A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c10.3

c10.3

IN the fourth century B.C., the empire of Magadha was greatly expanded under the powerful, though unpopular, dynasty of the Nandas who, according to purānic accounts, conquered all rival monarchs and became sole emperors of the whole of India. How far their sway extended into the South, it is by no means easy to determine. That it included Kalinga seems to be confirmed by the famous Hāthigumpha inscription of Khāravela who ruled over Kalinga in the second century B.C. This inscription mentions a Nanda raja in connexion with the construction of an aqueduct, and states elsewhere that King Nanda carried away as trophies of war a statue of Jina and other heirlooms of the rulers of Kalinga. Kannada inscriptions from Mysore of the tenth and eleventh centuries A.D. preserve faint memories of the rule of the Nandas in the Kuntala country; but there is little confirmation of this tradition. Nander on the upper reaches of the Godāvari has sometimes been taken to be the survival of an ancient name like Nau-Nandadhera and as indicating the extent of Nanda power into the Deccan. Indeed, punch-marked Purāna coins, which are found all over the Deccan, South India, and Ceylon as well as in North India, are clear witnesses of ancient contacts between the North and South whose details are now lost; but while they enable us to infer the existence of trade connexions, they are of no avail in fixing the southern limit of the Nanda empire. The inclusion of Kuntala in that empire conforms to the limits of the Mauryan empire under Aśoka as determined by the existence of his inscriptions in the South, and there is no clear evidence of the Mauryan emperors having undertaken wars of conquest in the South. It may, after all, be that the Kannada inscriptions mentioned above preserve a correct tradition—that the Mauryas came by their Southern possessions as a matter of course by overthrowing the imperial dynasty of the Nandas. The enormous wealth accumulated by the Nandas was well known to the ancient Tamils, and became proverbial. Māmūlanār, one of the poets of the Śangam Age, puts these words into the mouth of a love-lorn lady: ‘What is it that has attracted my lover more than my charms and kept him away from me so long? Can it be the treasure accumulated in prosperous Pātaliputra and hidden in the waters of the Ganges by the great Nandas victorious in war?’