In the centuries after Ashoka's dhamma echoed across India and before the dust of the early medieval kingdoms had even begun to settle, a shadow crept southward—not as a singular wave but as a series of shifting dunes. It carried with it the scent of the steppe and the silence of collapsed empires. These were the Hunas—riders from the roof of the world—who descended into the Indian subcontinent not only with fire, but with memory, ambition, and eventual oblivion.
The stage for this Northwestern influx had already been set by those who came before. The Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Kushanas, and Indo-Parthians had all walked the tightrope between conquest and assimilation. But their legacy was one of paradoxes: invaders who became patrons, foreigners who turned native, nomads who built cities. The Hunas would follow this path—but not before splintering the Gupta world that stood in their way.
The first tremors came from the Kidarites, a group who cloaked themselves in Kushan legitimacy while echoing the pulse of the steppes. They emerged in Bactria in the 4th century CE and took advantage of the declining Kushano-Sassanian power. Their ruler, Kidara, established a dynasty that entered Gandhara and western Punjab. They minted coins in the name of earlier Kushan rulers, employing their titulature and iconography, but the shift in style was clear. Their artistic idioms carried the hallmarks of nomadic minimalism and Central Asian aesthetics, and they began asserting political control over urban centers like Peshawar and Taxila. While their political reach was not as dramatic as their successors, they marked the first breach in the dam that had long protected India from steppe aggression.
The Guptas were not unaware of these threats. Even before the Hunas descended in force, the Gupta frontier had been fraying. Inscriptions from the era of Samudragupta and Chandragupta II hint at campaigns against tribal confederacies and groups in the northwest—perhaps an early indication of movements in the borderlands. But it was Skandagupta, the last truly powerful Gupta monarch, who confronted the Huna menace in its embryonic stage. His Bhitari pillar inscription speaks of "repelling the Huna army and restoring the fallen fortunes of his family." His resistance, fierce and urgent, likely delayed deeper Hunnic incursions, but it exhausted the empire’s treasury and exposed the brittle foundations of Gupta centrality.
Then came the Alchon Huns, led by rulers like Khingila, who appears in inscriptions as "Deva Shahi Khingila." His authority stretched from Kabul to Gandhara, and coins bearing his name were found as far east as the Punjab plains. His successors, including Toramana, pushed into India proper. Toramana's name appears in the Eran Boar inscription, which declares him as the sovereign over Malwa, Rajasthan, and parts of Uttar Pradesh. His rule in Eran was not symbolic; it was administrative. The inscription records land grants and governance in a language that mimicked Gupta formalities, demonstrating that Toramana, though a conqueror, had entered into the framework of Indian kingship. He rruled for over a decade in northern and central India, sometime around the late 5th to early 6th century CE. Far from being a transient invader, his presence is attested across a surprisingly wide stretch of territory. He adopted the title "Maharajadhiraja," the great king of kings, signaling an ambition to position himself not as a foreign ruler but as the legitimate heir to the imperial traditions of the subcontinent. His rule is attested in inscriptions not only at Eran but also at Kausambi and Gwalior, suggesting a considerable administrative reach. He minted coins in the style of late Gupta currency, a strategic decision to ease economic transition and stabilize rule over his Indian subjects. Under Toramana, the Alchons established political centers, oversaw religious donations, and actively governed—a testament to their evolving self-conception as settled rulers.
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| A Gupta-style gold coin of Toramana Source: Wikimedia Commons (Copyright) |
However, it was his son, Mihirakula, who carried the Huna ambition to its apogee. His early base was in Kashmir, where the Rajatarangini later remembered him as a brutal ruler. Chinese sources refer to him as “a great enemy of the Buddha’s law,” claiming he destroyed stupas and monasteries. Though these accounts may reflect religious polemics rather than strict historical record, they do paint a picture of a ruler who was aggressive, expansionist, and feared. In the Gwalior inscription of Mihirakula, he is described as a devoted Shaivite and as one whose arms stretched across the earth. His campaign records suggest a militarily capable and determined monarch. He launched expeditions into central India and possibly even the western Deccan. Like his father, he claimed the title Maharajadhiraja, and perhaps believed, more than any other Huna ruler, that the entire subcontinent could be subdued.
What is historically concrete, however, is the military counter-offensive led by a coalition of Indian powers. The Gupta king Narasimhagupta Baladitya, ruling a diminished but still resilient Gupta rump state, formed an alliance with Yashodharman of Malwa. Their campaign against Mihirakula was swift and decisive. According to the Mandasor pillar inscription, Yashodharman broke Mihirakula’s pride, took his symbols of kingship, and forced him into submission. Some later Buddhist sources claim Mihirakula was captured and pardoned by Narasimhagupta—an act that adds a layer of moral contrast to the narrative. Mihirakula retreated to Kashmir, where he lived out his final days with waning authority. According to Chinese accounts, he died bitter and broken, his dreams of ruling all of India shattered.
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| Source: Ollie Bye |
This wasn’t merely a skirmish. The twin forces of Baladitya and Yashodharman didn’t just defeat a king; they marked the end of Huna imperialism in India. And yet, defeat did not mean disappearance. Like the Indo-Scythians before them, the Hunas did not retreat en masse. They fragmented, dispersed, and melted into the social fabric of the subcontinent. Over time, they underwent a gradual process of Indianisation. They adopted Sanskritic titles, intermarried with local elites, and many eventually merged into emerging Gurjaras and Rajput clans. Their legacy, once marked by destruction, was soon remembered in genealogies and martial traditions. As mentioned, even half a millennium later, Rajatarangini vividly describes Mihirakula, still feeling the imperial and civilizational tremors the Hunas had left in the region.
The story of the Hunas thus mirrored the arc of earlier conquerors. The Indo-Greeks had brought Hellenic philosophies and coinage styles, only to be absorbed into the expanding Buddhist and Brahmanical cultures. The Indo-Scythians transitioned from raiders to patrons, building stupas, supporting local economies, and centuries later, adorning the costume of Shaka-Kshatrapas. The Kushanas, once Yuezhi nomads from Central Asia, became some of the most important Buddhist patrons of the Indian past, building Gandharan monasteries and connecting India to Rome and Han China. Even the Indo-Parthians, though less dominant, contributed to the cultural mosaic through cross-border trade and eclectic religious practices. In the same vein, the Hunas—especially the Alchons—became something other than what they arrived as. Their coinage adopted local motifs, their names began to appear in Brahmi script, and their descendants claimed Kshatriya status. The very memory of Mihirakula, feared destroyer of shrines, was transformed in some traditions into that of a heroic warrior king.
Meanwhile, beyond India, the Huna presence left deep scars. The Sasanian Empire, weakened by their own aristocratic rivalries, could not prevent Hunnic incursions into eastern Iran and Afghanistan. Trade routes suffered, and regional economies fractured. The eventual rise of the Gokturks in Central Asia and the alliance between them and Persia led to the crushing of the Hephthalites around 557 CE. What remained of the Huna world was pushed south into India or absorbed into the rising Turkic and Iranian powers. Meanwhile, the Western Huns lead by Atilla destabilized the Roman authority so dastardly to the point where the only consolation the Heaven-fearing autocrats could conjure was through naming him the "Scourge of God". A veteran tactic first employed to rationalize the Neo-Babylonian invasion of Judah a millenium prior.
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| Atilla's invasion of Italy; Ulpiano Checa (1860-1914) |
In the vacuum left by the Guptas and the withdrawal of the Hunas, India entered a new phase. The Vardhanas, regional kingdoms like those of the Maitrakas, and emergent powers like the Gurjaras rose in this transitional landscape. The decline of imperial cohesion led to an increase in local autonomies, temple-based patronage, and the growth of Sanskrit as a court language even beyond India proper.
This begs the question, but only to those who carry an extraneous impulse to be wary and, in the right political context, hateful of the legacy of certain so-called "invaders" in Medieval India. Their names erased from the streets, their architecture judged as unholy, and their history ripped out of the textbooks, all in the name of purifying the nation. For over a millennia before that, India had melted several invading cultures in its grand cauldron of civilizational "impurity". Whether they were the Kushanas, the Shakas or the Greeks, they had all been sucked into an identity that distanced itself from their ancestral roots. And it was not a peripheral phenomenon. A surprisingly high amount of Northern and Northwestern Indians still carry the genetic fingerprints of these Outsiders. Hunnic invasion in particular, is now understood to have even forced a gene flow into East India (Odisha and West Bengal). As per the conclusive study published by the Centre for Molecular Biology Research, certain South Indian groups, like the Nair and Thiyyar warrior communities of Kerala and Bunts and Hoysalas of Karnataka, DO NOT fit into the "Gangetic Migration" narrative as believed earlier. Instead, they are genetically closer to the ancient steppe-migrants in Northwest India. The communities in Kerala even show an enhanced Iranian ancestry. So when the invaders and their descendants live within yourself, who exactly are you running away from? Why is it that certain legacies are unclean while the others are intentionally pushed into oblivion?
In the end, the Huna invasion was never just about destruction. It dismantled the Gupta framework but opened up new forms of political organization. The ruins left in their wake became foundations for something else: a resilient, adaptable, and decentralized model of polity. The Gupta script lived on, Buddhism continued in new forms, and Hindu kingship incorporated the memory of resistance into its mythos. But the Guptas perished nonetheless, Yashodharman built a Kingdom that never saw the eve of that century, the Sassanids disintegrated at the hands of the Rashidun warlords, and the Romans witnessed their realm splitting into two entities that would reshape Europe like never before. The Horselords reminded the world that its polities, no matter how "golden" their ages, are not invulnerable to the storm of history. Empires fall and legacies vanish not because they were rejected, but because they were internalized so completely that forgetting them felt natural.
Further reading:
1. History of Civilizations of Central Asia (essential reading); UNESCO
- Volume II (700 BC to 250 AD); Harmatta, Janos (EDT)
- Volume III (250 AD to 750 AD); B. A. Litvinsky (Hephthalite Empire), Zhang Guand-Da, R. Shabani Samghabadi
2. Empires of the Silk Road; Christopher I. Beckwith
3. The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe; Hyun Jin Kim
4. India's Ancient Past; R. S Sharma
5. The History and Culture of the Indian People (Volume III); R.C. Majumdar
6. Political History of Ancient India, from the Accession of Parikshit to the Extinction of the Gupta Dynasty; H.C. Raychaudhuri
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