From Indus to Independence: A Trek Through Indian History (Vol IV The Onslaught of Islam)

By Dr. Sanu Kainikara

This is the fourth volume in the Indian history series From Indus to Independence: A Trek through Indian History. Its title ‘The Onslaught of Islam’ is apt, since the book covers the initial period in which the newly founded religion of Islam started to move eastwards. Islam, almost immediately after its inception, had subdued large parts of the western regions of the Middle-East and stemmed the eastward movement of the Byzantine Empire.
In ancient and medieval times all invaders of the Indian sub-continent came through the Khyber Pass in the Hindu Kush mountain ranges. The book examines the different invading armies starting with the Persian army of Darius the Great, the invasions of the Kushans and the White Huns, the repeated assaults by Mahmud of Ghazni ‘The Hammer of the Idolaters’, and the arrival of Muhammad of Ghur into the Indian sub-continent. While describing the military successes and failures of the Islamic armies the book also analyses the philosophical intermingling of cultural and religious ideas.
This volume brings the narrative of Indian history to the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: VIJ Books (India) Pty Ltd
• Release date: Oct 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9789385563874

Dr. Sanu Kainikara

Dr Sanu Kainikara is a practising military strategist, currently residing in Canberra, Australia. He is an ex-fighter pilot of the Indian Air Force who retired voluntarily in 1992. He holds a Master of Science in Defence and Strategic Studies from the University of Madras, and a PhD in International Politics from the University of Adelaide, Australia. Currently he is a Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Dr Kainikara has been widely published and is the author of numerous articles and papers on national security, military strategy and air power. He has also presented at various international conferences across the world. Sanu has an abiding passion for Indian history which he continues to nurture through research and providing lectures to students. This is the first volume of a series which will eventually cover the full spread of Indian history up to the nation’s independence from the British Raj.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME IV UNCERTAINTY LEADING TO DIVISION AND DOWNFALL

History is the basis for a people to remain a cohesive entity and to be able to move forward. The confidence of a State regarding its position and status in the comity of nations is founded in its history, a shared remembrance and understanding of its collective past. The direction that it will take in the contemporary environment is directly influenced by its past history, as perceived by the people. A nation’s history is tangible and ever present in all the dealings that it has with the outside world and is also manifest in its domestic behaviour pattern. This fundamental fact is not always acknowledged or comprehended. However, it is apparent that when history is not given its appropriate status and sufficient importance, the people as whole tend to be unfocused and their efforts at progress are invariably meandering. They tend to get lost.

History is not so much about change as eternal recurrences. The past is, more often than not, a blur of large but uninteresting forces that formulate change. These forces and the changes that they bring about achieve clarity only in certain points of the historical narrative. This clarity, when it does show itself, is such that every tiny flow of events before and after that point become spontaneously ‘clear’ to the astute observer. These milestones in the history of a nation instantaneously freeze into still compositions of great and in-depth insights of awareness of what was, is, and will be. The destiny of a land can be traced through a series of such milestones that encompass the religious, devotional and nationalistic tableaux; through pearl-like moments that reveal the essence, principles and maxims, which in turn expose the race, bloodline and the basic ethos of the people and the nation.

Another aspect that stands out in the study of history is that truth is always malleable. Truth is malleable even in the contemporary sense, but it is more easily moulded to suit particular requirements in the recounting of history, of events of the past. History is full of paeans sung to the glory of the high and mighty, normally the victor in battle, in which imagination soars to establish folklores of bravery and chivalry, of magnanimity and honour. In turn, these folklores gradually become believable description of events that get embedded in the historical context, becoming believable as facts. Truth is the casualty.

Indian History

Indian history has many interruptions that break the continuity of its narrative. It is also difficult to maintain an absolutely correct chronology since conflicting information tend to render such an endeavour impossible. The situation is further compounded by the inability of the researcher to authenticate some of the stray information that wafts its way into the broader narrative. Even so, a limited chronological line can be ensured in the narrative if the disparate events are carefully stitched together by identifying the common themes that flow through history and the story viewed at an overarching high level.

Indian history has the added complexity of the history of the southern peninsula being almost entirely separate from that of North India. Some historians have almost completely ignored South Indian history or made only fleeting reference to it. This method has only led to the creation of very poor narratives of history that tend to be packaged as ‘Indian history’ while in reality it is only the story of North India and the Gangetic Plains. Such analysis lack from not having a holistic understanding of the developments that have influenced the entire sub-continent. The Southern Peninsula, while following its own call, has been an indelible part of the sub-continent from pre-historic times. No history of India can be considered complete without the events of South India being considered and their considerable impact on the larger whole been carefully analysed.

This is the fourth volume in the series being written on Indian history titled, From Indus to Independence: A Trek through Indian History and is subtitled The Onslaught of Islam. Accordingly, it concentrates on the invasion of the sub-continent by the followers of Islam who were the first invaders to have a formalised and established religion that they adhered to with extreme rigidity. Until the arrival of the Muslim armies at the Khyber Pass, the invaders into India were generally ambivalent about their religious persuasion. Therefore, it was relatively easy for the well-established Hindu religion that percolated into the socio-political landscape of the sub-continent to absorb the foreigners into its fold. India, the name itself was given by foreigners, as was the slightly more common term Hindustan. To the locals, their land was Bharata Khanda, a term that is almost extinct now. Similarly, the Punjab, land of the five rivers, on which much of the deciding battles for control of the northern part of the sub-continent was fought, is also a foreign name. The local name was Panchanada, which also means land of the five rivers, although the term was used only in the Mahabharata and the ancient Vedas.

The Age of Uncertainty

For nearly six centuries after the death of Emperor Harsha Vardhana in 647, the history of North India is confused and obscure. The period suffers from an appalling lack of verifiable information that leads to an unclear and muddied picture of the times. It was also during this period that a medley of new peoples arrived into the sub-continent, some as invaders and some as supplicants after facing defeat and were fleeing oppression. They created emergent groups that were initially on the fringes of the main society but assimilated gradually with the Hindu culture. It is left to the historian to bring out the main features that characterise the times and explain the processes of integration involved. The significance of this period of uncertainty to Indian history cannot be underestimated, even though it seems to have been one in which turmoil was predominant.

The 6th and 7th centuries mark the end of ancient Indian history and the beginning of the medieval period. They are also watershed periods for the peoples, cultures and religions of the sub-continent that heralded significant changes. Hinduism and Brahmanism survived the decades of change and emerged in a greatly modified form. It is possible to demarcate this period and confirm that there is almost no living tradition of the religion, as practised now, which can be attributed to the customs before the 6th century. In an obtuse manner, this break from the ancient past can be considered the new beginning of Hindu religion. It is also from here, the beginning of the medieval period, that modern languages, groups and cults emerge within the broader Indian panorama.

After the decline of the Vardhana Empire and the fall of the dynasty, which was very rapid after the death of Harsha, the kingdoms and ruling dynasties that came up in the north were mere shadows in comparison. The personalities that pepper the historic narrative are more figures of folklore and legend, made out to be larger than life and bereft of actual historic substance. There are few generic literature books as well as a plethora of ballads and stories that give a glimpse of the narrative. However, they do not add up to historic certainty or fact. The political history of the period is reduced to pure epigraphy, wherever they can be found.

The period was also witness to fresh and large scale migration by a number of numerically large groups. They were strong enough to break up the existing social groupings and tribes, and to build new cultural and social groups that overshadowed or swallowed the old order. In this commotion, old names such as Magadha and Kosala gradually disappear; new ethnic and social groups such as the Rajputs and Jats appear; and North India steps out into the medieval period revealing some of its most striking features. It also isolated itself for a few centuries, till the onslaught of Islam started in earnest, creating the sanguine balance necessary to entrench new systems and processes.

Islam originated and rose in the Middle-East in the 7th century. For the first few centuries it was engrossed with perpetuating a westward expansion, coming into conflict with the Byzantine Empire of Constantinople—the successor to the great Roman Empire in the East. In the first few centuries, Islam did not look beyond Iran towards the east. When Islam finally came in force to the borders of the Indian sub-continent, it was not brought by the sophisticated Arab exponents of the religion. Islam was brought to India by newly converted, militant, brutish and at times boorish Turks who had no qualms about twisting the political and religious context to suit their own personal objectives. Because of this fundamental flaw in the arrival of Islam to the Indian border, what could have been a creative and cultural exchange between two evolved, albeit different, peoples and cultures degenerated very rapidly into one long destructive clash of arms.

The Period Covered

At the beginning of the period when the onslaught of Islam became the prominent aspect of North Indian history, both the socio-religious and the geo-political environments in the sub-continent had already changed. Buddhism as religion was almost fully defunct in the region of its birth and the great University at Nalanda had been destroyed. Hinduism was once again vigorous and ascendant, although in a very different manifestation to its ancient embodiment. Politically, North India was already broken up into clan-holdings, of varying economic and political viability. Some of the new kingdoms could not be counted as independent states, even though their nominal rulers claimed such status.

‘… and clan chieftains, claiming descent from the Sun, Moon and the Fire, rules a series of kingdoms over northern India behaving like the medieval knights, forever at war, forever in love, forever chivalrous, forever treacherous. Since actual descent form the Sun and Moon is unlikely, they must either have been descended from Central Asian invaders who carved kingdoms for themselves and adopted Hinduism, or from tribal chiefs who, on conversion to Hinduism claimed a Warrior status not even Brahmins dared challenge.’

Taya Zinkin,

India, p. 23.

On the positive side—Sanskrit as a language of culture was flourishing; women, although generally married at a very early age, were educated and played important roles in public life, essentially being emancipated; society was largely religious and followed a righteous path; and the rule of law was the norm and not the exception. Even though internecine wars were fairly common, at the beginning of the Islamic invasion, India was a picture of tranquil peace and prosperity. At the same time, a deeper analysis indicates that an inner weakness that affected the robustness of the political system was gradually taking hold. There were signs of frailty and decay visible, such as the decline of cultural developments. The beginning or the end of this period of decline cannot be assigned a particular date, but must be viewed as a slow creeping process, that affected the North before the South, and finally engulfed the entire sub-continent.

By the end of the first millennium, it was very obvious that India’s golden civilisation had already crossed its high noon. No great philosopher brightened the firmament anymore; intellectual curiosity and the spirit of inquiry that had so far been the hallmark of Hindu ingenuity had been replaced by sterile dialectic and formalised logic; the brilliance of Brahmanism and Buddhism had already waned into sporadic spluttering; the sciences had stopped producing great minds; literature had gradually been reduced to intricate and involved but prosaic writings, where freedom of expression or freshness of concepts were unknown; and religion was increasingly practised through degraded forms of worship that overshadowed the classical concepts. India was losing its vitality and drying up.

A geographically small country with limited scope of having an established civilisation can be overwhelmed by external aggression. There are ample examples of this fact in world history. However, a huge, well developed and highly civilised entity like the Indian sub-continent, cannot be overrun as easily as it was by the Islamic invasions unless the inner core had already become rotten. At the turn of the millennium, in the 11th and 12th centuries, India had become ripe for the picking.

The Sections of Volume IV

The first section of this volume analyses the Rajput clans who controlled most of North India during the period under discussion. The origins of the Rajputs have been the subject of a great deal of research and numerous studies. Even so, there is still no fully accepted theory regarding their arrival into India and the manner in which they became entrenched in the society, finally becoming the epitome of the Hindu warrior-ethos. One of the proven facts is that the Rajputs were a social grouping and not a separate race. Conjuncture leads the historian to believe that the Rajputs were originally Scythians, Sakas in Indian lore, mixed with the remnants of the Kushans who had briefly ruled the northern parts of the sub-continent. At this juncture, the Hindu religion was at a critical stage of its development and much more accommodating of other religious practices than is the case in contemporary India. It was therefore relatively easy to bring whole clan of outsiders into the religion. More importantly embracing the outsiders was a prudent move, since the foreigners were normally victorious in battle and prone to ruthless plunder. It was far safer to bring the foreigners into the fold than continue to treat them as enemies.

The 8th and 9th centuries saw the burgeoning of Rajput kingdoms across the entire North India. The period produced a few famed rulers, but failed to create even one lasting dynasty of overwhelming power and influence. The result was that the region broke up into small, and at times unviable, kingdoms, a situation that was conducive to internecine warfare and further weakening of already decrepit holdings. In the early period of the Rajput rule, the Chandels of Budelkhand and the Paramaras of Malwa were the more prominent ruling clans. By the 10th century, the clan of Chahamana, or Chauhan as they came to be called, became the dominant Rajput group and spawned a number of sub-clans. The sub-clans ruled minor principalities, always under the benign oversight of the primary branch. The legendary Prithviraja Chauhan, the hero of the eternal romantic story of love, elopement and perpetual enmity with the Ghadavalas of Delhi, was the last illustrious king of the Chauhans.

Prithviraja and his exploits have become part of the historical folklore of Hindu India. An embellished version of the story has been hijacked and propagated by the religion-biased nationalistic movement in more recent times. The story, as reiterated in contemporary writings, at times reads almost like a fantasy, making it difficult to distinguish truth from fiction. This volume attempts to provide a more balanced view of the military campaigns of the Chauhans under the leadership of Prithviraja. It describes the Islamic invasion that led to the two Battles of Tarain that to a certain extend foretold the future of the sub-continent.

The next section examines the history of other Hindu kingdoms during the ancient-medieval times. Although the mainstream Indian history narrative of the period obsessively concentrates on the Rajput kingdoms, the kingdom of Kashmir, the kingdoms of Vallabhi and Broach in the Kathiawar and Kutchch region, and the entire southern peninsula was completely outside Rajput control. The history of these kingdoms and regions are often neglected in the study of Indian history. They are, and continue to be, inextricably connected to the broader sweep of the history of the sub-continent and often decisively influence the flow of events. Kashmir is geographically contiguous with Central Asia, Afghanistan, Tibet and China and therefore was also a conduit for cultural exchanges. The Karkota dynasty that ruled Kashmir for many centuries is as ‘great’ as any other dynasty that forged and ruled large empires in the sub-continent. However, they do not find sufficient mention in the story of India. The reason(s) for being pushed almost into obscurity in the broad sweep of Indian historical narrative, even today, is perplexing. Within the politically and religiously charged and contested status of Kashmir in the contemporary security environment, it would seem that India is reluctant to emphasis the ancient, traditional, and long ‘Hindu’ antecedents of the valley.

From about the 9th century, signs of decay in what was once a great ruling house is visible in Kashmir. The kings gradually became oppressive tyrants under the control of religious vagabonds. There also rose a group of military elite who exercised extra-judicial powers and became the king-makers. The two Lohara dynasties that followed the Karkotas produced a series of insignificant and inefficient kings who were manipulated by self-serving courtiers, themselves of dubious merit and calibre. By the 1200s Kashmir was under the control of the invading Turks and neighbouring Tibetan monarchs.

Kashmir under the Hindu dynasties provide a template for the study of ruling dynasties of the medieval period across the sub-continent—it illustrates the universal path of dynastic rise to power, the achievement of greatness, followed by the inevitable decline into ineffectiveness and immoral rule culminating in the ultimate demise of the dynasty. The only difference between dynasties is the number of centuries that each take to reach their final obliteration. It is an unfortunate reality that most modern iterations of Indian history do not examine the peripheral areas, although the events transpiring in these regions influenced the flow of history in what is considered the core of the Indian sub-continent—the Punjab, Rajasthan and the Gangetic Plains—at times directly.

Vallabhi and Broach were smaller Hindu kingdoms that existed around the 7th and 8th centuries and disappeared in the span of about 200 years. They have been examined in this volume to obtain a firmer grasp of the status of middle and small powers in the overall politico-economic situation in the sub-continent. The description also brings out the custom of the time of smaller entities being reliant on larger and more powerful allies to ensure their own survival and sustainment. The political reality of alliances, clearly demonstrated in the narrative of these two medieval Hindu kingdoms, is the blue-print for international politico-strategic interaction even today. Interestingly, the story of the destruction of Vallabhi is also a guide to the role that traitors have played in Indian history. The placing of personal self-interest and ambition above the national interest has an interesting past in the annals of Indian history. While it may be politically incorrect to use the term ‘traitors’ for the people who continue to follow this path in the current political system, the actions and the result are the same. In future dates, when history of the current times is being written, these people will also be called traitors to the nation.

The third section provides a consolidated account of the invasions that came through the Khyber Pass and changed both the history and demography of the sub-continent. Khyber Pass has been the gateway to India from ancient times, even after the discovery of a viable sea route at a much later time. The first instance of an ‘invasion’ is that of the great Persian king Darius, who established a ‘Hindush’ satrapy after conquering the Punjab and surrounding areas around 500 B.C. The satrapy was fully assimilated into the Persian Empire and Indian soldiers fought in the Persian army of Xerxes against the Greeks. The next invasion through the Khyber Pass that is celebrated in history is that of Alexander of Macedonia, although the incursion left no visible or lasting effects on the interior of the sub-continent. The Macedonian army stayed on in the north-west for more than two years, but did not venture into the interior. The Greek-Iranian-Indian rulers, who created kingdoms after the death of Alexander, used the Khyber again to mount punitive expeditions into the rich and prosperous Hindu kingdoms.

Between the time of Alexander and his successors in the region, and the major Islamic incursions from Afghanistan centuries later, the Kushans, White Huns and Sassanians entered the sub-continent through the Khyber Pass. They came as conquerors, staying on to rule some territories and then being assimilated into becoming Indian, giving up their independent identities. During this period, the resilience of the Hindu society was on brilliant display. The central-western region of India was ruled by invading foreigners for decades and at times even centuries. However, the Hindu way of life—its cultural, civilisational and religious practices—was able to influence the outsiders and make them Hindu in habit and practice, gradually subsuming them into the Hindu pantheon. There are no equivalent examples in history where the invading and conquering forces were in turn overcome by the society that was originally vanquished in battle.

The next three sections, the rest of the volume, is devoted to a brief analysis of the origin of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and a description of its further advent into the Indian sub-continent. The chapters trace the military rise of the Arab-Islamic armies as an all-conquering force, even though the fledgling religion came very close to breaking up on the death of its founder, Prophet Muhammad. Even at that critical point in the early period of its development, Islam displayed its rigidity of stance and the military might that it would repeatedly rely on to spread its will and influence. The amalgamation of the hardy Turks as ‘slaves’ with special status as warriors was a stroke of military genius within the religion. It created a group of people, dedicated to the spread of the religion through military means, who went on to found dynasties in both Indian and Egypt.

In the spread of Islam to the Indian sub-continent, the initial forays were far from military or oppressive. Traditions within Islam like Sufism, with its mystical and introspective tendencies, at least attempted to find common ground with the Bhakti movement within Hinduism. In the early years of the 9th century, when the intermingling of the two religions was still a probability, there were tentative moves towards achieving spiritual convergence within the concept of a single divine being. This belief of a single supreme being, at its most basic, is the foundation of the concept that breeds introspection and compassion that in turn creates nonviolent action. Grassroots spread of devotional mysticism was what was common in the two movements. However, the path to ultimate salvation described in the two religions were so different that the attempts at arriving at a common way was doomed to failure from the very beginning.

The Onslaught of Islam

The onslaught of Islam can be considered to have started in earnest with the repeated attacks by Mahmud of Ghazni, all along the western borders. The eldest son of Sabuktigin who was a Turkish slave and known by the epithet ‘Hammer of the Idolaters’, Mahmud invaded Hindustan 17 times. He was subsumed by greed and avarice, which he managed to cover well under the veneer of religious compulsion and the sayings of the Koran. He had no thought of permanent occupation of the lands beyond the River Indus and remained the classic plunderer throughout his career. Subsequently the Ghaznavids did establish a foothold in the North-West of the sub-continent, giving Peshawar the status of the secondary capital of their kingdom. The Ghaznavids after Mahmud went through the usual convolutions of succession struggles, internecine wars and their quota of deception, betrayal and treachery. Each such episode diminished the power and status of the dynasty. The Ghaznavids gradually moved east, unable to withstand the military pressure from the Seljuqs on their western borders. Finally they were forced to become vassals of the overbearing Seljuq Amirs and accept the interference that came with the reduced status. The move into the sub-continent had the unexpected effect of some historians ruling out the ‘Ghaznavid’ status of the last few rulers in the dynasty. By the mid-1100s the Ghaznavid kingdom was limited in size, status, wealth and the ability to be a sovereign state, functioning as a vassal state of a vassal of the Seljuqs, a mere shadow of the glorious empire of Mahmud.

The Ghaznavid dynasty was ultimately destroyed by the Ghurids, one time vassals of the Ghazni rulers, who rushed down from their mountain abode to avenge the murder of one of their chieftains. They sacked Ghazni, the opulent centre and symbol of power of the Ghaznavid Empire that had stood unscathed for over 200 years. The Ghurids could be considered a flash in the pans of the long Indian history, although Indian commentators tend to make much of the activities of Muizz-ud-Din Muhammad of Ghur in the sub-continent. It is true that Muhammad of Ghur recognised and took advantage of the inherent weaknesses of the Rajput kingdoms and may have been the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of destroying the Rajput hold over North India. However, his military successes must be attributed equally to the bickering and internal jealousies of the Rajput clans as to his own initiative and audacity.

The penultimate section of the volume analyses the Indian interlude of the great Genghis Khan’s Conquering March from the arid wastes of Mongolia all the way to Europe. This was a brief passage through the Khyber Pass into the western banks of the River Indus, followed by a hurried withdrawal to put down a rebellion that was brewing in Afghanistan. Had this not been the case, it is conceivable that Indian historical narrative may have been very different to what it is today.

The volume concludes with a comparative analysis of the warfighting strategy of the Arab-Muslim armies and those of the Rajput-Hindu forces. The inability of the Rajput forces to understand the changing rhythms of war and adapt quickly to emerging ground realities; their lack of central leadership, doubtful loyalties superimposed by petty jealousies and proclivity towards betrayal; the overarching softness brought about through indulgence and generations of cultivated superiority complex; and the prosperity and tranquillity brought on by decades of relative peace, contributed, individually and collectively, to the very rapid defeat of the Rajput armies in the face of a determined and ruthless enemy pursuing a focused aim of single-minded destruction. With the comprehensive defeat of the Rajput-Hindu armies over just a few centuries, the Indian sub-continent was laid open to further onslaught.

THE RAJPUT CLANS

Chapter 1

THE ORIGINS

The death of Emperor Harsha Vardhana, and a little later the early Islamic invasions, stirred the affairs of North India. Internecine wars with kings and clan leaders of limited merit and vision scrambling for power, created a sense of disquiet and instability. In fact instability dominated North India across the great Gangetic Plain, all the way east to Bengal. In this state of confusion, a warlike people who belonged to different and independent clans gradually came into prominence, creating a number of dynasties. They were called the Rajputs. In chronological terms the rise to power of the Rajput clans creates a clear demarcation between ancient and medieval Indian history. The ancient dynasties like the Guptas and the Mauryas have not left any living tradition behind. They are only remembered in coins, books and other archaeological finds. On the other hand the Rajput dynasties that took hold starting from the late 6th century are still alive and continue to be an influential section of contemporary Indian society. The demarcation between ancient and medieval Indian history therefore is the clear line between the dead and living traditions.

Since the Rajputs play a decisive role in this move towards medieval history, the question arises, ‘Who were the Rajputs? Where did they originate?’ As is common in Indian history, this is yet another question that is thrown up, and which is difficult to answer comprehensively. Imperfect chronology, confusing facts, and conflicting information combine to make it extremely difficult for the researcher to arrive at answers that can be asserted as being correct with the necessary assurance. In the case of the Rajputs, the large number of clans and dynasties that evolved over a period of time make the task even more difficult. The remote origins of the Rajputs is difficult to guide a reader through accurately and therefore a certain amount of reasonable assumptions and conjunctures in the narrative must be accepted.

In Indian history the connection of ruling families, especially in ancient and medieval times, to the broader Hindu society at large is most of the time unclear. It is seen that a number of capable individual adventurers were able to lay the foundation for dynasties that went on to produce a long and distinguished line of kings ruling extensive empires before fading from the firmament. Similarly it is seen that some heads of prominent clans were also able to consolidate power and emerge as the undisputed rulers of other allied clans who then become subservient to the major clan. The rise to power of the Kushans is a vivid example of this tradition.

In the more remote days of Indian history the ruling clans of Kshatriyas were continually forming new states through conquest and through constant adaptation of clan-based alliances. It is certain that once the Rajputs burst on to the scene in medieval times they continued this tradition, although there are no records to fully establish such a progression as fact. The posited continuation of the earlier tradition must therefore remain conjuncture, derived from an understanding of the subsequent flow of events. The ancient times term Kshatriya had a very vague meaning and denoted the ruling class who were not of Brahmin descent. The Brahmins were the learned class and traditionally became the minsters of the king.

The Brahmin-Kshatriya Connection

In ancient times the demarcation and separation between the Brahmins and Kshatriyas were not as rigid as it became in later days when the concept of Hindu religion by itself was under attack. One represented the learned group of people clubbed into a caste and the other represented the warrior-class who protected the general population and the boundaries of the country. Their profession led to their gradually being accepted as hereditary rulers. The two groups often crossed over through change of profession or by intermarriage. Normally the Brahmins were content to be the ministers and advisers to the kings, although all through ancient history there are instances of Brahmin ministers usurping power and ruling as kings. The early Sunga dynasty is one such, wherein the Brahmin minister took over the kingdom and went on to found a dynasty of no mean stature.

Even in later times Hieun Tsang, the famous Chinese Buddhist pilgrim traveller, notes that Brahmin kings were ruling in Ujjaian and Jijhoti (Bundelkhand). When a Brahmin succeeded in founding a dynasty, the successors of the original king were normally recognised as Kshatriyas and intermarriage with established Kshatriya families were permitted. In fact it is noteworthy that the Brahmins