Watch all episodes here: 1. A Brief History of a Civilisation and Why We Need to Know it | 2. The Aryans and the Vedic Age | 3. The Mauryans and Megasthenes | 4. The Ikshvakus of Andhra Pradesh. | 5. Nalanda and the Decline of Buddhism | 6. Khajuraho and the World of Tantra | 7. Alberuni and Marco Polo in India | 8. The Vijayanagar Empire | 9. The Mughals and Bernier | 10. The Faiths of Varanasi.
Archaeological sites like Keeladi have pushed back the rise of complex societies in south India to at least the 6th century BCE. In the late first millennium BCE, a ‘cultural package’ from Aryavarta began moving south. It would radically reshape the religions, languages, and social norms of south India.
It brought religions like Brahminism and Buddhism, new ideas of caste endogamy and patriarchy, and cremation of the dead. A major channel for this northern cultural package was the Satavahana Empire, and a successor state, the Ikshvaku Kingdom. Their elites, from the tribe of Andhras, had earlier become culturally Aryanised.
The Ikshvaku Kingdom thrived from c. 220-320 CE. The sprawling remains of its capital city, Vijayapuri, and its monuments, were discovered only in 1920. This kingdom supported multiple religions, traded with Rome, and built the only amphitheatre found in ancient India. It hosted Nagarjuna, also known as ‘the second Buddha’, and founder of Madhyamaka, or the influential Middle Path school of Mahayana Buddhism.
Curiously, Vijayapuri’s elite religiosity had a gendered bias – its kings mostly patronised Brahminism and sold themselves as descendants of Rama, while its queens and other wealthy women mostly patronised Buddhism and actively shaped its evolution. In this episode, I’ll also examine the changing religious landscape of India and the strategies used by Brahminism and Buddhism to win new patrons and followers.’
The full transcript of the video is below.
Hello and welcome to Indians. I’m Namit Arora.
In the previous episode, we looked at Alexander’s invasion and the Mauryan Empire that arose in the 4th century BCE, especially through the eyes of the Greek ambassador, Megasthenes. And we considered what was unique and interesting about Ashoka.
Today we’ll travel south, to the Ikshvaku Kingdom of the 3rd century CE. The remains of its capital city, Vijayapuri, and its amazing monuments, were discovered just 100 years ago in a forest in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh. This kingdom supported multiple religions, traded with Rome, and built the only amphitheatre found in ancient India. It was home to the great thinker Nagarjuna, known as the second Buddha. Interestingly, women were the primary patrons of Buddhism here, and they actively shaped its evolution. But first, a little backstory.
Cultural Foundations of the South
After the decline of the Harappan civilization, the cultural foundations of the south had been shaped by centuries of mixing between Harappans who had migrated south, and earlier rural and tribal communities. Evidence of this mixing comes from genetic science. We don’t know how this mixing unfolded or what conflicts it caused. What is known is that by around 1000 BCE, much of the population had become part of a genetic cluster that we now call Ancestral South Indians, or ASI. In the north, heavier mixing with Steppe migrants, or the Indo-Aryans, had produced another genetic cluster called Ancestral North Indians, or ANI. Most modern Indians fall somewhere on this ANI-ASI cline, reflecting different proportions of Indo-Aryan ancestry.
Northerners’ View of South Indians
Earlier in this series, we saw that during the Vedic Age, the concept of Aryavarta, or the land of the Aryans, did not extend south of the Vindhyas. How did the Aryanized north view the people of the south? Very likely, as mleccha, or primitive and impure beings. Support for this view comes from certain Dharmashastras, including Manusmriti. Another clue comes from the Ramayana itself, composed in the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. There is of course no evidence that Rama ever existed, let alone travelled through south India to Sri Lanka. The Ramayana is a work of the imagination. But unlike how it sees the north, its portrait of the south contains no cultured human societies. The south seems to largely have rakshasas, and humanoid monkeys redeemed only by their selfless devotion to Rama, the exiled prince of the north. If I had written this story for the first time today, I suspect I’d have been mercilessly trolled on social media!
The reality in the south was quite different. Archaeologists have made exciting discoveries in recent years, at sites like Keeladi and many others in the Vaigai river valley in Tamil Nadu. They’re pushing back the timeline for the rise of complex societies in south India. Many etchings, tantalizingly similar to Harappan symbols, have been found. This is still being investigated, but it seems possible that India’s second urbanization—after the Harappans—may have happened independently at around the same time in south India as in the plains of the Ganga. We’ll surely learn a lot more in the years ahead.
The Indo-Aryan Cultural Package
What’s quite clear is that even before the start of the common era 2000 years ago, an Indo-Aryan cultural package had started moving south. It would permanently transform the religions, languages, and social norms in south India. This package included big religions like Brahminism and Buddhism. It included notions of caste endogamy and patriarchy, which would erode the older matrilineal sensibilities of the south. This Indo-Aryan package also popularized cremation of the dead at the expense of burials and other practices.
One major channel for this northern cultural package was the Satavahana empire, and one of its successor states, the Ikshvaku Kingdom. Their elites came from a tribe called the Andhras, who had become Aryanized in previous centuries. In both of these states, the administrative language was a Prakrit, derived from Sanskrit. Further south was the Dravidian zone, ruled by the Tamil dynasties of the Cholas, Pandayas, and Cheras.
The Discovery of Vijayapuri
The capital of the Ikshvaku kingdom was Vijayapuri. Its ruins are now in a place called Nagarjunakonda in Andhra Pradesh. A local schoolteacher discovered the ruins only a hundred years ago in a valley by the Krishna River. They lay buried in a forest with panthers and snakes. A tribe of Chenchus, who were hunter-gatherers, lived nearby. The discovery of this ancient city in 1920, full of magnificent sculptures and monuments, became one of the greatest archaeological finds in south India.
The Origins of the Ikshvakus
The Ikshvaku dynasty was founded by a chieftain called Chamtamula, a feudatory of the Satavahanas. As the Satvahana Empire declined, he claimed legitimacy as a sovereign king by performing an Ashwamedh yagya—the royal Brahminical ritual that ended with a horse sacrifice. He is popularly imagined today as this tough guy. Even his chosen dynastic name, Ikshvaku, was his attempt to attach himself to the mythological hero, Rama of Ayodhya. This was a common royal move; Indian kings invented glorious genealogies all the time—to raise their social status, and to establish their divine right to rule.
The Religious Landscape of Vijayapuri
The Ikshvaku kingdom flourished for about one hundred years, from 220 to 320 CE. It patronised Buddhism, Brahminism, as well as older folk religions. Their capital city, Vijayapuri, had at least 18 Brahminical temples, mostly along the Krishna riverfront. Archaeologists have also found 30 Buddhist monasteries on some of the best real estate in the city, and a giant stupa said to contain relics of the Buddha. The finds suggest that this kingdom was more Buddhist than Brahminical. It was in fact part of the early heartland of Buddhism in Eastern India, extending from Bihar to Andhra Pradesh. That’s why this eastern belt is dense with archaeological remains of Buddhist sites.
Curiously, Vijayapuri’s religious faiths also had a gendered bias. The kings mostly patronized Brahminism, worshipped Shiva and Vishnu, and imagined themselves as descendants of Rama. But queens and other wealthy women of Vijayapuri mostly patronized Buddhism. They made large financial contributions and actively participated in the spiritual life of that community. This made Vijayapuri a great and famous centre of Mahayana Buddhism. One such teacher and philosopher, a woman called Srimala, even wrote a significant Mahayana Buddhist text, The Lion’s Roar, where she advanced the idea of female Buddhas. She saw women as no less capable than men at being teachers and philosophers. Here is another depiction of her by East Asians.
Trade and Economic Divides
Vijayapuri also had a beautifully designed ghat on the Krishna River. Next to it was a customs house. Boats arrived and departed laden with goods for trade. The Ikshvakus even traded with Rome. There were so many Roman coins in circulation that fashionable youngsters began punching holes in them and wearing them as exotic earrings!
An economic class system is plainly visible in Vijayapuri. The royal family lived in a citadel on a hill. Senior officials and merchants lived in fancy homes with stone floors and walls, tiled roofs, and indoor plumbing. The less well-off lived in homes made of bamboo and thatch. In the rich and cosmopolitan households of Vijayapuri, one could even find such Roman amphorae.
Public Spaces and City Sculpture
The city had dozens of memorial pillars honouring their famous people—mostly warriors, but also a master artisan and a queen mother. The city featured bars, dance halls, hospitals, and bathing tanks. The city’s main streets had stores and workshops that sold jewellery, pottery, shoes, furniture, tools, clothes, and tailoring services. On platforms under shady trees, people gathered to play dice and other board games. At one time, the locals even struggled with the problem of fake currency. Such creativity, too, has deep roots in India.
Many foreigners came to Vijayapuri, including Kushans and Sakas from the northwest, and Romans. They were even portrayed on local sculpture, with their distinctive attires. The city had rest houses for traders, pilgrims, and students. Buddhist students came from many parts of India and Sri Lanka, so a university is sometimes claimed here. Student monks stayed in rooms like this one, but their monasteries are small compared to those in the centuries ahead.
A lot of fine sculpture has survived. It depicts Brahminical gods, yakshas & yakshis, and scenes from the Buddha’s life. Secular scenes include dancers and musicians; people bathing; courtly events; war scenes; wrestlers contesting; or stories from the Jataka Tales. By now, amorous couples have started appearing in monumental religious art. They’re all lovey-dovey, holding hands, being coy, but not going much further. Such depictions of loving couples were a significant and charming development in Indian religious art—until it disappeared. More on this topic in a later episode.
Excavations at Vijayapuri have also turned up a truly amazing and unique structure! — the only amphitheatre ever found in ancient India. Based on its design, it’s likely that it was inspired by the Romans. It was consciously designed to produce good acoustics, and was used to stage musical events, theatre, religious discourses, debates, and rip-roaring wrestling fights.
Changing Religious Trends
Archaeology has also revealed that the Buddhists of Vijayapuri were transitioning from the Hinayana school to the relatively new Mahayana school. How do we know this? The Mahayana school was more inclined to raise stupas and idols of the Buddha—a practice that the Buddha had opposed himself. Early Buddhists did not depict him in human form, which is why there are no images of the Buddha on the Sanchi stupa. But times were changing, and raising idols may have made Mahayana Buddhism more satisfying to its followers. This trend was rising in Vijayapuri, where the sculptures increasingly depict the Buddha and the iconic events of his life.
At this time, the rising practice of cremations coexisted with the older custom of burying the dead. Archaeologists have found relief carvings of the goddess Sati and other clues in sculpture at a cremation site that indicate what may be the earliest instances of sati in south India. Not too surprising—sati was a part of the advancing Indo-Aryan cultural front at Vijayapuri.
Nagarjuna, the Second Buddha
Vijayapuri is also where the famous thinker Nagarjuna lived in his later years. Often called ‘the second Buddha’, he is easily one of the greatest philosophers of all time. He is said to have lived and taught in one of the excavated monasteries. He expanded on the Buddha’s ideas and pioneered a new school of Mahayana Buddhism called Madhyamaka, or The Middle Way school, which later became influential around the world. The term Middle Way is a little tricky to understand. It refers to the notion of dependent origination, which is the idea that there is no objective, mind-independent reality that’s accessible to us. He spoke of shunyata, the idea that things have no innate essence independent of the observer. And what we make of reality inevitably depends on the cognitive structure of our minds. We understand the world through concepts, and there is no escape from our conceptual categories, no firm foundation we can reach beyond them.
Nagarjuna’s philosophy differed from the leading Brahminical school of Vedanta, which held that behind the veils of illusion, or Maya, there is a true and universal reality, of Brahman. The human mind, with effort, can come to know it. And knowing it became a precondition for attaining moksha, or liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. This view first appeared in the Upanishads and was developed later by Adi Shankara. Nagarjuna held the opposite view. He denied the possibility of knowing any ‘ultimate reality’. Even today, this is a fundamental disagreement between Mahayana Buddhists and Advaitin Hindus.
We can only try to imagine how sophisticated the intellectual culture of Vijayapuri must have been to produce a great thinker like Nagarjuna. After all, such people don’t appear in isolation. They come up through a vibrant tradition of dissent and debate. Nagarjuna’s thought echoes in the work of the 20th century Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Folk Religions
The finds in Vijayapuri have also revealed a temple to a goddess called Lajja Gauri, who had a lotus head. To her devotees, she represented abundance, fertility, and sexuality. Such divinities were quite popular. Remember that, back then, the vast majority of Indians did not live in cities. And most Indians followed neither Buddhism, nor Brahminism, but preferred local folk deities—of fertility, harvests, prosperity, protection from disease, and even animistic deities, based on serpents, eagles, trees, and so on. Both Buddhism and Brahminism were minority religions, though, as in Vijayapuri, they were allied with state power and wealth. They had the resources to build all the sturdy objects and monuments whose remains we see today. So it’s easy to get an inflated sense of their actual prevalence.
How Big Religions Spread
Big religions have always competed on at least two fronts: funding and followers. Around 2000 years ago, Buddhism and Brahminism competed fiercely on both fronts. Their strategies differed. Vedic Brahminism, in particular, gained followers by embracing a powerful and syncretic process with two key ingredients.
(1) Brahminical theology became more porous. It began absorbing popular non-Vedic spiritual ideas and folk gods into its pantheon. Countless dark-skinned folk and animistic deities came in as avatars of the big Brahminical gods, such as Vishnu, Parvati, or Durga. This co-option benefited Brahminism. Take Sheetala Mata, for example, a folk goddess who cured people from diseases like smallpox. Making her an avatar of Parvati made Parvati’s elite religious culture more palatable to the devotees of Shitala mata.
(2) In parallel, Brahminical ideas began trickling down to non-Vedic groups and forest tribes. This included ideas of caste, purity and pollution, patriarchy, Vedic rituals, cremation, and others. In time, whether through pressure or consent or out of self-interest, many less powerful groups absorbed at least a few ideas and customs of the dominant Brahminical ideology. Doing so was likely a path to upward mobility. To borrow a term from sociology, their gods and customs were gradually Sanskritised.
The Emergence of Hinduism
In time, this syncretic process produced a sea of overlapping faiths that we now call Hinduism. Some scholars see in this a form of colonisation, in which Vedic Brahminism injected its ideas, beliefs and values into the prior cultural fabric of India. In fact, this process is still underway, especially with Adivasi groups who’re being ‘Hinduized’. Unlike Brahminism, this larger thing we call Hinduism has no mandatory beliefs or dogma or central authority. Its organic and decentralised evolution gave it the amazing diversity it is known for.
But while Hinduism remained theologically flexible, it evolved oppressive social hierarchies in the form of caste distinctions — making it the mirror opposite of Christianity and Islam, which are theologically rigid but socially egalitarian. Brahminical scriptures, including the Bhagavad Gita, produced elaborate justifications of social hierarchy and privilege. Concepts like karma explained inherited inequality as an outcome of deeds in a previous life. They blamed individual conduct in past lives—and not the current social order—for people’s outcomes in this life!
Meanwhile, Buddhism displayed its own theological flexibility by embracing local yakshis and deities like Tara, Hariti, Mahakala, Jambhala, and others. But it stood for a more egalitarian social order. This compounded its adversarial dynamic against Brahminism. More on this in the next episode.
The Fall of the Ikshvakus
Going back to the Ikshvaku Kingdom, why did it come to an end? Scholars have proposed two theories. (1): Over a decade or two, the Krishna River rose dramatically and began flooding the capital city regularly. This was so disruptive that people began moving out. (2): There is also evidence of plunder, destruction, and the breaking of statues by an invading army of the Pallavas from the south. The Pallavas were an expanding military power in the early 4th century. The British archaeologist AH Longhurst, who excavated Vijayapuri, wrote, ‘The ruthless manner in which the buildings have been destroyed is simply appalling … so many of the pillars, statues and sculptures have been wantonly smashed to pieces.’ This included the breaking of some temples, stupas, and religious sculptures. Such targeted destruction of religious sites in rival kingdoms was not uncommon in the subcontinent, long before any Muslim invasions of India.
Between the floodings and the invasion, Vijayapuri’s fate was sealed. It was mostly abandoned by around 320 CE. It got covered by earth and shrub and was forgotten … until its rediscovery a mere hundred years ago.
Submersion by the Nagarjunasagar Dam
Sadly, the ancient city has been lost once again. It now lies beneath a lake created by the Nagarjunasagar dam in 1960. This happened after a spirited parliamentary debate in the 1950s on ‘heritage vs. development’. What was more important: preserving a major heritage site, or building a dam that could feed millions? The pro-dam lobby prevailed, and a decision was made to sacrifice the site. But for six years before that, the ancient site was excavated, mapped, and photographed. Many of its monuments were saved and relocated to higher ground. And that’s what we see today on the island of Nagarjunakonda, and at a nearby site called Anupu. But the charm of wandering the streets of an ancient city was tragically lost forever, just 40 years after its rediscovery.
In the next episode, I’ll take you to Nalanda, site of the famous ancient university. I’ll discuss what it was like to be a student there and what three Chinese travellers wrote about Indian society. I’ll also explore the causes of the decline of Buddhism in India. See you next time!