Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.130

c11.130

By his victory over the Nandas and the Macedonians Chandragupta became master of the extensive region stretching from Magadha and Bengal to the easternmost satrapies of Ariana. The king of Pāṭaliputra and the Prasii dominated not only "the whole tract along the Ganges",¹ but the countries on the Indus that had once acknowledged the sway of the Persians and Alexander. Unfortunately the classical writers do not say much about any further extension of the Magadhan dominions in the interior of India. We have only the vague statement of Plutarch that "with an army of six hundred thousand men (Chandragupta) overran and subdued all India."² The conquest and subjugation of one important province, that of Surāṣṭra or Kāthiāwār in the extreme west, is however clearly attested by the Junāgaḍh Rock Inscription of Rudradāman which refers to Chandragupta's Rāṣṭriya or High Commissioner Pushyagupta, the Vaiśya, who constructed the famous Sudarśana Lake. The incorporation of this country within the Magadhan empire implies control over Avanti or Malwa. The 'Muriyas' or Mauryas are actually included by Jain writers among the successors of Pālaka of Avanti³. Ujjain, the capital of the province, long remained the seat of a Maurya viceroyalty. In the days of Aśoka, grandson of Chandragupta, the Maurya frontier reached North Mysore. As the only specific conquest claimed by that emperor is that of Kaliṅga, the extension of the empire beyond the Tuṅgabhadrā must be due to one of his predecessors. Certain mediaeval inscriptions speak of parts of Mysore being protected by Chandragupta.⁴ The evidence is late and too much cannot be built on it. It should however be noted that a number of Tamil authors, usually assigned to the early centuries of the of the Christian era, make allusion to the "Moriyar" having crossed a mountain with snow-capped peaks towering to the skies, and these allusions will be discussed elsewhere in the section on South India. In the third century B.C. the Chitaldrug district marked the furthest limit of the Maurya empire in the South. But posterity ignored these limitations and loved to regard the hero who had overthrown the Nandas and given protection to the earth harrassed by the *Mlecchhas* as "king over all Jambudvipa", sole monarch of the country that extends "from the lord of the mountains (*Sailendra*, i.e., the Himalayas), cooled by showers of the spray of the divine stream (Ganges) playing about among its rocks, to the shores of the Southern ocean (*dakshinarnava*) marked by the brilliance of gems flashing with various colours."¹ These words find an echo in the statement of Plutarch quoted above, thus pointing to the prevalence, as early as the beginning of the Christian era, of the tradition of Chandragupta's universal rule—the realisation of the ideal of a united India under an *Ekarat* or *Chakravartin* to which the *Brahmanas* and the *Nikayas* give eloquent expression.