A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [109]
The god whose presence Kumaragupta chose to celebrate most intensely is obvious from his name; he selected Kumara, god of war, and it is Kumara that we see on our second gold coin. Naked to the waist, he holds a spear and is mounted on a sacred peacock – not the vainglorious peacock of Western tradition, but an aggressive and terrifying bird that he is riding into war. This image, created 1,600 years ago, is still immediately recognizable today: you can see it in many shrines. But there’s one detail worth mentioning – Kumara and his peacock are shown standing on a plinth. We are looking at an image not of a god, but of a statue of the god as it would have been seen in a temple, just the sort of statue that Kumaragupta himself might have commissioned. It’s a tradition of temple imagery that emerges at this point and continues to the present day.
Gold coin showing a statue of the god Kumara riding a peacock on one side and King Kumaragupta himself on the other
On the other side of the coin is King Kumaragupta himself, also with a peacock, but unlike Kumara he doesn’t ride it. Instead, he elegantly offers grapes to his god’s sacred bird. Crowned and haloed, the king wears heavy earrings and an elaborate necklace, and the inscription tells us that this is ‘Kumaragupta, deservedly victorious with an abundance of virtues’.
The gold coin does what coins have always done uniquely well: they tell everyone who handles them that their ruler enjoys the special favour of heaven and, in this case, the special favour of heaven’s commander-in-chief, because he is linked in a particular way to the god Kumara. It’s a form of mass communication invented around the death of Alexander (see Chapter 31) that rulers have exploited ever since: the Grace of God claimed for the Queen on every British penny stands in the same tradition as Kumaragupta’s coin. But Kumaragupta’s image of his god is about much more than the theology of power – it speaks also of a universal human desire. It is evidence of the longing for a direct personal connection with the divine that everyone – not just the king – could access. Mediated by statues and images, it is a relationship that has been central to Hinduism every since.
Under the Guptas, the main deities of Hinduism and their worship assumed a form that has dominated the religious landscape of India from that day to this, and in recent years this Hindu aspect of the Guptas’ religious activities has loomed large in historians’ accounts of their reign. As Romila Thapar, Professor Emerita of Ancient Indian History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, explains, the Guptas continue to make their presence felt in India today – not only in the monuments left behind, but also in the way the period is used politically:
When colonial history began to be written, when there was nationalist historical writing, the Gupta period was latched on to as the ‘golden age’. In the last few decades there has grown in India a way of thinking which has been called Hindutva, which is an attempt to suggest that the only person that has legitimacy as a citizen of India is the Hindu, because the Hindu is supposed to be the indigenous inhabitant. Everybody else – the Muslims, the Christians, the Parsees – all came later and came from outside. They were foreign. Never mind the fact that 99 per cent of them are of Indian blood. The Gupta period then came in for a great deal of attention as a result of this kind of thinking.
The BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, the Neasden Hindu temple, rising out of the London suburbs
This seems surprising. As these two coins show, although the Guptas established temple Hinduism in something like its modern form, they also honoured older religious traditions, and, far from being exclusive, were generous protectors of both Buddhism and Jainism. In short, Kumaragupta takes his place in the great Indian tradition inspired by Ashoka, the Buddhist king