The Allahabad Pillar Names 9 Northern Kings and 12 Southern Kings in Samudragupta's Campaigns, and His Gold Coins Show Him Playing the Veena

Samudragupta, the Gupta king who ruled in the middle of the fourth century CE, left a record of his campaigns that names nine kings of northern India and twelve of the south. The record is a Sanskrit eulogy, part prose and part verse, composed by his minister Harishena and cut into a stone pillar that now stands inside the Allahabad Fort at Prayagraj. His gold coins add eight designs, among them a king seated on a couch playing the veena, the Indian lute. John Allan’s 1914 catalogue for the British Museum calls that type “one quite unique among Indian coins”.

Both kinds of evidence were made for the king, so this account says each time whose voice is speaking.

A pillar and the minister who wrote on it

Harishena was not the first to use the pillar. Ashoka had his edicts cut on it about six centuries earlier, according to Vincent Smith, and one of them is addressed to the officials of Kausambi, the city now called Kosam, roughly thirty miles away on the Yamuna. A 1935 note in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society by C. S. Krishnaswamy Rao Sahib and Amalananda Ghosh records the view of the epigraphist E. Hultzsch that the Gupta text was cut while the pillar still stood at Kosam. Someone moved it to Allahabad later, and scholars disagree on who. Alexander Cunningham credited the Delhi sultan Firuz Shah, Hultzsch credited Akbar. Mughal-era inscriptions, Jahangir’s among them, were added afterwards, in places between and over the lines of the Gupta text, the Siddham inscription database notes. For the king whose edicts came first, see Ashoka.

Upinder Singh lists Harishena’s three titles as sandhivigrahika, minister for peace and war; kumaramatya, a high rank in the royal service; and mahadandanayaka, a senior judicial or military officer. The poem itself says his father Dhruvabhuti held the third title and that a mahadandanayaka named Tilabhattaka executed the work, and the Wuerzburg database lists Tilabhattaka as the scribe. It gives Samudragupta’s descent as son of Chandragupta I and Queen Kumaradevi, and grandson through his mother of the Licchavis. One verse has the father embrace him before the court and tell him to protect the whole earth, while others of equal birth watched with sad faces.

Whether Samudragupta was alive when the pillar was carved is unsettled. Fleet read the text as posthumous, and the Wuerzburg database follows him, giving 380 to 415 CE. Smith, citing Georg Bühler, held that it was not posthumous and placed it near 360. Allan thought it was probably engraved before the king’s horse sacrifice.

Nine kings of the north, twelve of the south

Harishena groups the campaigns by region. In the north, a verse says Samudragupta uprooted Achyuta and Nagasena, and a Ganapati whose name is partly restored, when they came together against him, and had a prince of the Kota family captured while amusing himself in a city called Pushpa. Another verse says he forcibly destroyed many kings of Aryavarta, the northern heartland, and made the rulers of the forest regions his servants. Singh and Smith both count nine names in that list.

Some of those names turn up outside the poem. Singh notes coins of a Ganapatinaga found at Pawaya and coins of an Achyuta found at Ramnagar, the ancient Ahichchhatra, in Bareilly district, along with a seal from Bulandshahr bearing the name Matila, though without a royal title. She reads the northern campaigns as seeming to extend Gupta control over the Ganga and Yamuna valley as far as Mathura and Padmavati.

For the south the poem says he first captured and then released all the kings of Dakshinapatha, the southern region, and it names twelve, among them Mahendra of Kosala, Vishnugopa of Kanchi, Hastivarman of Vengi and Dhananjaya of Kusthalapura. Smith counted eleven southern kings and read Mahendragiri and Kottura as hill forts. He took the list to be the route of one long march and estimated more than 3,000 miles over at least three years. The poem lists the kings without a route, and Smith himself wrote that its matter is arranged on literary rather than historical principles.

Singh reads the southern entries as kings who were humbled but neither annexed nor reduced to the status of feudatories. In her summary, Samudragupta’s directly held core seems to have covered much of northern India, with a ring of subordinate states around it, and the Guptas did not create an all-India empire under their direct control. They did build a network of paramountcy and subordination across a large part of the subcontinent.

Tribute from the frontier

The poem next lists rulers who paid every tribute, obeyed orders and came to pay their respects. The frontier kingdoms are Samatata in south-east Bengal, Davaka and Kamarupa in Assam, Nepala and Kartripura. Nine tribal peoples called ganas follow, among them the Malavas, Yaudheyas, Madrakas and Abhiras. Singh points out that the text makes no direct mention of these groups supplying troops.

Another verse names more distant powers. The Daivaputra, Shahi and Shahanushahi rulers, the Shakas and the people of Simhala, which is Sri Lanka, are said to have offered self-surrender, daughters in marriage and requests for the Garuda badge, the Gupta seal, to govern their own districts. Singh reads the first group as probably the last remnants of Kushana rule. That these powers behaved as the poem says is Harishena’s claim. For Sri Lanka there is an outside account, described at the end of this article.

Eight kinds of gold coin

Raven’s count of Samudragupta’s gold coins gives eight types: the standard type, king and queen, Ashvamedha, Kacha, lyrist, battle-axe, archer and tiger-slayer. In the standard type, the most common, the king holds a staff and offers at a fire altar beside a Garuda banner. The archer holds a bow, the battle-axe type has a dwarf attendant, and the tiger-slayer shows him trampling the animal. Their legends use words such as parakramah, valour, and apratirathah, unrivalled. Raven had documented some 7,000 Gupta gold coins in her database by 2016, and her ratios for the types run from 1:4 for the king-and-queen type to 1:40 for the tiger-slayer, which makes the tiger-slayer the rarest.

The lyrist coin is the one that matches a line of the poem. Allan describes the king on a high-backed couch, bare to the waist except for his jewellery, playing the veena, with the goddess Lakshmi seated on a wicker stool on the reverse. He divides the type into large coins from what was probably the capital’s mint and small coins from a provincial one, and says the type “affords striking corroboration” of the inscription’s claim about the king’s musical skill. Harishena says Samudragupta put the heavenly musicians Tumburu and Narada to shame and held the title kaviraja, king of poets. Singh notes that a prashasti, or royal praise poem, usually carries conventional compliments, but she reads these particular lines as possibly based on talents Samudragupta really had.

The horse sacrifice the pillar does not mention

The Ashvamedha coin shows a horse standing before a sacrificial post on one side and a queen with a fly-whisk on the other, and its legend calls the king Ashvamedhaparakramah, a phrase Raven renders as powerful enough to perform the horse sacrifice. The legible lines of the pillar say nothing about the ritual, Raven observes. A later source does. The Poona copper plates of his granddaughter Prabhavati Gupta describe him as a performer of several horse sacrifices.

Raven writes that the coins are generally assumed to have been issued for the occasion and handed out as gifts, but heavy wear on many of them shows they also circulated as money. The circular verse on the front is hard to read. Allan read it as saying the king of kings, having conquered the earth, wins heaven. A. S. Altekar, in 1957, read the verb as protected, and Raven finds three or even four versions of the legend across the surviving coins.

Dates, a brother and a successor

No source gives firm dates. Smith wrote that the year of Samudragupta’s death is not known and put it about 375. Allan placed his accession in 335, reckoning from the length of his father’s reign, and thought he most probably lived until 380 or 385. Singh gives about 350 to 370. A figure of 335 to 375 is therefore one reconstruction among several.

Singh says evidence indicates that a king named Ramagupta ruled between about 370 and 375, with Chandragupta II reigning from about 376 to 413 or 415. The Archaeological Survey’s edition traces that evidence to extracts from a Sanskrit play, the Devichandraguptam. Coins naming Kacha are assigned to Samudragupta himself by Allan, while Singh notes the other view that Kachagupta was a brother who ruled before him. The later reign is covered in the Gupta golden age, and Singh sets out why the king named Chandra on the Delhi iron pillar is most likely Chandragupta II rather than his father.

The “Indian Napoleon” label

The label is attributed to Smith, and it stands in the first edition of his history, published at Oxford in 1904. After summarising Harishena’s account he wrote that Samudragupta was “a man of genius, who may fairly claim the title of the Indian Napoleon”. In the same passage he cautioned that the eulogist’s courtly phrases cannot be accepted without some reservation, and he likened Harishena’s portrait of the king to Abul Fazl’s portrait of Akbar.

The Archaeological Survey’s revised edition of the Gupta inscriptions, which rests on D. R. Bhandarkar’s draft, sets Smith’s line beside an objection from the historian Krishnaswami Aiyangar, who called the comparison the most inappropriate description of the king. The same passage describes Samudragupta as a warrior and general and also as a statesman who built an empire and held it together.

A monastery for Sri Lankan pilgrims at Bodh Gaya

The Sri Lankan link rests on a Chinese text rather than on the pillar. According to Singh, that text says King Meghavarna of Sri Lanka sent a mission with gifts to Samudragupta and asked leave to build a monastery and rest house at Bodh Gaya for Sri Lankan pilgrims. The date of the embassy depends on the date given to Meghavarna. Smith put it near 330. Allan, following Fleet’s later chronology, placed Meghavarna at 351 to 379.

Xuanzang, the Chinese pilgrim whose travels in Harsha’s reign are told elsewhere on tuput, tells much the same story in the seventh century, without naming either king. In Samuel Beal’s translation, a Sri Lankan monk is treated with disdain at Indian monasteries, the Sri Lankan king sends the jewels of his country to the king of India, and permission follows for a convent near the Bodhi tree. Xuanzang describes the result as a building with six halls, three-storey towers, a surrounding wall thirty or forty feet high and a Buddha statue cast in gold and silver and set with gems. He puts the number of monks at more than a thousand, of the Sthavira school, and writes that the convent entertained many priests from Sri Lanka.