Reign of Chandragupta II Vikramaditya

The official Gupta genealogy has Chandragupta succeed his father directly, but the play Devichandraguptam and other evidence suggest that an elder brother, Ramagupta, reigned before him. The play tells how Chandragupta, disguised as Ramagupta’s queen Dhruvadevi, killed a Shaka ruler who had demanded her and later deposed his brother; its historicity is debated, but Gupta records name Dhruvadevi as Chandragupta’s queen and the mother of his successor Kumaragupta I. The beginning of the reign rests on a pillar inscription from Mathura dated in the year 61, usually taken as a year of the Gupta era, and, as usually restored, in the first or fifth regnal year of Chandragupta, that is 380–381 or 376–377; Harry Falk has argued that the year 61 belongs to another reckoning, dates the inscription to 388 and holds that it cannot fix the accession. The last dated record of the reign, at Sanchi, belongs to 412–413, and Kumaragupta was on the throne by 415–416.

His daughter Prabhavatigupta married the Vakataka king Rudrasena II and after his death around 390 ruled the Deccan kingdom as regent for her young sons; Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund regard the Vakataka realm during her regency as practically part of the Gupta Empire. Probably between 397 and 409 Chandragupta ended the rule of the Western Satraps in west-central India — their coinage breaks off in the 390s, and his silver coins of 409 imitate theirs — and extended the empire to the Arabian Sea. Most scholars identify him with King Chandra of the iron pillar at Delhi, whose inscription credits the king with victories in Vanga (Bengal) and beyond the Indus. Cave shrines were cut at Udayagiri in central India during his reign (an inscription there is dated 401–402), and the poet Kalidasa may have been at his court. Faxian, who came to India at the beginning of the 5th century, noted that households were not registered, that most offenders were only fined, and that in the cities the heads of Vaishya families kept houses where the poor and the sick received food and medicine.