Harsha Held Northern India for 41 Years, and Much of What We Know About Him Comes From a Court Poet and a Chinese Monk He Patronised

Harsha ruled northern India from 606 to about 647 CE, and the two writers who describe his reign in detail were both under his patronage. Banabhatta, known as Bana, was a Brahman poet at his court. Xuanzang was a Chinese Buddhist monk whom Harsha received and honoured at Kannauj.

Little else survives: a few copper-plate charters in Harsha’s name, an inscription by the poet of the Deccan king who beat him, and Chinese notes on embassies. Read together, these sources show a real power in the Ganges plain, a king who lost a campaign against the Deccan, and an empire smaller and looser than earlier historians assumed.

Crowned at sixteen after his brother’s murder

Harsha was born around 590, the second son of Prabhakaravardhana, king of Sthanvishvara, now Thanesar. Britannica says he was crowned at 16, after his elder brother was assassinated. Romila Thapar describes the north he inherited: after the Gupta empire broke up, four kingdoms held power, the Maukharis of Kannauj, the Pushyabhutis of Thanesar (Harsha’s family), the Maitrakas of Valabhi in Gujarat and a minor line of Guptas in Magadha.

Harsha’s sister Rajyashri married the Maukhari king Grahavarman, tying those two kingdoms together. In Bana’s poem, the king of Malwa killed Grahavarman after their father died and jailed Rajyashri. Harsha’s elder brother Rajyavardhana marched out, beat the Malwa army, and was killed by the king of Gauda in Bengal, who won his trust with false courtesy and then struck while he was alone and unarmed. Xuanzang names the killer as Shashanka, king of Karnasuvarna in eastern India, and says he murdered Rajyavardhana at a conference. Bana’s commentator gives the Gauda king the same name.

Bana’s Harsha swore to clear the earth of Gaudas, then found his sister in the Vindhya forest as she was about to climb onto a funeral pyre. Both accounts have him hesitate at the crown. Xuanzang says the great minister Bhandi pressed him to take it, and that a statue of Avalokiteshvara beside the Ganges, a bodhisattva or Buddhist being devoted to helping others, told him to rule but not to sit on the lion-throne or call himself Maharaja. Harsha took the title Siladitya and styled himself Kumara, meaning king’s son. Bana has the goddess of royal prosperity force him onto the throne against his vow of austerity.

Historians read the reluctance as a defence of a younger brother who took a dead elder brother’s place. Thapar notes that one reason to write a royal biography was to legitimise exactly that. Sayantani Pal, a University of Calcutta historian who wrote the Harsha unit for an Indira Gandhi National Open University course, says Bana’s portrait of the brothers’ love justifies the succession. Upinder Singh sees hints of a struggle between them underneath it.

Six years of war and an enemy he never beat

Xuanzang gives the campaign in round numbers. Harsha started with 5,000 elephants and marched from east to west against anyone who had not submitted. After six years he had subdued what Xuanzang calls the Five Indies, and he then raised the army to 60,000 elephants and 100,000 cavalry. After thirty years of this he put down his arms. He also forbade, on pain of death, the killing of living things for food throughout the Five Indies.

Other evidence is less sweeping. Though Harsha’s army fought for years, Britannica says, it never defeated Shashanka. Neither Bana nor Xuanzang describes a clash between them, Pal points out, and Xuanzang reports Shashanka cutting down the Bodhi tree at Gaya, which implies Shashanka held that region. Harsha’s gains in the east, including Odra and Kongoda in Orissa by 643, came after Shashanka died around 637, some 31 years after the vow in Bana’s poem.

Britannica puts Harsha’s influence from Gujarat to Assam but says the area he ruled directly was probably no more than modern Uttar Pradesh with parts of Punjab and Rajasthan. He left conquered kings on their thrones and took tribute and homage. Under his direct control, Singh lists, were Thanesar, Kannauj, Ahichchhatra, Shravasti and Prayaga, while Bhaskaravarman of Kamarupa in Assam and the king of Valabhi accepted his overlordship. Earlier historians called Harsha the last great Hindu empire-builder, and Vincent Smith dated the medieval Hindu kingdoms from his death. To Pal the empire was smaller than they thought, and there is no reason to keep the label.

Harsha moved his capital from Thanesar to Kannauj. Thanesar lay too close to raids by the Hunas (Huns) from the north-west, Pal suggests, while Kannauj sat in the fertile doab between the Ganga and Yamuna with routes running east and south.

The battle he lost, told by the man who won it

Pulakeshin II ruled the Chalukya kingdom of the Deccan from 610 or 611 to 642, according to Singh. Ravikirti, a poet who called Pulakeshin his patron, composed the Aihole inscription, a 37-verse poem cut into the wall of the Meguti temple at Aihole. F. Kielhorn dates it to 634 or 635. Verse 23 concerns Harsha. In Kielhorn’s translation his “mirth (harsha) melted away by fear”, “having become loathsome with his rows of lordly elephants fallen in battle.” The pun on the name is the poet’s.

His guest Xuanzang agrees on the result. His description of the Chalukya country says Harsha had conquered the nations from east to west but “the people of this country alone have not submitted to him.” Harsha gathered troops from the Five Indies and led the army himself, in Beal’s translation, “but he has not yet conquered their troops.”

A rival’s poem and a friendly pilgrim therefore both say Harsha did not win. Britannica dates the attempt to about 620 and says Pulakeshin drove Harsha back to the Narmada. The river is also the southern edge of the empire in Singh’s and Pal’s accounts. The Latas, Malavas and Gurjaras lay between the two kingdoms, Pal notes, and the Aihole poem claims all three as Pulakeshin’s vassals.

The scale of the defeat is less certain than the fact of it. Later Chalukya inscriptions style Harsha Sakalottarapathesvara, lord of all the northern regions, and say Pulakeshin took the title Parameshvara, supreme lord, by beating him. R. C. Majumdar, Pal notes, thought Pulakeshin’s successors magnified the result. Later Chalukya inscriptions return to the victory repeatedly with pride, Thapar says.

Xuanzang’s description of the same country also includes a monastery cut into a mountain valley, which Beal’s footnote identifies with the caves at Ajanta.

What Xuanzang saw at Kannauj and Prayag

Harsha’s two great set pieces survive in two Chinese texts, Xuanzang’s Records and the Life written by his disciple Huili, both translated by Samuel Beal. Xuanzang’s Kannauj has Buddhist monasteries and Hindu temples side by side, along with a stupa northwest of the capital that he says Ashoka built.

At Kannauj, Huili says, kings of 18 countries gathered (the Records say 20), with about 3,000 monks of the Great and Little Vehicles (the two broad branches of Buddhism), 3,000 Brahmans and Nirgranthas (Jain ascetics), and about 1,000 monks from Nalanda. A golden Buddha rode through on a caparisoned elephant, with Harsha dressed as the god Indra on one side and Kumara, the king of Kamarupa, dressed as Brahma on the other.

Xuanzang presided over the debate and hung up a placard offering his head to anyone who could find a single word of his thesis contrary to reason. For 18 days, Huili says, nobody entered the discussion. When followers of the Little Vehicle plotted to kill him, Harsha decreed that anyone who touched Xuanzang would be beheaded and anyone who spoke against him would lose his tongue. The Records tell the plot differently: a tower caught fire, a man with a knife rushed at Harsha, and 500 Brahmans were blamed and banished to the frontier.

Prayag, where the Ganges and Yamuna meet, came next. Harsha told Xuanzang he had held five assemblies there, one every five years, and was about to hold the sixth, over 75 days. Around 500,000 people attended, Huili counts. On the first day an image of the Buddha was installed, on the second the Sun, on the third Ishvara, a name of Shiva. Gifts went in turn to Buddhist monks, Brahmans, followers of other sects and finally the poor and orphans, who took a month. By the end he kept only the horses, elephants and arms, and asked his sister for a plain second-hand garment. The Records say he gives away five years of wealth “in one day.”

E. B. Cowell, in his preface to Boyd’s 1872 translation of the Nagananda, read the Life’s account as showing that the king’s official patronage “was shared by the Brahmans even more than by the Buddhists.”

Two witnesses with their own interests

To Singh the Harshacharita is a eulogistic biography that paints a glowing picture of its patron. It ends after Harsha rescues his sister and takes the thrones of Thanesar and Kannauj, so the wars that followed are outside it. Some scholars think the work unfinished. V. S. Pathak argues it is complete: Rajyashri’s name also means royal glory, so her rescue stands for Harsha winning it.

Xuanzang is a harder case. His opinions are questionable because of his strong Buddhist ties with Harsha, Britannica says, and Harsha appears to have backed orthodox Hinduism earlier in his reign. For Max Deeg of Cardiff University, the Records carry a bias that needs careful interpretation. Evidence from Harsha’s own side adds to the doubt, Pal says: the Banskhera and Madhuban charters record land grants to Brahmans and present him as a devotee of Shiva, and the first two plays attributed to him open with invocations to Brahmanical gods.

D. Devahuti, as Singh summarises, reads him the other way. Xuanzang praised some non-Buddhist kings and faulted some Buddhist ones, and he wrote after returning to China, far from Harsha’s court, with little reason to flatter. Thapar adds a caution of her own. If Harsha really split state income four ways, as Xuanzang says, she calls the scheme idealistic and perhaps economically impractical.

Three plays and a question of authorship

Tradition credits Harsha with three Sanskrit plays, Singh writes: the romantic comedies Ratnavali and Priyadarshika, and the Nagananda, about the bodhisattva Jimutavahana.

In Palmer Boyd’s 1872 translation of the Nagananda, the hero offers his own body to Garuda, the king of the birds, who has been eating snakes called Nagas, to save a snake prince, and Garuda repents. A note says the opening benediction invokes the Buddha, the only such case in Sanskrit literature. The prologue calls Harsha a clever poet and says he gave the play a new arrangement of the incidents.

Whether Harsha wrote any of it is unsettled. Thapar says there is some uncertainty whether he was the author or the plays are only attributed to him. In 1872 Cowell noted that the poetics text Kavyaprakasha mentions a poet, Dhavaka, who gained wealth through King Harsha, and that commentators say Dhavaka wrote the Ratnavali under the king’s name, though one commentator reads Bana instead. Cowell gave such traditions little historical value. He doubted a single author for the two plays, since one opens by invoking the Buddha and the other Shiva, and suggested the king may have put both out under his own name.

Nalanda and the royal villages

Nalanda, in Bihar, enjoyed royal patronage under Harshavardhana and later the Palas, Singh writes. Xuanzang spent more than five years there studying the Yogachara school of Buddhist philosophy. Huili says the convent housed up to 10,000 resident and visiting monks, set up about 100 pulpits for preaching every day, and drew on the revenues of about 100 villages that the king of the country had remitted to it. Thapar says Nalanda is said to have received the revenue of a hundred, or possibly two hundred, villages. UNESCO, which inscribed the site in 2016, describes it as a monastic and teaching establishment that operated from the 5th to the 13th century CE.

What came apart in 647

Tang embassies reached Harsha’s court in 643 and 647, Thapar and Pal write. On the second visit the envoys found Harsha dead and his throne taken by someone else. According to Singh, soldiers led by a man named Arunasha attacked the embassy and killed or captured everyone except the envoy Wang Xuance and his deputy. The Chinese ambassador raised a force in Nepal and Assam, Thapar says, that defeated the usurper and took him to China. Britannica dates Harsha’s death to about 647, Singh to 648.

The kingdom disintegrated rapidly into small states, in Thapar’s account. She adds that Harsha had tried to weld a cluster of small kingdoms into a larger structure that did not survive the political and economic conditions of the time. He apparently made no attempt at a centralised empire, Britannica says. Political confusion lasted until Yashovarman rose at Kannauj, about 715 to 745, Singh writes, after which the Rashtrakutas, Palas and Gurjara-Pratiharas fought over the city.

Why it came apart is still argued. R. S. Sharma, Pal records, saw Pataliputra as the pre-feudal order and Kannauj under Harsha as the start of the feudal age in the north, with trade shrinking and officials paid in land. Critics, Pal notes, find trade still flourishing in south-eastern Bengal and western India. B. D. Chattopadhyaya and Hermann Kulke, Singh writes, argue that early medieval India was a time of intensive state formation, with land grants as one way rulers built legitimacy.

The Harsha era outlived the kingdom. Pal gives 606 as its start, though Singh lists 612, 619 and 648 among other proposed dates. Alberuni, who came to India in the 11th century, recorded the era in use at Mathura and Kannauj, Pal adds.