भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

Thus Ended the Saka Rule 259. Having thus vanquished the Sakas completely, Chandragupta liberated the provinces of Sindh, Kaccha, Sourashtra, Gujarat, Malava and others under their domination and incorporated them into his Indian empire. After such a total destruction of the Sakas, when Emperor Chandragupta entered the ancient and renowned city of Ujjayini, which till a little while ago was the capital of the Saka kingdom, the people there celebrated his entry as a grand national festival. Samrat Chandragupta assumed the title of Vikramaditya. In order to immortalize his glorious and crushing victory over the Sakas, he renamed the so far universally current Malava Samvat itself as Vikram Samvat after his own name (cf: paragraph 222). He made Ujjayini the capital of the western part of his India-wide empire, and there he lived like a crowned King. 260. How far can one describe the satisfaction and pride that the people all over Bharat felt at this decisive victory won by Vikramaditya over the Mlenchchas? The whole of India became free from the foreign domination and became ‘Ekrat’, united under one King! How profound must have been the joy and pride of Vikramaditya himself when he saw that the strenuous efforts and successes and failures of a hundred-and-fifty years or so of the Youdheyas, Malavas Vilivayankur (Vilinayankur?), Satavahan and other great warriors for the destruction of the Saka power, and of the valorous achievements of his grandfather and the national aspirations of Vedic Hindus had, at last borne such glorious fruit! 261. Of this, the English historian, Vincent Smith says, though rather grudgingly, “We may feel assured that differences of race, creed and manner supplied the Gupta monarch with special reasons, for desiring to suppress the impure foreign (म्लेच्छ) rulers of Western India. Chandragupta Vikramaditya, although tolerant of Buddhism and Jainism was himself an orthdox Hindu, espeically devoted to the cult of Vishnu, and as such, could not but have experienced peculiar satisfaction in violently uprooting the foreign chieftains.” The Sakas too Vanished 262. In paragraph 230, it has already been described how the Sakas adopted the Vedic faith, Sanskrit language and Indian customs and manners. Now that Vikramaditya had utterly destroyed their political power with his ‘mailed fist’, they, hereafter, lost their separate existence as the Sakas as distinct from the Indians. Only within two or three generations, there was