HUNS, MIHIRAKULA AND KASHMIR
The history of Kashmir in late antiquity cannot be understood in isolation from the great Central Asian upheavals that reshaped the political geography of northern India in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. Amongst these, the irruption of the Hunas, a branch of the nomadic confederation known to the Western world as the Huns, remains the most violent and consequential.
The Huna Presence in India
The Hunas who appear on the north-western frontiers of India in the middle of the fifth century were not a single tribe but a conglomeration of Alchon, Kidarite and Hephthalite clans, speaking languages of the Turkic family and practising a formidable equestrian warfare. Classical Indian sources designate them generically as Huna, whilst Chinese annalists call them Yeh-ta or Ye-tha.
Their first incursion into Gupta territory was met with decisive resistance. The Bhitari pillar inscription records that the Gupta emperor Skandagupta, who reigned circa 455–467 CE, inflicted a crushing defeat upon them, thereby preserving the Gupta dominion for another generation. Foiled in the east, a considerable body of Hunas migrated westwards towards the Oxus and thence into Europe, where under Attila they would convulse the Roman world.
The reprieve for India was brief. By the close of the fifth century a new group, the Alchon Huns, had consolidated power in Bactria and the Hindu Kush. Under their chief Toramana, whose name occurs in inscriptions at Eran and Sanjeli, they forced the Khyber and descended into the Punjab. Between 500 and 511 CE Toramana established suzerainty over Punjab, Rajputana, Malwa and portions of Kashmir and the Gangetic Doab. His coinage, struck in silver after the Gupta model, proclaims his paramount status, and the Jain work Kuvalayamala refers to his residence at Pavvaiya on the Chenab.
Mihirakula: The Suryavanshi
Upon Toramana's death, about 515 CE, his dominions passed to his son Mihirakula. Our sources for his reign are fragmentary but mutually corroborative: the Rajatarangini of Kalhana Pandit, written in the twelfth century; the accounts of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims Song Yun, who travelled in Gandhara in 520 CE, and Xuanzang, who visited a century later; the inscription of Yashodharman at Mandasor; and numismatic evidence.
Mihirakula ruled from Sakala, modern Sialkot, then a great centre of trade and learning. At its zenith his empire stretched from Gandhara and Kashmir in the north to Eran in Madhya Pradesh in the south. A Hinduised Hun, he was a fervent devotee of Shiva. His coins bear upon the obverse a bust of the king and upon the reverse the humped bull Nandi with the legend Jayatu Vrisha "Victorious be the Bull". On some issues he styles himself "Mihirakula Suryavanshi" descendant of the Sun , an explicit attempt to assimilate into Kshatriya genealogy.
Chinese testimony is unsparing. Song Yun, who encountered him in Gandhara, describes a ruler "by nature cruel, vindictive and addicted to slaughter". Xuanzang, writing around 630 CE, states that Mihirakula ruled Kashmir and commanded a force of several hundred elephants and a vast cavalry, and that he persecuted Buddhists with systematic ferocity.
The denouement in the plains is well documented. In about 532 CE a confederacy of Indian princes led by Yashodharman of Malwa and Baladitya of Magadha inflicted a decisive defeat upon Mihirakula in central India. The Mandasor inscription of Yashodharman records with understandable pride that the chief "whose head had never been bent before in obeisance, whose arms were as hard as the Himalaya," was forced to pay homage. Mihirakula was taken captive but subsequently released , an act of magnanimity that Baladitya would have cause to regret.
The Kashmir Interlude
Stripped of his Indian possessions and displaced by his younger brother in Bactria, Mihirakula sought refuge in Kashmir. What followed is recounted in detail in the third Taranga of Kalhana's Rajatarangini.
The reigning prince of Kashmir, whose name tradition preserves variously as a Gonanda scion, received the fugitive with honour and assigned to him the district of Lohara and other lands for his maintenance. For a time Mihirakula bided his opportunity. He cultivated the discontented hill chiefs and, once his retinue of Hun warriors had grown sufficiently numerous, he rose in rebellion, slew his benefactor by treachery, and seized the throne of the Valley, probably in 533 CE.
Kalhana's portrait is unforgettable. He calls him "a man of violent deeds, resembling Death himself" — "kroorakarma kaalopamah". The approach of his army was, it is said, presaged by vultures, crows and other carrion birds that followed his camp in expectation of carnage. The chronicler attributes to him acts of almost theatrical sadism: that he derived pleasure from watching elephants hurled screaming into the gorge at the pass of Hastivanj, that he put to death women, children and the aged without compunction.
His policy in Kashmir had two aspects. On the one hand he was a lavish patron of Shaivism. He is credited with founding the shrine of Mihireshvara and endowing Brahmins. On the other, he pursued a relentless persecution of Buddhists and Jains, creeds that had flourished in Kashmir under the Kushanas. He demolished Viharas and Stupas, confiscated monastic estates, and, according to Xuanzang, massacred the inhabitants of a monastic settlement on the bank of the Jhelum (ancient Vitasta ) so that the river ran red.
A curious detail recorded by R.S. Pandit in his English translation of the Rajatarangini deserves mention. Pandit, drawing upon local tradition, observes that Mihirakula "never laughed" and that his court punished mirth and levity as offences against discipline. For this morose and pitiless temperament later historians have styled him "the Indian Nero". The epithet is apt insofar as both rulers combined cultural patronage with capricious cruelty.
Death and Historical Legacy
Mihirakula's second reign was brief. The Rajatarangini relates that he led a punitive expedition into Gandhara to exact vengeance for his earlier humiliation. There, after slaughtering the royal house that had betrayed him, he himself was stricken with a loathsome disease. He perished in 533 or 534 CE, amid portents : a tempest, an earthquake and a shower of meteors , p which Chinese observers interpreted as heaven's censure of his crimes. With his death the Alchon dominion in India collapsed. By 563–567 CE the combined forces of the Western Turks and the Sassanian Persians had destroyed the Hephthalite power in Bactria itself.
In Kashmir he was succeeded, not by a son, but by his younger brother Pravarasena II. It is to Pravarasena that Kashmir owes its enduring urban core. He founded Pravarapura, the city upon the Vitasta which, after numerous vicissitudes, endures as Srinagar. He re-established order, repaired temples and monasteries, and inaugurated the second Gonanda or Pravarasena dynasty that would rule the Valley for two centuries.
Numismatics confirms the extent of Hun influence. Coins of Toramana and Mihirakula have been unearthed from Bactria, Taxila, Jammu, Kashmir and central India , a distribution that attests to an empire based less upon administration than upon tribute and terror.
( A coin showing Mihirakula)
The Huns as a people left little institutional imprint upon Kashmir. Readily acculturating, they adopted Shaivism in India, Buddhism in some phases, and Christianity in Europe. Yet their legacy is twofold. In collective memory, Mihirakula remains the archetype of the tyrant, the cautionary tale of hospitality betrayed , a theme with profound resonance in Kashmiri didactic literature. In political history, his overthrow and Pravarasena's subsequent foundation of Srinagar mark the true beginning of early medieval Kashmir, the Valley's transition from a peripheral principality to a central Himalayan kingdom with its own distinct identity.
Thus a Central Asian nomad, seeking asylum in a mountain valley, inadvertently gave that valley its capital and its most enduring symbol.
( Avtar Mota)
