Kandahar or Gandhar in Sanskrit is the second largest city in
Afghanistan. Is one of the oldest known human settlements. Gandhar is
mentioned as an historical regional capital in Mahabharata. It is the
hometown of Gandhari, wife of Dhritarastra and mother to the Kaurava
princes, and her brother Shakuni, who is the ultimate cause for the kinslaying Mahabharata war.
Gandhari was preoccupied because she had other debts to clear. She was
busy collecting 100 golden vessels for performing the intricate rites of
the shradha for each of her hundred Kshatriya sons. She had a debt to
pay. She was subsequently freed of the debt after performing the rituals
she owed to her sons and grandchildren. The great burden was now off
her chest. In normal circumstances, her sons would have been obligated
to perform the ritual for her. Now the process had been reversed. She
had also time to think of her widowed but beloved daughter, Duhshala,
who her own mourning to do. It was a pathetic sight for her. She had a
horde of her daughters-in-law wailing loudly, on the Kurukshetra
battlefield within her hearing distance. Gandhari had enough on her
plate. She was also to mourn the death of her six brothers and her
nephew Uluka. She was confronted with the mourning and wailing Draupadi,
who lost her five sons, through treachery while they were asleep.
Gandhari was overheard telling Draupadi that her grief was greater than
hers, but she was absolved by placating others, rather than thinking of
her own grief.
Gandhari was a strong critic of the war. She was
also an acute observer of the scene, watching events from close
quarters. Her interventions were subtle and she was always on the side
of peace. She was as much critical of her husband, as of her elder son
and brother. While grieving over the death of her sons, she kept her
cool. She chose to be chief spokesman of the grieving and suffering
Kaurava women. She held Krishna responsible for the war and told him in
no uncertain terms that she did not mourn as much the dead as the
living, like her blind husband and widowed daughters-in-law, and other
teeming humanity.
There was no public expression of grief by
Gandhari, but there was plenty to preoccupy her in her public grief. It
even made Krishna join Gandhari and Dhritarashtra in shedding a tear or
two. Her misery was compounded due to her divine vision, which let her
go over the entire Mahabharata was day-by-day and moment-by-moment. She
could re-live the slaughter of each of her sons reel by reel. She could
find no rationale for the 18-day war. She attributed all this to her
karma, as well as of her daughters-in-law for sins committed in past
lives. She also realized fully that it was not the actual fact. The
Mahabharata was to be attributed to human folly, repeated again and
again.
Gandharvas are first described in the Vedas as cosmic
beings. Later literature describes them as a jati (community), and the
later Natyasastra refers to their system of music as gandharva. Gupt
explains1:
“Gandharvas, as spoken of in Samhitas and later
literature, had derived their name from a geographical people, the
Gandharas… Most likely they belonged to Afghanistan (which still has a
township called Kandhara)... It was perhaps at this time that the
Gandharas raised the art of music to a great height. This region of the
subcontinent at the time had become the locus of a great confluence of
the musical traditions of the East and the Mediterranean. The very art,
thus, came to be known by the name of the region and was so called by it
even in the heartland of India. This name, gandharva, continued to be
used for music for centuries to come. In the Vayu Purana one of the nine
divisions of Bharatavarsa is called Gandharva.”
During the
Mahabharata period, the Gandhara region was very much culturally and
politically a part of India. King Œakuni, brother of Gandhârî, fought
with Pandavas in the famous epic Mahabharata. The battle was fought in
Kurukshetra, in the heartland of India. Gandhârî was married to King
Dhrtrastra. Exchanges between Gandhara and Hastinapur (Delhi) were well
established and intense.
Mehrgarh, located in this region and
part of the Indus Valley civilization, is the oldest town excavated by
archeologists (8000B.C.E) in the world.
Gandhara was the trade
crossroad and cultural meeting place between India, Central Asia, and
the Middle East. Buddhist writings mention Gandhara (which included
Peshawar, Swat and Kabul Valleys) as one of the 16 major states of
northern India at the time. It was a province of the Persian king Darius
I in the fifth century B.C.E. After conquering it in the 4th century
B.C.E., Alexander encountered the vast army of the Nandas in the Punjab,
and his soldiers mutinied causing him to leave India.
Thereafter, Gandhara was ruled by the Maurya dynasty of India, and
during the reign of the Indian emperor Ashoka (3rd century B.C.E.),
Buddhism spread and became the world's first religion across Eurasia,
influencing early Christianity and East Asian civilizations.
Padmasambhava, the spiritual and intellectual founder of the
Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, was from Gandhara. Greek historian Pliny wrote
that the Mauryans had a massive army; and yet, like all other Indian
kingdoms, they made no attempt at overseas conquest.
Gandhara and Sind were considered parts of India since ancient times, as historian Andre Wink explains:
“From ancient times both Makran and Sind had been regarded as belonging
to India… It definitely did extend beyond the present province of Sind
and Makran; the whole of Baluchistan was included, a part of the Panjab,
and the North-West Frontier Province.”2
“The Arab geographers, in effect, commonly speak of 'that king of al-Hind...'”3
“…Sind was predominantly Indian rather than Persian, and in duration
the periods that it had been politically attached to, or incorporated
in, an Indian polity far outweigh Persian domination. The Maurya empire
was extended to the Indus valley by Candragupta, laying the foundation
of a great Buddhist urban-based civilization. Numerous Buddhist
monasteries were founded in the area, and Takshashila became an
important centre of Buddhist learning, especially in Ashoka's time.
Under the Kushanas, in the late first century A.D… international trade
and urbanization reached unprecedented levels in the Indus valley and
Purushapara (Peshawar) became the capital of a far-flung empire and
Gandhara the second home of Buddhism, producing the well-known
Gandhara-Buddhist art. In Purushapara, Kanishka is supposed to have
convened the fourth Buddhist council and to have built the Kanishka
Vihara, which remained a Buddhist pilgrimage center for centuries to
come as well as a center for the dissemination of the religion to
Central Asia and China… in conjunction with Hinduism, Buddhism survived
in Sind until well into the tenth century.”4
“Hiuen Tsang… was
especially impressed by the thousand Buddhist monks who lived in the
caves of Bamiyan, and the colossal stone Buddha, with a height of 53.5
m, then still decorated with gold. There is also evidence of devi cults
in the same areas.”5
Shaivism was also an important ancient religion in this region, with wide influence. Wink writes:
“…Qandahar [modern Kandahar]…. was the religious center of the kingdom
where the cult of the Shaivite god Zun was performed on a hilltop…”.6
“…the god Zun or Zhun ... shrine lay in Zamindawar before the arrival
of Islam, set on a sacred mountain, and still existing in the later
ninth century …. [The region was]… famous as a pilgrimage center devoted
to Zun. In China the god's temple became known as the temple of Su-na.
…[T]he worship of Zun might be related to that of the old shrine of the
sun-god Aditya at Multan. In any case, the cult of Zun was primarily
Hindu, not Buddhist or Zoroastrian.”7
“[A] connection of
Gandhara with the polymorphic male god Shiva and the Durga Devi is now
well-established. The pre-eminent character of Zun or Sun was that of a
mountain god. And a connection with mountains also predominates in the
composite religious configuration of Shiva, the lord of the mountain,
the cosmic pivot and the ruler of time… Gandhara and the neighboring
countries in fact represent a prominent background to classical
Shaivism.”8
From 1st century C.E., emperor Kaniska I and his
Kushan successors were acknowledged as one of the four great Eurasian
powers of their time (the others being China, Rome, and Parthia). The
Kushans further spread Buddhism to Central Asia and China, and developed
Mahayana Buddhism and the Gandhara and Mathura schools of art. The
Kushans became affluent through trade, particularly with exports to
Rome. Their coins and art are witness to the tolerance and syncretism in
religion and art that prevailed in the region. The Gandhara school
incorporated many motifs from classical Roman art, but the basic
iconography remained Indian.
