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Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c8: Introduction

Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c8

Language
English

Introduction

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THE natural frontiers of India, the mountains and the seas that serve to emphasise her inherent unity, have seldom acted as barriers to her intercourse with foreign lands. The progress of Indian historical studies has shown that the isolation of India is a relatively recent feature, and that in the earlier epochs of her long and by no means uneventful history, she maintained live contacts with many lands, far and near, to the mutual advantage of both sides. The age of the Nandas and Mauryas (c. 400-185 B. C.) witnessed great changes sweeping over the face of Western Asia, over lands with which India had much to do from the dawn of history, and account must be taken of their effects, direct and indirect, on the political, economic and artistic life of India. In this seminal period when Indo-Aryan civilization may be said to have attained its maturity, India did not hesitate to borrow political and economic plans and artistic motifs from abroad, and put them to the most appropriate uses in her own institutions and monuments. Thus to view the history of India on a wider background and point to her contacts with her neighbours is by no means to detract from the independence and originality of her culture; but only to lay stress on the catholicity of its outlook and taste, and its genius for drawing sustenance and strength from diverse sources. For in no single instance did borrowing result in mere imitation, but led to a thoughtful and harmonious integration of the borrowed feature with the indigenous setting in which it was placed.

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Alexander, Chandragupta, Chāṇakya, and Aśoka dominate the period. The overthrow of the Achaemenid empire of Persia by Alexander, his campaigns in the north-west of India, intended perhaps more to complete and round off his conquest of Persia than to further a scheme of world conquest, and his early death (323 B. C.) followed by the partition of his extensive empire into large territorial monarchies formed a chain of events that in one way and another prepared the ground for the extension of the Mauryan empire in the North-West, and fixed the political map of the regions with which that empire was to maintain a fairly lively intercourse for well over a century. The revolt of Bactria and Parthia from Syria (c. 250 B. C.) was the only notable change; but during our period their independence was far from assured, and the revolts had little historical significance as yet to India except perhaps by inducing the distracted Seleucid rulers of Syria to maintain friendly relations with their powerful neighbours on the east, the Maurya emperors. The importance of Alexander's Indian campaign has been both exaggerated and under-estimated. There was no Macedonian occupation of Indian territory worth the name, and what there was of it lasted only a few years. Yet there ensued two abiding results. The monarchies and tribal republics of the North-West were much exhausted by their sanguinary conflicts with the invader; this paved the way for the easy establishment of the Mauryan empire in these lands by weakening their power of military resistance to the advance of the empire, and possibly also by teaching them that submission to a strong state within the country was the best protection against the recurrence of danger from outside. Secondly, the Macedonian episode opened an era of some centuries during which Hellenism was to be the dominant factor of government and civilization on the western confines of the Indian world. The contact between India and the Mediterranean world became more direct and constant. And this is a fact of immense significance not only to the history of India, but to that of the world.

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In marked contrast to the precise and detailed notices of Greek and Latin authors on Alexander and India, are the vague and contradictory legends which issue from various sources and constitute the only aid to our knowledge of Chandragupta and Chāṇakya. There is little reason to doubt the truth of the main story in its outline : an unusually valiant Kshatriya warrior and a Brahmin statesman of great learning and resourcefulness joined to bring about the downfall of an avaricious dynasty of hated rulers, and establish a new empire which made the good of the people the object of its chief concern; they freed the land from the foreign invader, and from internal tyranny, and established a state which in due course embraced practically the whole of India;

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together they organised one of the most powerful and efficient bureaucracies known to the history of the world. Kshatra (Imperium) and Brahma (Sacerdotium) came together and engaged in the most fruitful cooperation for the great good of the land and the people. The *Arthaśāstra* of Kauṭilya (Cāṇakya) holds a place in the literature of Indian polity corresponding to that of the Mauryan empire in Indian history; there are two sides to both. The Mauryan empire was the culmination of a long centripetal development of which Magadha had become the nucleus for centuries; but its administrative system made new and bold departures from ancient practices and started innovations inspired by alien models, perhaps immediately Hellenistic, but traceable ultimately to Achaemenid Persia. Likewise, the *Arthaśāstra* is the culmination of the Indian political thought of several generations on the one side, while on the other, large sections of it were consciously based on the study of political practice, a good part of it doubtless contemporary and foreign.

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The forty years of Aśoka's rule form a great epoch not only in the history of India, but in the annals of mankind. In the remarkable series of his inscriptions found over the entire length and breadth of India, we hear the authentic voice of the great emperor explaining the purpose behind many of his actions. This enables us to check and control the numerous legends that have gathered round his name, as around the names of all great leaders of humanity. One war of conquest was enough to turn the mind of this monarch for ever from all thought of war and military conquest, so sensitive was he to the sufferings of men, and indeed of animals as well. He found instruction in the company of the Sangha and solace in the religion of the Buddha. His abstention from war and conquest was by no means a mere negation of a part of the king's duty as it was generally understood; the true emperor was a conqueror (*vijigīshu*) according to the political theory of Ancient India, and Aśoka accepted this ideal, and practised it vigorously for the rest of his life; only the conquest he pursued was of a higher order than that dictated by lust of power or territory; he became a *vijigīshu* in the cause of Dhammavijaya. But he was no visionary who sacrificed temporal well-being in the pursuit of spiritual objects. He combined energy and benevolence, justice and charity, as no one else did. He bent all the material resources of his great empire to the ethical education of his subjects and to the organisation of peace within his realm, and universal amity and order throughout the world. Aśoka strikes us as the most modern of all the great rulers of India.

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The work of the historian, unlike that of the novelist, is limited by the nature of his sources. Little or no evidence worth the name is forthcoming on many matters of interest in our period, and several questions that naturally rise in the mind as we recall its main events have to remain unanswered. Did Chandragupta deliver his attack on the Nanda empire at its heart and effect a revolution in the capital to start with, or did he begin by building up his power in the North-West at the expense of the Greeks and then proceed against the Nandas? What exactly was the role of Kauṭilya in the events that led up to the *abhisheka* of Chandragupta? How long did Chandragupta take to build up his empire, and who were the enemies, if any, who gave him fight? Did he turn Jain and abdicate towards the close of his reign as Jaina legends allege? What happened in the Mauryan empire during close upon three decades of Bindusāra's rule? We hear little of that monarch besides his love of Greek wine and figs, and his futile effort to buy a Greek philosopher. Yet this king could not have lacked ability as soldier and statesman, for he successfully guarded the vast empire, perhaps even extended it into the Deccan, and handed it over intact to his successor. Was Aśoka's succession to the throne disputed? Did he rule as emperor to the end of his life, or did he abdicate and live as a monk in his last years? And why did not the empire, reared by three generations of exceptionally talented rulers, hold together for many years after Aśoka's time?

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Historical truth is many-sided, and there is always scope for differences of interpretation of the evidence at hand; the scope for such differences is particularly wide in our period in which almost all the sources bear a certain bias—Brahmanical, Buddhist, Jaina—and offer divergent accounts of the same set of events. As nothing is gained and something may be lost by an artificial smoothening of these differences, it has appeared best to leave untouched the slightly differing views of the contributors of the different chapters and give the reader the opportunity of realizing the difficulty of reaching categorical conclusions on complex issues.

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The account of the period opens with a chapter (I) on India in the Age of the Nandas from the pen of Prof. H. C. Raychaudhuri who reconstructs, with great ingenuity, from very meagre sources a vivid picture of the establishment of the empire of the Nandas and its polity; in his survey of the outlying parts of India, he offers a succinct treatment of the political geography of North-Western India and of the advance of Persia and its rule on the banks of the Indus, and prepares the ground for the detailed study of the Indian campaigns of Alexander by the present writer (Chap. II). The hardest fights in which that great Macedonian warrior engaged were all fought on Indian soil, and his Indian opponents, though they did not win victories against him, generally won his approbation of their fighting qualities. These campaigns have been treated at some length, and their place in the history of India and of the world has been adverted to above. Alexander was accompanied by several scientists and literateurs whose writings communicated to Europe a vast amount of knowledge about India; they also formed the basis of many of the observations made by the ambassadors of the Hellenistic monarchs to the Mauryan empire, of whom Megasthenes is, of course, the most celebrated; in one chapter (III) all the notices of India by Greek and Latin authors bearing on our period have been brought together and reviewed also at full length with a view to put the reader in possession of most of the primary data now available; the chapter is followed appropriately by a comprehensive note, by Dr. J. N. Banerjea, on the foreign coins of the period found in India.

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The thread of the main story is taken up again by Prof. Raychaudhuri in the chapter (IV) on Chandragupta and Bindusāra. A brief criticism of the sources is followed by a discussion of chronology which may with advantage be read together with a further discussion of the same topic that follows in the chapter on Aśoka (VI). Prof. Raychaudhuri holds that the classical sources were well aware of the overthrow of the Nandas by Chandragupta though it might appear to some that in speaking of his overthrow of the existing government and liberation of India they meant only the destruction of the Macedonian domination in the Indus valley. He discounts heavily the part attributed to Chāṇakya in the internal revolution that resulted in the fall of the Nandas and the establishment of the Mauryan empire, and is inclined to consider Chandragupta as the hero of the drama. He has also grave doubts about the age and authenticity of the *Arthaśāstra*. But the whole of his narrative shows that he is quite fully aware of the possibility of other views being taken on these subjects and of the need for putting before his readers all the available evidence to enable them to form their own opinions.

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A brief study of the Mauryan polity, based mainly on the *Arthaśāstra*, follows (Chap. V); this sums up the state of government and administrative organisation as it was in the reigns of the first two emperors and provides the background necessary for the proper appraisal of the innovations of Aśoka in the administrative system, to which references occur in the inscriptions of that ruler. The present writer is inclined to accept the *Arthaśāstra* as a valid picture of conditions that prevailed in the Mauryan empire and has attempted to explain the basis for this view in an excursus on the *Arthaśāstra* at the end of the chapter.

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The chapter (VI) on Aśoka and his successors, also by the present writer, aims at presenting the primary evidence arranged under convenient heads with the necessary minimum of comment and criticism. The object has been to let the inscriptions tell the story as far as possible and to accept legendary evidence only to the extent to which it works in with and is not contradicted by the inscriptions. Aśoka's relations with the Sangha, the nature and content of the Dhamma he propagated, the extent of success that attended his missionary efforts, and the question whether he was both monk and monarch at one and the same time have been considered in some detail; the legends connecting Aśoka with Kashmir, Khotan and Nepal have also been considered with some care. All is darkness after Aśoka; the faint gleams from late and diverse sources, the earliest being the Divyāvadāna and Purāṇas, just render the darkness visible; no connected history is possible here; the available evidence has been summed up and the process of the dissolution of the Mauryan empire has been left largely to the imagination of the reader aided by the few scraps of evidence set forth at the end of the chapter. A brief account (Chap. VII) of South India and Ceylon rounds off the political history of the period; the vexed question of the identity and location of Satiyaputa has been discussed; and all the references to Nandas and Mauryas in early Tamil literature have been described in their proper setting and their historical value determined; and the evidence of the early Brāhmī inscriptions of the Tamil districts and of Ceylon, as also that of the Ceylonese tradition in the Mahāvamsa assessed.

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The remaining four chapters in the volume are devoted to studies of different aspects of the culture of the period. Dr. U. N. Ghoshal describes the Industry, Trade and Currency of the times in a chapter (VIII) which is as well documented, as it is replete with significant facts culled from various sources and set forth with remarkable lucidity and cogency. A perusal of this chapter and portions of the chapter on Art which form an excellent supplement to it, may well set at rest the doubts, sometimes expressed by scholars, that the state of technical arts depicted in the pages of the Arthaśāstra appears to be too advanced for the age of the Mauryas; for relying only to a very little extent on the evidence of the Arthaśāstra, the writers of these chapters have sought to trace the trend of development from earlier epochs up to and beyond the Mauryan epoch, and to indicate clearly the place of that epoch in the course of this development.

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In the chapter (IX) on Religion Dr. P. C. Bagchi makes a penetrating study of the ascetic movements in general, of Brahmanism, Ājīvikas and Nirgranthas, as well as of Buddhism and the beginnings of the theistic movements; he may appear to rely rather more on Buddhist texts than on other lines of evidence, but that has seldom stood in the way of the justice and truth of the interpretations offered by him. He has not included in the scope of his chapter forms of popular worship centring round flag-staffs, yakshas and so on, which have been noticed incidentally in the two succeeding chapters. The chapter (X) on Language and Literature and the life of the people is contributed by two scholars. Prof. Suniti Kumar Chatterji, the most competent linguist of India, offers a comprehensive and critical survey of the distribution and development of language and script in the various parts of Mauryan India. Dr. V. Raghavan's contribution in this chapter on Learning and Literature and popular life is the necessary complement to that of Dr. Bagchi on Religion. Depending more or less on exclusively Sanskrit and Brahmanical sources, Dr. Raghavan has produced a compact and illuminating account of the learning and literature of the age in their various branches, of the rites and forms of worship prevalent among the different strata of society, and of the habits, beliefs and modes of thought prevalent among the common people.

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The final chapter (XI) on Art from the pen of Dr. Nihar-ranjan Ray is a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of a difficult and interesting subject. The great acumen with which the author traces the development of the artistic tradition within the Mauryan period, even within a single reign, and adopts tests for the separation of the play of indigenous from that of foreign inspiration will not escape the attention of the discerning reader. Dr. Ray does not hesitate to declare as post-Mauryan several pieces that are generally held to be Mauryan on grounds of the material and technique which are hardly adequate in his eyes. His main thesis is that all the Mauryan art accessible to us is court art strongly marked by extraneous influences, Hellenistic and Achaemenian.

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Viewed from any angle, the age of the Mauryan empire was an age of great endeavour and noble achievement. Politically India became one, and the cultural unity in the midst of diversity that has always characterised her civilization became more marked than ever in this period. India was in the van of human progress, and one of her greatest emperors sent forth into the world the message of universal peace and love. It is to be hoped that the different chapters in this volume may help its readers in some measure to recall the life and happenings of that great epoch.

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