Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  That Chandragupta was a horseman of the Vaisya caste3 is supported by the story that his mother placed him in the care of a cattle herdsman, where he was spotted by Chanakya, who set about moulding him very much as the great Aristotle taught the young Alexander of Macedon. It is a remarkable coincidence that two of the ancient world’s most powerful men should have received their education at more or less the same time at the hands of two of the ancient world’s greatest thinkers. But Alexander soon abandoned his Aristotelian ethics, whereas Chandragupta never shook off his teacher until he abdicated as ruler of Magadha. Chanakya seems to have clung to him like a leech, remaining at his elbow even after Chandragupta had become the most powerful man that India had ever known, providing the guiding hand and the restraining influence that prevented power going to his protégé’s head.

  All the Indian records agree that Chanakya secured the removal of the last of the Nanda line and replaced him with Chandragupta, the Moon-Protected. The Greeks tell us only that Chandragupta fought his way to power, initially as the leader of a mercenary rebellion against their Greek patrons, but there is no reason to doubt that this was achieved with Chanakya as his strategic advisor. That Chanakya afterwards felt secure enough to write his Treatise on State Economy is the best possible proof that this primer grew out of his own experience of grooming Chandragupta and then guiding his ascent – a training that almost certainly began at Chanakya’s old alma mater of Taxila.

  His training over, the teenage Chandragupta then put Chanakya’s teaching into practice, accomplished with such dash that he was soon commanding a band of mercenaries, first offering his services to Bessos, satrap of Bactria, before switching sides to join the advancing Alexander the Great. According to the Greeks, Chandragupta was a stripling when he met Alexander but it is hard to believe that so experienced a warrior could then have been any younger than seventeen, which would put his year of birth at or around 343 BCE, making him thirteen years younger than Alexander.

  Alexander knew him as Sisikottos – Sashigupta, the Moon-Protected – Indian mercenary and leader of cavalry. And as Sashigupta, the young Chandragupta played a key role in Alexander’s subjugation of Chandragupta’s own mountain people, helping the Greeks conquer his former homeland in return for the governorship of Mount Aornos (Mahabun). As Meroes ‘the mountain man’, Chandragupta further justified Alexander’s faith in him by bringing King Poros over to Alexander’s side. He stayed his hand until Alexander and his army had moved down the Indus but may well have been implicated in the murder of Alexander’s governor Philippos. By the time Eudemos took over, Chandragupta appears to have united the local tribes, forming an alliance with King Parvataka of Himavatkuta, probably Kashmir.

  The Greek accounts date their withdrawal as completed in 317 BCE, but the evidence points to the loss of all Greek territory east of the Indus within a year or two of Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, at which point Chandragupta can have been no more than twenty-two. With Chanakya as his charioteer – surely a metaphor for guide and mentor – he attempted a lightning strike against Dhana Nanda and was soundly defeated. Then comes the popular story of the demoralised Chandragupta overhearing a woman admonish her son for eating only the centre of a hot chapatti and throwing away the rest. Whether a chapatti was involved or not, Chandragupta and Chanakya abandoned direct confrontation in favour of diplomacy. Virtually all the peoples listed in the Mudrarakshasa as joining Chandragupta as his allies – the Yavanas (Greeks), Sacas (Scythians), Cambojans (Kambojans of Gandhara) and Ciratas (Nepalese or Kashmiris) – came from the Indian north-west or beyond, greatly strengthening the case for this being the young man’s homeland.

  The subsequent defeat of Dhana Nanda left Chandragupta and his principal ally Parvataka as undisputed rulers of northern India. Both took daughters of the defeated Nanda king as their trophy wives, only for Parvataka to be poisoned: ‘Thereafter the Himalayan chief died’, declares The Lives of the Jain Elders, ‘and the whole empire passed intact to Chandragupta. Thus Chandragupta became king 155 years after the Mukti [final liberation] of Sri Mahavira [founder of Jainism].’4 The Jain belief is that Mahavira died in the year 527 BCE but scholarly opinion regards that date as too early by half a century, giving a date of about 322 BCE for Chandragupta’s anointing as king of Magadha. He adopted the epithet of Priyadasi, or ‘Beloved-of-the-Gods’, in recognition of the good fortune that had accompanied his rapid rise to power.5

  Parvataka’s death left Chandragupta undisputed master of northern India and with a vast standing army. He absorbed his deceased ally’s territories to the north and acquired further kingdoms to the south of the Vindhya mountain range, stopping short of modern Karnataka, the country to which he later retired to die.

  For the duration of his twenty-four-year reign Chandragupta’s army remained invincible, so that when in 305 BCE Seleukos the Victor, the new ruler of Babylon and Persia, took it into his head to reclaim Alexander’s lost Greek territories east of the Indus, Chandragupta repulsed his forces with ease, launching a counter-attack that drove Seleukos back across the Indus and deep into his own lands. Chandragupta was then wise enough to call a halt, no doubt on the advice of Chanakya – who devotes an entire chapter in his Treatise on State Economy on how to deal with a powerful enemy and how to respond to overtures of peace. The outcome was an unequal treaty that required Seleukos to give up Gandhara south of the Hindu Kush mountain range, including what is now modern Kabul, Ghazni, Kandahar, Herat and Baluchistan. In return, Chandragupta handed over five hundred war elephants and their drivers; a calculated act of friendship since there is evidence that the gifted pachyderms were past their sell-by date. Even so, their arrival gave Seleukos a decisive advantage in his struggles against his fellow Successors. At least four hundred Indian elephants took part in the battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE, which resulted in Alexander’s empire being carved up between Ptolemy, Lysimachus and Seleukos.6

  The third element of the peace treaty was the marriage. The most likely arrangement is that the bridegroom was Chandragupta and the bride one of the two daughters of Seleukos by his marriage to the Persian princess at Susa in 322 BCE. These girls would have been of marriageable age in 304 BCE and Chandragupta about forty years old. Whoever was the bridegroom, the offspring of that marriage would have been tainted in Indian eyes. Alexandrian in spirit it may have been but any child would have been regarded as outcaste and ineligible as a royal heir. Yet the subsequent impact of a Graeco-Persian queen and her entourage on Pataliputra must have been considerable.

  As a successful raja Chandragupta would already have taken a number of wives, including his first trophy wife, Dhana Nanda’s daughter. Only one of these early wives is known by name: his maternal cousin Dhurdara, who bore his son and heir Bindusara, and was the unlucky subject of a bizarre story in the Great Dynastic Chronicle in which she unwittingly takes poison while in the the last stages of pregnancy, forcing Chanakya to lop off her head, cut open her womb and keep the embryonic Bindusara wrapped in a succession of freshly slaughtered goats until he is strong enough to survive on his own. Hence the boy becomes known as Bindusara, or ‘Blood-Spotted’. The essence of the story seems to be that Dhurdara suffered complications at the birth, necessitating a fatal Caesarean with a successful outcome for her child – who may possibly have had some form of skin blemish, so giving rise to his curious name.

  The fourth element of the Chandragupta–Seleukos alliance was the exchange of ambassadors, a policy continued after Chandragupta’s death when Seleukos sent his man Deimachos to Chandragupta’s son Amitrochates, a rendering of the Sanskrit Amitraghata, or ‘slayer of enemies’ – a title known to have been used by Bindusara. Thanks to Chanakya’s Treatise and Megasthenes’ India, we have two perspectives on early Mauryan India. From the Treatise we can assume that Chandragupta ruled as a ‘Defender of Dharma’ – but Dharma in this context meaning the moral foundation underpinning the laws of the universe and the duties of caste. He acknowledged the immutable laws drawn up by Manu the La
wgiver, but applied a penal code drawn up by his ministers, led by Rakshasa Katyayan, the chief minister who gave his name to the verse drama Mudrarakshasa that so excited Sir William Jones when he first came across it in the 1780s. Chanakya played a more discreet role as the king’s éminence grise, but his influence clearly remained paramount.

  If Chandragupta or his descendants followed Chanakya’s advice to the letter they must have followed a very strict regime indeed. The king would be awoken by music in the early hours for a period of meditation on political matters, followed by consultations with his ministers and spies, then morning prayers. His mornings were divided into four periods devoted in turn to receiving reports, public audiences, the allotment of tasks and to writing letters and receiving reports from his spies; his afternoons given over to inspecting his troops and conferring with his generals; and his evening to prayers before a bath and retirement to his bedchamber.

  Megasthenes’ India describes Mauryan society as rigidly defined by caste, governed by a monarch who brooked no dissent, with widespread respect for the law: ‘Truth and virtue they hold in esteem … The simplicity of their laws and their contracts is proved by the fact that they seldom go to law. They have no suits about pledges or deposits, nor do they require either seals or witnesses.’7 Nevertheless, Chandragupta took no risks, Megasthenes reporting that the king entrusted the care of his person only to women, and changed beds every night for fear of assassination. And whenever Chandragupta left his palace, security was paramount: ‘Crowds of women surround him and on the outside are spearmen. The road is marked off with ropes, and it is death for a man or even a woman to pass within the ropes … At his side stand two or three armed women.’ Bas-reliefs from Sanchi and elsewhere confirm that women attendants and bodyguards were the norm.

  What Megasthenes was better able to observe was the smooth running of an administration run by a cadre of civil officers remarkably similar in their duties and responsibilities to the Indian Civil Service established more than two thousand years later. All were drawn from the Brahman caste, who served as priests but also provided an inner elite of counsellors: ‘This class is small in number, but in wisdom and justice excels all the others. From them are chosen their rulers, governors of provinces, deputies, treasurers, generals, admirals, controllers of expenditure, and superintendents of agriculture.’ Every city was administered by thirty civil officers, divided into five sections, each with specific responsibilities ranging from taxation to looking after strangers. Similar groups administered the provinces.

  Such a sophisticated system of government required an equally sophisticated system of written communications, which meant adopting the unsuitable Aramaic alphabet in the northwestern regions before Kharosthi and then Brahmi were devised as a better written medium for Prakrit. Kharosthi probably came into use in about 300 BCE when Ashoka was still a child and Brahmi after he himself had come to power. Chanakya, the spider at the web’s centre, was surely involved in the development of this pan-Indian script.

  King Chandragupta’s achievement was to unite northern and central India under one royal umbrella and a centralised government run by a professional civil service. With law and order came improved communications, better trading links, the growth of urban centres and the development of a monetary economy, all of which helped the mercantile castes to grow and prosper, while reducing the authority of the Brahmans. Silver punch-marked coins had already been circulating in India for more than a century but now a concerted effort was made to standardise coinage throughout the Mauryan empire in terms of weight, shape, material, symbols and the number of punch-marks – usually four or five. Arguments continue to rage among numismatists over which of the symbols found on punch-marked coinage is specifically Mauryan or identifies a particular ruler, but these coins always carried two specific symbols: one representing the sun and the other – a central dot and circle with three arrows radiating outwards interspersed with three hornlike objects, known as the sadar-chakra – probably representing universal kingship. Two other symbols commonly associated with the early Mauryas are the ‘three eggs in a row’ and the ‘three hills and horned moon’, the first made up of three ovals linked by a central band, the second made up of a pyramid formed by three arched mounds with a semi-circle above, almost certainly representing – as James Prinsep first proposed – a Buddhist stupa surmounted by the new moon – chandra:

  Despite Megasthenes’ service as ambassador to the courts of both Chandragupta and Bindusara, nothing survives from India on the transition of power. It appears to have been effected smoothly and peacefully, entirely in accordance with Chanakya’s advice in his Treatise on State Economy that internal strife within a royal family is to be avoided. But, highly unusually, this handover took place while Chandragupta was still alive. The Jain texts all agree that he abdicated to follow the Jain saint Bhadrabahu, who led a migration south following a twelve-year famine in the Magadha country.8 His death from self-starvation in a cave at Sravana Belgola in Mysore took place twelve years after the death of his guru Bhadrabahu.

  Chandragupta’s mentor Chanakya cannot have been happy at this turn of events. Yet he evidently transferred his allegiance to Bindusara and went on to act as his advisor until his own death some fifteen years later. Chanakya’s grandson and pupil Radhagupta is said to have presided over his cremation, having followed his grandfather to become chief minister at court in succession to Rakshasa Katyayan. This same Radhagupta then appears to have played the key role in helping Ashoka take the throne from his older half-brother. By these means Chanakya continued to shape Mauryan polity long after Chandragupta’s departure and his own death.

  With the Jains weakened by the migration south, the Brahmans became the dominant power at court, a dominance greatly resented by the oppressed Buddhist community. The tenth-century Indo-Tibetan Manjusri-mula-tantra, or ‘The Root of the Doctrine of Manjusri’, a chronicle masquerading as prophesy after the manner of the Puranas, declares that King Bindusara will be a wise and courageous monarch but that ‘Canakya, the minister of the king Candagupta and after him his son Bindusara, will depart to hell’. Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in India takes the same line, attributing to Chanakya demonic powers that he employed to kill the kings and ministers of sixteen major kingdoms, as a result of which he caught a foul disease which ‘decomposed his body into pieces.’9

  The Puranas seem undecided as to whether Bindusara reigned for twenty-four or twenty-eight years, presumably due to confusion over when his father abdicated. He justified his title of ‘Enemy-Slayer’ by extending his father’s empire across the Deccan to include the Mysore region – but failed to take the powerful kingdom of Kalinga to the east. These victories would have strengthened the position of Bindusara’s Kshatriya army, threatening the supremacy of the Brahmans at court.

  Little else is known about Bindusara’s rule other than that he maintained links with his western neighbours, favoured the Ajivikas and had a great many queens and concubines, who in turn produced a great many sons: 101 by Buddhist accounts, of whom the oldest was Sumana (Sushima in the Northern tradition) and the youngest Tissa (Vitashoka). According to the Southern tradition, the mother of Bindusara’s son Ashoka was Dharma, whose father was an Ajivika elder named Janasana. This would explain why Ashoka was a known patron of the Ajivika sect at least up to his twelfth year as ruler. However, according to the more favoured Northern tradition, Ashoka’s mother was Subhadrangi, daughter of a Brahman of Champaran, who also bore his younger brother Tissa/Vitashoka. There is no mention of further marriage alliances with the Seleucids, but there was a continuing Graeco-Persian presence at court through Ashoka’s step-grandmother by marriage. Her brother Antiochos I became ruler of the Seleucid Empire in 281 BCE, which would surely have made her a very powerful presence in the palace until his death in 261 BCE.

  It is unlikely that Ashoka was born before 302 BCE, his mother being among the most junior of the royal wives. One popular story has the boy Ashoka winning the affec
tion of his grandfather the king though his intelligence and fighting skills, but then Chandragupta becomes a Jain and throws his sword away, which Ashoka finds and keeps, despite Chandragupta’s admonitions. However, it is doubtful that Ashoka could have been known to his grandfather as anything other than a toddler. Since Bindusara patronised the Ajivikas, it is reasonable to suppose that his children were brought up with Ajivika beliefs.10

  Bindusara’s first-born son Sushima was the heir-apparent and treated as such, whereas the boy Ashoka was not only near the bottom of the princely pecking order but suffered from some form of skin condition – ‘rough and unpleasant to touch’ – that made him so unattractive that his father wanted nothing to do with him. There are no less than three further references to Ashoka’s ugliness in the Northern tradition, which accounts for it with a tale about Ashoka meeting the Buddha in a previous life as a little boy and unwittingly offering him some earth. The Legend of King Ashoka also tells how the unreformed Wrathful Ashoka burns his entire harem on hearing that they disliked caressing his skin. Some versions of the Legend of King Ashoka include an account of the court diviner declaring that Ashoka’s body bears certain inauspicious marks, which he tries to remove by performing meritorious deeds.11 Further supporting evidence for Ashoka’s ugliness comes from the panel on Sanchi’s South Gateway showing the emperor fainting into the arms of his queens before the Bodhi tree (see illustration, p. 344) Instead of a tall and handsome king, as portrayed by Shah Rukh Khan in the recent Bollywood movie, the artist has shown Ashoka as short, paunchy and with a grossly pumpkin-like face.