The Maurya Empire and Ashoka's Legacy

Reference library · 1025 words

The Maurya empire was the first state to bring most of the Indian subcontinent under a single administration. It was founded around 321 BCE by Chandragupta Maurya, who overthrew the Nanda dynasty ruling the kingdom of Magadha from Pataliputra, the city on the Ganga where modern Patna stands. Within two generations it stretched from the Hindu Kush to the Bay of Bengal and south into the Deccan, leaving only the far south of the peninsula outside its reach. It lasted roughly a century and a half, and its third ruler, Ashoka, produced the earliest deciphered writing in India and one of the most unusual documents any ancient ruler has left behind.

Chandragupta's rise happened in the wake of Alexander's campaign in the north west, which had destabilised the region without establishing durable rule. Tradition credits his success to the counsel of a brahmin adviser variously called Chanakya or Kautilya, associated with the Arthashastra, a manual of statecraft covering taxation, espionage, agriculture, law, diplomacy and war with a coldly practical eye that has invited comparison with Machiavelli. The text was lost for centuries and rediscovered when a manuscript was handed to the librarian R Shamasastry in Mysore in the early twentieth century; he published it in 1909. Scholars now generally think it was compiled and revised over a long period rather than written by a single minister, so it should be read as evidence for Indian political thought broadly rather than as a transcript of Mauryan practice. Around 303 BCE Chandragupta concluded a treaty with Seleucus Nicator, Alexander's successor in the east, gaining territory in the north west in exchange for war elephants, and Seleucus sent an ambassador, Megasthenes, whose account of India survives only in quotations by later Greek writers. Chandragupta was succeeded by his son Bindusara, and Bindusara around 268 BCE by Ashoka.

The edicts and what they say

What we know about Ashoka comes above all from his own inscriptions, carved on polished rock faces and on freestanding sandstone pillars and distributed from Afghanistan to Karnataka and from Gujarat to Odisha. They are written mostly in Prakrit, the everyday spoken language, in the Brahmi script, with Kharosthi used in the north west and Greek and Aramaic versions at Kandahar, evidently for populations left over from the Hellenistic presence. This is a striking choice: an emperor addressing subjects in languages they actually spoke, rather than in Sanskrit.

The most famous is the thirteenth major rock edict, which describes the conquest of Kalinga, in modern Odisha, around 261 BCE. It records enormous numbers deported, killed and dead of other causes, and then states that the king felt remorse, that the suffering of the conquered weighed on him, and that he had turned to dhamma. What Ashoka meant by dhamma is disputed. It plainly overlaps with Buddhist ethics, and other inscriptions confirm he was a lay Buddhist, visited Buddhist sites and intervened in disputes within the monastic order. But the edicts as a public programme read less like sectarian preaching than like a civic ethic for a plural empire: respect for parents and elders, generosity to renunciants of all sects, restraint in speech about other people's religions, kindness to servants and to animals, restrictions on animal slaughter, and the planting of shade trees, wells and rest houses along roads. He appointed a class of officials called dhamma mahamatras to promote these principles and to inspect the conduct of administration.

The edicts were unreadable for well over a thousand years, because knowledge of Brahmi had been lost. They were deciphered by James Prinsep, an assay master at the Calcutta mint and secretary of the Asiatic Society, who worked out the script in 1837 by comparing repeated donative formulas on the railings at Sanchi. The inscriptions name their author as Devanampiya Piyadasi, beloved of the gods, of gracious mien, and the identification of this figure with the Ashoka of Buddhist chronicles rested on inference until a version of a minor rock edict found at Maski in 1915 used the name Ashoka directly.

Administration, collapse and afterlife

The empire was governed from Pataliputra through provincial capitals at Taxila, Ujjain, Tosali and Suvarnagiri, often under princes of the royal house, with officials called rajukas responsible for districts and mahamatras for a range of duties. Revenue came chiefly from land, supplemented by state control of mines, forests and some manufactures. It is easy to overstate the uniformity of the system: much of the empire's territory was forested or thinly settled, control likely varied from direct administration around the Ganga plain to loose tributary relations further out, and the concentration of Ashokan inscriptions along routes suggests the state was strongest along its arteries.

Decline came quickly after Ashoka's death around 232 BCE. The reasons are unclear and were long attributed to the debilitating effects of Ashoka's pacifism, an explanation few historians now accept; succession disputes, the cost of a large administration, fiscal strain and the difficulty of holding a sprawling territory together are the likelier factors. The last Mauryan ruler, Brihadratha, was assassinated around 185 BCE by his commander in chief Pushyamitra, who founded the Shunga dynasty.

The afterlife has been more durable than the empire. Ashoka was largely forgotten in India, remembered chiefly in Sri Lankan and Southeast Asian Buddhist chronicles, until nineteenth century archaeology and philology restored him. He then became extraordinarily useful to modern India. When the republic chose its symbols, it took as the state emblem the lion capital that once crowned Ashoka's pillar at Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first sermon, and placed the wheel from that capital at the centre of the national flag. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote about him admiringly, and the appeal is obvious for a state defining itself as secular, plural and non-aligned: an ancient Indian emperor who renounced conquest, told his subjects to honour one another's beliefs, and built hospitals for animals. Historians such as Romila Thapar have cautioned against reading a modern liberal into a third century BCE monarch who never abolished the death penalty and reminded forest peoples plainly of his power to punish. Both things are true, and the tension is part of what makes the inscriptions worth reading.

Back to the library