Kṣudraka

A corporation in arms

Pāṇini's grammar names the Kṣudrakas among the corporations that live by arms, and the Greek sources, who call them Oxydrakai, describe a people without a king who assembled a joint force with their neighbours when threatened. This is the political form found across the Punjab and Rajasthan in this period: authority held by an assembly of clan heads, and military service as the definition of membership.

The alliance against Alexander

As Alexander moved down the Indus in 326 and 325 BCE the Kṣudrakas and the Mālavas — the Malloi of the Greek accounts — set aside a standing hostility and combined against him. The campaign that followed was the harshest of the Indian expedition. At a Mallian town, generally identified with Multan in ancient India (modern-day Pakistan), Alexander went over the wall ahead of his men and was pinned inside with an arrow through the lung; the army's reprisal after the town fell was, by the Greek historians' own account, indiscriminate.

The confederates submitted. The episode is the last significant fighting of the campaign and the point at which the sources' admiration for the resistance is most explicit.

Afterwards

The Kṣudrakas fade from the record after the Mauryan period. The Mālavas did not: they moved southeast into Rajasthan, issued coins bearing the name of their people rather than of a king, and gave their name to the Malwa plateau and, in one widely held view, to the Vikrama era reckoned from 58 BCE.