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War in Ancient India c11.s1: Section IV: International Relations

War in Ancient India c11.s1

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Section IV: International Relations

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We now proceed to refer to some of the diplomatic relations which existed between India and the outer world. The picture presented in the epics and the *Arthaśāstra* literature seems to be confined to the four corners of this Bharatakhaṇḍa. It is difficult to say whether India had any international relations with the outside world. The intercourse as envisaged in the literature, shows relations to be more commercial than political in character. But political relations with foreign countries became a matter of importance from the epoch of Chandragupta Maurya, if not earlier.

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Strabo quotes Megasthenes and says that the Indians were not engaged in wars with foreigners outside India nor was their country invaded by any foreign power except by Hercules and Dionysius and lately by the Macedonians. There is documentary evidence to indicate the naval expedition led by Darius about 517 B.C. and the Persian conquest of the North-west. But there were friendly relations of Chandragupta with Seleukos Nikator, of Bindusāra with Antiochus, of Aśoka and Samudragupta with Ceylon, of Pulakeśi with Persians, of Harṣa with Nepal and China, of the Choḷas with Śrī Vijaya. And when the conception of the State grew into an Imperial one, and when the Indian Empire became a separate entity, the problem of the North-West Frontier, through which entered all the great invading hosts of India, engaged the emperor's attention. The frontier, says Lord Ronaldshay, ‘possesses the possibilities of complications which cannot arise in a simple frontier consisting of a single boundary line more or less demarcated between one state and another, for it offers the option of two alternative policies. It is either absorption by the paramount power or non-interference.’ In this the Hindu kings succeeded more by diplomacy than by conquest. We also know from authentic history how Chandragupta Maurya was able to create a scientific frontier which is still a problem for the British Government in India for wellnigh over a century.

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A writer in the *Cambridge History of India* remarks: ‘It is in foreign policy that we find the culmination of the Indian genius for systematic exposition, the principles being those of Machiavelli. Policy has not large aims: the mainspring is the rivalry of the kings and the much applauded desire for glory and Imperial rule’. These statements are rather misleading. In the first place, it was not Machiavellian as has been already pointed out. Secondly, the idea that the policy was imbued not with larger aims but only with rivalry and glory, cannot be accepted. The ideal was not mundane. It was something higher and nobler and consequently spiritual. Rapson says: “It was always regarded as a legitimate object of the ambition of every king to aim at the position of Cakravartin or of supreme monarch.” This ambition was legitimate and had no narrow outlook about it. It was not the exclusive privilege of this or that sovereign, but a fruit to be sought after by every one of the monarchs comprising the maṇḍala. If the king is not actuated by this idea, he falls short of an ideal king according to the Hindu Rājadharma. Samudragupta, for instance, was full of this ideal. His conquests were not waged for the sake of mere territorial ambition, but to attain the larger end, namely, the realisation of Indrahood. As has been already said, Heaven is the ultimate goal and its attainment necessitates the conquest of this earth by the Kṣatriya. In a word, conquest is a means to a greater end, namely, happiness and glory in Heaven.

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