Porus to the Huns

1The Persians arrive

Around 518 BCE, Punjab became a province of the largest empire the world had yet seen — and started getting paid in gold to stay that way.

What happened

The Achaemenid Persian Empire, under Cyrus and then Darius I, expanded until it stretched from Greece and Egypt in the west to the Indus in the east. Sometime around 518 BCE, Darius annexed the Indus region.

Two new provinces — the Persians called them satrapies, which simply means governorships — appear in Persian records:

• Gandhara — the region around Peshawar and Taxila, straddling today's Pakistan–

Afghanistan border.

• Hindush — the Indus and Punjab country to the south and east.

The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 400s BCE, records something remarkable about this province. He says the Indian satrapy was the richest in the entire Persian Empire, paying tribute of 360 talents of gold dust — a colossal figure, far more than any other province.

Herodotus was not always reliable and the number may be inflated. But even allowing for exaggeration, the point stands and it confirms what Part 1 predicted from the geography: the five-river plain was wealthy, and everyone knew it.

What Punjab got out of it

Being ruled from Persepolis for roughly two centuries was not just a humiliation. It plugged Punjab into a world system.

W H AT P E R S I A N R U L E B R O U G H T T O T H E N O R T H - W E S T

There is a detail here that most Indians find surprising. Indian soldiers from these satrapies served in Persian armies in Europe. Herodotus lists Indian contingents — infantry with cane bows and iron-tipped arrows, and cavalry with chariots — in Xerxes' great invasion of Greece in 480 BCE. Men from the Indus and Punjab fought at Plataea, in Greece, in 479 BCE.

2Panini and Taxila

If you remember one thing from Part 2, make it this chapter. The single greatest thing ever produced in Punjab is not a battle, a fort or an empire. It is a book about grammar, and it is still being studied by computer scientists.

Taxila: what it actually was

Taxila — Sanskrit Takshashila — stood in what is now Rawalpindi district in Pakistani Punjab, about 35 km north-west of Islamabad. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site today.

It was not one city but a sequence of three, each built by a different power, which tells you everything about the region's history:

T H E T H R E E C I T I E S O F TA X I L A

Around them lie the great Buddhist complexes: the Dharmarajika Stupa — built over relics of the Buddha, traditionally attributed to Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE — and the monasteries of Jaulian, Mohra Muradu, Kalawan and others.

Was Taxila a "university"? An honest correction

You will often read that Taxila was "the world's first university," founded in 700 BCE, with 10,500 students from all over Asia. Treat those specifics with caution. They come largely from later Buddhist stories (the Jatakas) rather than from documents or inscriptions.

What the evidence supports is this: Taxila was a concentration of renowned individual teachers who took on students, in a city rich enough and connected enough to attract them from across the subcontinent and beyond. There was no single campus, no central administration, no degrees, no examinations in the modern sense. It was closer to Athens in the time of Socrates than to Oxford.

That is still extraordinary. But I do not need to inflate anything, so I will not.

Who studied or taught there, according to tradition and to some reasonably good sources:

• Chanakya (also called Kautilya), the political strategist who wrote the Arthashastra

and engineered the Mauryan Empire — Chapter 4.

• Jivaka, the physician of the Buddha's time, remembered across the Buddhist world as

the model doctor.

• Chandragupta Maurya, reportedly educated there before he became emperor. • And, from the same region, Panini.

Panini: the greatest mind Punjab ever produced

Panini was born at Salatura, a village in Gandhara near the confluence of the Indus and Kabul rivers, close to Taxila. He probably lived in the 5th or 4th century BCE, though the date is debated.

He wrote a book called the Ashtadhyayi — "Eight Chapters."

Here is what it is. In roughly 3,959 short rules, Panini describes the complete grammar of Sanskrit. Not a description in the sense of "here are some examples and patterns." A description in the sense of a formal system that generates the language. You feed it roots and rules, and correct Sanskrit comes out. Rules are ordered, they reference each other, some override others, and Panini invented a compressed technical notation to state them — including a metalanguage, a set of symbols for talking about the rules themselves.

To put that in plain terms: Panini did for a human language what a modern programmer does when they write the formal specification for a programming language. In the 4th century BCE. With no writing — the text was composed to be memorised.

Modern linguists do not treat this as a historical curiosity. Leonard Bloomfield, one of the founders of modern linguistics, called the Ashtadhyayi "one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence." The American linguist Noam Chomsky's approach to generative grammar has been repeatedly compared to Panini's method. In computer science, the notation used to define the syntax of programming languages — Backus–Naur Form — is so similar in spirit to Panini's system that some scholars have proposed calling it "Panini–Backus Form."

Sanskrit, as a formal literary language, is essentially Panini's Sanskrit. Every classical Sanskrit text written after him follows his rules. A man from a village in Gandhara fixed the grammar of the language of Indian civilisation, and it has not needed changing since.

Why this chapter is here

Two very different insults get thrown at Punjab, and this chapter kills both.

The first insult is the flattering one: Punjabis are simple, brave fighting people. It sounds like a compliment. It is not. It quietly says: strong bodies, no brains. Panini answers that.

The second insult is the direct one: Punjab has no intellectual tradition, it is all farmers and soldiers and loud music. Taxila, the Ashtadhyayi, the Milinda Panha and Gandhara art answer that.

Both insults survive only because most people, including most Punjabis, have never been taught that this period existed. That is a consequence of Chapter 6, where the whole thing gets destroyed.

3Alexander, 326 BCE

Everybody has heard of Alexander in India. Almost nobody knows what actually happened, in either direction. Here is the whole of it — the wins, the losses, the fabrications, and the part where his army told him no.

Before anything else: a warning about the sources

This is the single most important paragraph in the chapter, so read it before the exciting bits.

There is not one Indian account of Alexander's invasion. Not one. No Punjabi chronicle, no inscription, no Sanskrit text describes it. Everything we know comes from Greek and Roman writers: Arrian, Curtius Rufus, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, Justin.

And none of them was there. They were writing three to five hundred years after the events, working from earlier accounts — some by Alexander's own officers, who had obvious reasons to make their king look good.

So when this chapter gives you a number, understand what kind of number it is: a figure written by a member of the winning civilisation, centuries later, based on a report by someone on the winner's payroll. That does not make it worthless. It does mean I handle it the way I would handle a company's own press release about its own performance.

The campaign, step by step

327–326 BCE: Alexander crosses into the north-west. He has already destroyed the Persian Empire. He fights his way through the hill country and takes the fortress of Aornos.

Spring 326 BCE: Taxila surrenders without a fight. Its king — the Greeks call him Taxiles or Omphis; Indian tradition calls him Ambhi — comes out to meet Alexander with gifts, elephants and troops, and offers his alliance. His reason was straightforward: he had a rival across the Jhelum, and a Macedonian army was a useful thing to point at him.

Hold on to that. The very first Punjabi ruler Alexander met joined him, and then helped him attack another Punjabi ruler.

May 326 BCE: the Battle of the Hydaspes. The Jhelum, swollen by early monsoon rain, separates Alexander from King Porus — Puru or Paurava in Indian terms, a king of the Bari and Chaj doab country.

T H E B AT T L E O F T H E H Y D A S P E S — T H E F O R C E S , A S R E P O R T E D

How Alexander won. Not by breaking through. By deception. He spent days making noisy fake crossing attempts up and down the bank until Porus stopped reacting to them. Then, on a night of heavy storm, he took a picked force roughly 27 kilometres upstream and crossed in the dark, in the rain, with the thunder covering the noise. He came down on Porus's flank at dawn.

The elephants — Porus's main weapon — turned into his main problem. Wounded, panicked and hemmed in, they trampled backwards through their own infantry. Macedonian troops had learnt to open lanes and let them through, then attack their handlers.

Casualties. Indian dead are reported between about 12,000 and 23,000, including two of Porus's sons. Macedonian losses are reported between about 200 and over 1,000. Even taking the Greek sources at their word, this was a costlier fight than Gaugamela, where Alexander had destroyed the entire Persian imperial army.

The aftermath, and the strangest part. Porus, wounded, surrendered only after his army was destroyed. Brought before Alexander, he was asked how he wished to be treated. His reply, as the Greeks recorded it: "As a king treats a king."

Alexander then did something he did nowhere else in his career. He restored Porus to his throne as a subordinate ally — and enlarged his territory.

Sangala: the battle nobody mentions

After the Hydaspes, Alexander moved east and ran into a people the Greeks called the Cathaeans, at a fortified town called Sangala — its location is disputed but it was somewhere in central Punjab.

They did not negotiate. They ringed their position with wagons and fought. Arrian records that the resistance was fierce enough to maul Alexander's cavalry badly; the Macedonians had to take the place by infantry assault and siege. Alexander then razed Sangala to the ground. Arrian's figures — around 17,000 Indians killed and 70,000 captured — are almost certainly inflated, but the destruction was real.

Sangala is worth knowing about because it is the counter-example to the polite version of the campaign. This was not a tour with occasional duels between noble kings. In places it was a war of extermination against towns that refused to submit.

The mutiny on the Beas

Summer 326 BCE. Alexander reaches the Hyphasis — the Beas, the fourth of the five rivers. He wants to keep going east, across the Sutlej and on to the Ganga.

His army refuses.

They had been marching and fighting for eight years. They were thousands of kilometres from home, soaked by monsoon rain that rotted their equipment, and they had just been told what was waiting beyond the Ganga: the Nanda Empire of Magadha, whose army was reported to include something on the order of 200,000 infantry, 20,000 cavalry, thousands of chariots and several thousand war elephants. Whatever the true figure, the reports were terrifying, and they had just seen at the Hydaspes what 130 to 200 elephants could do.

An officer named Coenus — a respected veteran, not a malcontent — stood up and spoke for the men. Arrian preserves the substance of the speech: they had done everything he asked, most of their friends were dead, and they wanted to see their homes.

Alexander argued. Then he shut himself in his tent for three days, waiting for them to change their minds. They did not.

He turned back. Before leaving he built twelve enormous altars on the bank of the Beas to mark the eastern limit of his empire.

The way back: the Malli campaign, and the wound

Turning back did not mean going home in peace. Alexander went south down the Jhelum and Indus, fighting the whole way.

From November 326 to February 325 BCE he attacked the Malli — the Malava — a confederation living around the meeting point of the Jhelum, Chenab and Ravi. Their principal town is generally identified with modern Multan.

The Malli campaign was savage. And at Multan it nearly ended Alexander's life.

Impatient with a slow assault, Alexander went up a scaling ladder and jumped down inside the enemy wall with only two or three companions. Cut off, he was hit by an arrow that punched through his breastplate and into his lung. He collapsed, coughing blood.

His army, believing their king was dead, broke into the citadel in a fury and killed everyone inside — men, women and children. It was one of the worst massacres of the entire campaign.

Alexander survived the arrow, but the wound never properly healed and he was in pain for the rest of his life. He died in Babylon less than two years later, aged 32. A number of historians consider the Multan wound a contributing cause.

The honest scorecard on Alexander in Punjab

W H AT A C T U A L LY H A P P E N E D

4Chandragupta and Chanakya

Within twenty years of Alexander's death, a man from the north-west and his teacher from Taxila had built the largest empire India would see for two thousand years — and had taken the Greeks' Indian provinces back by force.

The rise

Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BCE. His generals immediately began carving up his empire. The Macedonian garrisons in the north-west were suddenly a long way from anywhere, with no one coming to help them.

Into that vacuum stepped Chandragupta Maurya, advised by Chanakya — also known as Kautilya or Vishnugupta — a strategist traditionally associated with Taxila.

The details of Chandragupta's origins are genuinely uncertain and the ancient traditions disagree about his caste and birth. What is well attested is the sequence: he built a power base in the north-west, cleared out the remaining Macedonian positions, and then marched east and destroyed the Nanda dynasty of Magadha — the very empire whose reputation had turned Alexander's army back — around 322 to 321 BCE.

Note the direction of travel. The empire that first unified India was assembled starting from Punjab and Gandhara, and moved east. Not the other way round.

The rematch: Seleucus, 305–303 BCE

One of Alexander's generals, Seleucus I Nicator, took the Asian half of the empire and, around 305 BCE, marched east to reclaim the Indian provinces.

He did not reclaim them.

The details of the fighting are poorly recorded — which itself suggests it did not go well for him — but the outcome is clear and is recorded on both sides. A peace treaty was concluded around 303 BCE with these terms:

• Seleucus ceded the eastern territories — broadly Gandhara, the Paropamisadae (the

Kabul region), Arachosia (Kandahar) and Gedrosia (Balochistan). The Mauryan frontier was fixed at the Hindu Kush.

• Chandragupta gave Seleucus 500 war elephants. • Some form of marriage alliance was agreed. • Seleucus sent an ambassador, Megasthenes, to the Mauryan court at Pataliputra. His

account, the Indika, survives only in fragments quoted by later writers, but it is our best outside description of Mauryan India.

Consider what that treaty means. Alexander's own successor came back with a professional Macedonian army to retake Punjab, and went home having given away Afghanistan.

Chanakya's Arthashastra

The Arthashastra — roughly, "the science of material gain" — is a manual on how to run a state. It covers taxation, law, agriculture, mining, currency, famine relief, diplomacy, war and, extensively, espionage.

It is startlingly unsentimental. It discusses when to break a treaty, how to run a spy network using disguised monks and courtesans, when assassination is the cheaper option, and how to manage a king's own household as a security risk. It is often compared to Machiavelli's The Prince — written about eighteen hundred years later, and considerably less thorough.

Scholars debate how much of the surviving text is by one hand and how much accumulated later; the text as we have it was probably compiled over centuries. But the tradition connecting it to Chanakya and to the north-western intellectual world of Taxila is old and strong.

Ashoka and the north-west

Chandragupta's grandson Ashoka (reigned roughly 268–232 BCE) is the emperor everyone knows — the one who, after the bloodbath at Kalinga, turned to Buddhism and inscribed his moral policy on rocks and pillars across the empire.

What is less known is how much of that programme is written in the north-west, and in what languages:

• The rock edicts at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra, in Gandhara, are written in the

Kharosthi script — the Aramaic-descended script that Persian rule had introduced. Everywhere else in India, Ashoka's edicts are in Brahmi. The north-west had its own writing system and the emperor used it.

• At Kandahar, Ashoka issued edicts in Greek and Aramaic — for the Greek-speaking

population living in his empire.

• The Dharmarajika Stupa at Taxila is traditionally attributed to Ashoka, built over

relics of the Buddha.

An Indian emperor publishing his laws in Greek, in Aramaic, and in a right-to-left script derived from Persian administration, is a good picture of what the north-west actually was: not a border, but a junction.

5Four hundred strange years

Between roughly 200 BCE and 300 CE, Punjab and Gandhara were ruled by Greeks, then Scythians, then Parthians, then Central Asians — and in that chaos produced the most influential art in Asian history.

The Indo-Greeks: a Greek king who became a Buddhist saint

The Mauryan Empire collapsed around 185 BCE. The north-west fragmented, and Greek kingdoms from Bactria (northern Afghanistan) came down through the passes.

The greatest of these Indo-Greek rulers was Menander I — known in Indian sources as Milinda — who reigned roughly 165 to 145 BCE. His capital was Sagala, which is modern Sialkot, in Pakistani Punjab.

Menander was a successful conqueror. But that is not why he is remembered.

There survives a Buddhist text called the Milinda Panha — "The Questions of King Milinda." It records a long philosophical dialogue between Menander and a Buddhist monk named Nagasena. The king asks hard questions: if there is no permanent self, who is reborn? What is the self, if you take away the body and the mind? Nagasena answers with the famous chariot argument — take a chariot apart and point to the chariot; you cannot, and yet the chariot is real.

It is a genuine classic of philosophy, and it is still read across the Buddhist world. According to the text, Menander became a Buddhist, and it says he attained arhatship — liberation — and was cremated and buried in a stupa, in the manner reserved for a holy man.

Then: Scythians, Parthians, Kushans

The Indo-Greeks were pushed out by waves from Central Asia.

• Indo-Scythians (Sakas), from around the 1st century BCE. Rulers like Maues and

Azes.

• Indo-Parthians, notably Gondophares, in the 1st century CE. • Kushans, from the 1st to 3rd centuries CE — the big one. At its height under

Kanishka, the Kushan Empire ran from Central Asia through Afghanistan and Punjab into the Ganga plain, with capitals at Purushapura (Peshawar) and Mathura. Sirsukh, the third city of Taxila, is theirs.

The Kushans sat astride the Silk Road at exactly the point where the routes from China, Persia, India and the Roman world met. They grew immensely rich on it. Roman gold coins have been found in quantity in their territory.

Gandhara: where the Buddha got a face

Now the thing that matters most in this chapter.

For the first several centuries of Buddhism, the Buddha was never shown as a person. Early Buddhist art represents him only by symbols: an empty throne, a pair of footprints, a wheel, a parasol, a tree. To make an image of him was thought inappropriate.

In Gandhara — in the workshops of Taxila, Peshawar, Swat and the surrounding country, under Indo-Greek and then Kushan patronage — that changed. Artists working in a Hellenistic sculptural tradition, carving for Buddhist patrons, began producing the Buddha as a human figure.

And they carved him the way Greek sculptors carved gods: a calm idealised face, wavy hair, and above all those heavy, deeply cut folds of drapery that look exactly like a Greek himation because that is precisely what the sculptors knew how to carve.

That image travelled. Along the Silk Road into Central Asia, into China, into Korea, into Japan; and southward through the Indian tradition into Sri Lanka and South-East Asia. Every Buddha statue on earth is a descendant, at some remove, of what was worked out in the north-west of the subcontinent in the first few centuries CE.

A note of precision: art historians argue about whether Gandhara or Mathura produced the very first human Buddha image, and the two traditions probably developed close together and influenced each other. Gandhara's claim is strong and its influence on the eastward spread is not in doubt.

The blender

Here is what these four centuries actually show.

Persians, Greeks, Scythians, Parthians and Kushans all came into Punjab and Gandhara as conquerors. And within a few generations, most of them were sponsoring Buddhist monasteries, minting coins with Indian deities alongside Greek ones, taking Indian names and titles, and being written into Indian texts.

Menander the Greek becomes a Buddhist saint. Kanishka the Central Asian convenes a Buddhist council. The Sakas produce Indian-style inscriptions. The invaders were absorbed.

6The Hunas: the hinge

In the fifth and sixth centuries CE, something came through the passes that Punjab could not absorb. What happened next changed the direction of Indian history, and it is the reason you were never taught Chapter 2.

Who they were

Indian sources call them the Hunas. Modern scholarship generally identifies the group that mattered most for India as the Alchon Huns — a Central Asian people, connected to the broader Hunnic movements that were simultaneously wrecking the Roman world at the other end of Eurasia.

They began pressing on the north-west from the mid-5th century CE. The Gupta emperor Skandagupta fought them off around 455–460 CE and boasted about it in an inscription, but the effort drained the treasury and the army.

Toramana and Mihirakula

By around 500 CE the Hunas were not raiding. They were ruling.

Toramana (reigned roughly 500–520 CE) established a genuine kingdom, and — this is the detail that matters for us — its base was the Punjab region. His inscriptions show him using the titles and administrative style of an Indian monarch. Central Asian nomads had become a settled Indian dynasty ruling from the five-river plain.

His son Mihirakula (reigned roughly 520–550 CE) is remembered very differently.

The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang, travelling through India in the 7th century, recorded a tradition that Mihirakula was initially interested in Buddhism, felt slighted by the monasteries, and turned on them — destroying monastic establishments across his territory. Other sources, including the Kashmiri chronicle Rajatarangini, describe him as exceptionally cruel.

The end of the Hunas — and the price

Around 528 CE, at the Battle of Sondani in central India, a coalition led by Yashodharman of Malwa, alongside the Gupta ruler Narasimhagupta, defeated Mihirakula decisively. Yashodharman erected victory pillars that survive and boast of humbling a king whose head had bowed to no one else.

The Alchon remnants were pushed back and confined to Kashmir and Gandhara, and faded out over the following century.

India won. But look at what the war cost.

Four consequences, and they are enormous

1. The Gupta Empire died. Already weakened by the earlier Huna wars, the Gupta state fragmented and was effectively finished by around 550 CE. North India then broke into competing regional kingdoms and stayed broken, with one brief exception, for the next six hundred years. When Mahmud of Ghazni arrives in Part 3, there is no north Indian empire to meet him — and this is why.

2. Gandhara's civilisation was destroyed. The monasteries of Taxila, the workshops, the libraries, the whole Greco-Buddhist world described in Chapters 2 and 5 — it ended here. Taxila had survived Persians, Greeks, Scythians, Parthians and Kushans. It did not survive this. When Xuanzang passed through in the 630s CE, he described a region of ruined and deserted monasteries.

3. The north-west stopped being India's intellectual capital, permanently. The centre of learning moved east — to Nalanda in Bihar, to Vikramashila, to Valabhi in Gujarat. Punjab, which had produced Panini and hosted Chanakya, would not be a centre of scholarship again on anything like that scale. What it would be instead is a frontier.

4. Buddhism in the north-west was broken. The region that had given the Buddha his face largely ceased to be Buddhist. Over the following centuries the north-west's religious landscape reformed around Hindu Shaiva traditions and, later, Islam.

7The long decline, and the last shield

Between 600 and 1000 CE, Punjab is quiet in the history books. It is the quiet of a region that has been hollowed out and is now, without much help, holding a door shut.

Harsha: the last flicker

Harshavardhana (reigned 606–647 CE) briefly reassembled much of north India. His capital was at Thanesar — Kurukshetra, in today's Haryana, which is to say inside historical Punjab — before he moved to Kannauj.

Harsha was a genuine ruler of the old style: a patron of scholars, host to Xuanzang, subject of a biography by the writer Bana. But he was checked in the south by the Chalukyas, and when he died without an heir in 647 CE his empire dissolved immediately.

After Harsha, no one rules north India as a single unit until the Delhi Sultanate, more than five hundred years later.

Xuanzang's Punjab

Xuanzang, the Chinese monk, travelled through the region in the 630s CE. His account is one of the best snapshots we have, and it is melancholy. He describes Taxila as subject to Kashmir and much diminished; he describes monastery after monastery in the north-west as ruined, deserted, or occupied by a handful of monks where hundreds had lived.

He was walking through the wreckage of Chapter 2 and did not know it.

The Hindu Shahis: three hundred years of holding the door

From around 850 CE, a dynasty known as the Hindu Shahis (or Kabul Shahis) ruled a kingdom covering eastern Afghanistan, Gandhara and western Punjab, from capitals at Udabhandapura (Hund, on the Indus) and later Nandana in the Salt Range.

Their significance is simple and heroic and almost entirely forgotten: for about 170 years they were the only organised force standing between the Central Asian powers and the north Indian plain. And they did it alone. The kingdoms of the Ganga valley — rich, populous, endlessly quarrelling with each other — sent them essentially nothing.

The end came in stages:

THEFALLOFTHESHAHIS

The Muslim scholar Al-Biruni, who came to India with Mahmud's court and had no reason to flatter them, wrote about the Shahis with real respect — praising their nobility and lamenting their fall. When an enemy's own chronicler writes your obituary kindly, you did something right.

8Scorecard: what Part 2 proves

Timeline of Part 2 What happens in Part 3

Part 3, The Invasion Highway, covers roughly 1000 to 1500 CE — the five hundred years in which Punjab is hit harder and more often than any comparable region on earth.

Mahmud of Ghazni raids India seventeen times, every single time through Punjab, and makes Lahore a provincial capital of an Afghan empire. Muhammad of Ghor defeats Prithviraj Chauhan at Tarain in 1192 and the Delhi Sultanate begins. The Mongols arrive at the Indus and Punjab becomes a permanent war zone for a century. Timur sacks Delhi in 1398, marching in and out through Punjab and leaving, by his own chronicler's account, pyramids of skulls.

Part 3 also covers what Punjab built while all this was happening: the Sufi tradition of Baba Farid and the beginnings of Punjabi as a literary language; the Bhakti movement; and the social conditions — caste rigidity, forced conversion, and an exhausted, plundered peasantry — that made the Punjab of 1469 the exact place where a man named Nanak would say something new.

9Sources and further reading — Part 2

Primary sources (in translation)

• Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander — the most sober of the Alexander historians, drawing on Ptolemy and Aristobulus. Books 4–6 cover the Indian campaign, the Hydaspes, Sangala, the Hyphasis mutiny and the Mallian campaign. Available in translation at Livius.org and in the Penguin Classics edition.
• Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander; Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica Book 17; Plutarch, Life of Alexander; Justin, Epitome. These give the alternative and often larger figures.
• Herodotus, Histories, Books 3 and 7 — the Indian satrapy's gold tribute, and Indian troops in Xerxes' army.
• Megasthenes, Indika — surviving only in fragments quoted by Arrian, Strabo and Diodorus.
• Milinda Panha — "The Questions of King Milinda." T. W. Rhys Davids' translation is the standard English one.
• Xuanzang, Records of the Western Regions (Da Tang Xiyu Ji) — the 630s CE account of the north-west, including Mihirakula and the ruined monasteries.
• Al-Biruni, Tahqiq ma li-l-Hind ("India") — on the Hindu Shahis, written by a scholar in Mahmud of Ghazni's own entourage.
• Kalhana, Rajatarangini — the Kashmiri chronicle, on Mihirakula.
• Panini, Ashtadhyayi. For an accessible account of what it actually does, see Vyakarana scholarship; Bloomfield's assessment appears in Language (1933).

Modern scholarship and reference

• World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Hydaspes" and "The Hyphasis Mutiny"; Livius.org, "Hydaspes (326 BCE)", "Multan", "Arrian on the mutiny at the Hyphasis"; Britannica, "Battle of the Hydaspes" — used for the campaign sequence and the competing casualty figures.
• Wikipedia, Indian campaign of Alexander the Great, Mallian campaign, Mallian people, Porus, Sirkap, Sirsukh, Dharmarajika Stupa, University of ancient Taxila, Indo-Greek Kingdom, Greco-Buddhist art, Toramana, Mihirakula, Battle of Sondani, Seleucid–Mauryan war, Chandragupta Maurya — for dates, names and figures, all reasonably well sourced to specialist literature.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, listing for Taxila (site 139).
• Kumar, "Alchon Huns," in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History: Asia and Africa (Wiley) — on Toramana and Mihirakula establishing a monarchical kingdom based in the Punjab region.
• Timothy Howe and Sabine Müller, "Mission Accomplished: Alexander at the Hyphasis," Ancient History Bulletin 26 (2012) — a revisionist reading of the mutiny.

Books worth reading

• Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 — the standard scholarly survey.
• Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India — thorough, well illustrated, good on archaeology.
• A. K. Narain, The Indo-Greeks — still the key work on Menander and his successors.
• Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon — a hostile and very useful biography that takes the Indian campaign's difficulties seriously.
• Frank Lee Holt, Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan — on how badly the eastern campaign actually went.
• Michel Danino and others on Indian responses to the Alexander sources — for the case that the Greek accounts are systematically self-serving.

10About the author

Lovepreet Singh is a researcher and writer working toward doctoral research. He writes long-form work on Indian history, society, religion, public policy and technology — from the record, in plain language, with competing views left standing.

Background

He is the founder of Lovelace, an independent design and engineering studio building websites, brand systems, 3D and WebGL experiences and digital products, and is Founder and Managing Director of Five Rivers Inc.

He has studied at Panjab University and Chandigarh University, and is in the second year of an MBA in Business Strategy and Analysis. He is a Certified Ethical Hacker and a self-taught developer working in the MERN stack.

His interests run across history, epistemology, belief and public life — and the common thread, in the security work as much as the research, is a preference for testing a claim to destruction rather than defending it.

The Living Archive

Punjab: The Whole Truth is the first major work of The Living Archive, a long-form research project examining subjects that are argued about constantly and read about rarely. The method is fixed across everything published there: plain language, named sources, disputed figures shown as ranges, and every opposing argument stated at full strength before it is answered.

What comes next

He is working toward doctoral research, with Punjab — its history, its politics and the contested decades between 1966 and 1995 — as the intended field. These thirteen parts are the groundwork for it.

If you find an error of fact in this work, please write. Sources are listed at the end of every part so that any claim here can be checked against the record. A corrected edition is better than a confident one.