D. Multán, the city of the Sun-worshippers, was occupied, and part at least of the Indus valley submitted to the youthful conqueror. He and his successors in Sindh were tolerant rulers. No attempt was made to occupy the Central Panjáb, and when the Turkish Sultán, Sabaktagin, made his first raid into India in 986-7 A.D., his opponent was a powerful rája named Jaipál, who ruled over a wide territory extending from the Hakra to the frontier hills on the north-west. His capital was at Bhatinda. Just about the time when the rulers of Ghazní were laying the train which ended at Delhi and made it the seat of a great Muhammadan Empire, that town was being founded in 993-4 A.D. by the Tunwar Rájputs, who then held sway in that neighbourhood.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 4: See Sykes' _History of Persia_, pp. 179-180; also Herodotos III. 94 and 98 and IV. 44.]

[Footnote 5: "The Indians clad with garments made of cotton had bows of cane and arrows of cane tipped with iron."--Herodotos VII. 65.]