His topi-style helmet appears much too big; protruding curls and delicate features suggest effeminacy; and he calls himself ‘Basileos’ and ‘Soter’, ‘King’ and ‘Saviour’, rather then ‘Conqueror’ or ‘Patriot’. With this gentler image his other legacy is more in keeping; for in Buddhist tradition he is remembered as ‘Milinda’, the great king who in a celebrated question-and-answer session with the philosopher Nagasena became the vehicle for an exposition of Buddhist doctrine; he may even himself have adopted Buddhism. The meeting took place in Menander’s capital of Sagala, whose whereabouts are uncertain but which may have been in the boulder-strewn valley of Swat. If this surmise is correct, it must be thanks to Menander that the gentle terraces beside the racing river Swat came to accommodate the pre-eminent centre of Buddhist teaching in the north-west.
Of Menander’s successors we know little. One, Antialcidas, is thought to have briefly reunited the Greeks’ territories on either side of the Hindu Kush in around 110 BC. He is mentioned in an inscription on a pillar erected by one Heliodorus in a village in central India hundreds of miles away to the south-east but just fields from Vidisha and the stupas of Sanchi. Heliodorus was Antialcidas’ emissary to a King Bhagabhadra who is otherwise unknown but who may have been one of the Shungas. Perhaps Antialcidas was seeking some kind of alliance against his ever quarrelsome rivals. The memorial is more revealing about ambassador Heliodorus who, though decidedly a Greek and the son of a certain Dion of Taxila, nevertheless describes himself as a devotee of the god Vasudeva. Accordingly he crowned his pillar with an image of the winged Garuda, Vasudeva’s ‘vehicle’. Already associated with both the Greek Heracles and the Yadavas’ Lord Krishna, the heroic Vasudeva was about to become absorbed into the multiple persona of the great Lord Vishnu. Heliodorus thus provides an early example of the adoption by a non-Indian, not of the generally more accessible and proselytising doctrines of the Buddha, but of an orthodox cult within the so-called ‘Great Tradition’ of what we now call Hinduism.
Such cross-cultural adoptions, for which the word ‘conversion’ is still too strong, become commonplace amongst those who in the first century BC supplanted the Bactrian Greeks. On their coins, modelled on those of the Bactrian Greeks, Greek gods are jumbled up with unmistakably Indian deities, amongst whom Lord Shiva and his consort Uma have been identified. Elephants also appear, and kings are often depicted mounted on horseback. The newcomers have unfamiliar names – Maues, Azes, Spalirises; each is typically designated a ‘king of kings’ and, less proud of their profiles, they eschew the close-up portraits so beloved of the Greeks.
Who these people were, when they reigned and where, is still debated. Most authorities believe that Maues, who first displaced the Greeks in the Taxila region, was a Shaka, others that he was a Pahlava. The Pahlavas, it appears, may or may not be the same as the Parthians of northern Iran, just as the Shakas may or may not be the same as the Scythians of the Caucasus. But if Maues and his immediate successors in the first century BC were Shakas, their immediate successors in the first century AD were probably Parthians.
Of one of these Parthians we know from a source other than his coins and the odd inscription. His name was ‘Gondophares’, which, as the French scholar M. Reinaud noticed in the 1860s, bears a more than coincidental resemblance to ‘Gudnaphar’, an Indian king mentioned in an early Christian text. This text was the Acts of St Thomas, wherein the self-same apostle is said to have actually attended the court of King Gudnaphar. Thomas, it seems, had reached the Panjab under protest. After the death of Christ, when the apostles drew lots as to their respective missions, Thomas had drawn India and, ever the ‘doubting Thomas’, immediately knew that the task was beyond him. ‘Whithersoever thou wilt, O Lord, send me,’ he prayed, ‘only to India I will not go.’ But the prayer was of no avail. Thomas, apparently a skilled carpenter, found himself indentured to a passing Indian merchant who took him back to work on Gondophares’ new palace. In the Panjab he was eventually rewarded with honours and converts. Later, he would undertake a second mission to peninsular India, where his misgivings would prove tragically well-founded.
Whether this Thomas was really Thomas the apostle, and whether he really reached the Panjab, is suitably open to doubt; likewise the ‘converts’ he is supposed to have made there. But at least the tradition implies that Gondophares must have ruled after the death of Christ. This may not seem a great point. It deserves, though, to be greeted as something of a milestone in what is otherwise a trackless wilderness of dynastic uncertainty.
Both Shakas and Parthians had originated beyond the Hindu Kush. There, along the desert routes from China and across the steppes of Turkestan, a major upheaval had been taking place. Chinese sources tell of the construction of the Great Wall in the third century BC and the repulse of various marauding tribes. Forced to head west and eventually south, these tribes displaced others in an ethnic knock-on effect which lasted many decades and spread right across central Asia. The Parthians from Iran and the Bactrian Greeks from Bactria had both been dislodged by the Shakas coming down from somewhere near the Aral Sea. But the Shakas had in turn been dislodged by the Yueh-chi who had themselves been driven west to Sinkiang by the Hiung-nu. The last, otherwise the Huns, would happily not reach India for a long time. But the Yueh-chi continued to press on the Shakas and, having forced them out of Bactria, it was sections or clans of these Yueh-chi who next began to move down into India in the second half of the first century AD.
Once again the ready assumption that the Yueh-chi, or Kushana as they are known in Indian history, actually invaded India should be treated with caution. Little is known either of the circumstances which accounted for the movements of these peoples or of the reception they received in India. They may have come as allies or mercenaries, invited by disaffected Indians like Alexander’s Ambhi; or they may have come as refugees fleeing invasion just like the Tibetans, Afghans and Bangladeshis of the twentieth century. India’s ancient history was first reconstructed largely by British scholars in the nineteenth century who, schooled on the invasions of Aryans, Macedonians and Muslims, readily detected a pattern of incursions. Their own presence conformed to it; indeed this pattern of constant invasion conveniently excused their presence.
The coins and inscriptions of the first few centuries BC/AD certainly testify to alien rulers, but of battles we know nothing, let alone who won them. Marital alliances, economic crises, coups and assassinations have probably triggered more dynastic changes than have successful invasions. Given the crisis of political legitimacy, given too the obscure origins of most indigenous dynasties of the period, plus the absence of anything like a national consciousness, there may have been no fundamental objection to accepting as kings men with strange names, remote origins and unusual headgear.
The Pahlavans/Parthians quickly disappeared from the Indian scene. They would be resurrected only once, and much later, as the doubtful antecedents of the Pallavas of Kanchipuram, a distinguished dynasty but one separated from the Parthians by three centuries and the breadth of the entire subcontinent. The Shakas/Scythians, segmenting into a variety of junior kingdoms, or satrapies, and readily assimilating to Indian society, made a more lasting impression. At one time they penetrated to Mathura and Ujjain but would latterly be penned into Saurashtra (in Gujarat); thence, as the ‘Western Satraps’, they would resurface briefly in the first and second centuries AD. Only the Yueh-chi or Kushanas, and in particular their great king Kanishka, would establish anything like an Indian empire.
Coins, plus an inscription found at Taxila, bear early testimony to the pretensions of the Kushana. ‘Maharajah’, ‘King of Kings’, ‘Son of God’, ‘Saviour’, ‘Great One’, ‘Lord of all Lands’, ‘Caesar’ and other such titles are reeled off as if the incumbent wished to lay claim to every source of sovereignty going. ‘Son of God’ is thought to be a legacy of the Yueh-chi’s familiarity with China and its celestial rulers; ‘King of Kings’ was borrowed from the Shakas, who had imitated the Achaemenids of Iran; ‘Saviour’ came from the Greeks; ‘Caesar’ from the Romans. The coins are of the highest quality and show a switch to Roman weight standards; possibly they were actually recast Roman aurei. But to accommodate such fanfares of majesty in the limited space available, the name of the king in question was often left out. The succession of the Kushana kings is therefore far from certain. It is thought that there was a Kujula Kadphises and then a Wima Kadphises, evidently another devotee of Lord Shiva, who between them added to