Alchon Huns

The invasions

The Hūṇas of Indian sources — the Alchon group is distinguished from the Hephthalites and others by its coinage — appear in the northwest in the later fourth century and press into India across the following hundred years. The Bhitari pillar inscription records that Skandagupta met and defeated them; the Gupta gold coinage debases sharply in the same period, and the two facts are usually read together as the cost of the frontier war.

By the end of the fifth century Toramāṇa was ruling in Malwa, as an inscription from Eran attests, and the Gupta hold on northern India had broken.

Mihirakula

Toramāṇa's son Mihirakula is the most notorious figure of the period. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, writing more than a century later, describes him as a persecutor who destroyed monasteries and killed monks; Kalhaṇa's Rājataraṅgiṇī, later still, gives a similar portrait of cruelty. Against this, Mihirakula's own inscription at Gwalior records the building of a temple to the sun, and his coins carry Śaiva symbols.

The evidence is therefore a hostile Buddhist tradition on one side and a claim to Brahmanical patronage on the other, and modern assessments differ considerably. The archaeological picture in Gandhāra, ancient India (modern-day Pakistan), shows a real decline of the great Buddhist establishments in this period, but disentangling invasion from the broader shifts in patronage and trade is not straightforward.

Mihirakula was defeated in the 520s or 530s by a coalition that included Yaśodharman of Malwa, whose Mandsaur pillar inscription boasts of having made him bow, and by the Aulikara and Gupta forces of the region. He withdrew to Kashmir.

Consequences

The Hūṇa wars are one of the standard explanations for the end of the Gupta empire, alongside fiscal strain and the growth of independent feudatories. They also changed the northwest permanently: the Buddhist monastic economy of Gandhāra, already shifting, did not recover its former scale, and the trans-Hindu Kush routes passed into other hands.

Some later Rajput lineages have been argued to descend from Hūṇa settlers, and a Hūṇa people is named among the peoples of northern India in inscriptions for centuries afterwards. The genealogical claim is old, much repeated and not demonstrable.