The Kushan Empire was a syncretic empire, founded by the Yuezhi tribal chief, Kujula Kadphises (30 CE – c. 80 CE) in the early 1st century CE. Yuezhi’s ancestral home was on the Chinese frontier but they were forced to move to Central Asia by the Chinese monarch. Kujula Kadphises unites the five principalities of Yuezhi into a powerful monarchy and took possession of Kabul making him the master of the Indian borderland. His successor Vima Kadphises is credited with the conquest of the Indian interior, at least as far as Varanasi.^[1] He became a convert to Saivism and proclaimed himself as Mahisvara on his coins. However, the Kushan Empire reached its zenith under the next ruler, Kanishka (78 CE – 101 CE)^[2], the son and successor of Vima Kadphises. The Kushan Empire under Kaniska encompasses much of the modern-day territory of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Northern India, at least as far as Sarnath and Patliputa. To rule his vast empire effectively, he established two capitals, one at Purushapura (Peshawar) and another at Mathura.^[3]

The Kushans brought ideas of kingship and administration from Central Asia and China and tried them on Indian soil. But it is to be remember that Kushans from Vima Kadphises onwards in the course of their Indianisation also get well-versed in the Indian science of polity and adopted the general administrative machinery described in it. The Kushan kings, some of whom are shown on their coins as holding a sceptre (danda), might have been considered the chief upholder of law and justice as in the Indian tradition the king was made the upholder and administrator of Dharma or Law since the Vedic times.

The house of the Imperial Kushan was the first royal dynasty to inaugurate the practice of adopting grandiloquent titles and propagate the idea of divine kingship in India. They occasionally practised the dual hereditary rule, in which two monarchs governed at the same time. To administer remotely located regions of their empire, they set up the Satrap system of government, which divided the empire into different provinces called satrapies that were each run by a Satrap. Thus, Kushan political organisation did not possess that rigid centralisation that characterised the Mauryan administration. Inscriptions and coins which form the chief source of Kushan polity do not indicate numerous state officials. The functions of the Kushan emperor, suggest that he did not merely reign, but ruled almost as an absolute monarch. He was the head of the administration—civil and also judicial. ^[4]