Pushyamitra Shunga

Pushyamitra Shunga killed the last Mauryan emperor at a parade of his own army and founded the dynasty that replaced him, and almost everything else said about him is contested. He was commander-in-chief to Brihadratha Maurya, and the Puranas say that around 185 BCE he struck him down while reviewing the troops, ending a line that had ruled from Afghanistan to Karnataka within fifty years of Ashoka's death. What he took over was already much smaller than what Ashoka had held; the Shunga realm was Magadha and the middle Ganges, with a capital at Pataliputra and a western frontier around Vidisha that had to be defended against the Indo-Greeks. He fought them, and the Yuga Purana and Patanjali between them place a Greek advance as far as Saketa and possibly Pataliputra itself during his reign, which was pushed back. Kalidasa's Malavikagnimitra, written centuries later, has his son Agnimitra governing at Vidisha and his grandson defeating a Greek force on the Sindhu. He is remembered in Buddhist tradition, principally the Divyavadana and the Ashokavadana, as a persecutor who destroyed monasteries and put a bounty on the heads of monks, and the Brahmanical sources present the same reign as a revival of Vedic ritual, with the horse sacrifice performed at Pataliputra. Modern historians treat the persecution story with caution: the Buddhist accounts are hostile and late, and the great stupa at Sanchi and the rail at Bharhut were extended under Shunga rule, which is difficult to reconcile with a policy of destruction. He reigned about thirty-six years and was succeeded by Agnimitra. The dynasty lasted a century and its cultural output outlived its politics. The coup is one of the few precisely narrated palace killings in early Indian history, and the sources for it are all considerably later than the event. His dynasty gives its name to a distinct phase of Indian sculpture. The Shunga period also saw the consolidation of Sanskrit as the language of learning, reversing the Prakrit of Ashoka's edicts.

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