Harsha

This peace and prosperity drew travelers from across the Asian continent, none more famous than the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang, who arrived at the court of the king he recorded as Shiladitya. Xuanzang’s accounts paint a portrait of a monarch of tireless energy and boundless generosity, who reportedly banned the slaughter of animals for food, constructed thousands of hundred-foot-high stupas along the Ganges, and built well-maintained hospices on the highways to care for travelers and the destitute. Xuanzang described a magnificent twenty-one-day religious festival in Kanyakubja, where Harsha and his tributary kings paid daily homage before a life-sized golden statue of the Buddha. Every five years, Harsha also held a grand assembly called Moksha, during which he systematically distributed the accumulated wealth of his treasury as alms to scholars, monastics, and the poor.

Despite Xuanzang’s portrayal of Harsha as a devout Buddhist convert, the reality of the emperor’s spiritual life was far more complex and eclectic. The royal house of Thanesar had long been religiously pluralistic; Harsha’s ancestors worshipped the sun god Surya, his late brother had followed the Buddha, and Harsha’s own land grants and royal seals identify him as a Parama-maheshvara—a supreme devotee of Shiva. Even in his literary works—for Harsha was a celebrated playwright, widely credited with authoring the Sanskrit plays Ratnavali, Priyadarsika, and Nagananda—this fluidity is on display. In the Nagananda, which dramatizes the self-sacrifice of a Bodhisattva, the invocatory verses honor the Buddha, yet it is the Hindu goddess Gauri who ultimately intercedes to restore the hero to life. This intellectual and religious open-mindedness was not a contradiction but a deliberate imperial strategy. By patronizing Shaivites, Buddhists, and solar deities alike, Harsha anchored his legitimacy across the diverse social landscapes of his empire.

The end of Harsha's forty-year reign in 647 CE plunged Northern India back into the very fragmentation from which he had rescued it. Because he died without an heir, his death triggered an immediate succession crisis and a bizarre, international postscript. A diplomatic mission sent by the Tang Emperor Taizong, led by the envoy Wang Xuance, arrived in India shortly after Harsha’s death, only to find the empire seized by a usurper named Aluonashun. The new ruler attacked the Chinese embassy, forcing Wang Xuance to flee north to Nepal and Tibet. There, Wang raised a joint force of over seven thousand Nepalese mounted infantry and twelve hundred Tibetan soldiers, swept back down into the Ganges plain, and defeated the usurper’s forces. Aluonashun was captured and taken back to China to be displayed as a prisoner of war, his stone likeness eventually placed beside the tomb of the Tang Emperor.

With Harsha’s passing, the imperial structure he had painstakingly built evaporated. He was the last native monarch to hold paramount, centralized power in Northern India prior to the arrival of Islamic rulers centuries later. In the wake of his death, the region fractured once more into an era of petty states and regional kingdoms. Yet the legacy of his reign survived in the memory of a golden age of cosmopolitan dialogue, dramatic literature, and a rare, transient moment of political unity that temporarily bridged the deep divisions of the northern subcontinent.