Heliodorus, the Greek Envoy From Taxila, Raised a Garuda Pillar to Vasudeva at Besnagar in the Fourteenth Year of King Bhagabhadra, and It Still Stands Near Vidisha

A sandstone column near the meeting of the Betwa and Bes rivers, beside the city of Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, carries a seven-line inscription in Prakrit and the Brahmi script that names the man who set it up. He is Heliodorus, son of Dion, a native of Taxila, and he calls himself a Bhagavata, a worshipper of the Lord Vasudeva. The text says he came as a Greek ambassador from King Antialkidas to King Bhagabhadra, and that the column went up in the fourteenth year of Bhagabhadra’s reign.

John Marshall, then director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, wrote in the Survey’s report for 1908 to 1909 that the pillar shows how Greek influence could travel from the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom of the north-west to the Hindu states of central India. He called it the earliest known architectural monument of the contact between the two civilisations. The eSamskriti essay and The Wire both give its height as about 6.5 metres, and it still stands at Besnagar, the ruined ancient town next to Vidisha.

What the seven lines say

The English version in the Survey’s report, by J. Ph. Vogel, reads the first inscription as a Garuda standard made by order of the Bhagavata Heliodoros, son of Dion, a man of Taxila, “a Greek ambassador from King Antialkidas, to King Bhagabhadra.” Garuda is the great eagle who carries Vishnu, and a Garuda standard is a pillar topped with his figure. Vogel inferred from the word that this column once bore one. A Bhagavata is a worshipper of the Bhagavat, the Lord, whom Vogel identified with Krishna. In his reading the Prakrit word for the envoy is yonaduta, a Greek (yona) who is also a messenger (duta).

Marshall’s own note, printed in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1909, called it the only stone record then found that mentions the Indo-Greek rulers of the Punjab. The first readings differed widely. The tentative translation by Theodor Bloch that Marshall printed made a king named Chandadasa, of Bhagabhadra’s family, the central figure, and Fleet’s version in the same volume had Chandadasa order the pillar made through Heliodoros. Further cleaning showed the inscription ends at line seven, and the reading Vogel gives, which the Survey described as agreed by the best authorities, takes the last line as “in the fourteenth year” of Bhagabhadra’s reign. The king’s epithet was also read two ways: Vogel preferred Kasiputa, “son of the princess from Kashi” (Benares), over Bloch’s Kosiputa.

On another face of the shaft is a second inscription of two lines. Vogel translated it as three steps to immortality which, if followed, lead to heaven: “self-control, self-denial and watchfulness.” Historian Meenakshi Jain, quoted in the eSamskriti essay, says the verse comes from the Mahabharata, and the essay quotes Subhasis Chattopadhyay placing it in the Shanti Parva.

Red lead hid it for thirty-two years

Alexander Cunningham, the Survey’s first director general, noticed the column in January 1877 during a survey of Besnagar. He called it the “fan-palm pillar” because of the palm-leaf ornament on top and, going by its style, thought it belonged to the Gupta period. Generations of pilgrims had smeared the shaft with red lead, and the local priests assured him, Vogel writes, that it bore no inscription. He tried to clean off the paint and gave up.

In January 1909 Marshall visited Besnagar. The State Engineer of Gwalior, H. H. Lake, saw what looked like lettering low on the shaft, and removing a little paint proved him right. A glance at the few exposed letters was enough, Marshall reported, to show that the column was many centuries older than the Gupta age.

Marshall described the shaft as a single block, eight-sided at the base, sixteen-sided in the middle and thirty-two-sided above, with a garland dividing the upper and middle parts and a bell-shaped capital under a heavy abacus, the flat slab at the top. D. R. Bhandarkar, who excavated the site in the winters of 1913 to 1914 and 1914 to 1915, added that the stone is a pinkish-brown Vindhyan sandstone and that the abacus carries a frieze of pairs of geese with honeysuckle between them.

Two names, and a date that depends on both

Antialkidas was already known before the pillar was read. Bhandarkar noted that his coins had turned up on the north-western frontier long before, and the Survey report says they have been found at Begram in Afghanistan and as far south as Sonepat, north of Delhi. Percy Gardner’s 1886 British Museum catalogue lists his silver coins with a Greek legend naming him king and giving him the epithet Nikephoros, “victory-bearing,” and a Prakrit legend on the reverse in which his name appears as Amtialikidasa. The reverse shows Zeus enthroned, with an elephant in the field.

Bhandarkar’s report for 1913 to 1914 lays out how far the coin specialists differed on his date. V. A. Smith placed him about 172 BCE, Gardner about 143 BCE, and Bhandarkar called 140 BCE the latest date anyone gave. Vogel, citing Gardner, put him about the middle of the second century BCE. The age now given for the pillar is later. Art historian Benoy Behl, quoted by eSamskriti, says 120 to 100 BCE, and the same essay reports that an Archaeological Survey of India board at the site gives about 113 BCE.

Bhagabhadra is harder to place, because the inscription gives only his name and his mother’s origin. In 1909 Bhandarkar proposed that he was the king the Puranas, the old Sanskrit genealogies, call Bhagavata, the ninth of the Shunga dynasty that followed the Mauryas, with the name having changed in transmission. Vogel added that V. A. Smith’s date for that king lay not far from the date given for Antialkidas. Live History India says some historians identify Bhagabhadra instead as the fifth Shunga king. Neither identification is proved by the inscription itself.

Historian Upinder Singh, quoted by The Wire, reads the embassy as the Shungas continuing the Mauryan habit of receiving ambassadors from Greek courts, the habit that brought Megasthenes to the court of Chandragupta Maurya.

A Greek who called himself a Bhagavata

Singh points out that Heliodorus describes himself as a Bhagavata, a worshipper of Vasudeva Krishna. The inscription gives no sign that he thought this unusual. Bhandarkar wrote in the Survey’s report for 1914 to 1915 that a Greek taking up Indian worship should cause no surprise, since many Greeks, like Shakas and Pahlavas, became Buddhists and Hindus. Greek presence in the north-west also shaped art, which the tuput piece on Gandhara and Mathura describes.

Bhandarkar read the dedication as proof that Vasudeva’s shrine at Vidisha was already renowned in the middle of the second century BCE, because a Greek ambassador would not otherwise have paid for a costly Garuda pillar there. The eSamskriti essay draws the same conclusion, that Vidisha was a sacred site before Heliodorus arrived. The tradition of Vasudeva as the god Krishna is the subject of tuput’s piece on Krishna. Vidisha was also a city of craftsmen: an inscription on the southern gateway of the Great Stupa at nearby Sanchi says its ivory carvers came from there.

What the spades found, 1910 to the 1960s

Lake dug at Besnagar in the cold season of 1910, under instructions from the Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior, and published his account in the Journal of the Bombay Asiatic Society. Bhandarkar judged the digging “not quite as thorough and scientific as was desirable.” It showed that the mounds Lake opened held nothing older than the Gupta period. Lake also cut two trenches beside the pillar and refilled them.

Bhandarkar worked there in two winter seasons after the state set up its own archaeological department, with funding from the Maharaja. Beside the column he found three retaining walls of an old platform, which he took to be the base of the shrine of Vasudeva that the inscription implies, facing east toward the pillar. The fourth wall could not be traced because the priest’s house stood on it. Foundations of a dwelling to the south he judged to be the home of the worshippers who looked after the shrine, and an unusual “solid” railing enclosed both.

He also studied the stump of a second pillar that Lake had saved from a lane in Bhilsa, which carries a fragmentary inscription. Bhandarkar translated it as a Garuda standard made when a king Bhagavata had been crowned twelve years. A. Venis, who had first transcribed it, took Bhagavata as a word for a devotee rather than a royal name. Bhandarkar held that Venis was wrong and that the king was the Puranic Shunga ruler of that name.

No Garuda figure survives on top of the Heliodorus pillar. A palm-leaf ornament lay beside it, and Cunningham’s drawing had set it on the capital. Marshall suspected that it never belonged there, and Bhandarkar found a tenon on the abacus while the palm ornament has no socket in its base. A second excavation led by M. D. Khare around 1963 to 1965 cleared the priest’s house and uncovered the foundations of a Vishnu temple, The Wire reports, dating it to the late third century BCE, earlier than the pillar. The eSamskriti essay, citing the Survey’s own board, describes an elliptical temple plan marked by two rows of grooves with a path for circling the shrine.

Khamba Baba

When Bhandarkar arrived in 1913 the ground around the column belonged to a Shaiva priest named Pratap-puri Gosai, known as Babaji, who held it as a grant from the Gwalior court. Babaji told Bhandarkar that he was third in line from a first Baba named Hirapuri, who began the worship. The story he told is that a distinguished visitor came with an army, agreed to stay for good at Hirapuri’s request, and turned himself into the pillar called Kham Baba.

The Bhois and Dhimars, fishing communities, held the pillar a favourite god, Bhandarkar wrote, and said Kham Baba had been one of their caste. People of higher castes, Raghbansis and even Brahmans, came occasionally. They made vows chiefly to obtain a son. The usual offering was red lead mixed with oil, which is why coat after coat of paint covered the shaft, along with liquor.

The Wire reports that local people still call the column Khamba Baba, the pillar saint, and that it remains a favourite of the Bhoi and Dhimar communities.

Where the figures differ

The sources opened for this article give several dates. Marshall and Vogel, in 1909, put Antialkidas about the middle of the second century BCE. The Survey board at the site, as reported by eSamskriti, gives about 113 BCE for the pillar and, in another entry, 150 years before Christ, while Behl’s range is 120 to 100 BCE. The inscription itself gives only a regnal year, the fourteenth of Bhagabhadra, so its calendar date depends on where historians place Bhagabhadra and Antialkidas.