India: A History

by John Keay

When the Buddha died (at Kushinara in the Malla republic), it was Bimbisara’s Magadha which made good its claim to most of his hotly contested relics and, immediately afterwards, it was in the Magadhan capital of Rajagriha that the first Buddhist council was convened. Magadha’s economic expansion provided a social ambience particularly favourable to Buddhism. In the wake of Magadha’s political expansion Buddhism would prevail over most of the other heterodox sects (although not brahmanical orthodoxy) and spread throughout the subcontinent.

Bimbisara had predeceased the Buddha. His long reign came to an end when Ajatashatru, one of his sons, either seized the throne and starved his father to death or was nominated his successor so that the aged Bimbisara, having renounced the throne, could starve himself to death. Both practices appear to have been standard.

As one might expect in a republic, the beautiful Amrapali (or Ambarapali) was not a princess. In fact she was a courtesan whose physical perfection and outstanding skills had secured her elevation to the status of a national asset. In other republics an elaborate beauty contest was held to select the principal courtesan, and this may also have been the case in Vaisali. But Amrapali, as befitted one of the Buddha’s most devoted future followers, was shrewd as well as comely. Though her favours were supposedly reserved exclusively for those 7707 (or ‘twice 84,000’) Licchavi ‘knights-raja’, she also wielded great political influence and became, in effect, Vaisali’s ‘first lady’. It was therefore a crushing blow to Licchavi self-esteem when it was discovered that, in the midst of desultory fighting with Magadha, the Magadhan king had entered Vaisali in disguise and, undetected, had there enjoyed a week’s dalliance in Amrapali’s delectable company. Bimbisara had to be made to pay for his indiscretion, and the Licchavis had duly multiplied their attacks on Magadhan territory.

Buddhist texts also mention that on his last journey north the Buddha, after his meeting with the king but before crossing the Ganga, passed a building site where a new Magadhan fort was being erected. The place was called Pataligrama. To it the Magadhan court would remove under Ajatashatru’s successor and, greatly extended and beautified, the city by the Ganga at what is now Patna would become, as Pataliputra, the metropolis of the Magadhan empire under the Mauryas.

Magadhan forces occupied Vaisali unopposed, the Licchavi republic was finally reduced, and the 7707 rajas were dispersed, although not eliminated. When the Second Buddhist Council was convened in Vaisali some time in the latter half of the fourth century BC the city was under Magadhan control.

The twenty-five-year-old Alexander was now master of all that had comprised the largest empire the world had yet seen – all, that is, except for its easternmost provinces, including Gandhara and ‘India’.

In Greek as in Indian tradition, Porus is all that Ambhi is not. A giant of a man, proud, fearless and majestic, he may have owed his name to Paurava descent, the Pauravas being only slightly less distinguished than the Bharatas in the pecking order of Vedic clans. Alexander had summoned him, along with other local rulers, to meet him and render tribute. Porus welcomed a meeting, adding casually that an appropriate venue would be the field of battle.

Porus, wounded but still conspicuously fighting from the largest of the elephants, was captured. ‘How did he expect to be treated?’ asked Alexander. ‘As befits a king,’ he famously replied. To the Greeks it sounded, under the circumstances, like an extraordinarily noble and fearless request. Alexander responded magnanimously, reinstating him as king and subsequently augmenting his territories.

Even to Alexander it was becoming apparent that ‘there was no end to the war as long as an enemy remained to be encountered’.

Chandragupta’s revolt must have started soon after 326 BC and have lasted three to four years, so that he then reigned from his many-pillared palace in Pataliputra from approximately 320 to 297 BC. That meant that his successor, Bindusara, ruled from 297 to 272 BC, and that Bindusara’s successor, an enigmatic figure who had yet to be clearly identified (let alone accorded universal recognition as ‘one of the greatest monarchs the world has ever seen’2), must have acceded (after a four-year interregnum) in about 268 BC.

what would make the early Mauryan empire potentially the best-documented period in the entire history of pre-Muslim India was the discovery of that classic of Indian statecraft, the immensely detailed if almost unreadable text known as the Arthasastra. For it would appear that Kautilya, the steely brahman to whom the work is credited, was none other than the instigator, operative, ideologist and chief minister of the self-same Chandragupta.

The suggestion has also been made that Chandragupta derived the very idea of an empire based on military supremacy from his observation of Alexander’s conceit.

It is therefore assumed that Chandragupta conducted a successful campaign in western India and probably also reached the Bombay region. The Mauryan empire thus became the first to stretch from sea to sea – from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea.

It may be inferred that Seleucus, like Alexander, had to fight his way forward and that, like Alexander’s men, he soon thought better of the venture. Perhaps he was roundly defeated. The terms on which he withdrew certainly suggest so.

Although Chandragupta certainly left his successor an empire which reached from Bengal to Afghanistan and Gujarat, there is no clear indication of how far south it extended. Jain tradition insists that, when he abdicated in favour of his son, Chandragupta retired to a Jain establishment in Karnataka. At Sravana Belgola, a picturesque little town nestling in the cleavage between two steeply swelling hills west of Bangalore, the emperor is said to have passed his final days in austerity and devotions.

‘Devanampiya’, meaning ‘The Beloved of the Gods’, is now thought to have been an honorific title, like ‘His Majesty’. ‘Piyadassi’ means something like ‘gracious of mien’ and may have been the name assumed when Ashoka was enthroned in C268

Not only is he said to have killed all rival claimants to the throne, notably ninety-nine of his brothers, but also to have paid a visit to hell so that he could construct on earth something similar, equipped with the very latest in instruments of exquisite torture, for all who incurred his displeasure.

If not a monster, Ashoka undoubtedly evinced the Kautilyan ruthlessness essential to gaining the throne and the Kautilyan cunning essential to retaining it.

Contrary to popular opinion, he never specifically abjures warfare, nor is there any mention of his disbanding units of the Mauryan army. This is not to say that his remorse was insincere.

However, the tradition that Ashoka actually became a Buddhist monk is now discredited. The inscriptions never mention the Buddha and show no awareness of his ‘Noble Eightfold Path’ or any other Buddhist schema.

Religion as creed, doctrine as dogma, and faith as truth are equations with little validity in pre-Islamic India.

The individual was defined purely by his relationship to the rest of society. Not doctrine but conduct was what mattered.

Pataliputra itself, according to Megasthenes, lay within a walled and heavily fortified parallelogram of roughly fifteen kilometres by two and a half; its palace rivalled that of the Achaemenids, and even in decay made such an impression on a Chinese traveller that he thought it the work of spirits.

The Greek ambassador’s enthusiasm for India’s roads is more than matched by Ashoka’s insistence in one of his Edicts that they be lined with shade trees, clearly marked with milestones, and provided with frequent wells, orchards and rest-houses.

The innovation which he pioneered of appealing across the barriers of sect, caste and kin to the community of India would be revived by a host of other reformers, not least Guru Nanak of the Sikhs and eventually Mahatma Gandhi.

The five hundred years between the Mauryas and the Guptas become, in fact, ‘India’s Dark Age’.2

the ‘Age of Invasions’ looks to have been one of expansion. For every incursion by non-Indians from central Asia, there is good evidence for an excursion by Indians into south-east Asia – or even back into central Asia.

The last Maurya was murdered and supplanted by his commander-in-chief in about 180 BC. Pushyamitra, the assassin, was a brahman; his family came from Ujjain, where they had once served in the Mauryan administration.

Perhaps, after a century of Mauryan patronage of the heterodox sects, Pushyamitra headed an orthodox brahmanical backlash. The dynasty he founded is known as the Shunga and his successors presided over a still disintegrating kingdom for about 110 years.

Much-simplified derivatives of classical Sanskrit, the Prakrit languages have sometimes been unfairly likened to pidgin; after a further stage of adaptation, they would spawn the Indo-Aryan regional languages of today – Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Panjabi, etc.

A Chandragupta had founded the Mauryan empire in C320; just so did a Chandragupta found the Gupta dynasty in C320. It could be confusing. But the first date was, of course, BC, the second AD; and to clarify matters further, the Gupta Chandragupta is often phonetically dismembered as ‘Chandra-Gupta’ or ‘Chandra Gupta’.

But unlike the directly administered empire of the Mauryas, this was at best a web of feudatory arrangements and one which, lacking an obvious bureaucratic structure, left the sovereignty of the feudatories largely intact.

In the fourth century BC the Mauryas had been able to extend their rule into politically virgin territories where state-formation, if it existed at all, had been in its infancy. Ashoka had carefully noted several foreign kings in his inscriptions but within India he found not one sovereign worthy of being so named; the ‘Cholas’ and ‘Keralaputras’ were families or clans; even Kalinga was just a place and a people. In such a vacuum, Mauryan empire had a pioneering quality and was necessarily one of agricultural settlement, administrative decree and fiscal organisation.

Six hundred years later the Guptas may have found a similar situation in Bengal and have pursued similar policies there. Elsewhere they faced more advanced opponents who were already administering their own states and taxing their own subjects. The submission of all these now carefully named and previously unconquered kings was, of course, most gratifying; ‘the Beloved of the Gods’ had been merely a raja, a ‘king’; the Guptas were maharajadhirajas, ‘kings of kings’. On the other hand they also recognised the difficulty of trying permanently to engross such distant and confident kingdoms. It was more expedi...

Chandra-Gupta II, like his predecessor Samudra-Gupta and his successor Kumara-Gupta, reigned for about forty years. Such longevity over three generations is exceptional and must have been another important factor in the stability of Gupta rule.

In fact the Guptas were the first north Indian dynasty to extend their rule into and across the heavily forested maze of swamps and waterways that was the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta.

To Fa Hian (Fa-hsien, Faxian, etc.), a Buddhist pilgrim from China who visited India in C400–410, Chandra-Gupta II’s realm was indeed something of a utopia.

In Fa Hian’s account of India, Magadha is made to sound especially impressive. Its towns were the largest and its people the richest and most prosperous as well as the most virtuous.

Ajanta more than anywhere the golden age of the Guptas is made manifest.

Gupta sculptures have been distinguished as strongly intellectual in flavour and ‘composed deliberately as aesthetic objects’.

The sculptor of the Gupta age matched mastery of his art with an astonishing maturity of vision to create ‘some of the greatest sculptures ever produced anywhere in the world’.

But only Kalidasa wrote both plays and poetry, and he did so with an excellence which, by unanimous consent, justifies the inevitable comparisons with Shakespeare.

Unfortunately all Sanskrit literature is so rich in metaphors, synonyms, allusions, double meanings and all manner of grammatical and phonetic pyrotechnics that satisfactory translation is impossible.

‘Few who can read [Kalidasa] in the original would doubt that, both as poet and as dramatist, he was one of the great men of the world.’

When and where Kalidasa lived remains a mystery. He acknowledges no links with the Guptas; he may not even have coincided with them. Familiarity with Ujjain and telling descriptions of the lush Narmada valley suggest that he belonged to Malwa rather than Magadha. Tradition insists that he adorned the court of a shadowy King Vikramaditya whom chronology assigns to the first century BC. On internal evidence, however, he seems unlikely to have preceded the Guptas; and it may be significant that Vikramaditya was also one of the many epithets used by Samudra-Gupta.

There and in Indo-China the Sanskrit inscriptions which begin to appear during the third and fourth centuries mark the beginnings of literacy, nearly all the pre-Islamic scripts of south-east Asia being derivatives of Gupta Brahmi.

The vocabulary was constant, the grammar frozen. ‘Perfected’ by Panini, elevated by all, yet spoken by few, Sanskrit was the victim of its own prestige.

Important works on astronomy and, to a lesser extent, medicine indicate that science was not neglected under the Guptas. The length of the solar year was calculated with a precision which even the Greeks had not achieved, and Indian mathematics was probably the most advanced in the world.

‘At the lower level of achievement was the perfection of the decimal system and at the higher the solution of certain indeterminate equations’; pi was correctly calculated to four decimal places, and it was also at about this time that the concept of zero made its epigraphic debut, usually in the form of a dot.

In the history of what used to be called ‘medieval’ India, the key words are ‘fragmentation’ and ‘regionalisation’.