The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c18.176

c18.176

The Deccan, or Peninsular India, down to approximately the latitude of Nellore, must therefore, apparently, have been subjugated by either Chandragupta or Bindusāra, because it was inherited from the latter by Asoka, whose only recorded war was the conquest of Kalinga; and it is more probable that the conquest of the south was the work of Bindusāra than that it was effected by his busy father. In fact, it may be affirmed with confidence that the conquest of the south actually was effected by Bindusāra. Tāranāth, using no doubt ancient authorities, asserts expressly that Bindusāra, who continued to be guided by the counsels of his father’s minister, Kautilya or Chānakya, slew the kings and ministers of some sixteen capitals, and thus extended his empire from sea to sea. The sixteen states thus annexed cannot possibly have been in Northern India which was firmly held by Chandragupta. That testimony of the Tibetan historian is confirmed by the evidence of Māmulanār, an ancient Brahman Tamil poet and scholar, who refers frequently to invasions by the Mauryas in early times. The invaders advanced as far south as Madura and the neighbouring parts of the Tinnevelly District with ‘a great army’. Those conquests in the extreme south were not held by the invaders. Asoka’s inscriptions prove that in his time the Tamil states were independent neighbours of the northern empire, which included a southern Viceroyalty with its head-quarters at Suvarnagiri, or Golden Town, presumably situated in the ancient gold-field near Maski in the Raichūr District of the Nizam’s Dominions, where an Asoka inscription exists. Faint memories of the Maurya conquest of the south lingered for centuries. The early Pallava inscriptions claim Asoka as one of the ancestors of the Pallava dynasty, and as late as the seventh century the Chalukya monarchs subdued Maurya chiefs in the Konkan.¹