Chandragupta Maurya and His Times c13.s2.69

c13.s2.69

No better maxims and principles can be thought of for empire-building for an emperor like Chandragupta Maurya who had to deal with so many communities of different social systems and religions making up his vast empire comprising the foreigners or *Yonas* at its north-western end and, in the rest of the empire, within India proper, peoples in different stages of social evolution from the aboriginal peoples, forest-tribes (the *Āṭavikas*) and nomads, up to the cultured classes (the *Āryas*) brought up under the *Varṇāśrama-dharma* system at the top of the social structure. It was only a wide principle of synthesis and comprehension, as enunciated by Kauṭilya for the *Digvijayī* emperor, which could accommodate within its extensive range so many differences and such a large amount of diversity so as to reconcile them in a composite whole and weld them together as parts of a common political system or empire. Kauṭilya and Chandragupta thus rank as India's first empire-builders by virtue of both sound imperial theory and practice. They founded their empire on the stable and broad basis of complete cultural freedom for all its communities, respect for their differences in language, custom, and creed, and protection of all their rights, social, religious, and linguistic, which make up communal integrity.