War in Ancient India c11.s1.3

c11.s1.3

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.