Successors of the Imperial Mauryas.
WITH the fall of the Mauryas, Indian history for the time being loses its unity. The command of one single political authority is no longer obeyed over a large part of India. Hordes of foreign barbarians pour through the north-western gates of the country and establish powerful kingdoms in Gandhara (North-West Frontier), Sakala (North-Central Punjab) and other places. The southern provinces throw off the yoke of Magadha and rival in power and splendour the remnant of the great empire of the Gangetic plain. A new dynasty supplants the Mauryas in the Madhya-desa, or the Upper Ganges valley, and finds it no easy task to maintain its position against the rush of invasion from the south and the north-west.
In Magadha and the neighbouring provinces the immediate successors of the Mauryas, according to the Puranas, were the Sungas who are usually regarded as a Brahmana family belonging to the Bharadvaja clan. The founder, Pushyamitra, is known from literature and also from an epigraph, discovered at Ayodhya. In one famous work, the family to which he belonged is styled, Baimbika and not Sunga. He was the general of the last of the Imperial Mauryas, whom he overthrew in the very sight of the army. The people seem to have acquiesced in the change of dynasty as the later Mauryas had proved tyrannical and incapable of stemming the tide of Greek invasion and maintaining the prestige of the arms of Magadha.
The dominions of the new king at first extended as far south as the Narmada (Narbada or Nerbudda). The north-western boundary seems to have been ill-defined, but tradition credit the house of Pushyamitra with having exercised control as far as Jalandhar and Sialkot in the Punjab.Pataliputra continued to be graced with the presence of the sovereign, but it had a rival in the city of Vidisa, modern Besnagar in Eastern Malwa, where the crown prince Agnimitra held his court.
The prince was soon involved in a war with the neighbouring kingdom of Vidarbha or Berar. He succeeded in defeating his adversary and reducing him to obedience. A more serious danger threatened from the north-west. The Greeks had renewed their incursions towards the close of the third century BC and a Greek king, Antiochos the Great of Syria, had penetrated into the Kabul valley and induced the Indian king Subhagasena to surrender a number of elephants. His example was soon followed by his son-in-law Demetrios, prince of Bactria, who effected extensive conquests in the Punjab and the lower Indus valley. Equally brilliant achievements are attributed to a later king, Menander. The warlike activities of the Greeks are alluded to by Patanjali, Kalidasa and the author of the Gargi Samhita. We are told that the “viciously valiant barbarians” besieged Saketa in Oudh and Madhyamika near Chitor and threatened Pataliputra itself. The tide of invasion was arrested and prince Vasumitra, son of Agnimitra, inflicted a defeat on the Yavanas on the banks of the Sindhu, either the Indus or some stream in Central India. The grandfather of the victorious prince signalised the triumph of his arms by the successful performance of two horse-sacrifices. These rites had a double significance. On the one hand they proclaimed the rise of a new empire on the ashes of Mauryan hegemony, which was successful in defending Aryavarta against the barbarian outcastes of the frontiers. On the other hand they heralded the dawn of a new Brahmanical movement which reached its climax in the spacious days of the Guptas.
Pushyamitra died after a reign of thirty-six years, according to the Puranas (c. 187-151 BC according to the system of chronology, adopted in these pages). He was succeeded by his son Agnimitra. This prince is the hero of a famous drama by India’s greatest play-wright, Kalidasa. After him the history of the dynasty became obscure. Vidisa, modern Besnagar in Eastern Malwa, continued to be a great political centre, and its princes had diplomatic relations with the Greek potentates of the borderland. But the power of the family gradually weakened, and in the end the ruler of the line became a puppet in the hands of his Brahmana minister. Eventually the ministerial family, known as Kanva, assumed he purple under Vasudeva (c. 75 BC), but permitted the kings of the Sunga dynasty to continue to rule in obscurity in a corner of their former dominions. In or about 40-30 BC both the Sungas and the Kanvas were swept away by a southern power, and the province of Eastern Malwa where stood the metropolis of Vidisa was eventually absorbed within the dominions of the conqueror. Princes with names ending in Mitra, and possibly connected with the Sungas and Kanvas, seem to have exercised sway in Magadha and the Ganges-Jumna valley till the Scythian conquest.
The Satavahanas
The southern potentate who put an end to the rule of the Sungas and the Kanvas is described in the Puranas as an Andhra, a name applied to the people of the Telugu-speaking tract at the mouth of the Godavari and the Krishna. In contemporary epigraphic records, however, kings of this line are invariably referred to as Satavahana and a “district of the Satavahanas” has been proved to lie in the neighbourhood of Bellary in the Kanarese area of the Madras Presidency. The memory of the dynasty lingers in the story of the king Salivahana famous in Indian folk-lore. This legendary hero seems to have appropriated to himself the glorious deeds of several distinguished members of a long line of emperors of the Deccan.
The founder of the family was Simuka, but the man who raised it to eminence was his son or nephew Satakarni I. 
The latter allied himself with the powerful Maharathi chieftains of the western Deccan, and signalised his accession to power by the performance of the horse-sacrifice. Some time after his death, the Satavahana power seems to have been submerged beneath a wave of Scythian invasion. But the fortunes of the dynasty were restored by Gautamiputra Satakarni, who took pride in calling himself the destroyer of the Sakas (Scythians), Yavanas (Greeks) and Pahlavas (Parthians). Gautamiputra built up an empire that extended from Malwa in the north to the Kanarese country in the south. His son, Vasishthiputra Pulumayi, ruled at Pratishthana or Paithan on the banks of the Godavari, now situated in the Aurangabad district of the Nizam’s dominions. Two other cities, Vaijayanti (in North Kanara) and Amaravati (in the Guntur district), attained eminence in the Satavahana period. A king namedsatkarni coin Vasishthiputra Satakarni, who may have been a brother of Pulumayi, married the daughter of the contemporary Saka satrap (viceroy) Rudradaman I, but this did not prevent the latter from inflicting crushing defeats on his southern relation. The power of the Satavahanas revived under Sri Yajna Satakarni, but he was the last great prince of the line, and after him the empire began to fall to pieces like the Bahmani kingdom of a later age. According to some Puranas 19 kings of this dynasty ruled for 300 years, while according to others, 30 kings ruled for 456 years. The dynasty came to an end about the middle of the third century AD.
The most important among the succeeding powers in the Deccan were the Abhiras and the Vakatakas of Nasik and Berar in Upper Maharashtra, the Ikshvakus and the Salankayanas of the Krishna, and West Godavari districts, the Pallavas of Kanchi (near Madras) and the Kadambas of Vaijayanti or Banavasi in North Kanara.
