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Maurya and Shunga Art c5: II. Social Background

Maurya and Śuṅga Art c5

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II. Social Background

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Any attempt at an explanation of the phenomenon referred to above must take into account the state of artistic effort and activities in India itself during the centuries immediately preceeding that of the Mauryas; i.e. during the period dominated by the Haryaṅka, the Śaiśunāga and the Nanda dynasties on the one hand, and the place of India, especially Northern India, in the entire culture-complex of the early Asiatic world, on the other. It will also be necessary to consider at the same time the historical and cultural forces that were at work at the Mauryan court which was directly responsible for Mauryan art.

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The Brahmanical sūtras and the Buddhist jātakas reflect to a very great extent the art and culture of Northern India during the centuries of Haryaṅka, Śaiśunāga and Nanda domination. Storeyed buildings, presumably of wood and brick, were already widely known and mention is made of round and square huts perhaps of wood and bamboo. An advanced knowledge of the use of metals like tin, lead, silver, copper and iron shaped and formed into objects meant for various domestic and other purposes is already known from later Vedic texts, and the jātakas reveal that there were eighteen different kinds of ‘śilpas’ or arts and crafts including carpentery, smithery, leather-dressing and painting. Metal workers in general were probably known by the word ‘kammāra’ ( sans.

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Karmakāra ), and there are definite evidences to show that these artists and craftsmen were organised into guilds. Localisation of certain industrial crafts also took place to the extent that an entire village or a particular locality in a town came to be designated according to the craft pursued there. The jātakas also afford a more or less vivid picture of contemporary city and village life, villages with scattered huts made of wood, bamboo and reed, cities with roads and lanes lined with buildings of brick and wood, all set off against the background of an agricultural, industrial and commercial life in small scale and within narrow proportions.¹² With the exception of certain stories in the Mahābhārata, there is nothing else to suggest that the canvas of contemporary life was large enough and that it was conceived in any magnificent and monumental scale. Tribal and primitive was indeed the character of the social psychology of Northern India during these centuries. This tribal and primitive outlook is also fully in evidence in the remains of the old city of Rājagṛiha with its walls and remains of dwellings built of rough cyclopean masonry¹³ which is the one definite architectural example that can be said to belong to pre-Mauryan times.

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But a slow and steady widening of the tribal and primitive outlook was being effected in the political sphere. Already in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa we hear of such sacrifices as the ‘Rājasūya’ and the ‘Aindramahābhisheka’, of ‘Sārvabhauma’ kings, of paramount rule and of all-encompassing sovereignty. The same political conception of ‘rāja sārvabhauma’ is repeated in Baudhāyana Śrautasūtra, and that of ‘rāja chakkavatti’ in early Buddhist and Jaina texts.¹⁴ In reality however the normal political condition of Northern India till the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. was not that of an empire of any considerable extent under a ‘sārvabhauma’ monarch but it was that of separate small and independent states and kingdoms under a king or tribal leader. It was only towards the third quarter of the fourth century B. C. that the ideal was partially achieved in the person of Mahāpadmananda who has been referred to in the Purāṇas as ‘sarvarājochchhettā’, ‘sarvakshatrāntaka nṛipaḥ’ and ‘ekarāṭ’, the supreme monarch, and one of his sons, the last of the dynasty, as the powerful monarch of the Prasioi and the Gangaridai, in the accounts of classical historians. Politically, India was thus slowly but steadily growing out of its tribal psychological outlook which was sure eventually to influence the social and cultural outlook of the leading sections of the people.

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Whether the evolution of such a political outlook was the outcome of natural historical process or was directly or indirectly conditioned by India’s contact with the contemporary West-Asiatic world, is difficult to say. In any case the chronological and historical background is significant and is worth consideration. Already in pre-historic times, the Indus Valley civilisation formed a part of the civilisation that extended to ancient Sumer; much later, the civilisation represented by the Ṛigveda was but a cognate of that represented by the Avestā. There is no reason to assume that this intimate relation of India with Iran and the ancient Asiatic West lapsed at any time during the centuries that followed. Indeed, from about 800 B. C. almost continuous contact of Aryanised India with Iran can be traced back to or inferred from various sources, literary and archaeological. In the sixth century B. C. part of Northern India went under the political domination of Iran, and gradually the Indus came to form the eastern boundary of the wide Iranian empire of Darius; indeed this part of India came to be politically organised into the 20th satrapy of that empire.¹⁵ Darius describes himself in his inscriptions as ‘Kshayathiyanam Kshayathiya’, the king of kings, the great king;¹⁶ he was in reality a ‘sārvabhauma’ monarch of the old Indian conception, an ‘ekarāt’ like Mahāpadmananda. Indeed the Achaemenid dynasty was the first to evolve and give reality to the idea of imperial suzerainty which a century later was partially achieved by the Nandas, but fully by the Mauryas.¹⁷ Certainly no contemporary borrowing can at once be postulated, but it is likely that both India and Iran participated in a common historic process.

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This is more evident in the domain of art and general culture. Indeed early Indian art can be viewed and understood fully only against the background of the age-old but very potent and effective Indo-Sumerian and Indo-Iranian contacts maintained through long centuries. In Maurya, Śuṅga, Āndhra and Kuṣāṇa art, there is a rich treasure of art and decorative motifs, ornamentations, devices and patterns that we meet with for the first time and which at once suggest “parallels in Sumerian, Hittite, Assyrian, Mykenean, Cretan, Trojan, Lykian, Phoenician, Achaemenid and Scythian cultures.” Coomaraswamy gives a long list of such common elements and technical analogies, and finally argues that “so far as its constituent elements are concerned, and apart from any question of style, there is comparatively little in Indian decorative art that is peculiar to India and much that India shares with Western Asia.” It is difficult to disagree with Coomaraswamy when further he says :

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All this amounts to proof that the themes and motifs of pre-Maurya art cannot have differed very greatly from those of Maurya and Śuṅga; fantastic animals, palmettes, rosettes and bell-capitals must have been common elements of craftsman's repertory under the Nandas as in the time of Aśoka. India, in centuries and perhaps millenniums B.C. was an integral part of an ‘Ancient East’ that extended from the Mediterranean to the Ganges valley.”¹⁸

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Apart from India's forming an integral part of an 'Ancient East' and sharing in a common cultural heritage from very early times, there is more or less definite evidence of intimate cultural contact of India with Iran in particular from about the eighth and seventh centuries B. C. The North-west and the Indus Valley forming a part of the empire of Darius made contacts with Iran easier still. This intimate contact must have been responsible for certain elements in Buddhist and later Brahmanical mythology, tradition, worship and iconography, especially those connected with the cults of the Sun and the Fire.¹⁹ It was also responsible for the origin and evolution of the Kharoshṭhī script in about the fifth or fourth century B. C. An Aramaic inscription belonging to about the fourth century B. C. has actually been found at Taxila.²⁰ The Haryaṅkas, the Śaiśunāgas and the Nandas must have more or less felt the pressure of this contact, but since their dominions lay far away from the regions where presumably the effects of the impact of the two civilisations were directly felt, Eastern India was perhaps only indirectly touched by Iranian contacts.

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With the coming of the Mauryas to power on the throne of Pāṭaliputra, with the building up of an all-India empire by Chandragupta extending upto modern Afghanisthan and therefore touching almost what had once been the heart of Achaemenid power and culture, with the establishment of intimate friendly relations with contemporary Hellenistic powers and intimate contacts of Maurya kings and court with Greek political and cultural representatives from Graeco-Bactrian courts and kingdoms, the situation however took a new turn. The Achaemenid empire had long gone to dust and India had ceased to form a part of that empire. In 330 B. C. Alexander the Great overthrew the once mighty Persian Empire, but in the process of consolidating his conquest the Greek conqueror felt the overpowering influence of Achaemenian imperialism and Achaemenian art and culture to both of which he fell an easy prey. Plutarch has left us a long and vivid description of how Alexander behaved himself at Persepolis and how he worked for a fusion of the cultures of Greece and Iran of the Medo-Achaemenid monarchs. Donned in the robes of Iranian monarchs he used to sit on the throne of Darius under a golden canopy. He himself married Darius's daughter Statira, and married his Greek friends to Iranian ladies; one of these friends was Seleukus, later known as Seleukus Nikator, who married Apama, the daughter of Spitamenes. Not satisfied with having simply adopted somewhat the Persian mode of dress, Alexander, says Plutarch, "accommodated himself more than ever to the manner of the Asiatics, and at the same time persuaded them to adopt some of the Macedonian fashions; for by a mixture of both he thought a union might be promoted, much better than by force, and his authority maintained even when he was at a distance. For the same reason he elected thirty thousand (Persian) boys and gave them masters to instruct them in Grecian literature as well as train them to arms in the Macedonian manner."²¹

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The same process seems to have been fully at work in the realm of art. Colonial Hellenistic art was slowly coming under the influence of Persian art, specially of Persian motifs, patterns and designs on the one hand, while Persian art itself began to feel the pressure of Ionian and Hellenistic influences onwards from the fifth century B. C.²² This pressure became active during and after the Achaemenid period, so that when the Mauryas came into intimate contact with the colonial Greeks of Western Asia, both Achaemenid and Hellenistic art-traditions had become heavily touched by each other.

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After the withdrawal of the Macedonian army of Alexander, and the establishment of an alliance *jus connubii* of Chandragupta Maurya with Seleukus, the Mauryas came into very intimate friendly relations with the Seleukid Greek houses, and this relation continued from generation to generation. Besides contracting a matrimonial alliance Chandragupta repeatedly received Megasthenes, an officer from Arachosia, as an ambassador from Seleukus; is reported to have sent Seleukus some strange Indian drugs presumably through his own envoy, and is further said to have been used to offer sacrifices in Hellenic manner to Alexander's altars on the Hyphasis. The ceremonial at the court of this king described by classical writers also reveal Achaemenian influence.²³ His son Bindusāra had in his court a Greek envoy, Deimachus of Plataea, sent by Antiochus Soter, son of Seleukus. Bindusāra also like his father seems to have been a Hellenophile; he wrote back to Antiochus requesting him to buy and send on to him sweet wine, dried figs and a Greek sophist. From Antiochus came the reply: "we shall send you dried figs and sweet wine, but it is not lawful in Greece to sell a sophist." Diodorus speaks of a Greek author Iamboulus by name who found his way to the king of Palibothra, and this king of Palibothra, presumably Bindusāra or atleast one of the first three Maurya monarchs, "is credited with having a great love for the Grecians." The court of Bindusāra or of his son was visited by a Greek envoy Dicnysius sent by Ptolemy (II) Philadelphos, King of Egypt, while Deimachus was another Greek ambassador from the king of Syria who presented his credentials to Bindusāra. If the evidence of Dion Chrysostom is to be believed, the Indians sang the poetry of Homer which was translated into Indian language and Indian mode of expression. Aśoka’s friendly relations with the Yavanas or the Greek states of Western Asia and Egypt are much to well-known; the world that he claims to have contacted in pursuance of his policy of ‘Dhammavijaya’ was pre-eminently this Hellenistic world; he arranged for the medical treatment of men and cattle among others in the dominions of Antiochus Theos and his neighbours; he despatched ‘dūtas’ or envoys to the realms of the five Greek frontagers to initiate or encourage various works of piety and public utility, to inculcate the principles of Dhamma, and further to assure his frontagers of his sincere desire to respect their territorial integrity, and of his solicitude and good will.

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Both Megasthenes and Kauṭilya refer to a state department run and maintained specifically for the purpose of looking after foreigners²⁴ who evidently were quite numerous not only in the capital city of Pāṭaliputra but in other provincial capitals and trade centres as well. There can hardly be any doubt that these foreigners were mostly colonial Greeks and a very large majority of them were merchants and businessmen. Indeed in the third century B. C. a caravan high way ran from Taxila via Kandahar, Persepolis and Susa to Seleukeia on the Tigris, while another old main road ran via Kandahar, Heerat, Hekatompylos, Ekbatana and Seleukeia and was joined by the Taxila-Kabul-Bactria route.²⁵ Taxila, it is well-known, was the seat of an important Maurya province, and from here a great high way ran direct to connect Pāṭaliputra with the Hellenic East. Besides, there was also a coastal sea-borne trade route to Seleukeia along the Persian Gulf and up the Tigris, and to Egypt following the coastal line. It is this trade route that explains the Aramaic inscription referred to above and dateable in the fourth century B. C. It was along this route also that foreigners including Greek envoys, traders, travellers, artists and craftsmen must have flocked to Maurya India in such numbers as to oblige the state to maintain a department to look after their comfort and well-being. This intimate contact indeed explains such finds as the fragmentary handle of a terracotta vase showing Alexander’s head in lion’s skin recovered from Taxila,²⁶ or random finds from Sarnath, Basarh and the Patna region of terracotta pieces of distinctive Hellenistic appearance or with definite Hellenistic motifs and designs.²⁷ That they belong probably to a later date does not minimise the importance of the very intimate relations the Maurya court maintained with the Hellenic East; rather they point to the fact that even after the decline and downfall of the Mauryas parts of India continued to remain in touch with the Hellenistic world. Was it not that within a quarter of a century after the death of Aśoka a Greek army crossed the Hindukush and penetrated into the east as far as Sāketa ( in Ayodhyā ), the Pañchāla country, Mathurā and Pāṭaliputra ?

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The phil-Hellenism of the Maurya kings and court is indeed beyond doubt, and it must have been their intimate relation with the Hellenistic East that also brought them into an indirect contact with the art and culture of the Achaemenids. The grandiose and magnificent monuments of the Achaemenid monarchs had still been standing when the Mauryas came to exercise all-India suzerainty and Maurya art was making its appearance. Certain Achaemenian forms and motifs had presumably already migrated to the Punjab and the Indus Valley during the Achaemenian occupation of the region.

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Excavations at the Bhir mound at Taxila long ago yielded from the pre-Hellenistic strata a scaraboid of steatite exhibiting a winged stag which is reminiscent of similar objects of Achaemenian origin.²⁸ "The Indian punch-marked silver coinage struck on the Persian standard represented perhaps the Achaemenian coinage for India."²⁹ But even after the extinction of Achaemenian power importation of Achaemenian art objects to India seems to have continued. Curtius, Diodorous and Arrian state that Alexander presented to the king of Taxila among other things a large number of gold and silver vessels and an enormous quantity of Babylonian and Persian embroideries from the treasury of old Persian monarchs.³⁰ It has also been pointed out that a few minor antiquities found in the upper strata of the Bhir mound excavations "reflect the influence of Achaemenian art." Among these four bangles of thin beaten gold with their heads terminating in lion's heads and a few fragments of pottery from the side of a vase decorated with the conventional leaf design and reminiscent of the capitals of well-known Aśoka pillars, are particularly noteworthy. Moreover, a polished sandstone head from Sarnath wearing a crenellated crown, the method of wearing the waist cloth without the 'kachchha' as we find in the two Patna 'yaksha' statues in the Indian Museum and the coiled armlets of the same figures inevitably recall Achaemenian parallels.³¹ It is evident that the trade routes referred to above opened up avenues through which Maurya India came to acquire more direct and intimate contact with Medo-Achaemenian art and culture, perhaps through Greek intermediaries.

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But the more important evidence of Achaemenian cultural influence on the Maurya court and Maurya cultural ideology is afforded by the accounts of the city and royal palace of Pāṭaliputra left by classical authors evidently following Megasthenes and by the actual remains of the same city and palace unearthed by Waddell and Spooner.³² We have it in Strabo that the city of Palibothra was situated at the confluence of the Ganges and the Erannoboas ( Hiraṇyavāha, the modern Son ); it was 80 stadia in length and 15 in breadth and was of the shape of a parallelogram. The city was surrounded by a wooden wall pierced with loop-holes for the discharge of arrows, crowned with 560 towers and provided with 60 gates. In sumptuousness and magnificence according to Strabo, Pāṭaliputra compared very favourably with Susa and Ekbatana. Waddell’s exacavations actually laid bare the remains of what had been once the city wall, and Spooner later brought to light remains of huge wooden buildings at Bulandibagh and Kumrahar, both near Patna. The remains of one of these buildings are of particular significance—those of a pillared hall in which stone columns were employed to support the roof. Of the eighty pillars that had once stood on a wooden platform and supported a wooden roof Spooner was able to discover the entire lower part of at least one in almost perfect condition ; it is more or less like an Asokan pillar, smooth, highly polished and made of grey Chunar sand-stone.

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Writing about Indian towns Arrian says, “All their towns which are down beside the rivers or the sea are made of wood ; for towns built of brick would never hold out for any length of time with the rains on the one hand, and on the other, the rivers which rise above their banks and spread a sheet of water over the plains. But the towns which are built on elevated places out of reach, these are built of brick and clay.” The excavations of Waddell and Spooner admirably confirm what we are told by Strabo, Arrian and early Sanskrit and Pali writers, and constitute one more proof of the fact that before the employment of stone for building purposes, wood was generally the only material for even the most sumptuous and magnificent buildings. Spooner’s exacavations however revealed for the first time that stone was employed for building purposes in at least one building of the Maurya royal city, and that it was a pillared hall. That the magnificent palaces of Pāṭaliputra reminded Strabo who evidently followed Megasthenes, of the palaces of Susa and Ekbatana is not without significance when it is remembered that the Maurya Pillared Hall reminded Spooner of the famous Hall of Hundred Columns erected at Persepolis by Darius the Great.

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“Whereas no other structure of really early date in ancient India disclosed”, says Spooner, “an arrangement of pillars in square bays over the whole floor the hall at Kumrahar did show this otherwise unparalleled arrangement, and this was identical with the arrangement of the pillars in the Achaemenian Hall. The columns themselves moreover showed a technique in their polished surface which is not only known to have been un-Indian, and outside the line of Indian architectural development, but which again is identical with Persepolitan workmanship.” Apart from the question of the origin and morphology of the Asokan columns, it is not unlikely that the Maurya Pillared Hall owed its inspiration and general design to the Hall of Hundred columns erected by Darius. We have it on the authority of classical writers that Chandragupta’s palace at Pāṭaliputra consisted of halls whose gilded pillars were adorned with golden vines and silver birds; indeed fragments of golden vines have been discovered in the exacavations at Kumrahar. We know that the halls of the palaces of Ekbatana had gilded pillars constructed of cedar and cypress, and golden vines of the pillars invariably recall the vines hanging over the couch of Darius, a gift of the Lydian Pythias and perhaps of Ionian workmanship.

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It is difficult to say whether the Mauryan Pillared Hall at Pāṭaliputra was the conception of Chandragupta himself or one of his successors—personally I think it was built at the direction of Aśoka—, but there can be no doubt that one of the first three Maurya emperors was responsible for it, nor is it unlikely that "this adoption of the Persepolitan style of building at Pāṭaliputra was not the normal result of the contact of the Achaemenian and Indian sculptors, but was due to conscious adoption of the plan of the Achaemenian Hall of Public Audience by the Mauryan emperor ( Aśoka ) as a part of the paraphernalia of his imperialism..."³³

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It has been argued with some force that Mauryan imperialism as revealed in the inscriptions of Aśoka was largely influenced by the imperial ideology of the Hellenistic and Achaemenian monarchs.³⁴ This may not be altogether unlikely, but be that as it may the fact remains that the inscriptions themselves indicate the extent to which Aśoka was indebted to his great Achaemenian predecessor Darius, not only for the idea of making his royal edicts known throughout his empire but also for the form of the inscriptions themselves.³⁵ At the end of the Susian version of the Behistun inscription of Darius we have the following :

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"( Thus ) Saith Darius, the king : By the grace of Auramazda I made inscriptions in another fashion...such as was not formerly...and it was written and I...then I sent the same inscriptions into all lands, and the people..."

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The duplicate copies were evidently written on leather or brick. This was also the arrangement made by Aśoka for the circulation of his edicts ( R. E. XXIV ; Kalinga Edict I ; P. E. VII).

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The very idea of recording royal orders and directions on such permanent material as rocks (and pillars) seems to have been inspired by Achaemenian practice. In respect of the form of the Asokan inscriptions Senart long ago pointed out their strong resemblance with that of the inscriptions of the Achaemenian kings. The edicts of Aśoka begin with the usual formula ‘Devānampiya Piyadasi evamāha’ which according to Senart, “is an absolutely isolated example in Indian epigraphy... In the entire series of the inscriptions of the Achaemenides, from Darius to Artaxerexes Ochus, the phrase ‘thatey Darayavaush Kshayathiya’, ‘thus saith the king Darius’, or its equivalent ‘thatey Kshayarsha’ etc., inevitably forms the preamble of each of the proclamations. In both cases, this phrase in the third person is immediately succeeded by the use of the first person, and we are still further justified in drawing attention to this curious fact that again in both cases the same word—‘dipi’, ‘lipi’—is used to designate the inscriptions, and that, as we have seen, we are led to admit, on altogether independent grounds, that the Indian form of the word was originally borrowed from Persian.” One may not fully agree with Senart in his contention, since the ‘Arthaśāstra’ ascribes a similar formula for royal proclamations, and early Buddhist texts make constant use of such archaic and conventional phrases as ‘Tathāgato āho’, ‘evamvādi Mahāsamaṇo’ etc. Indeed one has to agree with Prof. Barua when he points out that the Asokan formula probably originated from the Indian literary convention that can be traced to even such Upanishadic phrases as ‘hovācha Yājñavalkya’, ‘evamāhur’ ‘manīśiṇaḥ’ etc. But the fact remains that the whole character of Asokan epigraphs including their form has an undeniable family likeness with Achaemenian inscriptions, and has nothing to connect them with later Indian epigraphy. Aśoka's peculiar way of exhorting people to follow the laws of Dhamma also seems to have been adopted from Achaemenian practice initiated by Darius in his Behistun and Naksh i-Rustam inscriptions³⁶.

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Two important facts emerge. First, that whatever extant remains we can lay our hands on as definitely belonging to the Maurya period are products of the Maurya court, i.e. they were worked out by orders of the Maurya monarchs and perhaps also under their direct supervision. Secondly, that this court and its presiding lords were all ardent Hellenophiles and was largely under the influence of Achaemenian art and culture at the same time. It is to this second factor that we can ascribe the fixation of Indian art in permanent materials during this period for the first time and the handling of stone for sculptural and architectural purposes with perfect ease and efficiency. At the same time it has to be recognised that there existed in India a pre-Mauryan art mainly practised in wood and partly in sundried brick, clay, ivory, metal and mineral stone. Admittedly this art could hardly conceive life and things in huge proportions and large dimensions. Tribal and primitive outlook circumscribed the vision of the artists and craftsmen who must also have been handicapped by the very nature of the materials they used. But this art happened to be the repository of certain patterns, designs and motifs that India shared in common with the rest of the early Asiatic world.

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For the rest, we know from Megasthenes, Kauṭilya and the inscriptions of Aśoka himself that the Maurya administration was a highly centralised one supported and strengthened by a tight bureaucracy, and the Maurya monarch nothing short of a benevolent autocrat. Aśoka’s ‘Dhammavijaya’ was more an imperial policy than a religious missionary movement and his moral exhortations to his people had almost the force of law behind them. He had even gone to the length of regulating the social and religious life of his people according to his conception of Dhamma. It must also be taken into account that Aśoka, if one has to go by what he himself says in R. E. I, IV and IX, was averse to popular demonstrations of religion as well as to certain kinds of ‘samājas’ or festive gatherings and to auspicious rites and rituals performed by the ordinary people, particularly by the women-folk. It is clear further that his Dhamma was nothing but an abstract code of certain ethical principles of more or less universal recognition, and that his methods for the propagation of his Dhamma had almost the force of law behind them. To all these points I shall have occasion to turn at a later stage; here it would suffice to point out that the king and the court were both highly conscious of their power and their imperial glory; Aśoka’s inscriptions breathe the very air of this consciousness. And if the ‘Arthaśāstra’ of Kauṭilya is to be believed, law, order and precision were the watchwords of the Mauryan government. This is surprisingly reflected in the writings of the inscriptions themselves; not only are they beautifully executed, but they are indeed remarkable for their clarity, orderliness and precision; every single letter is cut into the stone with remarkable accuracy and carefulness, lines are more often than not straight and well-ordered, and mistakes, considering the enormous output, few and far between. The socio-economic policy of the Mauryan state, it must be taken into account, was also highly centralised and monopolistic. Mauryan art has to be viewed and understood against this historical, cultural and sociological background.

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This would help us to understand the character and ideology of Mauryan art.

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