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Friday, June 3, 2011

Who were the Kushans ?

The issue not driven firmly enough in our early history books was that the subcontinent has been a pot boiler for a smorgasbord of ethnic cultural and linguistically diverse people that have added to the gene pool of humanity living there - and in our veins we have the collective mix of all that blood.
The Kushans - and its most famous representative - Kanishka, has remained, at least to me through the school years - an enigma. The headless statue is the best image I remember - a poor way to remember a person, though the frock coat and tight pajama like pants with long boots are etched in memory. Other images include a beard and a cap of some kind.

But, apart from being from the central Asian steppe stock, he was likely more mongolian in feature than caucasoid, and in a way more of a Tibetan Chinese than a north Indian, did not properly register. I do not remember ever having any conversation in school or elsewhere about the circumstance that brought the Kushans to northwest of India, who they were, what they looked like, what language they spoke, and what made them tick. In fact, I have a hard time naming any Kushan king other than Kanishka. And that is sad.

 
It was much later, out of curiosity, that I learned that the central asian tribes and nomads were themselves jostling against one another, and an attack by one of the Chinese tribes, or perhaps the Tibetans, pushed another tribe off their nomadic range, essentially pushing them towards Gandhara, and Northwest frontier regions, in todays Pakistan. These folks had a sort of Chinese name - I think Qui-Shan .. Which became Kushan for the Indian subcontinent. There is another name for them in Chinese - Guishang. Anyhow, they were described in Chinese history as a group of Indo-Europeans that had entered China and lived on its western periphery. This group was later pushed out by another group of Indo-Europeans.

So, the newly arrived Guishang people in North-west India broke in 5 subgroups. And one of these groups subjugated the other brethren clans and sort of established a hierarchy with themselves at the top, and established a proto-empire, eventually expanding it enough to cover a reasonably big stretch of real estate, including parts of central asia, a few chinese (Tibetan) provinces, as well as Afghanistan, todays Pakistan and northern Indian stretches covering areas near then Sarnath and todays Varanasi. One of their capitals were Purushpur, which is todays Peshawar, and the other was Mathura. There is a dispute on exact dates, but generally it is believed that Kanishka, the greatest of the Kushans, ascended throne around the year AD 115 or so.

It would have been nice to have these issues come back to popular discussions time to time, or subject of further creative expressions, such as the dance drama and plays etc, or discussed in Podcasts and elsewhere.

The Gandhara region at the core of the Kushan empire was home to a multiethnic society tolerant of religious differences. Desirable for its strategic location, with direct access to the overland silk routes and links to the ports on the Arabian Sea, Gandhara had suffered many conquests and had been ruled by the Mauryans, Alexander the Great (327/26–325/24 B.C.), his Indo-Greek successors (third–second centuries B.C.), and a combination of Scythians and Parthians (second–first centuries B.C.). The melding of peoples produced an eclectic culture, vividly expressed in the visual arts produced during the Kushan period. Themes derived from Greek and Roman mythologies were common initially, while later, Buddhist imagery dominated: some of the first representations of the Buddha in human form date to the Kushan era, as do the earliest depictions of bodhisattvas.

Unfortunately, we did not learn enough about our history in school or college and our knowledge of our own past is sketchy at best. Kanishka remained a headless entity for me, a disembodied character that could have looked either like a Bengali babu, or an marauding devil, like a Rakshash. Was he short, or tall, was he Mongoloid in features or perhaps Caucasoid, more like an Afghan than a Tibetan ? How was life those days in Purushpura, or Mathura, in AD 100 ? What language did folks speak there ? What kind of a script was commonly used? Brahmi ? Was that the script common for all of them ? Does the coinage for Kanishka and other Mushans use Brahmi as the script, or Greek, or some other script and some other language ? There are obviously people who know about that, but it did not come down to school kids and ordinary folks like ourselves.

Is there someone we can talk to, and engage with, to popularize these topics about our past ? Better late than never !

All we remember about Kanishka from our childhood studies is the frock coat that appeared specific of the person. Later, Kanishka represented the downed passenger aircraft of Air India that was brought down by terrorism in the 1980s.

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