A section from the journey

The Shakas and the Kushans

Through the centuries after the Mauryas, new peoples came down through the northwestern passes. First the Shakas, riders from the north. Then the great Kushans, who built a wide empire joining India to Central Asia. These newcomers did not stay strangers. They took up Indian gods, Indian titles, and Indian ways, and made this land their home. When exactly each ruled is a question scholars still weigh.

Look to the northwest of this land, to the high passes through the mountains. For all of history they have been a doorway. Trade comes through them — and so, again and again, do peoples on the move, drifting down from the wide grasslands of Central Asia in search of warmer, richer country.

In the centuries after the Mauryas, two such peoples came and left a deep mark. The first were the . The Greeks called them Scythians: tough horse-riders from the north. They pushed in through the passes and set up kingdoms across the northwest and the west of the land.

After the Shakas, and greater than them, came the . They too came from Central Asia, but they built something far larger: a wide empire that joined the lands beyond the mountains to the plains of northern India. They sat astride the great roads where the trade of half the world passed by.

Now here is the part that matters most for our long story. These newcomers did not stay strangers in the land. They could have ruled as foreigners apart, keeping their own ways behind palace walls. They did not. Slowly, surely, they became Indian.

They took Indian names. They honored Indian gods beside their own. They took up grand titles in the Indian style, calling themselves "great king" and "king of kings." Their coins show gods from many lands standing side by side. The land did not push them out. It drew them in. We will follow that quiet, powerful pattern more closely in the chapters just ahead.

Before we go on, an honest word about time. You may have noticed I have given few firm dates here. That is on purpose. These peoples counted their years in their own eras, and scholars still argue over exactly when those eras began. So let us step to the and look at why even the dates of so famous a line are held with care.

The rishi steps to the Threshold — where accounts differWhen exactly did the Shakas and Kushans rule, and when did their most famous king reign?

What scholars find

Historians broadly agree on the order of events: Shaka (Scythian) kingdoms across the northwest and west from around the 1st century BCE, then the rise of the Kushan empire by the 1st century CE. But the precise years are genuinely uncertain. The trouble is that these rulers dated their inscriptions by year-numbers in eras whose starting points are themselves debated. The starting date of King Kanishka's reign, for example, has been placed by serious scholars anywhere from the late 1st to the mid-2nd century CE; many now favour about 127 CE, but the question is not finally settled. So scholars give cautious bands of years, not exact dates, and say so plainly.

As the inscriptions and era-reckonings hold

Much of what we know of these kings comes from their own dated inscriptions and coins, which count years within named eras. One such era, long linked by tradition to a Shaka king and still used in the Indian calendar today, has a fixed starting point of 78 CE. Reading the rulers' year-numbers against such era-anchors is how their reigns are reconstructed. The dating debate, then, is not about whether these records are real — they are firm and physical — but about exactly which era each inscription counts from. It is a careful matter of matching year-counts to their starting points, not a clash of belief.

Whatever the exact years, the truth of it stands. The doorway in the northwest let in not only armies but newcomers who, in time, became us. That is one of the deepest patterns in the whole story of this land, and we will see it again and again.

A stranger arrives, and in time is no longer a stranger but one of the family. Where in your own life, or your own people's memory, has someone come from far away and slowly become part of home?