Maurya and Shunga Art c7.19

c7.19

This is not surprising in the least, since the whole of the North-West of India during the centuries of Śaiśunāga-Nanda-Maurya domination formed really a part of the Asiatic West and of the international world extending from the coasts of the Mediterranean to the banks of the Indus. It was the art and culture of this world with which the Maurya kings and court had affiliated themselves. The Yonas or Yavanas (evidently derived from Greek Ionian), the Kāmbojas, and the Gandhāras were the typical peoples of this region of India on this side of and beyond the Hindukush, mentioned along with the Kirātas and the Barbaras in the ‘Mahābhārata’, and with still some more tribes in the ‘Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa’. It is significant that Manu describes the Yavanas and the Kāmbojas as Kshatriya tribes who occupied the position of fallen castes of the ‘Vrātyas’. Still more significant is that the Pāli ‘Assalāyana Sutta’ mentions Yona and Kāmboja as peoples who had altogether a different social-organisation “admitting of nothing but a general distinction between the status of a master (ayya, ārya) and that of a slave or servant (dāsa), creating no impassable barrier between the two, and thereby making it possible for men to pass from one class into another according to opportunities and vicissitudes of life." This kind of social organisation along with the tradition recorded by Buddhaghosha in his 'Papañcha-sūdanī', that the Aparānta janapada was peopled by men who originally came from Aparagoyāna or the Western Continent which was the division of the earth lying to the west of Sumeru and Jambudvīpa and extending as far west as the Western Seas, seems to suggest that these regions of India lay within the orbit of the international world which was during all those centuries dominated by Perso-Hellenistic culture and politics. This is further supported by Buddhaghosha when he says that the Yaunas, Kāmbojas and other allied frontier peoples, all belonged to the Pārasaka-vaṇṇa. The 'Mahābhārata' too brands them all as 'dāruṇa Mlechchhajātayaḥ' or dreaded barbarians, while in the 'Bhūridatta Jātaka' the majority of the people of Kāmboja are credited only with barbarous habits and false creed. Nor there can be any doubt, from the combined testimony of Pāṇini, Kātyāyana and Patañjali, that there had existed somewhere on the Kabul river a Persianised Greek settlement even prior to Alexander's invasion of India. The one fact that emerges from all these literary references (Barua, Inscriptions of Aśoka, II, pp. 257-61) is that these regions west of the Indus shared in a common social organisation and a common culture that extended upto the shores of the Mediterranean. Aśoka's role in contemporary Indian history was to bring India into the orbit of this international culture, to raise her from Middle and Eastern Indian tribalism to the internationalism of the contemporary world.