Skandagupta repels the Hunas

The fullest record is the inscription on the stone pillar that Skandagupta set up at Bhitari, in the Ghazipur district of the Ganges valley, where he installed an image of Vishnu for the religious merit of his father. After telling how, when his father ‘had attained the skies’, he restored the fallen fortunes of his family by defeating the Pushyamitras (in another reading, simply ‘enemies’), the poet says that the earth was shaken by his two arms when he joined in close conflict with the Hunas. His rock inscription at Junagadh in Gujarat, which mentions the years 136–138 of the Gupta era (455–458), celebrates a victory over the mlechchhas, ‘foreigners’, which R. C. Majumdar took to be the same war: in that case it was won no later than 455/456, perhaps while Skandagupta, still a prince, was holding the frontier and his father died in the capital. The order of events at Bhitari points rather to a date later in the reign, and other works give 455 or 460. The invaders are usually identified with the Kidarites, who then held Gandhara, though some historians see them as the Alchon Huns; how the Hunas of India were related to the Huns who had invaded Europe under Attila in the same period is disputed.

Skandagupta had taken the throne around 455 in what seems to have been a disputed succession, and he is generally regarded as the last of the great Gupta emperors. The Junagadh inscription also records that Chakrapalita, son of his governor of Surashtra Parnadatta, rebuilt the dam of the Sudarshana lake — restored three centuries earlier by Rudradaman — after it burst in 455–456 (year 136 of the Gupta era); the new embankment was built the following year. The wars may have strained the treasury: Skandagupta struck fewer gold coins than his predecessors, some of them with less gold. The Kidarites kept part of the Punjab, and at the turn of the 5th and 6th centuries the Alchon Huns invaded northern India.