- Lived:
- reigned c. 130–150 CE · a Śaka — descendant of Central Asian steppe nomads — ruling from Ujjayinī (Ujjain) over Gujarat, Malwa, Kutch and Sindh's borderlands as Mahākṣatrapa, "Great Satrap"
- Field:
- kingship and patronage — Western Kṣatrapa dynasty; commissioner of the Junagadh rock inscription, the first long public text in classical Sanskrit
- The Big Idea:
- A foreign-descended king rebuilt a four-hundred-year-old Mauryan dam — and announced the repair in polished literary Sanskrit, the moment the language of the priests became the language of the state.
- In their words:
- "…without oppressing the inhabitants of the towns and country by taxes, forced labour and acts of affection." (the Junagadh inscription's boast about how the dam was paid for, c. 150 CE, in F. Kielhorn's translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- On one granite boulder in Gujarat sit Aśoka's Prakrit edicts, Rudradāman's Sanskrit self-praise, and a Gupta emperor's sequel three centuries later — six hundred years of Indian statecraft on a single rock, and the man in the middle, the immigrant's grandson, is the one who changed the language.