Maurya rose up against the princes Alexander had left behind and seized lands beyond the Indus, turning Kandahar and Kabul into the western outposts of a mighty Indian Empire. His son Bindusara and grandson Ashoka would push that empire to the south and southeast, with the conquest of the kingdom of Kalinga. The Mauryas were the equivalent of China’s Chin dynasty, political unifiers of a great civilization for the first time in its history.
Wall paintings at Ajanta reveal the magnificence of Mauryan rule. They show the king surrounded by noblemen, Brahmin priests, acrobats, snake charmers, standard-bearers, musicians blowing conch shells, and horses and elephants arrayed in pearls, plumes, and gold pendants. Moving just one pillar for Ashoka’s palace at Palipurta required a cart of forty-two wheels, drawn by 8,400 men. The imperial storehouses held gold and silver by the ton, diamonds and rubies by the pound. 23
Amassing all this wealth and power required incessant war of the most brutal and merciless kind. According to the Greek ambassador at their court, the Mauryans maintained the largest standing army on earth, with more than 700,000 men, 9,000 elephants, and 10,000 chariots. The court’s treatise on strategy and diplomacy, the Arthashastra, India’s equivalent of Machiavelli’s The Prince, prescribes an eighteen-day cycle of torture for captured rebels or traitors, suggesting a different method of torture for each day. Ashoka’s own inscriptions tell us that in order to complete the conquest of Kalinga, he killed 100,000 people and ethnically cleansed another 150,000, while tens of thousands more died of starvation and exposure. 24
But Ashoka grew sick of the endless cycle of slaughter and conquest and turned to the teachings of the Buddha for his own peace of mind, and to reform his kingdom. All humanity were his children, he declared, and he would henceforth rule through the Law of Righteousness and ahimsa, or nonviolence: “For the Beloved of the Gods [i.e., Ashoka] desires safety, self-control, justice and happiness for all beings.” He established a new class of officials to look after the well-being of his subjects, and he banned animal sacrifice. He had fruit trees planted along the empire’s roads in order to provide travelers with food and shade, collected more than seven thousand relics of the Buddha, and invited Buddhist monks into his court while sending others to foreign capitals. 25
His high-mindedness and renunciation of violence would earn him the admiration of future generations of Indians, including Gandhi. His four-lion crowned pillars became the official seal of India. But perhaps not surprisingly, his legacy did not last. The kingdom fell apart shortly after his death in 232 B.C.E. , and within fifty years the Mauryan Empire had vanished. The old ruthless laws of the jungle replaced the Law of Righteousness, and it would take five hundred years of chaos before another dynasty of worthy successors arose, the Guptas.
The Gupta Empire marks the “classical” period of Indian history, with a flourishing of architecture and art, including Buddhist and Hindu carvings of exquisite splendor and complexity; of language, with the poetry of Kalidasa, the “Shakespeare of India” and author of the Sanskrit drama Shakuntala; and of religious thought, along with wars of breathtaking savagery. Under the Guptas a Hindu society of clearly defined castes first emerged, built around an agricultural economy of landlords and peasants; it would survive right down to Gandhi’s time and beyond. By the time the dynasty collapsed under assault by the Huns in the sixth century C.E. , Indian civilization was ready to survive, and even defy, the next waves of catastrophic change.
The first was the coming of Islam and the rise of the Mughals. Despite their name, the Mughals were not Mongols at all but Turks. However, the dynasty’s founder, Babur, claimed descent both from Tamurlaine and from the mighty
Wall paintings at Ajanta reveal the magnificence of Mauryan rule. They show the king surrounded by noblemen, Brahmin priests, acrobats, snake charmers, standard-bearers, musicians blowing conch shells, and horses and elephants arrayed in pearls, plumes, and gold pendants. Moving just one pillar for Ashoka’s palace at Palipurta required a cart of forty-two wheels, drawn by 8,400 men. The imperial storehouses held gold and silver by the ton, diamonds and rubies by the pound. 23
Amassing all this wealth and power required incessant war of the most brutal and merciless kind. According to the Greek ambassador at their court, the Mauryans maintained the largest standing army on earth, with more than 700,000 men, 9,000 elephants, and 10,000 chariots. The court’s treatise on strategy and diplomacy, the Arthashastra, India’s equivalent of Machiavelli’s The Prince, prescribes an eighteen-day cycle of torture for captured rebels or traitors, suggesting a different method of torture for each day. Ashoka’s own inscriptions tell us that in order to complete the conquest of Kalinga, he killed 100,000 people and ethnically cleansed another 150,000, while tens of thousands more died of starvation and exposure. 24
But Ashoka grew sick of the endless cycle of slaughter and conquest and turned to the teachings of the Buddha for his own peace of mind, and to reform his kingdom. All humanity were his children, he declared, and he would henceforth rule through the Law of Righteousness and ahimsa, or nonviolence: “For the Beloved of the Gods [i.e., Ashoka] desires safety, self-control, justice and happiness for all beings.” He established a new class of officials to look after the well-being of his subjects, and he banned animal sacrifice. He had fruit trees planted along the empire’s roads in order to provide travelers with food and shade, collected more than seven thousand relics of the Buddha, and invited Buddhist monks into his court while sending others to foreign capitals. 25
His high-mindedness and renunciation of violence would earn him the admiration of future generations of Indians, including Gandhi. His four-lion crowned pillars became the official seal of India. But perhaps not surprisingly, his legacy did not last. The kingdom fell apart shortly after his death in 232 B.C.E. , and within fifty years the Mauryan Empire had vanished. The old ruthless laws of the jungle replaced the Law of Righteousness, and it would take five hundred years of chaos before another dynasty of worthy successors arose, the Guptas.
The Gupta Empire marks the “classical” period of Indian history, with a flourishing of architecture and art, including Buddhist and Hindu carvings of exquisite splendor and complexity; of language, with the poetry of Kalidasa, the “Shakespeare of India” and author of the Sanskrit drama Shakuntala; and of religious thought, along with wars of breathtaking savagery. Under the Guptas a Hindu society of clearly defined castes first emerged, built around an agricultural economy of landlords and peasants; it would survive right down to Gandhi’s time and beyond. By the time the dynasty collapsed under assault by the Huns in the sixth century C.E. , Indian civilization was ready to survive, and even defy, the next waves of catastrophic change.
The first was the coming of Islam and the rise of the Mughals. Despite their name, the Mughals were not Mongols at all but Turks. However, the dynasty’s founder, Babur, claimed descent both from Tamurlaine and from the mighty
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