by John Keay
The suggestion has also been made that Chandragupta derived the very idea of an empire based on military supremacy from his observation of Alexander’s conceit. Yet unlike Alexander, whose campaigns progress from one victorious encounter to the next, he cannot certainly be credited with winning a single battle. The Mauryan empire was probably the most extensive ever forged by an Indian dynasty; even the Mughals rarely achieved a wider hegemony. Yet we have positive knowledge of only one campaign undertaken by a Mauryan ruler – and we know of that only because the man responsible chose publicly to express his remorse. All of which may say more about relative attitudes to the past and about the variable nature of the source materials than about Mauryan imperialism.
In assessing Chandragupta’s conquests it would be helpful to know the extent of the empire to which he succeeded when he overthrew the Nandas. We can only presume that, as well as Magadha and Anga, it included most of the erstwhile Gangetic states (Koshala, Vatsya, Licchavi, etc.) and reached south across the Vindhya hills to central India and the Narmada river; beyond that river the Deccan preserves only highly doubtful hints of any Nanda presence.
From a later inscription found in Kalinga, the modern Orissa, it is evident that that region had also formed part of the Nanda empire. It may have been retained by Chandragupta, but must subsequently have slipped from Mauryan control since it would have to be reconquered by his grandson. A thousand miles away, on the other side of India at Girnar in Junagadh (Gujarat), another inscription refers to the repair of a local dam which, it says, had originally been built under the direction of Chandragupta’s governor in the region. Nanda power may have reached as far west as Avanti (Malwa), but is unlikely to have reached Gujarat. It is therefore assumed that Chandragupta conducted a successful campaign in western India and probably also reached the Bombay region. The Mauryan empire thus became the first to stretch from sea to sea – from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea. The object, however, may not have been ‘to unite India’, an unlikely ambition at a time when geographical, let alone national, horizons were still hazy. More probably its westward extension was intended to engross that lucrative maritime trade, pioneered by the Harappans, in timbers, textiles, spices, gems and precious metals between the ports of India’s west coast and those of the Persian Gulf.
In the Panjab and the north-west Chandragupta’s successes were no less extensive, as is coyly acknowledged by those Graeco-Roman sources. From these we know that, after a prolonged struggle, Seleucus Nikator, one of Alexander’s generals, succeeded to the eastern half of his empire. Much of it had to be reclaimed, and it was not until 305 BC that Seleucus turned his attention to India. There it seems that Chandragupta had already ‘liberated’ (as one Latin source has it) the Panjab. Seleucus, nevertheless, crossed the Indus, and possibly the Jhelum too, before he came to terms with Chandragupta and retired. It may be inferred that Seleucus, like Alexander, had to fight his way forward and that, like Alexander’s men, he soon thought better of the venture. Perhaps he was roundly defeated. The terms on which he withdrew certainly suggest so. Chandragupta presented him with five hundred war-elephants, which would prove decisive in further struggles with his main rivals in the west, although they can scarcely have dented Mauryan resources. In return Seleucus ceded to Chandragupta not only the Panjab but also Gandhara and all of what is now Afghanistan save Bactria (the northern region between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus). The treaty may have been sealed with a matrimonial alliance by which Chandragupta, or his son, received a daughter of Seleucus as a bride.
To cement their friendship further, Seleucus appointed an ambassador to the Mauryan court at Pataliputra. This was Megasthenes, whose account of ‘Sandrokottos’ and his empire, as viewed from its capital, survives only in fragments quoted or paraphrased by later authors. As a first-hand description of anywhere in fourth/third-century BC India east of the Panjab, these fragments are nevertheless valuable. Indeed Megasthenes, in his emphasis on the bureaucratic and absolute nature of Mauryan rule and on the structure of its standing army, goes some way towards vindicating the utility of the Arthasastra as a possible source material. Back home in Greece, his work was seen as vindicating those who dismissed all descriptions of India as a pack of lies. To the floppy-eared and umbrella-footed monstrosities already on record were added such palpable fantasies as reeds which yielded syrup and trees that grew wool. Rocking, no doubt, with Attic mirth, his readers confidently rubbished such early accounts of sugarcane and cotton production as more tall stories from the impossible East.
Although Chandragupta certainly left his successor an empire which reached from Bengal to Afghanistan and Gujarat, there is no clear indication of how far south it extended. Jain tradition insists that, when he abdicated in favour of his son, Chandragupta retired to a Jain establishment in Karnataka. At Sravana Belgola, a picturesque little town nestling in the cleavage between two steeply swelling hills west of Bangalore, the emperor is said to have passed his final days in austerity and devotions. The pinnacle of one of the hills comprises a massive nude sculpture of Gomateshwara, an important Jain teacher; mostly free-standing and nearly twenty metres high, it is one of the sights of south India – ‘nothing grander or more imposing exists anywhere out of Egypt and even there, no known statue surpasses it in height.’5 But it is on the other hill, the less sensational Chandragiri, that Chandragupta is supposed to have resided. Inscriptions and reliefs dating back to the fifth century AD record his presence; and a low cave amidst the granite scarps is said to be where, in the ultimate act of Jain self-denial, the emperor finally starved himself to death.
Scholarly doubts, of course, remain, particularly since the imperial lifestyle as recorded by Megasthenes amidst the splendour and luxury of Pataliputra seems the very antithesis of Jain asceticism. But abnegation was not uncommon in Mauryan society and, in the light of subsequent evidence of Mauryan authority in the south, the story ‘may be accepted as proof of his acquisition of this part of the peninsula’.6
That it probably represented the frontier of his empire is evident from the prologue to the story. The emperor had chosen to abdicate (C297 BC) after receiving information about an imminent famine from the revered Bhadrabahu, who was reputedly the last Jain monk to have actually known the Jain founder Mahavira Nataputta. (Just such a famine is anticipated in two very early inscriptions, engraved on copper plates found in Bengal and UP, which have been dated to Chandragupta’s reign; and unless Bhadrabahu was extraordinarily long-lived, his connection with Mahavira, the Buddha’s contemporary, may be further evidence in favour of the Buddhist ‘short chronology’.) As a result of this prophecy not only Chandragupta but an entire Jain congregation is said to have migrated south. In what, judging by remarks in the Arthasastra, was a continuing pattern of settlement in lands newly conquered or on the margins of existing settlement, the Jains journeyed south till they reached Karnataka. There, where a stream slid between the twin hills of Sravana Belgola, they stopped and stayed, nourishing the legends beloved of generations of pilgrims and patrons whose donations would enable them to dig a fine tank, build a dozen neat temples, and whittle their granite surroundings into megalithic images of the starkest abstraction. The Jains have been there ever since; and to this day they tell much the same story of the emperor Chandragupta.
Such continuities are not uncommon in India. Sir William Jones had likened first meeting his brahman informants to discovering an isolated community of Greeks who, two thousand years on, still wore toga and sandals, worshipped Zeus, recited Homer, and stood guard over a written archive reaching back to the Stone Age. Even now historians of India continue to scrutinise their own surroundings and society for clues to the past. In one of the most compelling exercises in modern historical writing D.D. Kosambi, armed with his notebook and a stout stick (‘fitted with a chisel ferrule for prying artefacts out of the surface … it also serves to discourage the more ambitious village dogs’), conducts his reader on a short walk from his home on the outskirts of Pune (Poo
na). Chance finds, encounters with neighbouring social groups, careful scrutiny of domestic routines and patient enquiries about local images reveal a three-thousand-year panorama of settlement patterns, trade contacts, and Sanskritic acculturation. ‘There is no substitute for such work in the field for the restoration of pre-literate history,’ writes Kosambi.7 Most of India’s history prior to the arrival of Islam fits his definition of pre-literate; and no society retains a more rewarding consciousness of the past than India’s. Legend and oral tradition, when credible, may be quite as reliable as authentic contemporary documentation.
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THE MAURYAS Probable Succession
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THE GREATEST OF KINGS
In 1837, following years of conjecture and study by numerous other ‘Orientalists’, James Prinsep, the assay-master at the British mint in Calcutta, made what remains the single most important discovery in the unravelling of India’s ancient history. From inscriptions in an unknown script found on the stone railings of the great Buddhist stupa at Sanchi, he managed to identify two letters of the alphabet. One was ‘d’, the other ‘n’; when added to other letters already tentatively identified, they suggested words which convinced him that the language being used in these inscriptions was Pali. Pali was a Prakrit, one of several derivatives of Sanskrit, that was popular in Magadha in the Buddha’s time and was subsequently appropriated as the sacred language of much Buddhist scripture. Armed with his insight into the likely language, plus much of the alphabet, Prinsep proceeded to make the first ever translations from the neat ‘pin-man’ script now known as Ashoka Brahmi. He translated the short Sanchi inscriptions – they recorded the donation of the stupa’s individual stones and the names of their donors – and he began to tackle a series of much longer inscriptions.
Copies of these longer inscriptions had come from puzzled antiquarians as far afield as Orissa, Gujarat, Allahabad and Delhi. ‘The memorial in question,’ wrote James Tod in 1822 of the Girnar (Gujarat) inscription, ‘is a huge hemispherical mass of dark granite which, like a wart upon the body, has protruded through the crust of mother earth, without fissure or inequality, and which, by the aid of the iron pen, has been converted into a book’.8 Some of the inscriptions were engraved on cliff faces, others on colossal cylindrical pillars; and an odd thing about all of them was that, though found dotted over the length and breadth of the subcontinent, they seemed to contain similar phrasing and even the same message. It was as if, in Europe, chapter-length runes were to be found identically etched, squiggle for squiggle, in the marble of Carrara, the granite of the Grampians, a pillar in the Rhineland and the rock of Gibraltar. Given the obvious antiquity of both script and find-sites, curiosity about their significance was intense. The Harappan civilisation was not as yet even suspected. These looked to be India’s earliest monuments and, whatever their message, they must be of enormous historical importance. Some saw parallels with the Egyptian hieroglyphics; others were reminded of the Ten Commandments as found by Moses on Mount Sinai.
Announcing his translation in 1837, an exhausted and dying Prinsep also saw parallels with Moses: ‘we might easily cite a more ancient and venerable example of thus fixing the law on tablets of stone.’9 For, contrary to expectations, these were not obscure Vedic invocations of unfathomable import but hard statements of policy, and so historical documentation of an immediacy as yet unknown in India. Henceforth called Edicts, rather than Commandments, the inscriptions clearly announced themselves as the directives of a single sovereign. ‘Thus speaks Devanampiya Piyadassi’ was how most began. The formula, echoing that of Persian inscriptions (and later popularised by the Nietzschean ‘Thus spake Zarathrustra’), may indeed have been influenced by Achaemenid practice. Some of the pillars carrying the inscriptions still retained fluted, bell-shaped capitals crowned with an animal image, both of which features are anticipated in the monumental sculpture found at Persepolis.
Yet the confident modelling of these animal figures, the incorporation of subsidiary motifs like the Buddhist wheel, and the lustrous finish imparted to the sandstone have no foreign counterparts. Moreover, the restrained use of honorific titles in the Edicts themselves and, when fully comprehended, the extraordinarily humane sentiments expressed in them, could scarcely have been more Indian. ‘Devanampiya Piyadassi’ unmistakably belonged to the land of the Buddha and Mahavira. A Gandhian ring would be detected in his emphasis on human values, non-violence and moral regeneration; and to Nehru it would be self-evident that the exquisite capital of one of these inscribed pillars should serve as the national emblem of the republic of India. As usual it mattered not that, featuring a four-faced lion rather than a tiger, it bespoke the Mauryas’ associations with regions of the subcontinent now largely in Pakistan.
But who was this ‘Devanampiya Piyadassi’? Unfortunately for Prinsep no king called anything like that was to be found in the king-lists in the Puranas. But from Sri Lanka one of Prinsep’s contemporaries, who was working on the Buddhist chronicles preserved in that still Buddhist island, reported that there had been a Sri Lankan king called Piyadassi, and then that the same name had also been that of a famous Indian sovereign. Indeed this Indian king was a figure of gigantic standing and copious legend in Buddhist sources. He had championed Buddhism in India, had sent his own son to convert Sri Lanka, and was otherwise gloriously known as Ashoka.
‘Devanampiya’, meaning ‘The Beloved of the Gods’, is now thought to have been an honorific title, like ‘His Majesty’. ‘Piyadassi’ means something like ‘gracious of mien’ and may have been the name assumed when Ashoka was enthroned in C268 BC. That this man was indeed the third Maurya, the grandson of Chandragupta, who would rule for nearly forty years, became self-evident from his listing as Asoka in the Purana king-lists.
Information on Ashoka’s early life is available neither from the Puranas nor from his inscriptions, and must therefore be sought mainly in those Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicles. Of Bindusara, his father (and Chandragupta’s son), little is known. Greek sources call him Amitrochates and testify to further exchanges of ambassadors and gifts between Pataliputra and Alexander’s successors in Egypt and Syria. The name ‘Amitrochates’ has been identified with a Sanskrit title meaning ‘slayer of enemies’. This could imply that he extended his father’s conquests. Additionally he is thought to have patronised the heterodox Ajivika sect in much the same way as his father did the Jains and his son the Buddhists. Clearly considerations of policy, as well as of conscience, may have dictated Mauryan alignment with the new sects; their lay followers were mainly drawn from the rising mercantile and industrial classes and, statecraft being principally about taxation (Artha-sastra literally means ‘the science of wealth’ or ‘economics’), their support was to be cultivated.
Bindusara ruled for twenty-five years and was probably at least into his late fifties when he died. Ashoka, evidently one of several sons, therefore had the opportunity to become closely involved in imperial affairs during his father’s reign. His first appointment seems to have been to Taxila, where he successfully dealt with a revolt against the local Mauryan administration. Perhaps on the strength of this, he was sent to Ujjain as governor. He stayed there until his father’s death. Ujjain nestled beside the Sipra river, a tributary of the Chambal, in the heart of the rolling and well wooded uplands of west central India. Now a major city of pilgrimage, it was then the capital of one of the five main divisions of the Mauryan empire. As the principal power centre in Avanti, or Malwa, it was also well sited to control traffic and trade moving between Broach, the principal west coast port, and either Pataliputra (by way of the Narmada valley) or the upper Gangetic regions (by way of the Chambal and the old Daksinapatha).
However, of Ashoka’s sojourn there what was thought most worthy of note by Buddhist chroniclers was his love affair with the daughter of a local merchant. The lady in question was Devi or Vidisha-mahadevi, the lovely ‘goddess of Vidisha’. She was not apparently married to Ashoka nor destined to acc
ompany him to Pataliputra and become one of his queens. Yet she bore him a son and a daughter. The son, Mahinda, would head the Buddhist mission to Sri Lanka; and it may be that his mother was already a Buddhist, thus raising the possibility that Ashoka was drawn to the Buddha’s teachings while still in Avanti. In that Vidisa, about 120 kilometres east of Ujjain and near the modern Bhopal, is where stand the glorious monuments of Sanchi (including the great stupa whose inscriptions so enlightened Prinsep), it was clearly home to an important Buddhist community in Mauryan times. But its earliest viharas (monastic halls) and stupas probably date from after 275 BC. It therefore seems just as probable that, instead of Vidisa converting Ashoka, it was Ashoka who converted Vidisa. Mindful of its romantic associations in his youth, he may, in later life as emperor and a lay Buddhist, have retained a soft spot for this peaceful mound in its then sylvan setting near the headwaters of the Betwa river, and by lavish endowment have ensured its religious celebrity.
As with earlier subscribers to the Buddha’s teachings like Ajatashatru of Magadha, Buddhist sources tend to represent Ashoka’s pre-Buddhist lifestyle as one of indulgence steeped in cruelty. Conversion then became all the more remarkable in that by ‘right thinking’ even a monster of wickedness could be transformed into a model of compassion. The formula, if such it was, precluded any admission of Ashoka’s early fascination with Buddhism and may explain the ruthless conduct attributed to him when Bindusara died. Not only is he said to have killed all rival claimants to the throne, notably ninety-nine of his brothers, but also to have paid a visit to hell so that he could construct on earth something similar, equipped with the very latest in instruments of exquisite torture, for all who incurred his displeasure. This ‘Hell-on-Earth’ evidently became quite a curiosity: nine hundred years later a Chinese visitor, while touring the locations associated with early Buddhism, records the site, which was then marked with a pillar.