The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c20.10

Language: English

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The cycle thus designated as a millennium is one of very varied political fortunes; and the social, political, and religious material of the legal and epical literature must necessarily be explained in accordance with the outward changes. What these changes were is described in detail in other chapters of this work. For our present purpose it is necessary only to recount them in outline. At the end of the sixth century B.C., early in the period to which the Sūtras belong, the Persian Empire held two provinces in N.W. India—Gandhāra, the present districts of Peshāwar and Rāwalpindi, and the ‘Indian’ province, that is to say, the country of the Lower Indus: and the northern part of India generally was dominated by peoples of the Āryan race who had descended from the Punjab and spread eastward for centuries, but not so that the recently acquired territory was thoroughly assimilated to the cults and culture of the invaders, nor so that any one of these invaders had established an empire. Long before the end of this same period, Buddha, Mahāvīra, and other reformers had broken with the cult derived from the Vedic age, and the great empire of Açoka had made a new epoch in political life. This alteration, however, had been introduced, though adventitiously, through outer rather than inner conditions.

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After the short campaign in the Punjab, made by Alexander as the conqueror of the Persian Empire, his Indian dominions were, within a few years, absorbed by the growing power of Magadha (S. Bihār) then under the sway of a usurper, Chandragupta (c. 321–297 B.C.) the low-born son of Murā and the founder of the Maurya empire. This empire extended from Pāṭaliputra (Patna) to Herāt and was maintained by an army of approximately 700,000 men, the first real empire in India. His successors, Bindusāra and Açoka, enlarged the empire, annexing Kaliṅga on the eastern coast and ruling as far south as Madras. This dynasty continued in power till the end of the Sūtra period; and under it, during the reign of Açoka (c. 274–236 B.C.) Buddhism became the court-religion. Açoka’s period is determined by the mention in his edicts of certain Hellenic princes who were his contemporaries, but after his reign there comes a period of less chronological certainty. The different versions of the Purāṇas are not in agreement as to the exact number of his successors; but they are unanimous in asserting that the Maurya dynasty lasted for 137 years; that is to say, it is supposed to have come to an end c. 184 B.C. For over a century after its fall the Çuṅga dynasty, whose founder, Pushyamitra, had slain Bṛihadratha Maurya and usurped his throne, held sway, despite forcible inroads of the Yavanas (Greeks) and the Andhras;

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and we learn that both Pushyamitra and the Andhra king, Çātakarṇi, performed the famous ‘horse-sacrifice,’ in accordance with the ancient Vedic rite, thus challenging all opponents of their authority. The son of this Pushyamitra was Agnimitra, who conquered Vidarbha (Berār), then a province of the Andhra Empire of S. India, and the grandson, who guarded the horse, was Vasumitra. These names, as also the re-establishment of the ‘horse-sacrifice,’ are highly significant in that they show a renascence of the Vedic religion and a consequent decline in Buddhism. The same thing is indicated by the fact that Khāravela, a king of Kaliṅga, who boasts of having invaded the Andhra dominions as well as Northern India, was a Jain. Sumitra, the son of Agnimitra, was, according to Bāṇa’s historical romance, the *Harshacharita*, miserably slain by Mitradeva, who may perhaps have been a Brāhman of the Kaṇva family which eventually gained the chief power in the state. The account given by the Purāṇas states that the minister Vasudeva slew the tenth and last of the Çuṅga kings and inaugurated a new dynasty, called the Kaṇva dynasty, which lasted for about half a century;

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but, since the Kaṇvas are definitely styled 'servants of the Çuṅgas' and for other reasons, it seems more probable that the later Çuṅga kings had been reduced to subjection by their Brāhman ministers, and that the lists of these contemporary rulers nominal and actual were wrongly regarded by some late editor of the Purāṇas as successive. It is further related that one of the Andhra kings¹ slew Suçarman, the last of the Kāṇvas, and thus brought Magadha under the sway of the sovereigns, whose names and titles, as well as their sacrificial inscriptions, show them to have been followers of the ancient Vedic religion. But here again it appears that dynastic lists have been brought together and arranged in an unreal sequence. There can be little doubt that the first of the Andhra kings was earlier in date than the first of the Çuṅgas, and not 157 years later as would appear from the Purāṇas. It is indeed doubtful if the Andhras ever ruled in Magadha: but their sway in Central and Southern India lasted until the middle of the third century A.D.²