The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c25.185

v1.c25.185

Alexander had come and gone. Was the European irruption a violent episode which left India unchanged? And, if so, was that due to an essential unchangeableness in India under impact from without? One may notice first that nothing was farther from Alexander's own thought than that his invasion of India was a mere raid. He left the Punjab and Sind solidly attached, he believed, to his world-empire. Let us glance once more at the conditions there in the year 324 b.c. The country fell into three divisions. There was first the satrapy of Philip the son of Machatas. It is impossible to make out with certainty what its confines were. Philip first appears (unless he is identical with the commandant of the garrison in Pushkalāvatī¹) as satrap in Takshaçilā², and we gather that there was then combined under his authority the principality of Āmbhi and what had been the satrapy of Nicanor in the lower Kābul Valley³, as far as the passes over the Hindu Kush into Bactria⁴. He accompanies Alexander's expedition down the Hydaspes (Jhelum) and is made satrap of a province extending as far south as the confluence of the Indus and Acesines⁵ (Chenāb). We do not however know whether this new appointment was in addition to, or in lieu of, his previous satrapy. If the former, his extensive satrapy continued to embrace the principality of Āmbhi, and we do not know how the double rule of Macedonian satrap and native prince was adjusted. A second division was the satrapy of Pithon the son of Agenor, covering Sind from the Indus confluence to the ocean and extending westward to the Hab. A third was the large principality of the Paurava prince, extending from the Hydaspes (Jhelum) to the Hyphasis (Beās). Here there was no division of authority between prince and satrap, but the Indian acted in both capacities himself⁶. A fourth satrapy lay outside India, but within the river system of the Indus—that of the Paropanisidae (the Hindu Kush) with Alexandria-under-the-Caucasus for its capital. This was the satrapy held by Oxyartes, Alexander's father-in-law. There was finally a fifth district in somewhat looser connexion with the Empire, Abhisāra in Kashmīr, whose ruler, as we have seen, had been enabled by Macedonian influence to establish his authority over the smaller rājas in his neighbourhood.