Chandragupta Maurya and His Times c4.6

c4.6

*Other Titles to Greatness.* We may now examine his other titles to greatness. He is the first Indian king who established his rule over an extended India, an India greater than modern British India. The boundaries of this Greater India lay far beyond the frontiers of modern India along the borders of Persia. Chandragupta is again the first of the Rulers of India to be able by his conquests to join up the valleys of the Indus and the land of the five rivers with the eastern valleys of the Ganges and the Jumna in one Empire that stretched from Aria (Herat) to Pāṭaliputra. And he is also the first Indian King who followed up this political unification of Northern India by extending his conquests beyond the barriers of the Vindhyas so as to bring both North and South under the umbrella of one paramount sovereign. Earlier in his career, he was again the first Indian leader who had to confront the distressing consequences of a European and foreign invasion of his country, the conditions of national depression and disorganisation to which it was exposed, and then to achieve the unique distinction of recovering his country's freedom from the yoke of Greek rule. It may be recalled that Alexander's invasion of India covered a period of about three years from May 327 B.C. to May 324 B.C., while it will be seen that Chandragupta was able to rid the country of all traces of Greek occupation by 323 B.C. Very few Rulers of India have to their credit the accomplishment of so much within the short time of his reign which, according to the *Purāṇas*, embraced a period of only 24 years. To crown all, Chandragupta, as the founder of the imperial Maurya dynasty, gives to India for the first time a continuous history as well as a unified history, a history affecting India as a whole, and as a unit, in the place of merely local histories involving only particular peoples and regions of India. This imperial history thus inaugurated by Chandragupta could not long survive him. It soon lost itself in local annals. The political unity of India attained under the Maurya emperors was not maintained by their successors. One political authority no longer shaped her history. India was again split up into a multitude of smaller States and Kingdoms, each having its own history.