The North West India
The North West India
During the second century B.C. when the great Mauryan Empire had crumbled and fell, the north-west India suffered from a series of invasions, which had far-reaching effects on this region.
The Bactrian Greeks who occupied first the Kabul valley and then the Panjab were undoubtedly a thorn in the side of India. Probably their military methods were fiercer and more ruthless than those to which Indian kings had been using. Indian kings were strictly governed by war rules & war ethics set up by their ancestors. For example they would never ever attack enemy camps after sunset, they would never ever attack & kill unarmed enemy soldiers, they would never ever harm civilians, they wouldn’t destroy crops etc etc.
Enemies took advantage of this weakness of Indian kingdoms.
There are enough references to prove these points in ancient sanskrit literary sources.
Invaders raided Indian heartland several times,
The Greek occupation of India, in the light of her later history, by no means, was a disaster, like Mughal invasions. Through it introduced new blood and new ideas into the rich culture of india, and during the second century B.C.
This was the period when Indian culture began to take new forms-an age of rapid change and development, pregnant with the future.
The Greeks themselves, quickly began to come to terms with the culture of the people whom they were ruling.
Menander, the Buddhist and Heliodorus, the worshipper of Vishnu are the two best-known examples of a class of semi-Indianised Greeks which must have been quite large and have increased in number as the Greek rulers became more firmly settled in their new lands. The assimilation of new ideas which has always been a striking feature of Indian cultural life resulted in the complete disappearance of almost every trace of these Indo-Greeks with the exception of an enormous corpus of beautiful coins which are the most important source for the historians who study this period.
In the early years of second century B.C, India was invaded by the Greek rulers of Bactria. The administration of the later Mauryas crumbled and the Sungas had emerged as a new force.
Unfortunately, a few narratives which were notoriously hostile to the Brahmanical forces as well as Greeks had foreign sources. Therefore there is a need to investigate the Brahmanical literatures also especially The Mahabharata, the Vedas, Ramayana etc.
