THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRES
THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRES
The foundation of the Maurya empire
Alexander’s campaign probably made an indirect impact on the further
political development of India. Not much is known about the antecedents
of Chandragupta Maurya, but it is said that he began his military career by
fighting against the outposts which Alexander had left along the river
Indus. How he managed to get from there to Magadha and how he seized
power from the last Nanda emperor remains obscure. Indian sources,
especially the famous play Mudrarakshasa, give the credit for
Chandragupta’s rise to his political advisor, the cunning Brahmin Kautalya,
author of the Arthashastra.
At any rate Chandragupta seems to have usurped the throne of
Magadha in 320 BC. He used the subsequent years for the consolidation of
his hold on the army and administration of this empire. There are no
reports of his leading any military campaigns in this period. But in 305 BC
Seleukos Nikator, who had emerged as the ruler of the eastern part of
Alexander’s vast domain, crossed the Hindukush mountains in order to
claim Alexander’s heritage in India. Chandragupta met him at the head of
a large army in the Panjab and stopped his march east. In the subsequent
peace treaty Seleukos ceded to Chandragupta all territories to the east of
Kabul as well as Baluchistan. The frontier of the Maurya empire was thus
more or less the same as that of the Mughal empire at the height of its
power about 2,000 years later. Chandragupta’s gift of 500 war elephants
appears to be modest in view of this enormous territorial gain. But this
Indian military aid is supposed to have helped Seleukos to defeat his
western neighbour and rival, Antigonos, in a decisive battle some four
years later.
European knowledge about India was greatly enhanced by the reports
which Seleukos’ ambassador, Megasthenes, prepared while he was in
Pataliputra at Chandragupta’s court. The originals have been lost but
several classical authors have quoted long passages from Megasthenes’
work and, therefore, we know a good deal about what he saw while he
was there. Two parts of his report have attracted special attention: his
description of the imperial capital, Pataliputra, and his account of the
seven strata of Indian society which he observed there.
He reported that Pataliputra was fortified with palisades. This
fortification was shaped like a parallelogram measuring about 9 miles in
length and about 1.5 miles in breadth and it had 570 towers and 64 gates.
The circumference of Pataliputra was about 21 miles and thus this city was
about twice as large as Rome under Emperor Marcus Aurelius. If this
report is true, Pataliputra must have been the largest city of the ancient
world. There was an impression that Megasthenes may have exaggerated
the size of the capital to which he was an ambassador in order to enhance
his own importance. But the German Indologist D.Schlingloff has shown
that the distances between the towers or between a tower and the next gate
as derived from Megasthenes’ account closely correspond to the distance
prescribed for this kind of fortification in Kautalya’s Arthashastra (i.e. 54
yards).
Megasthenes’ description of the society of Magadha seems to be equally
accurate. As the first estate, he mentioned the philosophers, by which he
obviously means the Brahmins. The second estate was that of the
agriculturists. According to Megasthenes, they were exempt from service in
the army and from any other similar obligations to the state. No enemy
would do harm to an agriculturist tilling his fields. For their fields they
paid a rent to the king because ‘in India all land belongs to the king and no private person is permitted to own land. In addition to this general rent
they give one quarter of their produce to the state’. Megasthenes then
named the herdsmen who lived outside the villages, then the traders and
artisans ‘who get their food from the royal storage’. The fifth estate were
the soldiers who, like the war horses and war elephants, also got their food
from the royal storage. The sixth estate was that of the inspectors and spies
who reported everything to the emperor. The seventh estate was that of the
advisors and officers of the king who looked after the administration, the
law courts, etc., of the empire.
Although these seven social strata were not listed in any Indian text in
this fashion (which does not seem to pay attention to any hierarchical
order), there are references to each of them in Indian texts, too. The
general impression we get from Megasthenes’ report is that of a centrally
administered, well-organised state. Of special interest are his categorical
assertions that all land belonged to the emperor, that artisans and soldiers
were supported directly by the state and that spies reported on everything
that went on in the empire. Perhaps these observations were applicable
only to the capital and its immediate hinterland which was the area which
Megasthenes knew well. But Kautalya’s famous account of the proper
organisation of an empire also talks about espionage.
The political system of the Arthashastra
The Arthashastra which is attributed to Kautalya, the Prime Minister and
chief advisor of Chandragupta, provides an even more coherent picture of
a centrally administered empire in which public life and the economy are
controlled by the ruler. Ever since this ancient text was rediscovered and
published in the year 1909 scholars have tried to interpret this text as an
accurate description of Chandragupta’s system of government. There is a
consensus that Kautalya was the main author of this famous text and that
he lived around 300 BC, but it is also accepted that parts of this text are
later additions and revisions, some of which may have been made as late as
AD 300.
Kautalya depicts a situation in which several small rival kingdoms each
have a chance of gaining supremacy over the others if the respective ruler
follows the instructions given by Kautalya. In ancient Indian history the
period which corresponds most closely to Kautalya’s description is that of
the mahajanapadas before Magadha attained supremacy. Thus it seems
more likely that Kautalya related in normative terms what he had come to
know about this earlier period than that his account actually reflected the
structure of the Mauryan empire during Chandragupta’s reign. Thus the
Arthashastra should not be regarded as a source for the study of the
history of the empire only but also for the history of state formation in the
immediately preceding period. The relevance of the Arthashastra for medieval Indian politics is that the coexistence of various smaller rival
kingdoms was much more typical for most periods of Indian history than
the rather exceptional phase when one great empire completely dominated
the political scene.
The central idea of Kautalya’s precept (shastra) was the prosperity
(artha) of king and country. The king who strove for victory (vijigishu) was
at the centre of a circle of states (mandala) in which the neighbour was the
natural enemy (ari) and the more distant neighbour of this neighbour
(enemy of the enemy) was the natural friend (mitra). This pattern of the
rajamandala repeated itself in concentric circles of enemies and friends. But
there were certain important exceptions: there was the middle king
(madhyama) who was powerful enough that he could either maintain
armed neutrality in a conflict of his neighbours or decide the battle by
supporting one side or the other, and finally there was the great outsider
(udashina) whose actions were not predictable because he did not belong
to one of these power circles but was able to interfere with it. He was to be
carefully watched.
