Ramagupta

Ramagupta (IAST: Rāma-gupta; r. c. late 4th century CE), according to the Sanskrit play Devichandraguptam, was an emperor of the Gupta dynasty of northern India. The surviving fragments of the play, combined with other literary evidence, suggest that he agreed to surrender his wife Dhruvadevi to a Shaka enemy: However, his brother Chandragupta II killed the Shaka enemy, and later dethroned him, marrying Dhruvadevi. The official Gupta genealogy does not mention Ramagupta, and therefore, the historicity of the Devichandraguptam narrative is debated. Several other sources refer to the events mentioned in the play, but these sources do not mention Ramagupta by name, and may be based on the play itself. Three undated inscriptions, written in a variety of the Gupta script and discovered in central India, mention a king called Ramagupta: this seems to attest the existence of a Gupta emperor named Ramagupta, although it does not conclusively prove the historicity of the Devichandraguptam story. Some coins discovered in central India have also been attributed to Ramagupta, but this attribution has not been unanimously accepted by modern historians. Ramagupta's name does not appear in the official records of the Gupta dynasty. According to the official Gupta genealogy, Samudragupta's successor was Chandragupta II, whose queen was Dhruvadevi. It is possible that the records of Ramagupta's successors omit his name from genealogical lists because he was not their ancestor. Ramagupta is mentioned in the Sanskrit-language play Devichandraguptam. The original text of the play is now lost, but its extracts survive in other works. Several later literary and epigraphic sources corroborate the narrative of Devichandraguptam, although they do not mention Ramagupta by name (see ). After the extracts of Devichandraguptam were first discovered by Sylvain Levi and R. Saraswati in 1923, Ramagupta's historicity became a matter of debate among historians. Some scholars, including Levi, dismissed Devichandraguptam as unreliable for the purposes of history.