Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (48 page)

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 affection 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.

This fainting episode is one of several such instances described in Lanka’s
Great Dynastic Chronicle,
suggesting either that Ashoka was a highly emotional type or that he suffered from something like epilepsy – the ‘falling sickness’ of antiquity. All in all, Prince Ashoka appears to have been physically afflicted to a degree that disqualified him as a potential heir to the throne.

Yet even as an unwanted prince Ashoka was educated as a son of the most powerful ruler India had yet known. Everything we know about Ashoka points to the continuing influence of Chanakya through his grandson Radhagupta – and perhaps Kautilya, the ‘crow-like’, was someone with whom the ugly prince could identify. A point much emphasised by Chanakya in his
Treatise on State Economy
is the importance of associating with learned men, and this Ashoka seems to have taken to heart, for he certainly had powerful friends at court, including Bindusara’s chief minister Radhagupta, who appears to have led a conspiracy to exclude the heir-apparent Sushima in favour of Ashoka. Bindusara may have got wind of this, which would explain why at an unreasonably early age Ashoka was despatched to Taxila to put down a local rebellion, although it could be that even in his early teens Ashoka was seen as the most capable of the king’s male offspring as well as the most dangerous. After all, his early nickname was
canda,
‘wrathful’ or ‘storm-like’, and this appellation may well have predated Ashoka’s supposed cruelties as ruler. Certainly, his very appearance at Taxila seems to have been enough to restore order.

Taxila in 287
BCE
or thereabouts was still very much the international crossroads where Greek, Persian and Aramaic were as much spoken as Indian Prakrit. Prince Ashoka was welcomed as the grandson of the local hero Chandragupta, liberator and vanquisher of Seleukos the Victor, and that welcome seems to have left its mark on the teenager. Renewed family ties with leaders of the mountain tribes stood him in good stead a decade later.

Prince Ashoka’s reward for the pacification of Taxila was to be sent south as his father’s viceroy to Ujjain, the capital of Avanti (today Madhya Pradesh). This continuing exile set Ashoka among Buddhists and it was here that he met Devi, the daughter of a merchant from Vidisha. That she was a
Sakyakumari,
a princess claiming descent from the family of Sakyamuni Buddha, may be a pious fiction, but she was undoubtedly a devout Buddhist. We have the touching evidence of the tapped-out message on the rock shelter at Panguraria that this was a close, loving relationship unlike the usual dynastic arrangement. Devi gave Ashoka his first two children – the boy Mahendra/Mahinda, born in about the year 285
BCE
, and the girl Sanghamitta, born about three years later.

Yet Devi failed to convert Ashoka to her faith and he left her and their children in Vidisha when finally recalled to Pataliputra. It would have been unfitting for a prince of the house of Maurya to have a merchant’s daughter for a spouse, and a more suitable wife was found for him in Asandhimitra, afterwards his chief queen. She probably came from a little
kingdom in what is now East Haryana north of Delhi, for it seems more than coincidence that the little town of Assandh boasts what it claims to be the biggest Ashokan stupa in India, 80 feet high and 250 feet in diameter.