by John Keay
To round off his conquests, complete his explorations, and disguise his failure, Alexander opted to return by sailing down the Jhelum and the Indus to the ocean. Ships were readied and he sailed in late 326 BC. The voyage downriver took six months. Stern opposition came from numerous riverine peoples, some of whom have been tentatively identified, and from sizeable townships which clearly included well established brahman communities. Some of these townships no doubt occupied sites beneath which the Harappan cities had already lain, cocooned in alluvial oblivion, for 1500 years.
In an engagement with the ‘Malloi’ Alexander himself was seriously wounded. An arrow struck him in the chest and may have punctured his lung. He barely recovered. The wisdom of forgoing a contest with the Nandas’ multitudinous cohorts was amply demonstrated; so were the dangers of withdrawal. With few regrets, in September 325 BC the fleet sailed out of the Indus into the Arabian Sea. Meanwhile Alexander led the rest of his men west on what proved to be, for many, a death-march to Babylon along the desert coast of Gedrosia (Makran). There was still some talk of returning to India, of resuming the march with fresh troops, and of consummating the ultimate conquest. But other appetites proved Alexander’s undoing. Within two years he died from hepatoma following a massive banquet in Babylon.
With him from India had gone the wherewithal for a vastly enriched Western image of the land beyond the Indus. He had prised open a window on the East through which emissaries would pass, ideas would shine, and prying eyes would covet. With him too went all those Hellenised personae and places – Omphis, Aornos, Porus, the Malloi and countless others – never to be heard of again in India’s history. The ‘invasion’ had amounted to little more than a hasty intrusion, scuffing a corner of the carpet but neither baring its boards nor troubling its political furniture.
With Alexander there had also gone one ‘Calanus’, a figure worth remembering in that he seems to be the first Indian expatriate to whom a name and a date can confidently be given. One of a group of ascetics encamped near Taxila, Calanus had accepted Alexander’s invitation to join him in that city and subsequently accompanied him back to the west. There, in Persia shortly before his patron’s death, his own death would cause a sensation.
Calanus’ doctrinal persuasion is uncertain. As one of his companions at Taxila had put it, trying to explain one’s philosophy through a wall of interpreters was like ‘asking pure water to flow through mud’. In that Calanus and his friends went naked, a condition in which no Greek could be persuaded to join them, they may have been nigrantha or Jains. Jain nudity was dictated by that sect’s meticulous respect for life in all its forms. Clothes were taboo because the wearer might inadvertently crush any insect concealed in them; similarly death had to be so managed that only the dying would actually die. Jains bent on ending their life, therefore, usually starved themselves to death. Yet Calanus, a man of advanced years, chose to immolate himself on his own funeral pyre. Though an extraordinarily stoical sacrifice in Greek eyes, this was a decidedly careless move for one dedicated to avoiding casual insecticide. Evidently the Persian winter had induced a chill, if not pneumonia, and Calanus had decided it was better to die than be an encumbrance. No one, not even Alexander, could dissuade him from his purpose. He strode to his cremation at the head of an enormous procession and reclined upon the pyre with complete indifference. This composure he maintained even as the flames frazzled his flesh.
Visibly shaken by such an exhibition, the Greeks held a festival in his honour and drowned their sorrows in a Bacchanalian debauch. Calanus, though he had made no converts, had won many friends. He also left a profound impression well worthy of India’s first cultural emissary. ‘Gymnosophists’, or ‘naked philosophers’, henceforth became stock figures in the Western image of India. As ‘Pythagoreans’, they were also identified with Greek traditions of abstinence and the conjectures of Pythagoras about rebirth and the transmigration of the soul. Lucian, Cicero and Ambrose of Milan all wrote of Calanus and his naked companions. Much later, as the epitome of ascetic puritanism, India’s gymnosophists would be revered by, of all people, Cromwellian fundamentalists. And later still, as mystics, gurus and maharishis, they would come again to minister to another spiritually impoverished Western clientele.
5
Gloria Maurya
C320–200 BC
FLASHES OF INSPIRATION
ALTHOUGH SEVERAL of those who marched east with Alexander wrote of their travels, and although other contemporaries and near-contemporaries compiled lives of Alexander and geographies based on his exploits, none of these survives. Such accounts were, though, still current in Roman times and were used by authors, including Plutarch, the first-century AD biographer, and Arrian, the second-century AD military historian, to compile their own works on Alexander. These do survive. They do not always agree; scraps of information gleaned from other later sources are included indiscriminately; and when describing India, they often dwell on fantastic hearsay. To the gold-digging ants of Herodotus were now added a gallery of gargoyle men with elephant ears in which they wrapped themselves at night, with one foot big enough to serve as an umbrella, or with one eye, with no mouth and so on.
Allowing for less obvious distortions, these accounts yet provide vital clues to the emergence after Alexander’s departure of a new north Indian dynasty, indeed of an illustrious empire, one to which the word ‘classical’ is as readily applied as to those of Greece and Rome – and with good reason, in that it has since served India as an exemplar of political integration and moral regeneration.
In 326 BC, when Alexander was in the Panjab, ‘Aggrames’ or ‘Xandrames’ ruled over the Gangetic region according to these Graeco-Roman accounts. His was the prodigious army at which Alexander’s men had balked; and his father was the low-born son of a barber and a courtesan who had founded a dynasty with its capital at Pataliputra. ‘Andrames’ was therefore a Nanda, probably the youngest of Mahapadma Nanda’s sons. And since, unusually, these Graeco-Roman accounts agree with the Puranas that Nanda rule lasted only two generations, he was the last of his line. Immensely unpopular as well as dismally documented, the second Nanda was about to be overthrown.
According to Plutarch, Alexander had actually met the man who would usurp the Magadhan throne. His name was ‘Sandrokottos’ (‘Sandracottus’ in Latin) and in 326 BC he was in Taxila, perhaps studying and already enjoying Taxilan sanctuary as he prepared to rebel against Nanda authority. No such person, however, is known to Indian tradition, the voluminous king-lists in the Puranas containing no mention of a ‘Sandrokottos’ sound-alike. Although from other Greek sources, especially the account of Megasthenes, an ambassador who would visit India in C300 BC, it was evident that someone called Sandrokottos had indeed reigned in the Gangetic valley, it was still not clear to which if any of the many listed Indian kings he corresponded, nor whether he ruled from Pataliputra, nor whether he could be the same as Plutarch’s Sandrokottos. Like Porus and Omphis, it looked as if Sandrokottos was either a minor figure or else someone whose name had been so hopelessly scrambled in its transliteration into Greek that it would never be recognisable in its Sanskritic original.
It was Sir William Jones, the charismatic father of Oriental studies and pioneer of Indo-Aryan linguistics, who in another flash of inspiration rescued the reputation of Sandrokottos. ‘I cannot help mentioning a discovery which accident threw my way,’1 he told members of the Bengal Asiatic Society in his 1793 annual address. In the course of exploratory forays into Sanskrit literature he had earlier worked out that Sandrokottos’ capital could indeed have been the Magadhan city of Pataliputra. He had now come across a mid-first-millennium AD drama, the Rudra-rakshasa, which told of intrigues at the court of a King Chandragupta who had usurped the Magadhan throne and received foreign ambassadors there. The flash of inspiration, the ‘chance discovery’, was that ‘Sandrokottos’ might be a Greek rendering of ‘Chandragupta’. This was later established by the discovery of an alternative Greek spelling of the nam
e as ‘Sandrakoptos’. The ‘Sandrokottos’ of Plutarch and of Megasthenes, and the Chandragupta of this play and of occasional mention in the Puranas, must be the same person. Crucially and for the first time, a figure well known from Graeco-Roman sources had been identified with one well-attested in Indian tradition.
At the time, the late eighteenth century, the excitement generated by this discovery stemmed from its relevance for Indian chronology. Very little was yet known of Chandragupta or the empire he had founded; the latter would only be recognised as an exceptional creation following even more exciting discoveries in the nineteenth century. In Jones’s day his breakthrough was applauded solely because it at last made possible some cross-dating between, on the one hand, kings (with their regnal years) as recorded in the Puranas and, on the other, ascertainable dates in the history of western Asia. Thus, for instance, if Chandragupta was planning his rebellion against the Nandas when Alexander was in the Panjab, if according to Indian tradition he ruled for twenty-four years, and if Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the court of ‘Sandrokottos’, could not have been sent until after 305 BC, it followed that Chandragupta’s revolt must have started soon after 326 BC and have lasted three to four years, so that he then reigned from his many-pillared palace in Pataliputra from approximately 320 to 297 BC. That meant that his successor, Bindusara, ruled from 297 to 272 BC, and that Bindusara’s successor, an enigmatic figure who had yet to be clearly identified (let alone accorded universal recognition as ‘one of the greatest monarchs the world has ever seen’2), must have acceded (after a four-year interregnum) in about 268 BC.
These dates have since been further substantiated by cross-reference with later Buddhist sources. Buddhist and Jain texts have much to say about the dynasty they call ‘Maurya’ and, along with surviving extracts of the report written by ambassador Megasthenes, plus a truly remarkable series of inscriptions, they constitute important sources for the period. But what would make the early Mauryan empire potentially the best-documented period in the entire history of pre-Muslim India was the discovery of that classic of Indian statecraft, the immensely detailed if almost unreadable text known as the Arthasastra. For it would appear that Kautilya, the steely brahman to whom the work is credited, was none other than the instigator, operative, ideologist and chief minister of the self-same Chandragupta. In fact orthodox tradition has it that Kautilya was the kingmaker, and Chandragupta little more than his adopted protégé. Kautilya’s great compendium, therefore – with its exhaustive listing of the qualifications and responsibilities required of innumerable state officials, its schema for the conduct of foreign relations and warfare, its enumeration of the fiscal and military resources available to the state, its ruthless suggestions for law enforcement and the detection of dissent, its advocacy of state intervention in all aspects of social and economic activity, and its rules-of-thumb for just about every conceivable political eventuality – such a work should indeed supply uniquely well informed and authoritative insights into the workings of the Mauryan state.
There are, though, grounds for caution. The full text of the Arthasastra is comparable in size and excruciating detail to the Kamasutra but, though cited ‘sometimes eulogistically and sometimes derisively’3 in other ancient works, it was only discovered in 1904. For Dr R. Shamasastry, the then government of Mysore’s chief librarian, as for Sir William Jones, the discovery was accidental. An anonymous pandit simply handed over the priceless collection of palm leaves on which it was written, and then disappeared. Happily, Shamasastry quickly divined the importance of his acquisition; he was also well qualified to undertake its organisation and elucidation. His English translation was published in 1909, since when other editions have appeared and controversy may be said to have raged.
It now seems fairly certain that the work in its present form dates, at the earliest, only from the second century AD, five hundred years after Chandragupta. Moreover, a computer-generated statistical analysis of the frequency with which certain linguistic particles appear in the text would seem to prove that the work was not written by a single author but is an accretion of earlier texts. It may have been compiled by a single person, but it ‘has no one creator’, writes the American scholar Thomas Trautmann.
I believe it true to say that the ‘author’ of the Arthasastra is his predecessors, and that his personality as inferred from the work is a composite picture to which three or four different individuals have contributed, one a nose, the other the hair, another the eyes.4
Who these individuals were and when they lived is unknown; but Kautilya, though not (as the work implies) its compiler, could well have been one of them. A wily master of intrigue and deception who is elsewhere described as physically deformed, he could have been the eyes. Much of the Arthasastra might still be his eye-witness account of the Mauryan state.
But there is another difficulty. Ancient Indian compendia, like the Kamasutra, the Manu-smriti (the legal Code of Manu) or the Arthasastra, none of which was compiled in its present form until the early centuries AD, may not be very reliable guides to actual practice. They were certainly based on observation, but just as it is inconceivable that any swain could have observed all the rules, contrived all the occasions, and mastered all the technical demands of love-making as recorded in the Kamasutra, so it seems unlikely that any state can ever have been so minutely organised, so determinedly interventionist, and so uncomfortably vigilant as that in the Arthasastra. The latter is, as it says, ‘a guide not only for the acquisition of this world but of the next’. Like the Ten Commandments or the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, it was a counsel of perfection. Such works should be seen as exercises in comprehending, rationalising and idealising important human activities which, in practice and by implication, may often have been conducted impromptu with inconsistent and unsatisfactory results. Thus if only parts of the Arthasastra relate to the Mauryan state, only parts of these parts may be taken to be a statement of how government actually operated under Chandragupta Maurya.
‘AN INDIAN JULIUS CAESAR’
Chandragupta Maurya’s origins were probably undistinguished; they certainly remain so. Buddhist texts claim that he was related to the Buddha’s Sakya clan, others that he was related to the Nandas. Both may be taken as fairly transparent attempts to confer lustre and legitimacy on a new dynasty whose founder was of humble caste, possibly a vaisya. If not born in the Panjab, he seems to have spent some time there, as suggested by Plutarch and as confirmed by a legend, found in both Indian and Graeco-Roman sources, associating him with the lion. Tigers were widely distributed throughout India, but the Indian lion, now retaining a clawhold only in a corner of Gujarat, seems never to have roamed further east than Rajasthan and Delhi.
At some point in his youth the self-possessed Chandragupta was adopted as a promising candidate for future glory by Kautilya (otherwise known as Chanakya), a devious and disgruntled brahman who had been slighted at the Nanda court. Kautilya sought his revenge by exploiting the unpopularity of the Nandas; and, disqualified from kingship himself because of deformity (possibly only the loss of his teeth), he championed the ambitions of Chandragupta. An early attempt to overthrow Nanda power in Magadha itself was a failure. Perhaps Kautilya hoped to achieve his ends by a simple coup d’état but failed to win sufficient support. The pair resolved to try again, and took their cue from a small boy who was observed to tackle his chapati by first nibbling round its circumference. This time, instead of striking at the heart of Nanda power, they would work their way in from its crusty periphery, exploiting dissent and enlisting support amongst its dependent kingdoms before storming the centre.
A good starting place may have been the Panjab, where Alexander’s departure had left a potential power vacuum. Settlements founded by the Macedonian seem not to have prospered, and their garrisons to have trailed home or gravitated to older power centres like Taxila. While in western Asia Alexander’s successors disputed his inheritance, the Indian satrapies reverted to local control. Ambhi
and Porus, designated governors for the region by Alexander, had no love for the Nandas and may, under the circumstances, have felt themselves entitled to endorse Mauryan ambitions. Troops from the gana-sangha republics, of which there were still many in the north-west, are also said to have joined Chandragupta, along with other local malcontents. So, more certainly, did a powerful hill chief with whom Kautilya negotiated an offensive alliance.
Overrunning the satellite states and outlying provinces of the Nanda kingdom, the allies eventually converged on Magadha. Pataliputra was probably besieged and, aided no doubt by defectors, the allies triumphed. The last Nanda was sent packing, quite literally: he is supposed to have been spared only his life, plus such of his legendary wealth as he could personally crate and carry away. The hill chief, with whom Kautilya seems previously to have agreed on a partition of the spoils, was then poisoned, probably at Kautilya’s instigation, and Chandragupta Maurya ascended the Magadhan throne in, as has been noted, C320 BC.
Of his reign very little is known for certain. There are hints that pockets of Nanda resistance had to be laboriously stamped out, and there is ample information in the Arthasastra that could be used, and usually is, to flesh out the policies and methods on which Mauryan dominion was founded. Firm evidence of the extent of this dominion comes mainly from later sources. But since few named conquests can definitely be credited to his successors, it seems likely that Chandragupta, adding the Nandas’ vast army to his own, found ample employment for it. He may reasonably be considered the creator as well as the founder of the Mauryan empire, indeed ‘an Indian Julius Caesar’ as nationalist historians call him (though chronologically speaking Caesar should, of course, be ‘a Roman Chandragupta’).