Watch all episodes here: 1. A Brief History of a Civilisation and Why We Need to Know it | 2. The Aryans and the Vedic Age | 3. The Mauryans and Megasthenes | 4. The Ikshvakus of Andhra Pradesh. | 5. Nalanda and the Decline of Buddhism | 6. Khajuraho and the World of Tantra | 7. Alberuni and Marco Polo in India | 8. The Vijayanagar Empire | 9. The Mughals and Bernier | 10. The Faiths of Varanasi.
In 327 BCE, the Greek warrior Alexander of Macedon invaded the Punjab. He was forced to turn back after his army suffered heavy losses in fighting Porus. Soon after, the Greek-ruled Seleucid Empire arose west of the Punjab, and the Mauryan Empire to its east, with its capital in Pataliputra. This produced a freer flow of ideas between India and Greece, as in science, art, and philosophy—and a fascinating account of India by Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan court. Megasthenes described the huge city of Pataliputra, its wooden homes, walls, and watchtowers; its bureaucracy, taxation and laws; its giant army; urban lifestyles, elite fashions and social norms. He noticed the emergence of endogamy and early castes in the Aryanized groups around him, and he saw Brahminism as more patriarchal than Buddhism.
Two generations later came Ashoka who presided over an expanding agricultural state, often at the expense of the forest peoples. Still, his public embrace of non-violence in midlife was significant and likely unique among the world’s emperors. He converted to Buddhism and sent missions to spread it far and wide. His public edicts can be seen as the earliest expressions of Indian secularism, in which the state attempts to fairly patronize all major religions. From the Mauryan period, we get monumental stone art and stunning sculpture, such as of Sanchi and Bharhut stupas, some with clear continuities with pre-Aryan forms and aesthetics.
Full transcript
Hello and welcome to Indians. I’m Namit Arora.
In the previous episode we looked at the coming of the Aryans and the Vedic Age. After centuries of ethnic mixing and migration, Indians once again developed a taste for cities and urban life, around 2500 years ago. It produced a new age of social, intellectual, and religious innovation, and major cultural milestones like the Upanishads, the Buddha, Mahavira, the Carvakas, Panini, and more.
Alexander’s Invasion
Shortly after this came a major new force—the Greek invasion of the Punjab in 326 BCE. It was led by Alexander the Great, who came down the Khyber Pass with his army of 50,000 seasoned warriors. As he entered modern day Pakistan, king Ambhi of Taxila saw the writing on the wall and promptly surrendered. But another king challenged Alexander. His name, Porus, appears only in Greek sources. They fought a huge war by the river Jhelum. Alexander defeated Porus but suffered heavy losses. Impressed by Porus’s bravery and dignity in defeat, Alexander restored his kingdom to him.
This encounter between Porus and Alexander, who is also known as Sikandar in India, has been depicted in Hindi cinema twice, in the films Sikandar in 1941 and Sikandar-e-Azam in 1965. They captured the imagination of Indians by projecting modern nationalist passions into ancient settings: Porus was turned into a patriot defending Bharat mata, and Ambhi was declared a traitor. They’re best seen today as unintentional comedies.
Even though his army had shrunk, Alexander wanted to keep going all the way to the Ganga, but his troops rebelled. They had heard rumours of the Nanda Empire’s massive army. So Alexander reluctantly turned back from what is now Amritsar, and died on his way back to Greece. He was only in his early 30s. After his death, his generals fought each other for territorial control, and set up independent kingdoms and empires of their own.
Chanakya and Chandraguptra Maurya
A few years after Alexander’s death, two people in the northwest got together. The first was a Brahmin called Chanakya, variously described as brilliant, ruthless, and devious. The second was an ambitious warrior called Chandragupta Maurya. Historical sources ascribe “humble origins” to Chandragupta, suggesting that he may have been a Shudra. The two men forged alliances with other kings, assembled a large army, and fought a brutal war with the Nanda king, who ruled from Pataliputra, near Patna. Chandragupta won the war and established the Mauryan Empire, with its capital also at Pataliputra.
Megasthenes, the Ambassador
When the dust settled, to the west of the Mauryan Empire was the Seleucid Empire, stretching from Afghanistan to Turkey. The Seleucid emperor, Seleucus Nicator, was Greek. As part of a peace treaty with Chandragupta, he offered his daughter, Helena, in marriage. Chandragupta sent back 500 elephants as a gift. Seleucus also sent Megasthenes as his ambassador to Chandragupta’s court.
Megasthenes has left behind a fascinating account of his time in India, even though parts of it are unreliable and seem outlandish. That’s because he seems to have written down both what he saw and what he heard. Sometimes he uncritically recorded tall tales that his native informants told him. Among these are absurd stories of people with bizarre physical features, like earlobes stretching down to their feet, men with only one eye on their foreheads, and so on. Megasthenes is much better on Pataliputra, where he stayed for at least a couple of years, around 300 BCE. This part of his account is based more on his direct observation and experience.
Mauryan Empire According to Megasthenes
So what did Megasthenes observe? He wrote that Pataliputra was a giant city located by the Ganga. It extended 15 km along the riverfront and 3 km inland. Its size and population made it the largest city in the world. That’s not very surprising—India had a relatively large population even back then, thanks to its fertile plains, abundant rivers, and warm climate. Some estimates say the subcontinent then had about 30 million people. It then had a larger share of the global population than it does today.
But here is an amazing factoid. Just since the Mauryan period, India’s population has grown SEVENTY times! Seventy times in about two thousand years. Imagine how empty it must have felt back then. It’s like the Mauryans lived in a different country.
Megasthenes tells us that much of Pataliputra, including the king’s palace, was made of wood. This was not uncommon then for Indian cities located on floodplains. The city was surrounded by wooden walls and a moat. It had 570 watch towers, and 64 gates—averaging one gate every half a km. Archaeologists have found fragments of its wooden walls and a pillared hall of polished stone. But much of ancient Pataliputra is likely still beneath modern Patna—including what post-Mauryan dynasties later built in brick and stone.
With the Mauryan empire, we see the rise of the bureaucratic state, with officers in charge of trade, taxation, roads, markets, births and deaths, population census, and so on. They catalogued people based on their occupations and taxed them differently. What’s not clear is how far the state’s bureaucratic reach extended. The Mauryan Empire is conventionally shown as covering a huge area, but it included large autonomous regions where the reach of the state did not extend at all. Its actual sphere of influence may have been even smaller than in the map you see on the screen. It was likely based around a few urban centres in the subcontinent, such as Magadh, Gandhara, and Avanti. Much of India back then was forest land, where the locals hardly produced any surplus that an empire would want to control or tax. So it’s good to be sceptical of such evenly coloured maps of territorial unity or control.
In its urban zones, the Mauryan state was definitely a force to reckon with. It apparently had some aspects of the coercive authority and the surveillance regime described in the Arthashastra. This is a treatise on political statecraft attributed to Kautilya, who is often incorrectly equated with Chanakya. It was the work of multiple authors over centuries and is easily the most important work of political thought in ancient India, comparable to Aristotle’s Politics.
The Mauryan standing army was the largest India had ever seen. Megasthenes noticed that when the men of the army were not serving, ‘they spent their time in idleness and drinking bouts at the expense of the royal treasury.’
The land was fertile and enabled two harvests a year. People looked well fed, had a ‘proud bearing’ and were ‘well skilled in the arts.’ Theft was rare in Pataliputra. People often left their homes unguarded when they stepped out. Rich people wore expensive ornaments and fine cotton robes studded with gold work and precious stones. Polygamy, the practice of having more than one wife, was common in the upper class. Prostitution was legal; women in the profession were taxed and the state punished those who harmed them. Prostitution as a legal and taxable profession would remain common in Indian civilization. Many other foreign travellers noticed and wrote about it, as we’ll see in future episodes.
The Mauryans built a road between Pataliputra and Taxila, a precursor to the Grand Trunk Road. A significant proportion of their trade and transportation also happened on rivers. But much of the Mauryan state’s revenue was tied to land, not so much to trade. Megasthenes wrote that people could not buy or sell land. Why? Because all land belonged to the crown. People could use the land but not own it. This would remain the dominant system in India through ancient and medieval times, with some variants and exceptions around religious land grants. Farmers typically paid a land use tax plus a produce tax. In Mauryan times, farmers paid 25% of their produce to the king, plus a sales tax of 10%. Tax dodgers were severely punished.
But Brahmins and Buddhist monks had worked out a sweet deal—they were exempt from all taxes, whatever their income! This tax break to the priestly class would also become a persistent feature of Indian society.
Megasthenes on the Animals of India
Megasthenes took great interest in the land animals and birds of India. He was Greek so elephants were especially exotic to him, and he was fascinated by them. He saw them often because the giant army of the Mauryan state had lots of elephants. He studied them carefully … how they are captured, domesticated, used in war, and how their injuries are healed. He also wrote about a very interesting custom: When an elephant got angry, the Mauryans sang and played music before it to calm it down. Very much like the music therapy that’s offered nowadays in elephant sanctuaries in some parts of the world. Megasthenes also marvelled at parrots who would become, he wrote, ‘as talkative as children’.
Caste and Patriarchy as seen by Megasthenes
Megasthenes noticed a peculiar kind of social hierarchy in India, in which endogamous groups were seen as high and low—especially among the speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, or Prakrits. He wrote, ‘No one is allowed to marry out of his own group … or to exercise any calling or art except his own: for instance, a soldier cannot become a herder, or an artisan a philosopher.’ Clearly, this was not a free-wheeling division of labour but a division of labourers. What he had observed were not mere social classes but early castes. The spread of caste consciousness and patriarchy was then intimately tied to the spread of Indo-Aryan culture, and it was common enough in urban centres.
Already in 300 BCE, Megasthenes had observed that Brahmin men guarded their religious knowledge and did not share it with men of other castes, or with women—not even their own wives! What the ambassador had observed was very real. A stark patriarchy is plainly evident even in the Brahminical texts whose early versions were being written at this time, such as the Manusmriti and Arthashastra. These texts demanded chastity from women and total obedience to their husbands. Women were largely relegated to domestic and maternal roles. But while Brahminical society created such restrictions on women, Megasthenes observed that women were free to pursue philosophy with the Sramanas, which included the Buddhists, Jains, Ajivikas, and others.
It’s fair to say that in Mauryan times, Brahminism had already become the leading driver of patriarchy in the subcontinent. And it was about to get a lot worse as endogamy spread. Upper-caste women had it worse because their sexuality had to be more strictly controlled to maintain the sanctity of caste and ‘purity of blood’. Even the roots of child marriage and the prohibition on widow remarriage lie in the peculiar logic of caste and endogamy. In the 3rd century BCE, all this was still in its infancy and affected only a small minority in the subcontinent, but it would steadily gather steam in the centuries ahead.
Indo-Greek Cultural Exchanges
After Alexander, there was a freer flow of ideas between East and West. Indians gained in science—such as astronomy—and in the arts, especially with the syncretic Greco-Buddhist art of the Gandhara school. In return, Indian philosophy influenced many schools of Greek philosophy, such as Neoplatonism, Stoicism, and Pyrrhonism, which was a school of philosophical scepticism that rejected dogma. The sceptical tradition was not only alive and well in India, it was even inspiring sceptics in Greece!
Emperor Ashoka
Three decades after Megasthenes, Ashoka became the Mauryan emperor. His story is now well known, but for centuries, Indians had completely forgotten him. His story was recovered through archaeology and non-Indian texts in modern times. As with so much of our history, it’s probably best NOT to rely much on Bollywood to understand Ashoka’s life and times.
We now know that after a brutal war with Kalinga, Ashoka was pained by the suffering he had caused. His remorse led him to embrace Buddhism and its doctrines of nonviolence and compassion. By then, Buddhism had acquired a large urban following, though both Buddhism & Brahminism were still minority religions in the Subcontinent. That’s because most people still followed their animistic faiths and worshipped animals, trees, spirits, ancestors, and highly localised divinities of fertility, harvests, health, and so on.
But Ashoka’s urban subjects cared a great deal for Buddhism. So it was not a radical move for Ashoka to convert to Buddhism, or to send missions to spread it across India and beyond. Unlike Brahminism, Buddhism was a missionary religion equally open to all people. It devalued social hierarchies and held that everyone in the community had the same potential for spiritual attainment. At least in this respect, Buddhism was like Christianity and Islam, and this helped it gain followers across Asia.
What Ashoka’s Edicts Reveal
Ashoka’s edicts reveal his benevolent yet stern paternalism. ‘All men are my children,’ he said. He urged them to lead pious, gentle, and virtuous lives. A politician saying such things today may seem to us overbearing, but that’s a quibble. Ashoka’s personal inner transformation was rather impressive. He gave up armed conquest as part of his turn to nonviolence. He gave up hunting. He drastically cut down the killing of animals in his royal kitchen. He also made laws to reduce animal sacrifices, presumably by the Brahmins. He focused more on social welfare, as in building hospitals, tree-lined roads, and wells. He even made the treatment of prisoners more humane. Ashoka’s public embrace of non-violence was significant and likely unique among the world’s emperors.
Some scholars believe that even Arjuna’s reluctance to join the war in the Mahabharata was a plot twist inspired by Ashoka. That’s quite plausible. Arjuna expresses his moral doubts about the war in the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita is of course a much later addition to the Mahabharata. It’s almost as if, after Ashoka, the Brahminical class had to find retroactive justification for a war that also led to massive death and suffering in the epic. That justification is what Krishna tries to provide in the Gita, in contrast to the moral ambiguities about the war in the rest of the epic.
Having said that, we ought to keep things in perspective about Ashoka. There were surely gaps between his pronouncements and his practices. After all, he continued to maintain his armies, because can you run the business of empire without unnecessary violence? The empire had to grow by clearing forests for agriculture. Resistance and rivals had to be crushed. His rock edict #13 even issued a stern warning to the Adivasis of his day, asking them to behave or else be killed. These non-agricultural forest tribes were now part of a long and losing battle against expanding agricultural states in India.
Ashokan ‘Secularism’
Ashoka is interesting in another way. His public edicts can be called the earliest expressions of Indian secularism. In one edict, Ashoka claimed that he ‘honours all sects and both ascetics and laymen, with gifts and various forms of recognition.’ He also said that anyone who glorifies his own faith at the expense of other faiths only damages his own. True religious merit, he said, comes from harmonious coexistence with people of other faiths. This sentiment is in line with what would later become the Indian ideal of secularism, in which the state does not separate itself from religion but attempts to patronise all major religions. Ashoka promoted this idea of an inclusive and secular state, long before the term ‘Indian secularism’ came into being. Even for a small sect like that of the Ajivikas, he built the Barabar Hill Caves. In fact, Indian rulers have a long history of patronising multiple faiths—such as Ashoka, Kanishka, the Guptas, Harsha, the Palas, Akbar, and others. There are also counter examples.
The Rise of Monumental Art
It’s only from the Mauryan period in Indian history that we get monumental art and stunning sculpture. Examples here include the magnificent Sanchi Stupa, commissioned by Ashoka himself and augmented by others after him. Its intricate carvings include scenes of urban life, foreign visitors, animals, jataka tales, stories from the Buddha’s life, and much else. One can also see continuities with the art of the Harappans. The stupa’s beautiful art includes this dangling yakshi, with the same sort of mekhala belt around her hips that we saw in the Harappan female figurines. Many exquisite yakshi sculptures have been found, which seem to amplify the Harappan taste for curvaceous bodies. We see tantalising continuities in jewellery, ornaments, and headdresses. The origins of these voluptuous yakshis lay neither in Vedic Brahminism nor in Buddhism, but in folk religious cultures outside them both. In fact, they were mostly rooted in non-Aryan belief systems. They represented popular goddesses of prosperity and fertility, such as Sri. Including such iconography on their religious monuments was a clever move. It made this new thing called Buddhism more palatable to the wider public.
Ashoka’s edicts on rock surfaces and sandstone pillars appeared throughout his empire. They were written in various Prakrits, and in Greek and Aramaic in the northwest. His officials probably read it aloud to a public that was still largely illiterate. One fine specimen is the lion capital at Sarnath, now the national emblem of the Republic of India. I also love this head of a suave looking gent from the 3rd century BCE. I like his sardonic smile. Who knows, perhaps he belonged to a society of sceptics that may have inspired the Greeks.
Finally, this folk goddess figurine from the Mauryan era reminds us of Harappan figurines like this one, with their ornate headdresses and ornaments. This clearly shows continuities in artistic tastes and conventions.
After the Mauryas
After Ashoka, the Mauryan empire would fragment and shrink. The last of the Mauryas was murdered by an overzealous Brahmin named Pushyamitra, who was a Mauryan official. He then founded the Shunga Empire in Pataliputra. Scholars think that this was an orthodox Brahminical backlash to Mauryan rule. Pushyamitra hated Mauryan support for Buddhism, and he even persecuted Buddhists.
A fair bit of art from this period has survived. The eastern edges of the Shunga empire, where Indo-Aryan influence was weak, have left behind some remarkable art. Here are some examples from Bengal. They very much reveal a non-Aryan aesthetic of the human body and sexuality. We can see a new kind of realism and emotion in this art, and women are prominent in it. The subject matter is often secular, containing scenes from ordinary life. Amorous couples have started appearing on terracotta plaques. There is also some erotica from this period in Bengal that significantly predates later developments in other parts of India. At this stage, it’s not yet on the walls of temples or stupas but on small personal terracotta objects, such as plaques, vases, and other decorative art. These centuries also saw the maturation of the Jataka tales and the fables of the Panchatantra, Patanjali’s yoga sutras, Tamil Sangam poetry, and more.
In the northwest, the Indo-Greek states were replaced by the Sakas and then the Kushans, one of whose kings was the famous Kanishka. The sculpture of the Gandhara school, with its sublime Indo-Greek aesthetic, is perhaps the most visible legacy of this period. By then the Mathura school of art was also producing beautiful statues in its typical red sandstone. Some of the architectural marvels from these centuries include the Bharhut and Amravati stupas, and the many elaborate rock-cut caves of the Buddhists and Jains. On the social front, ideas of ritual purity and pollution, high and low caste, are evident in the literature of the period. The still evolving epics also embrace them. Many texts speak of despised jatis like chandalas, and of others involved in physical work like cleaning, basket making, hunting, fishing, and so on. A new hierarchical social order is well underway.
In the next episode, I’ll turn my attention to south India. After the Mauryas, the big political entity there was the Satavahana Empire, alongside many smaller kingdoms. I’ll focus on the remarkable Ikshvaku kingdom and its capital city of Vijayapuri, located near Nagarjunakonda in Andhra Pradesh. See you next time!
Bibliography/further readings
- Allen, Charles, Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor, Abacus, 2013
- Dahlaquist, Allan, Megasthenes and Indian Religion: A Study in Motives and Types, Motilal Banarsidass, 1996
- Evans, James, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, OUP, 1998
- Keay, John, India: A History, Harper Collins Publishers, 2000
- Kulke, Hermann, Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India, Psychology Press, 2004
- McCrindle, J.W. (Translator), ‘Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian: A Translation of Fragments of Indika of Megasthenes Collected by Dr. Schwanbeck, and of the First Part of Indika of Arrian’, Trubner and Co., 1877
- Muhlberger, Steve, ‘Democracy in Ancient India,’ 1988
- Olivelle, Patrick and M. McClish (Eds.), The Arthaśāstra: Selections from the Classic Indian Work on Statecraft, Hackett Publishing, 2012
- Sen, Amartya, The Argumentative Indian, Penguin, 2006
- Sen, Sudipta, Ganga: The Many Pasts of a River, Gurgaon, Viking, 2019
- Singh, Upinder, Ancient India: Culture of Contradictions, Aleph Book Company, 2021
- Singh, Upinder, Political Violence in Ancient India, Harvard University Press, 2017
- Thapar, Romila, Early India, Penguin Books, 2002
- Thapar, Romila, The Past as Present, Aleph Book Company, 2013
