The Gupta Golden Age
Chandragupta II reigned from about 380 and the period is the one Indian tradition calls a golden age. He extended the empire by war and by marriage — the conquest of the Western Kshatrapas gave the Guptas the ports of Gujarat and the Arabian Sea trade, and his daughter's marriage secured the Deccan — and ruled from Ujjain as well as Pataliputra. His coinage is unusually fine and shows him hunting lions. What the label rests on is not the conquests. Aryabhata, writing in 499, gave a place-value decimal system, an approximation of pi accurate to four places, a method for quadratic equations, and the argument that the apparent rotation of the stars is produced by the earth turning on its own axis. Kalidasa's plays and poems are the summit of Sanskrit literature. The murals at Ajanta were painted in this period, the iron pillar at Delhi was cast without rusting since, and the university at Nalanda was founded shortly after it. Faxian, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who spent six years in India around 400, describes a country of free hospitals funded by merchants, light taxation, roads safe to travel and a government that did not use corporal punishment. The other side of the record is the hardening of caste, the appearance of untouchability as a category, and the legal restriction of women's property and remarriage. The Huna invasions broke the empire in the sixth century. The word golden also does the work of a comparison. It was applied by nineteenth-century historians looking for an Indian classical antiquity to set against the Greek and Roman one, and the period it names is genuinely remarkable and was not golden for most of the people living in it.
- Year: 380 CE
- Category: Cultural
