The Alchon Huns invade India: Toramana and Mihirakula

The Alchons — long regarded as a branch of the Hephthalites, but now seen by historians such as Khodadad Rezakhani as a separate Huna people — had replaced the Kidarites in Gandhara and the western Punjab in the 5th century. An inscription of about 495–500 from Kura in the Salt Range records a Buddhist monastery founded under Toramana, who combined the Indian titles rajadhiraja maharaja with the Central Asian shahi jauvla. He then struck at the heart of the Gupta Empire. At Eran in Malwa the local ruler Dhanyavishnu dedicated a colossal image of Vishnu as the boar Varaha ‘in the first year of the reign of the king of kings Toramana’ — dated by Hans Bakker to 497–500, by others to about 510. At Kausambi, whose last levels of occupation show destruction on a vast scale, excavators found a monastery seal restamped with Toramana’s name; a copper plate of his third year from Sanjeli in Gujarat names his governor there; and a memorial pillar of 510 at Eran records that Goparaja fell in a ‘great battle’ beside Bhanugupta and that his wife followed him onto the pyre. Toramana struck coins on Gupta models, and Bakker argues that he sought to take over the empire rather than to destroy it. In 515, according to an inscription found at Rīsthal in 1983, he was defeated by the Aulikara king Prakashadharman of Dashapura (Mandsaur).

Mihirakula, who succeeded his father soon after 515, ruled from Sakala (Sialkot); his inscription at Gwalior, of his 15th regnal year (about 530), shows his power reaching central India and his devotion to Shiva as Pashupati. Buddhist writers remembered him differently. Xuanzang, who toured India a century later, tells how Mihirakula ordered Buddhism to be stamped out, was defeated and captured by Baladitya, king of Magadha (often identified with the Gupta Narasimhagupta), was released at the request of the victor’s mother, fled to Kashmir and seized its throne, destroyed 1,600 stupas and monasteries in Gandhara and soon died. In the mid-6th century the Alexandrian merchant Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote of Gollas, the White Hun lord of India, who went to war with two thousand elephants and exacted tribute — often identified with Mihirakula. Around 530 (the date is disputed) Yashodharman defeated him, and the Alchons fell back on the Punjab and Kashmir. The scale of the destruction is debated — scholars such as Shoshin Kuwayama and Jason Neelis find no evidence of a general blow to Buddhist monasteries — but the wars finished the Gupta Empire: power passed to regional dynasties such as the Aulikaras of Dashapura, the Maukharis of Kanauj and the Maitrakas of Valabhi, and excavations show that Kausambi never recovered.