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Magadha, Kingdom of. |
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Rise and Fall of an Empire |
Chandragupta Maurya, having established his rule in the Ganges plain and central India, lost no time in utilizing the opportunity left by Alexander in the north-west. He quickly marched towards the Indus, and with little difficulty conquered the lands of the west and Gandhara to the north. Seleucus Nicator proved a little harder to dislodge but, by 303 bc, he was defeated and pushed back westwards. The treaty with Seleucus appears to have involved a marriage alliance, and a present of 500 elephants to Seleucus (a fact noted with wonder by Plutarch) and the two leaders remained on friendly terms. Valuable descriptions of Chandragupta Maurya's court at Pataliputra are provided by Megasthenes, Seleucus's envoy. Pataliputra, the Mauryan capital, appears to have been a magnificent city, and would have been, at the time, one of the most important in the world, attracting visitors from both east and west. It was linked by a royal road following the old trade route to Takshasila (Greek, “Taxila”), in Gandhara, a centre for trade and learning which was to become increasingly important in the following centuries.
Chandragupta's son, Bindusara, extended the empire southwards down to Mysore, but it was the next king, Ashoka, who was able to take Kalinga in the east and, with treaties of friendship and cooperation with the far south (the splendour of the Mauryan army is described in Tamil literature), claim that the whole subcontinent was effectively under his control. Ashoka's extraordinary reign has been well documented, and little needs to be said in this context. The Mauryan emperors had been patrons to the religions that evolved in the Magadhan region, while also supporting the Brahmins. Ashoka, while becoming a Buddhist himself, continued to provide patronage to all religions. His approach of dhamma (Sanskrit, “dharma”) led to his many public works, such as the building of hospitals and shady resting places along the trade routes. This was quite against the policies given in the Arthashastra, as such actions did not provide any revenue for the state, and indicate how far the form and function of the state moved away from its Kautilyan roots in Ashoka's time. Quite apart from the principles that Ashoka brought into his rule, the sheer size and scale of the empire was severely testing the highly centralized methods of the state—it was proving unviable to run such far-flung areas effectively without some devolution of power to local agents. Ashoka himself toured the lands regularly, establishing a personal link with the people that helped to keep the empire together. Other weaknesses were also apparent, however. The Kautilyan state relied upon a web of secret agents: not a policy that is likely to succeed in the long run, particularly as the size of the empire increased. The army was expensive, and the reliance on a successful agrarian economy to provide the basis of revenue was also stretched by the inclusion of lands less efficiently farmed. Soon after Ashoka's death in 232 bc, the empire collapsed, although Magadha and surrounding areas remained in Mauryan hands until close to the end of the century.
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