by John Keay
As well as conciliating the Jains, we know from an inscription in a cave in Orissa that Ashoka continued his father’s policy of patronising the Ajivikas. As for his Buddhist sympathies, they have already been mentioned. They found ample expression in dhamma, especially in injunctions about right conduct towards relatives, friends and colleagues. He makes, though, a significant addition by adding to the list of such beneficiaries the brahmans. Ashoka had no intention of slighting orthodox society or its deities. ‘The Beloved of the Gods’ would keep in with the gods, whatever his personal sympathy for the Buddhist sangha (monastic community).
It would appear that Ashoka aimed at creating an attitude of mind among his subjects in which social behaviour had the highest relevance. In the context of conditions during the Mauryan period, this ideology may have been viewed as a focus of loyalty and a point of convergence for the existing diversities of people and activities.17
‘Yet,’ continues Romila Thapar, ‘the ideology of dhamma died with the death of the emperor [in 231 BC].’ Others have conjectured that dhamma may even have been the undoing of the empire; perhaps it invited defiance, perhaps it provoked defiance. During his last ten years on the throne Ashoka had no further Edicts inscribed, and his empire may already have been falling apart. Mauryas would continue to rule from Pataliputra for another fifty years but their writ seldom ran beyond Magadha. The provinces, centred on Ujjain, Taxila, Suvarnagiri and Tosali, rapidly broke away as Ashoka’s successors proved unworthy of their inheritance and incapable of his vision. If dhamma was supposed to hold the empire together, it was an unmitigated failure.
Yet a policy that failed became an intimation that endured. The Ashokan legacy of an empire which stretched from sea to sea and from the mountains to the peninsula was promptly mislaid and would remain so for a couple of millennia. Likewise Ashoka’s historicity. But tradition cherished his memory; Indian historians insist that the ideal of a pan-Indian empire was never forgotten; and nor, more certainly, was the spirit of humanity embodied in his Edicts. The innovation which he pioneered of appealing across the barriers of sect, caste and kin to the community of India would be revived by a host of other reformers, not least Guru Nanak of the Sikhs and eventually Mahatma Gandhi.
6
An Age of Paradox
C200 BC–C300 AD
EBB OF EMPIRE, FLOW OF IDEAS
BETWEEN THE DEATH of Ashoka in 231 BC and the advent of Gupta power in 320 AD, India’s ancient history plummets again to a murky obscurity. ‘Certainties are not many,’ bemoans a writer on the period.1 Prior to the Mauryas our vision is blurred by the ambiguity of mainly literary sources whose purpose is suspect and whose dates are vague. After the Mauryas the source materials are more varied: coins furnish the names of a host of otherwise forgotten kings; other archaeological finds, plus inscriptions, provide additional information about guilds and religious establishments; and texts – Indian, Graeco-Roman and Chinese – hint at a wider historical context and testify to the importance of trade. Yet the sum total of these sources remains inadequate and, in respect of the successor states of the Mauryan empire, certainties are indeed ‘not many’. How far the writ of these states ran, whence came their rulers and when they reigned, even the order in which their dynasties succeeded one another, are matters of dispute. The Puranas continue to prove tantalisingly unreliable; and the greater variety of sources often serves only to introduce contradictions. A long period of political confusion is deduced and, pre-modern history necessarily being a reflection of such sources, this confusion is taken to indicate instability, fragmentation and turbulence. The five hundred years between the Mauryas and the Guptas become, in fact, ‘India’s Dark Age’.2
While Rome beamed its civilisation into three continents, handsomely documenting its conquests in the process, Pataliputra retreated into insignificance and silence. In India no king or dynasty would either scale the heights of Ashoka’s lofty universalism or cast such long imperial shadows across the subcontinent. Inscriptions claiming otherwise are usually couched in bombastic phrases which should be treated with caution. Ideals of legitimacy and empire would remain: Ayodhya’s utopian Ram-raj (the rule of Lord Rama) would continue to exercise a fascination; so would inclusive concepts of a ‘one umbrella’ sovereignty as claimed by the Nandas and of a world-ruling Cakravartin (literally ‘wheel-turner’) as featured in Buddhist teaching. But the reality was of many jostling umbrellas, of no consensus on legitimacy, and of no universal sovereignty.
Worse still from the viewpoint of latter-day nationalists, many of the dynasties credited with contributing to this turbulence would be of non-Indian origin. In some histories this ‘Dark Age’ thus also becomes an ‘Age of Invasions’ characterised by foreign hordes from Bactria, Parthia, and the wilds of Turkestan pouring across the north-west frontier. They would overrun all of what is now Pakistan and strike deep into the Gangetic heartland and central India. To orthodox minds such disasters were no worse than was to be expected of the dreaded Kali Yug. Vedic values and brahmanic authority had been undermined by the pushy teachings of the Buddha and his rivals. An earlier spirit of metaphysical enquiry had given way to an unnatural and populist egalitarianism. Fickle sources of royal patronage had been diverted; the neglect of ritual obligations had necessarily prejudiced political legitimacy. A disrespectful age got the discredited history it deserved.
Yet, politics apart, the half-millennium which straddles the birth of Christ was not all petty doom and patriotic gloom. On closer inspection the ‘Dark Age’ proves to be softly illuminated by the steady glow of cultural integration, especially in peninsular India. There and elsewhere the gloom was also fitfully dispelled by dazzling shafts of artistic, scientific and commercial innovation. Indeed, if an age be judged in terms of art and literature, the tag of ‘classical’ belongs less to the much-studied decades of the great Mauryas and more to the quickly dismissed centuries of their less distinguished and often non-Indian successors.
The Mauryas, for instance, had done little for India’s artistic heritage. If one excludes his pillars and their Achaemenid-style capitals, Ashoka’s numerous endowments, principally stupas and viharas, seem to have been modest affairs of brick and timber. It was only under his successors that stone became established as the supreme medium of artistic expression. To the first two centuries BC and AD may be attributed the magnificent sculptural reliefs of the Bharhut, Sanchi and Amaravati stupas. Typically crammed with scenes of popular devotion and, judging by their inscriptions, often paid for by commercial and religious benefactors, these were not manifestations of royal prestige nor products of courtly largesse. Ascribing them to a particular dynasty is thus misleading. Rather should they be attributed to a pious merchant class, proud of its skills and increasingly interested in the security and patronage afforded by religious centres in an age of political uncertainty.
Much the same applies to the first of a long succession of ‘rock-cut cathedrals’, now more prosaically known as ‘cave temples’, which date from the last century BC onward. They are found principally in western India, inland from Bombay, where sudden folds and gashes at the edge of the Deccan plateau expose long, snaking strata of sheer rock. No doubt here were already natural caves which, affording secluded shelter and yielding readily to the sculptor’s chisel, inspired the idea of more elaborate excavations. There followed entire monastic establishments with prayer chambers, deep pillared halls, lofty stupas, finely fretted façades, and airy meditation cells, all connected by galleries and staircases and all cut and carved into the solid rock.
The skills involved appear to have derived from a contemporary tradition of working in the hard timbers of India. In the north, in the first centuries AD, similar skills and similar mainly Buddhist patronage gave birth to two distinctive schools of more portable sculpture. One, deeply indebted to the aesthetic of the Graeco-Roman world, depicts figures from Indian tradition as Apollo Belvederes attended by a ‘classical’ repertoire of cherubs and acanthus leaves. Fashi
oned in stucco or carved from a hard grey-black schist, these figures and motifs are particularly associated with Taxila and the north-west frontier region (hence the ‘Gandhara school’). The other school is very different. A gloriously voluptuous celebration of nature’s mainly female charms, it uses a fleshy pink sandstone flecked with white spots from the region around the city of Mathura where, on the tourist highway from Delhi to Agra, a fine collection of both Gandhara and Mathura figures now languishes largely unseen in the city’s museum.
As for literature, in the second century BC Patanjali, a Sanskrit grammarian who wrote a commentary on Panini, compiled the standard text on yoga. Mighty compendia of other important human activities followed, with the Manusmriti (‘Manu’s code’ of law), the Kamasutra of Vatsyana, and Kautilya’s Arthasastra all datable in their final form to the second century AD. Meanwhile a Buddhist writer, Asvaghosha of Magadha, may be credited with the first Indian drama; he was a contemporary and protégé of King Kanishka, who would be the age’s nearest equivalent to an Ashoka. Subsequently the great tradition of Sanskrit drama got off to a more certain start with Bhasa, whose prolific output of plays probably dates from the third century AD. A debt to his work would be acknowledged by Kalidasa, the Sanskrit Shakespeare, who may have been a near-contemporary although he is usually assigned to the cultural efflorescence that awaited the Guptas after 320. Perhaps the ‘dark’ centuries on either side of the year zero should be seen more as a sprightly preface to this ‘golden age of the Guptas’ than as a dire postscript to that of the Mauryas.
The ‘Dark Age’ looks to have been one of enlightenment and, even more paradoxically, the ‘Age of Invasions’ looks to have been one of expansion. For every incursion by non-Indians from central Asia, there is good evidence for an excursion by Indians into south-east Asia – or even back into central Asia. Hellenised kingdoms on the upper Indus are matched by Indianised kingdoms on the lower Mekong, Roman trading stations on the Indian coast by Indian trading stations on the Malay peninsula. Just as the archaeology of northern India is being invaded by uncompromising images of Greek adventurers and booted warlords from beyond the Oxus, so that of Sumatra and Sinkiang is invaded by serene Buddhas and handsome stupas. That first Indian drama by Asvaghosa came to light not in some Magadhan archive but in a horde of manuscripts found in the oasis city of Turfan, between the Takla Makan and the Gobi desert on China’s silk route. For every inscription in Greek or Sogdian script that is chiselled into India’s rocks another in Brahmi or Kharosthi is etched in the cliffs of Afghanistan or echoed in a stele on the coast of Vietnam.
In short, the diaspora of India’s culture began just as India itself apparently buckled before a succession of intruders. Both processes would continue, with intermissions, for the next two thousand years. Indeed the great paradox of political vulnerability in the midst of commercial and cultural dynamism may be considered one of Indian history’s distinctive features. If for no other reason than to explore the genesis of such a phenomenon, the underrated interlude between the glorious Mauryas and the golden Guptas merits attention.
IN THE DYNASTIC WILDERNESS
Of Ashoka’s Mauryan successors in the third to second centuries BC we know practically nothing except that they lost most of their inheritance. There were at least six of them, and they continued to rule, mostly from Pataliputra, for another fifty years. One, Dasaratha, may have been Ashoka’s grandson and immediate successor. In the only inscription certainly attributable to the later Mauryas, he dedicated some caves to the Ajivikas. Another, Brhadratha, was by common consent the last of the dynasty; a half-wit, he was murdered by his commander-in-chief. There is nothing to suggest that any of them ever exercised authority in the Deccan or in Orissa, and there is reason to suppose that many other Mauryan provinces, including those in Afghanistan, Gandhara, Kashmir, the Panjab and perhaps Malwa, all broke away at an early stage. Reasons suggested for this rapid decline include the economic crisis implied by an adulteration of the coinage, the reluctance to use force which was supposedly inherent in dhamma, and the vulnerability of Ashoka’s personalised authority to the presumed failings of his successors.
It is perhaps also worth reflecting on the nature of an empire which could so rapidly disintegrate. For instance, the scatter of Ashokan inscriptions in Karnataka (Mysore) and Andhra Pradesh (Hyderabad) should probably not be interpreted as evidence that Mauryan authority was ever effective throughout the Deccan. Instead, the empire should be seen as consisting of corridors of authority connecting pockets of agricultural, mineral (many of the southern inscriptions are in a gold-mining area), commercial or strategic importance. Beyond this carefully administered root-structure of nodes and conduits lay wild tracts of hill, forest and desert whose peoples produced no surplus of taxable significance. Here the Mauryan policy of containment, if they proved disruptive, or of neglect, if peaceable, may have been an early casualty of retrenchment. For all the evidence of an elaborate fiscal and judicial system under the Mauryas, we know remarkably little about the sanctions which enforced it. Along the highways, as well as rest houses and shade trees, one might expect some mention of garrisons, forts and escorts; but there is none. Mauryan authority, theoretically so extensive and invasive, may, in practice and beyond the confines of Magadha itself, have always been localised and vulnerable.
The last Maurya was murdered and supplanted by his commander-in-chief in about 180 BC. Pushyamitra, the assassin, was a brahman; his family came from Ujjain, where they had once served in the Mauryan administration. An inscription testifies to his performing two horse-sacrifices, and he is portrayed in Buddhist texts as no friend to the sangha (the monastic community). Perhaps, after a century of Mauryan patronage of the heterodox sects, Pushyamitra headed an orthodox brahmanical backlash. The dynasty he founded is known as the Shunga and his successors presided over a still disintegrating kingdom for about 110 years. The last Shunga, being reportedly ‘overfond of women’s company’,3 was assassinated by the daughter of one of his female companions. Vasudeva, his brahman minister, is said to have instigated the crime and it was he who duly founded a new dynasty. This was the Kanva, which lasted barely fifty years and of which almost nothing is known. Thereafter the kingdom of Magadha virtually disappears from the record for three centuries.
The Shungas and the Kanvas, like the later Mauryas, had been challenged on many fronts. An inscription in Orissa tells of the great king Kharavela of Kalinga who, though apparently a devout Jain, led his forces deep into the Deccan as well as invading Magadha and taking Pataliputra. Immense booty was accumulated, Kharavela’s horses and elephants were watered in the Ganga, and the king was styled a cakravartin, or world-ruler. Perhaps it was by way of a Kalingan revenge for Ashoka’s triumph of 260 BC. But Kharavela’s dates remain a mystery and his inscription is in ‘a rather flowery and pompous style and doubtless much of it was royal panegyric’.4 The only obvious inference is that Kalinga had long since broken away from Magadhan rule and now held its neighbour in contempt.
Amongst other adversaries over whom Kharavela was supposedly victorious, the inscription mentions the Shatavahana kings of the Deccan and a confederation of Tamil rulers in the extreme south, plus the Yavanas, or Greeks. As will be seen, the Deccan and the south begin to feature prominently in Indian history from about the last century BC. Slightly earlier the Yavanas had led the procession of intruders who now descended on India from the north-west. They originated in Bactria, or northern Afghanistan, where the Achaemenids had established a Greek colony. Alexander had augmented it, and over it Seleucus had briefly reasserted Macedonian authority before, some time during the reign of Ashoka, one Euthydemus had declared an independent kingdom. His successors, who were not necessarily his descendants, extended Bactrian rule to much of Afghanistan. Then, taking further advantage of the break-up of the Mauryan empire, some of them passed on down the Kabul river to the Indus and the Panjab.
Almost everything that is known of these Bactrian Greeks has been surmised from
their splendid coins. Minted and die-cast in imitation of Greek practice, they are mostly circular, of silver, often large, and altogether a great advance on the punch-marked lumps of the Mauryas. Considerable hoards as well as individual examples have been found over a vast area; and coinage design being extraordinarily conservative, they provide somewhat the same information as a modern coin. Thus, we learn of the names of these kings, of their preferred titles, and often of the Greek deity with whom they wished to be associated. From the obverse, or ‘heads’ side of the coins, we also know what they looked like and what headgear they sported. Such personal insights are rare; knowing nothing of, for instance, Ashoka’s mien (other than that it was ‘gracious’), we feel personally aquainted with the bull-necked Eucratides and the big-nosed Heliocles. Some wear a curious cap, modelled on an elephant’s skull, with the trunk serving as a peak; others favoured the kausia, like a shallow upturned bowl, of faintly ecclesiastical look; the chinless Amyntas, whose long nose quests from beneath a sun helmet indistinguishable from the British solar topi, must surely have had knobbly knees and worn knee-length white socks. From such portraits information has been drawn about the likely age of a king when he ascended the throne; and blood relationships, indeed the succession, are sometimes premised on resemblances in their physiognomy and headgear. Lacking much in the way of corroborative sources, scholars have pored over every iota of numismatic detail to ingenious but seldom conclusive effect.