Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (47 page)

The Langudi rock-cut elephant, similar in design and dating to the Ashokan elephant guarding the Dhauli Rock Edict. This was uncovered during excavations that in 2011 are still ongoing at the site of the Great Monastery of Pushpagiri in ancient Kalinga, visited by the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang in the seventh century. (Courtesy of the American Committee of South Asian Arts)

In the Cold Weather of 2000–1 a team led by Dr D. R. Pradhan, curator of Orissa State Archaeology, uncovered at Langudi two small stone sculptures. What has so excited students of Indian history is that both of these sculptures carry inscriptions in Brahmi lettering that appear to refer to Ashoka by that name. The smaller of the two is the head and shoulders of a man with long piled-up hair and large earrings. According to Professor B. N. Mukherjee of Calcutta University, the accompanying inscription reads:
‘Chhi
[
shri,
honoured]
karena ranja ashokhena’.
The word
karena
can be read as ‘bestowal’, which suggests that the statue is a portrait of a donor named ‘King Ashoka’.

The second sculpture is slightly larger, some twenty inches across, and shows a man seated on a throne flanked by two standing queens or female attendants. He sits with his legs crossed and his hands on his knees, and wears a turban and pendulous earrings, with numerous bangles from his wrists up to his elbows. Here the inscription is a little longer:

ama upaska ashokasa samchiamana agra eka stupa.

This Professor Mukherjee has provisionally translated as:

A lay worshipper Ashoka with religious longing is associated in the construction of a prominent stupa.
¹⁷

The reference to Ashoka as a lay Buddhist would appear to date this image to about 265–263
BCE
– about the time of the conquest of Kalinga.

So the story of the Lost Emperor continues to unfold.

An overlooked detail from the front of the pillar beside the East Gateway at Bharhut. It shows a king bearing a Buddhist relic casket on an elephant. The accompanying donor inscription declares this to be the gift of ‘Chapa Devi, wife of Revati Devi of Vidisha’, the town close to Sanchi where Ashoka’s first wife lived. (Courtesy Benoy K. Behl)

The story of Ashoka begins with his grandfather – and the man who placed him on the throne of Magadha: the Brahman Chanakya, nicknamed Kautilya, the ‘crow-like’. Chanakya was a product of Taxila,
¹
absorbed into the Achaemenid empire at the time of Cyrus the Great and by the fourth century
BCE
a centre of learning that drew high-caste youths from all over India – Brahmans to study law, medicine and military science, Kshatriyas the art of warfare. But Taxila was also a crossroads of cultures where men came together to exchange ideas and goods – a crucial factor when considering the influences that shaped the thinking of Chanakya and the early Mauryan rulers.

One of Chanakya’s teachers at Taxila may have been the grammarian Panini,
²
who laid down the rules of classical Sanskrit. Yet the sole medium available to Panini and his colleagues in which to set down their thoughts was Aramaic, a poor vehicle for the Prakrit spoken languages of northern India. It forced them to think long and hard as to why they had nothing comparable – or better – but it also required the authority of a ruler strong enough to challenge tradition and willing to listen to good advice.

Chanakya’s period of study at Taxila preceded Alexander the Great’s arrival by a couple of decades. He then followed the example of Panini in travelling east to Pataliputra and presenting himself to King Dhana Nanda, a bid that failed so disastrously that he had to flee for his life, helped first by Ajivikas and later by Jains who supported him with funds. He then began a search for a candidate ‘entitled by birth to be raised to sovereign power’, a quest that led him to the boy Chandragupta.

But who was Chandragupta? Was he Dhana Nanda’s son by
his equally low-caste queen Mura, grandson of a keeper of peacocks? Or was he a Kshatriya descended from surviving Sakyas who had settled in Champaran in eastern Magadha, famous for its peacocks? Or could he have been the son of the chieftain of a hill-town named Moriyanaga, ‘peacock mountain’? The last is the most credible. The Mauryas may well have had a link with peacocks as a tribal totem, but the family most probably had its origins in the mountain region of Mer or Meru on India’s north-western border, dominated by the Mer-Koh or Mahabun massif, Alexander’s Mount Aornos. It explains why Ashoka’s two major Rock Edicts at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra are sited where they are, as gateways to the Mahabun region. It also means that Chandragupta was one of the Greeks’ Assakenoi, the Ashvakan horse-people of the Chandravanshi lunar dynasty who offered their services to Alexander as mercenary cavalrymen.

That Chandragupta was a horseman of the Vaisya caste
³
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 Lawgiver, 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.