Harsha

• 1. Introduction

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  Harshavardhana ascended the throne at the age of 16, with two killings to avenge and a captured sister to rescue. His brother had been murdered. His brother-in-law had been killed in war. His sister Rajyashri had fled into the forests, and Harsha found her as she was about to immolate herself. This was the beginning of a reign that would stretch from April 606 until 647. How did a teenage king from the small kingdom of Thanesar come to rule much of northern India? Why did a Chinese traveller cross half a continent to write a glowing account of his justice? And why, despite his power, was he turned back at the banks of a single river? The answers run through palaces and stupas, through Sanskrit plays and a faraway Tang court that would one day send soldiers across the Himalayas.

• 2. Blood And Succession

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  Rajyashri, Harsha's sister, had been married to the Maukhari monarch Grahavarman. King Devagupta of Malwa defeated and killed Grahavarman, then captured Rajyashri and imprisoned her. Her brother Rajyavardhana, then king at Sthanesvara, could not accept this affront to his family. He marched against Devagupta and defeated him. The victory did not hold. Shashanka, the King of Gauda in Eastern Bengal, entered Magadha posing as a friend of Rajyavardhana while secretly allied with the Malwa king. Shashanka treacherously murdered Rajyavardhana. On hearing of his brother's death, Harsha resolved at once to march against the treacherous King of Gauda. That campaign remained inconclusive, and beyond a point he turned back. The succession itself ran through a single family line. Prabhakaravardhana, father of both brothers, had been the first monarch of the Vardhana dynasty, ruling from Sthanvesvara. He died in 605, and his eldest son Rajyavardhana took the throne before his murder cleared the way for Harsha.

• 3. Crowned By An Assembly

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  In April 606, representatives of small republics from Punjab to central India gathered at an assembly and crowned Harsha emperor. They gave him the title Maharajadhiraja. This was an unusual path to power, for Harsha did not simply inherit a throne. He united the scattered states that had emerged after the fall of the Gupta Empire in the middle of the 6th century, when northern India had broken into a dozen or more feudatory kingdoms. At the height of his power his realm covered much of northern and northwestern India, with the Narmada River as its southern boundary. He made Kanyakubja, present-day Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh, his imperial capital. Xuanzang would later mention that the term "Five Indias" was used to describe the lands Harsha brought under allegiance, though that phrase was applied so loosely that historians warn against reading it as a precise map. Harsha was the most powerful emperor of northern India, but he did not rule all of it.

• 4. The River That Stopped Him

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  Pulakeshin II of the Chalukya dynasty repelled Harsha's invasion on the banks of the Narmada in the winter of 618-619. Harsha had tried to push his empire south into the peninsula, and he failed. Xuanzang recorded the moment plainly. "Shiladityaraja, filled with confidence, marched at the head of his troops to contend with this prince; but he was unable to prevail upon or subjugate him." After the defeat, Pulakeshin entered into a treaty with Harsha. The Narmada River was designated as the border between the Chalukya Empire and Harsha's realm. The same river that marked his southern boundary became the limit that no army of his could cross.

• 5. A Cosmopolitan Court

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  Xuanzang, the Chinese traveller, journeyed to Harsha's imperial court and wrote a very favourable account of him, naming him Shiladitya and praising his justice and generosity. The peace and prosperity of the reign drew scholars, artists, and religious visitors from far and wide. Harsha organized an annual assembly of global scholars and bestowed charitable alms on them. Every five years he held a great assembly called Moksha. Xuanzang also describes a 21-day religious festival in Kanyakubja, during which Harsha and his subordinate kings performed daily rituals before a life-sized golden statue of the Buddha. His biography, the Harshacharita, or "The Life of Harsha," was written by the Sanskrit poet Banabhatta. It describes Harsha's association with Sthanesvara, and mentions a defensive wall, a moat, and a palace with a two-storied Dhavalagriha, a white mansion. The court that produced such accounts would soon attract attention from an empire even farther away.

• 6. Faith And Its Limits

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  Harsha's seals describe his ancestors as worshippers of the sun god Surya, his elder brother as a Buddhist, and himself as a Shaivite. His land grant inscriptions call him Parama-maheshvara, supreme devotee of Shiva, and his court poet Bana also describes him as a Shaivite. Xuanzang tells a different story. According to the Chinese Buddhist traveller, Harsha was a devout Buddhist who banned animal slaughter for food and built monasteries at the places visited by Gautama Buddha. Xuanzang reports that Harsha erected several thousand 100-feet high stupas on the banks of the Ganges and built well-maintained hospices for travellers and the poor along highways across India. Historians such as S. R. Goyal and S. V. Sohoni argue that Harsha was personally a Śaiva, and that his patronage of Buddhists misled Xuanzang. Even Xuanzang states that Harsha patronised scholars of all religions, not just Buddhist monks. Any conversion to Buddhism, if it happened at all, would have come in the later part of his life. The eclectic spirit ran into his own writing too, for his play Nāgānanda tells the story of the Bodhisattva Jīmūtavāhana, opens with a verse dedicated to the Buddha vanquishing Māra, and yet gives Shiva's consort Gauri the power to raise its hero back to life.

• 7. The King Who Wrote Plays

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  Three Sanskrit plays are widely attributed to Harsha himself: Ratnavali, Nagananda, and Priyadarsika. The attribution is not settled. Some, including Mammata in his Kavyaprakasha, hold that Dhāvaka, one of Harsha's court poets, wrote the plays as a paid commission. Wendy Doniger takes the other view, writing that she is "persuaded, however, that king Harsha really wrote the plays himself." The dispute over authorship matters because it places a working emperor among the recognized dramatists of Sanskrit literature. The same figure who commanded armies on the Narmada is credited with composing dialogue for the stage. Centuries later his life reached the screen, when a 1926 Indian silent film, Samrat Shiladitya, told his story under the direction of Mohan Dayaram Bhavnani.

• 8. The Envoy And The Aftermath

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  In 648, the Tang Chinese emperor Tang Taizong sent Wang Xuance to India, responding to an ambassador Harsha had earlier sent to China. Wang arrived to find that Harsha had died. The new king, recorded as Aluonashun and supposedly named Arunāsva, attacked Wang and his 30 mounted subordinates. Wang Xuance escaped to Tibet, where the kingdom had been subdued by the Tibetan King Songtsen. From there he assembled a joint force of over 7,000 Nepalese mounted infantry and 1,200 Tibetan infantry. On June 16 they struck at the Battle of Chabuheluo, in the war that took place in 649. The Nepali and Tibetan forces under Wang took 2,000 prisoners from Magadha, and the Indian pretender was among the captives. For this success Wang won the title "Grand Master for the Closing Court," and he secured a reported Buddhist relic for China. The pretender's name was recorded in Chinese records as "Na-fu-ti O-lo-na-shuen," with Dinafudi probably a reference to Tirabhukti. A lasting trace of the campaign survives in stone: Taizong's grave was given a statue of the Indian pretender, the captured ghost of a kingdom that had ended with Harsha's death.