6.5 — The Centuries Between: Indo-Greeks, Kushans, Satavahanas, the Sangam South

A coin from the second century BCE carries a Greek king's portrait and his name in Greek on one side, and on the other the same name in Prakrit written in Kharosthi script, alongside a Buddhist wheel. Another shows the Hindu deity Vasudeva-Krishna. Another names its issuer as maharajasa tratarasa — great king, saviour — a Prakrit translation of the Greek royal titles.

These are the coins of kings who spoke Greek, ruled Indians, and had to be legible to both. They are also, incidentally, the reason we can date this period at all: much of the political history of the Indo-Greek kingdoms is reconstructed from coins, because there are almost no texts.

This chapter covers the five centuries between the Mauryas and the Guptas — a period usually presented as a gap between empires, and one in which a great deal happened.

The northwest: Indo-Greeks

The Greek and Macedonian settlers Alexander left in Bactria — northern Afghanistan and southern Uzbekistan — broke away from the Seleucid empire around 250 BCE, and from about 180 BCE their kings pushed south into the Indus valley and Punjab.

Around forty of these kings are known, almost entirely from their coinage. Menander I, ruling in the second century BCE, was the most successful and is remembered in Indian tradition as Milinda.

The Milindapanha, the Questions of Milinda, is a Buddhist text in the form of a dialogue between the king and the monk Nagasena, and it is genuinely good philosophy. Its most famous passage handles the doctrine of no-self (Chapter 6.3) with the chariot analogy: Nagasena asks whether the chariot is the wheels, the axle, the pole, the frame or the yoke, gets "no" each time, and then asks whether it is anything besides these — establishing that "chariot" is a designation for an assemblage, not a thing with an essence, and that "Nagasena" works the same way.

The cultural fusion was real and it left a permanent mark.

Gandharan art. Buddhist sculpture in a Greco-Roman idiom — realistic drapery folds, modelled musculature, classical facial proportions, and motifs including wreaths, cherubs and acanthus leaves.

And the first images of the Buddha in human form appear in this milieu, in Gandhara and at nearly the same time at Mathura in a distinctly Indian style. Earlier Buddhist art never depicted him — his presence was shown by an empty throne, a footprint, a parasol or the wheel. The standard Buddha image reproduced across Asia for two thousand years has an ancestry that includes Hellenistic sculpture, and Chapter 5.2 gave the route.

The Heliodorus pillar at Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh is a small monument with a large significance. Erected around 110 BCE, its inscription records that Heliodorus, a Greek ambassador from Taxila to the Shunga court, a devotee of Vasudeva, set up this Garuda pillar. A Greek diplomat, a worshipper of Krishna, leaving a Sanskrit-tradition inscription in central India — the earliest surviving epigraphic evidence for Vaishnava devotion.

The Kushans

Central Asian nomads, the Yuezhi, displaced westward by pressure on the Chinese frontier (Chapter 5.6), settled in Bactria, and one of their branches — the Kushans — built an empire from around 30 CE that reached from Central Asia through Afghanistan and Pakistan into the Ganges valley.

They sat astride the Silk Roads (Chapter 5.7), controlling both the overland routes and the connection to Indian ports, and they grew enormously wealthy on it. Kushan gold coinage was based on the Roman standard, which tells you where the gold was coming from — the Roman trade deficit with India that Pliny complained about.

Kanishka, ruling probably from around 127 CE, is the best known, and his coins are the clearest illustration of what a multi-ethnic empire looked like. They carry deities from four traditions: the Buddha, labelled in Greek script; Iranian gods such as Mithra and the fire deity; Indian deities including Shiva as Oesho; and Greek ones including Helios and Selene. The legends are in Greek script writing the Iranian Bactrian language.

This is not confusion. It is policy — the Persian model from Chapter 4.7, of presenting the ruler in each community's own religious language.

Under the Kushans, Buddhism took its decisive turn. The Mahayana tradition — with its bodhisattva ideal of postponing one's own liberation to help others, its devotional practices, and its far larger cosmology — developed in this period and this region. And it is from Kushan territory that Buddhism moved into Central Asia and China, carried by merchants and monks along the routes the Kushans controlled.

Kanishka is credited with convening a Buddhist council, and Kushan patronage funded the great monastic complexes of Gandhara.

They also had contact with Rome. Kushan embassies to Roman emperors are recorded, and Roman glass, coins and metalwork are found in Kushan sites.

The Deccan: the Satavahanas

The Satavahanas ruled much of the Deccan from around the first century BCE to the third century CE, based first in the Andhra region and later westward toward Maharashtra.

They are the first major power of peninsular India after the Mauryas, and their significance is threefold.

They connected the coasts. Their territory spanned the peninsula, linking the Arabian Sea ports that traded with Rome and the Arab world to the Bay of Bengal ports trading with Southeast Asia. Roman coin hoards and Mediterranean pottery are found in their territory.

They funded the rock-cut caves. The Buddhist cave complexes of the Western Ghats — Karla, Bhaja, Nasik, and the earliest phase of Ajanta — were excavated in this period, financed by donations. The inscriptions naming donors are one of the best sources for the social history of ancient India, because they record ordinary people: merchants, guilds, artisans, and — significantly — many women donating in their own names.

And their queens held unusual prominence. Several kings are named in inscriptions with a matronymic — Gautamiputra, son of Gautami — and Gautami Balashri's inscription at Nasik praising her son is one of the most important Satavahana records. This is not evidence of a matriarchy, but it is evidence of a society in which a royal woman's lineage was worth stating.

The Sangam south

This is the section most Indian school syllabi shortchange, and it should not be.

The far south — the Tamil country — was never part of the Mauryan empire and developed on its own, ruled by three dynasties named in Ashoka's own inscriptions as neighbours: the Cheras in what is now Kerala, the Cholas in the Kaveri delta, and the Pandyas around Madurai.

The Sangam literature is a body of about 2,381 poems by around 473 poets, composed roughly between the third century BCE and the third century CE, in classical Tamil. It is one of the world's great secular ancient literatures, and its distinguishing quality is what it is about.

It is divided into two categories that are worth knowing. Akam — the interior — is love poetry, and it is codified by landscape: five ecological zones, each associated with a phase of love. Mountains for union, forest for waiting, farmland for sulking, seashore for separation, wasteland for elopement and hardship. A poem's setting tells you its emotional situation before a word is said about it.

Puram — the exterior — is public poetry: war, kings, generosity, death, ethics, and grief.

The quality is high and the register is startlingly direct. The poems talk about a woman noticing her lover's chariot dust on the road, about a bard's poverty, about a mother whose son has died in battle and who searches the field and is proud rather than only grieving, about kings who gave away everything. There is very little religion in them and no priestly framing.

One short poem, by Kaniyan Punkunran, is among the most quoted lines in Tamil: yaadhum oore, yaavarum kelir — every town is our town, everyone is our kin. It is from around two thousand years ago, and it is inscribed in the United Nations building in New York.

The society they describe had extensive trade — with Rome directly (Chapter 5.7), and eastward — well-organised ports, a courtly culture of patronage where poets travelled between kings, and a system of chieftains and kings with clear conventions about generosity and honour.

And the Tamil grammatical tradition is old and sophisticated. The Tolkappiyam, a work on grammar and poetics, is the oldest extant Tamil text, and it analyses not only language but the conventions of literature and the classification of human situations. The Tirukkural, by Tiruvalluvar, probably a little later, is 1,330 couplets on virtue, wealth and love, entirely non-sectarian, and it is quoted across every Tamil community regardless of religion.

What this period actually establishes

Three corrections to the standard narrative.

Political fragmentation is not cultural decline. The five centuries between Mauryas and Guptas produced Gandharan art, Mahayana Buddhism, the Sangam corpus, the western Deccan caves, the great expansion of Indian Ocean trade, and the transmission of Buddhism to Central and East Asia. Empires are not the unit of cultural achievement.

India was never isolated. Greeks, Central Asians, Romans, Arabs, Chinese and Southeast Asians were all in continuous contact with the subcontinent, and the traffic was in ideas as much as goods.

And the south is not a supplement to Indian history. It had its own dynasties, its own literature in a language unrelated to Sanskrit, its own maritime orientation, and its own trajectory. Chapter 6.7 covers what it built later, and it is a story of empire and engineering on a scale that matches anything in the north.

Where this shows up in your life

Tamil is one of the world's oldest continuously used literary languages, and a Tamil speaker today can read Sangam poetry with effort — a continuity comparable to a Greek reading Homer.

The Buddha image, everywhere in Asia, carries this period's fusion.

Southeast Asia's Indian inheritance begins here. The scripts of Thai, Khmer, Burmese, Javanese and Balinese descend from Brahmi (Chapter 3.11). The Ramayana and Mahabharata became national epics in Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and Laos. Angkor Wat is a Vishnu temple. Sanskrit was the language of inscription across the region for a thousand years. This transmission was overwhelmingly by traders, monks and Brahmin advisers rather than by conquest, and it began with the trade networks of this period.

And a note on names. Indonesia's national airline is Garuda. Thailand's former capital was Ayutthaya, from Ayodhya. The connection is not decoration; it is the residue of the largest peaceful cultural transmission in Asian history.

What the next page covers

Around 320 CE a dynasty from Magadha rebuilt a large north Indian empire, and later tradition and modern textbooks call the result a golden age. Chapter 6.6 examines that claim — what the Guptas actually achieved in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, literature and art, what a Chinese pilgrim who walked across the empire reported about ordinary life, and what the same period did to the position of women and of the lowest castes. It was genuinely one of the great creative periods in world history, and the phrase "golden age" hides as much as it reveals.