Śuṅga dynasty

Seizure of power

Puṣyamitra Śuṅga was commander-in-chief to the last Mauryan king Bṛhadratha and killed him at a review of the troops, according to the account in the Purāṇas. The change was a coup within the existing state rather than a conquest from outside, but the territory the Śuṅgas actually held was much reduced: Magadha, the middle Ganga and central India, with the northwest already lost and the Deccan going its own way.

Vidiśā in central India functioned as a second seat and appears to have been the more important one in practice. The Heliodorus pillar at nearby Besnagar — set up by a Greek envoy from Taxila, in ancient India (modern-day Pakistan), who describes himself as a Bhāgavata, a devotee of Vāsudeva — is dated to the reign of a Śuṅga king and is among the most quoted inscriptions of the period.

Persecution or not

Buddhist texts, principally the Divyāvadāna, portray Puṣyamitra as a persecutor who destroyed monasteries and set a price on the heads of monks. The charge has been repeated in modern histories as a straightforward fact, and it has also been strongly contested: the source is late and hostile, and the archaeological record shows Buddhist construction continuing through the period, including the stone railing and gateways at Bharhut and the enlargement of the Sanchi stūpa in Śuṅga territory.

The most that can be said with confidence is that royal patronage shifted toward Brahmanical ritual — Puṣyamitra is credited with performing the horse sacrifice — and that this shift did not stop Buddhist building. The persecution narrative should be treated as contested rather than as established.

Art and the frontier

The Śuṅga century is one of the formative periods of Indian sculpture. The Bharhut railing, the Sanchi gateways and the reliefs at Bodh Gaya belong to it: crowded narrative panels, the Buddha still represented by symbols rather than in human form, and an inscriptional record naming ordinary donors — monks, nuns, merchants, whole villages — which shows how such monuments were financed.

In the northwest the Śuṅgas faced the Indo-Greeks. Kālidāsa's Mālavikāgnimitra, a play about Puṣyamitra's son, refers to a clash with Yavana forces on the Indus, and Patañjali's grammatical commentary uses as an example the sentence "the Yavana besieged Sāketa," which is usually taken as a contemporary allusion.

The dynasty ended around 73 BCE when the last Śuṅga king was displaced by his brahmin minister Vasudeva Kāṇva, in a repetition of the manner of its own beginning.