Kandahar And Gandahari
Gandhari was preoccupied because she had other debts to clear. She was busy collecting 100 golden vessels for performing the intricate rites of the shraddha 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 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 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.”
“The Arab geographers, in effect, commonly speak of 'that king of al-Hind...'”
“…Sind was predominantly Indian rather than Persian, and induration 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 Chandragupta, laying the foundation of a great Buddhist urban-based civilization. Numerous Buddhist monasteries were founded in the area, and Takshashila became an important center 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.”
“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.”
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…”.
“…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 worships 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.”
“[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.”
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 witnesses 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.
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