The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c10.79

c10.79

Sir G. Grierson informs me that the Nandas were reputed to be bitter enemies of the Brahmans, and that their reign was therefore excluded from chronological computation by the poet Chand in the twelfth century, who used the *Ananda* ('without Nanda') form of the Vikrama era, less by ninety or ninety-one than the ordinary reckoning. The word 'nanda' seems to be used as equivalent to 'nine' (100–9 = 91). It is very probable that the Nandas were Jains and therefore hateful to the Brahmans, who would naturally regard them as unholy persons unworthy of inclusion in orthodox Hindu annals. It is unquestionable that the Nanda king dethroned by Chandragupta was a heretic in Hindu eyes, for the concluding verse of Kantilya's *Arthasāstra* (transl. by Shāma Sastri) states that 'this *Sāstra* has been made by him who from intolerance (of misrule) quickly rescued the scriptures and the science of weapons and the earth which had passed to the Nanda king'. (The text is quoted by R. K. Mukerji in Introd., p. xiii, to N. N. Law, *Studies in Ancient Hindu Polity*.) The supposition that the last Nanda was either a Jain or a Buddhist is strengthened by the fact that one form of the local tradition attributed to him the erection of the Pānch Pahārī at Patna, a group of ancient *stūpas* which might be either Jain or Buddhist.