The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  At last they came in sight of Chandragupta’s capital, Pataliputra, today’s Patna, in Bihar. This bustling city of 1.5 million inhabitants is seldom mentioned these days on the tourist trail, but it is one of most important and interesting places in Indian history. Founded in the sixth century BC, it would be the chief city of northern India until the Gupta age in the fourth century AD, and through all the later phases of its life down to the Mughals, the East India Company and the freedom movement. It is a living witness to the drama of Indian history.

  PATNA: INDIA’S FIRST IMPERIAL CITY

  We sail at dawn with a Patna boatman from Collectors Ghat, the upstream landing place where the British built their offices, villas and opium warehouses from the eighteenth century onwards. Floating slowly downstream, as the Greeks did so long ago, we pass early morning bathers and head straight into the rising sun – for the Ganges flows almost due east as it passes the city. Viewed from the river, Patna is still low-rise, with woods, gardens and clumps of palms. The shore is dotted with gaily painted shrines, both Hindu and Muslim. During the Middle Ages Patna became a noted centre of Islam, and can boast over a dozen important darghas (tombs) of Sufi saints, their white onion domes dotting the riverbank. Soon the boat is drifting past immense ruined palaces, medieval Mughal fortresses, drum towers keeling over into the water, their huge walls displaced by the relent-less flow of the river, their crumbling bastions silted with thick mud the colour of chocolate. As the sun rises above the city, it is as if we are sailing in slow motion past an Indian Rome.

  Gradually, the silting of the river pulls the channel away from the line of the old walls, and the boat drifts alongside a great shoulder of whitened sand about 20 feet above the water. On the shore between the city and the river are a dozen towering brick-kiln chimneys rearing up one after the other, some with long smudges of smoke hanging in the dawn air. The whole scene begins to take on the feel of a dystopian fantasy in science fiction. At the landing place are three big wooden sand barges with giant skeletal stern rudders and huge lateen sails, their torn and patched grey canvas hanging limp in the still air. Beside them women are cooking at a fire, while others in bright saris are bathing and laughing. We pull in under long, bending bamboo poles with snapping flags, and scamper up the bank past the shrines of Shiva and the monkey god Hanuman under a spreading tree. From the riverbank it’s a 100-yard walk through a brickyard with towering chimneys up to what was once the medieval waterfront, which crowns a steep rise lined with red-brick mansions and old shrines. The former landing place is now high and dry, crowned by a lovely Sufi shrine that once commanded beautiful vistas over the river. And so we enter the old Mughal and British town, the eastern end of the city that played such a role in Indian history for nearly ten centuries, and which, after Delhi, was India’s greatest imperial city.

  Buddhist tradition tells of the Master’s prophecy that Patna would be the greatest of all centres of trade and population. In the first century BC the author of the text known as the Yuga Purana saw Mauryan Patna as the fruition of urban life in early India. He wrote: ‘On the southern and most excellent bank of the Ganges the royal sage will cause a lovely city to be founded, filled with people and flower gardens. And that pleasant city will endure for 5000 years.’

  Chandragupta Maurya’s capital, so the Greeks recorded, stood at the junction of the Ganges and the Erranoboas (the latter derived from the ancient Sanskrit name for the river Son, Hiranyabahu, meaning ‘golden armed’). The city stretched for nearly 10 miles along the Ganges, and was about 1½ miles deep, making a circuit of 22 miles. According to Megasthenes, the city had sixty-four gates and 570 towers. These seem almost incredible figures, but remnants of stockades and tower bases found a century ago in the British period tend to confirm his story. Given the strength of the seasonal inundations, the defences were mainly wooden, consisting of huge palisades with piles sunk along the riverside to give better protection against the flooding of the Ganges. The main gates had wide, timber-floored walkways through the ramparts, with bridges across an outer ditch system fed by water from the Son, which was 600 feet wide on the landward side and fed a network of smaller canals. Inside the city were massive buildings of burnt brick, with stone and wooden columns, and decorated plaster. ‘I have seen the great cities of the east,’ wrote Megasthenes, ‘I have seen the Persian palaces of Susa and Ecbatana, but this is the greatest city in the world.’

  From a distance the townscape of gardens, trees, ornamental woodland, parks and menageries might have given the impression of a vast pleasure garden, rather like Kublai Khan’s magic world of Xanadu, or the peony and cherry gardens of imperial Xian celebrated by the poets of the Tang dynasty in China. In other words, the Asiatic city might be seen as a royal ritual enclosure, and a far cry from today’s bustling, proletarian Indian city. But on closer inspection – and Indian ministers and equerries plied them with mind-boggling facts (some no doubt exaggerated for effect) – the Greeks rapidly came to understand that Pataliputra was, in fact, a vast military base. Outside the walls to the south was an enormous cantonment of the kind later laid out by the British, a semi-permanent camp for the royal army, which, so the Greek visitors were informed, amounted to 40,000 men (out of a full military establishment claimed to number 400,000, with 3000 war elephants). As for the ruler’s own residence, the palace area lay in a great oblong to the south, inside separate moated defences. There Chandragupta Maurya himself kept court, ever vigilant for insurrection, ‘never sleeping by day’, as Megasthenes reports, surrounded by his female bodyguard ‘loyal only to him’, yet still ‘by night obliged to change his couch from time to time to thwart plots against his life’.

  PORTRAIT OF EARLY INDIAN SOCIETY

  Even in the fragments preserved in the pages of later historians, the Greeks’ first view of India is one of those texts from history – like the letters of Cortes from Mexico – that tells us how it feels to encounter another world. ‘There are one hundred and eighteen separate nations in India,’ noted Megasthenes with amazement (and presumably his informants could speak only of the lands under Mauryan rule). No wonder the Greeks overwhelmed by the scale of it all, and by the sheer exoticism, which at times led them to descend to literally fabulous fairy tales. There were sections on climate, custom and even on the physiognomy of the Indians. There were lengthy digressions on elephant hunting and tigers, on cotton and banyan trees. The Greeks noted disapprovingly that the Indians did not make eating the social ritual that it was in the Mediterranean, where the communal meal was also a religious rite, as it still is today. ‘The Indian people,’ Megasthenes remarked, ‘take food at any time of the day, and even singly if they wish.’

  Like all modern visitors, Megasthenes noticed the Indians’ ‘love of adornment’, especially gold jewellery and precious gems, and their ‘brightly coloured cotton garments, a brighter colour than any other’. He adds, ‘For since they esteem beauty so highly, they do everything they can to beautify their appearance.’ But a cultural trait that particularly impressed the Greeks was the Indian respect for ‘the superiority of wisdom above all’, and their emphasis on simplicity, frugality, ‘orderliness’ and ‘self-restraint’ in daily life. Even more striking is his observation that ‘No Indians ever set out beyond their own country to wage aggressive war because of their respect for justice’.

  Coming from a literate society, the Greeks were surprised by ‘the lack of written letters’ in a memorizing society, where ‘everything is regulated from memory’. Given that, one of the most surprising elements in Megasthenes’ account is the level of organization Chandragupta achieved over such a wide empire. With government departments for the supervision of public works, roads, prices, markets and harbours, and with joint administration of military affairs, transport and naval supply, the degree to which memory and custom regulated Indian society is revealed in one of the most fascinating sections of Megasthenes’ lost text, which gives the first outside account of the caste system:

  The popul
ation of India is divided into seven castes. The first is formed by the collective body of the philosophers [Brahmins]. These in numbers are inferior to the rest, but in dignity are pre-eminent. They are exempt from public duties, but are engaged by private persons to perform the necessary rituals of life and death. For they are believed to be most dear to the gods, and most conversant with matters pertaining to the world of the spirits. In requital of such services, they receive valuable gifts and privileges.

  Elsewhere (as recorded by the geographer Strabo), Megasthenes talks about the Brahmins of the mountains worshipping Dionysus (Shiva?) and in the plains, especially around Mathura, worshipping Heracles (Krishna?). He also adds a fascinating and little-noticed reference to a huge annual gathering, ‘the great assembly, as it is called’. This took place each year in January in northern India when ‘all the philosophers [Brahmins and holy men] come together at the gates of the king’, where they perform rituals and iron out issues of civil and religious law. Such a gathering, accompanied by a great royal distribution of alms, is described by the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsuan Tsang in AD 640 as ‘having gone on since ancient times’ at Prayag, today’s Allahabad, where great annual melas are still held, and where every twelve years the Kumbh Mela takes place, the largest gathering anywhere on Earth.

  Megasthenes also describes the other ranks of Indian society. He writes of the peasant cultivators, who formed the mass of the population, and ‘who pay a land tax and a fourth of their yield’, the cattle herders and shepherds, the hunters, trappers and bird-catchers, and the artisans, craftsmen, wood-and metal-workers. The fifth caste in his scheme is the military (kshatriyas), a numerous class, who lived at leisure in time of peace. They were ‘well organized and equipped for war, with a huge establishment of elephants and war horses’. Megasthenes also tells us that there was a royal fleet, with shipbuilders and a ‘first sea lord’ who let out ships for commercial purposes in time of peace. Going outside the customary fourfold division of castes we find in early Indian texts, he assigns a separate category to the civil service (ephors), ‘whose duty is to enquire into and report everything that goes on in India to the royal government or magistrates’. Similarly, he makes a seventh caste, the smallest in numbers, of councillors, administrators, governors, judges, army commanders and chief magistrates. Megasthenes concludes by noting caste rules – ‘no one is allowed to marry outside his caste, or exercise any calling but his own: a soldier cannot become a peasant; an artisan cannot become a [Brahmin] philosopher.’

  Megasthenes’ fascinating account is the first of Indian society and the caste system to be written by an outsider. It is interesting that he expands the basic four castes of the ancient texts – Brahmins, warriors, traders and farmers – to a sevenfold division, which is in fact found in southern Indian Brahminical accounts of the caste system, though no doubt then, as now, there were thousands of subcastes. Essentially, though, he corroborates the information in the Arthashastra, which is ascribed in its earliest form to the time of Chandragupta. He also mentions what are clearly Stone Age indigenous tribes in a number of areas, with whom the Mauryans had contact, among them ‘wild people’ living in the Himalayas around the source of the Ganges. Many such peoples survive today. The one section of society he may not have come into contact with as a foreigner (though its members are mentioned in the Arthashastra) was the chandalas (untouchables). They lived outside towns and were viewed as polluted, so they were forbidden, for example, from using the wells of other castes. How this form of oppression arose is still disputed, but it has been sustained over millennia and is still very strong, despite India’s democratic constitution and the further legislation on untouchability since the 1980s which has sought to abolish it. In general, caste rules were not as rigid as Megasthenes makes them sound, and medieval Muslim and later British observers were equally misled by the possibilities of diversification within the castes and movement between them. But the core principles of caste are still functioning, as can be seen from any marriage column today in India’s Sunday newspapers.

  THE LEGEND OF CHANDRAGUPTA

  Of the physical remains of the city of Chandragupta there are few traces. The broad topography is still there, with the Ganges, 5 miles wide in the rainy seasons, defining the northern edge of the city. The Son river has shifted and now meets the Ganges 20 miles upstream. For such an important site, there has been very little excavation. Indeed, it was only a century or so ago that British archaeologist Laurence Waddell, with growing excitement, was able to prove that the physical remains of ancient Pataliputra lay underneath the modern city. Even the wooden walls described by Megasthenes were exposed. They were made of sal tree trunks, their tops 20 feet below the present ground level, and the remains of the great moat described by Megasthenes, an old channel of the river Son, also still existed. It was 200 yards wide and still known in one place as Maharaj Khanda, ‘the emperor’s moat’.

  But of Chandragupta himself there is one specific and remarkable survival. This is at the Kamaldah Jain temples, which lie on a picturesque wooded peninsula inside the city. They are set in a beautiful lake, the ‘lotus pond’, where fishermen still cast their nets from boats only a few hundred yards from the railway track. The lake shore, with its fruit orchards, is now being encroached on by Patna’s burgeoning urban sprawl, but here it is still possible to imagine the city of pools and pleasure gardens described by the Greeks. The main shrine stands on a deep mound of ancient debris, its crumbling brick plinth surrounded by trees. You climb a flight of steps on to a sun-baked plastered platform with a little sanctum on top. According to the custodian, it commemorates not one of the twenty-four Jain tirthankars (great saints), but the muni (guru) of Chandragupta Maurya himself, Sthula-badra who is said to have died here. In this almost forgotten corner of his imperial city, perhaps a real connection and a living tradition has survived from the age of Alexander the Great.

  The Jain tradition brings us to the most fascinating of many legends about Chandragupta. After a life of great deeds and conquests, so the story goes, he resigned his kingship to become a Jain monk. The custodian of the Kamaldah shrine tells me what happened as we sit on a golden evening overlooking the lake at Patna against a distant background roar of rush-hour traffic and the claxons of crowded commuter trains. The tale that the Jains still tell goes like this. At the height of Chandragupta’s rule, a Jain teacher warned him of the limits of his power. Soon afterwards a terrible famine decimated the population, and, despite all his caparisoned elephants, his vast palaces, his numberless bodyguard and his magnificent tiger hunts, the king was powerless to prevent it. He sat in his gilded throne-room while the smell of death and the sound of lamentation rose up from the streets. Eventually he summoned the teacher and submitted to him as his guru. Chandragupta’s son Bhimbisara would become king, and he himself would take the cloth and begging bowl. With that, he said goodbye to his palace staff and his family, and walked out of the gates on a pilgrimage that led him far south into the rugged mountains of the Deccan. There he ended his life by ritually fasting to death in a cave at the most sacred Jain site of Sravanabelgola. This is still a great place of pilgrimage today. In 2006 millions of Jains from all over the world gathered for the twelve-yearly mela, pouring great vats of coconut milk, sandal paste, saffron and vermilion over the giant statue of Bahuballi (an ancient Jain guru who also renounced his kingdom). He is depicted standing naked and impassive, rapt in contemplation as the creepers grow around his body, his eyes fixed on what lies beyond. In this one dramatic image, the statue encapsulates the ancient Indian faith in the power of knowledge to break the bonds of human existence.

  All around this magical landscape are rocky hills and weathered outcrops where Jain ascetics still live, making offerings to images of the gurus and living on rice and pulses. On one crag the cave where the great Chandragupta passed his final days is still pointed out, its entrance smoothed by the fingers of centuries of pilgrims. On the floor is a worn carving of stone feet and a scatt
er of pale rice grains and hibiscus petals stirred by the warm breeze. Fierce light floods in from the cave mouth. Here the former king died, his body wasted to skin and bone, his mind floating above the emerald green hills.

  ‘Chandragupta Maurya came here to find moksha [salvation],’ one pilgrim told me. ‘He did penance here, and when one does penance one does not eat. And so he died. But he found moksha.’

  ASHOKA AND THE RULE OF REASON

  The first great political genius of Indian history, Chandragupta, died in about 297 BC. His son Bhimbisara extended the empire further, justifying his name, the ‘killer of foes’. There are even later Tamil legends of a Mauryan attack on the southern kingdoms of the Cholas and Pandyas. Bhimbisara also continued diplomatic relations with the Greeks. One delightful tale tells of his request to Antiochus of Syria to purchase consignments of figs, Greek wine and a Greek teacher of rhetoric. Antiochus sent him the fruit and wine with a note saying that ‘unfortunately Greek law does not permit the sale of professors’!

  Then, in 268 BC, following a power struggle after Bhimbisara’s death, Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka came to power. Ashoka is one of the great figures in history, and his story is told across southern Asia and the Far East in legends, folk plays and wisdom literature in the manner of the Western tales of King Arthur or Charlemagne. As a young man, the legends say, he was unattractive and ungainly in appearance, with bad skin, and was disliked by his father. But he was a capable administrator and was made viceroy of Ujain. While living there, he met and fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a merchant from the town of Vidisa, a woman called Devi. They had two children, though there is no suggestion that they married. Both the children, a boy called Mahinda and a girl called Samghamitta, are later associated with Ashoka’s Buddhist mission to Ceylon. Indeed, it is Buddhist sources from Ceylon that say Devi herself was a Buddhist. They also claim that she was a member of the Sakya clan, a branch of the Buddha’s family, who had emigrated to Vidisa. Whether this connection with the Buddha is a fiction or not cannot now be decided, but Buddhist tradition insists she was Ashoka’s inspiration in eventually adopting Buddhism.