FACTORS IN THE LEGITIMATION OF THE KIDARITES POLITICAL RULE IN NORTHERN INDIA

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Abstract

This article examines the factors that legitimized Kidarite political rule in Northern India, with special attention to symbolic, titulary, and numismatic traditions connected with the imperial legacy of the Kushans. The study argues that the third-century crisis of the Kushan Empire did not eliminate the political language of sovereignty, administrative experience, and visual forms of authority that had developed in Gandhara, Punjab, and the northwestern regions of the Indian subcontinent. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the Kidarites entered this post-imperial environment and articulated their authority through recognizable forms inherited from the Kushan and Kushano-Sasanian worlds. The article combines numismatic evidence, Chinese documentary traditions, regional historiography, and scholarship on Gupta-period northwestern India. It also incorporates the methodological value of A. Khodjaev’s work on ancient Chinese transcriptions of ethnonyms and toponyms, especially for understanding the Yuezhi/Kushan and Hephthalite contexts. The article concludes that Kidarites rule should not be reduced either to military conquest or to an intermediate episode between larger empires. Rather, it was a process of selective appropriation, adaptation, and political reuse of Kushan imperial memory. This approach makes it possible to interpret the Kidarites as active actors in the post-Kushan political order between Late Antique Central Asia and Northern India. This conclusion makes it possible to reassess the history of the Kidarites within the context of Late Antiquity.