The Mauryas: Chandragupta, Chanakya, Kalinga and the Emperor Who Counted His Dead

Dhauli, a low hill outside Bhubaneswar, above the Daya river. Out of the top of a great boulder, a stone elephant steps forward, its front half cut free of the rock. Below it, on the smoothed face of the stone, run long lines of a script that nobody alive could read two hundred years ago.

The words belong to a king who calls himself Devanampiya Piyadasi: Beloved of the Gods, He Who Looks Kindly. He is telling his officials in conquered Kalinga to be fair, and to stop jailing and torturing people without cause.

But his most famous words are not on this rock. Far away, at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra in today’s Pakistan, at Kalsi above Dehradun and at Girnar in Gujarat, the same king had a confession carved. Eight years after he was anointed, he says, he conquered Kalinga. A hundred and fifty thousand people were carried away. A hundred thousand were killed. Many times that number died.

Few rulers in history have counted the victims of their own war and called the count a sorrow. In Kalinga itself, where the survivors lived, the count was left out.

This is the story of that king, Ashoka, of the grandfather who built his empire, and of how all of it was forgotten for two thousand years, until a man who tested coins for a living sat down with an inscription in Calcutta.

Punjab, 326 BC. Alexander of Macedon has beaten Porus on the Jhelum, and his army has refused to march past the Beas. Somewhere near his camp, if the Greek writer Plutarch is right, is a young Indian who will remember all of it.

Plutarch, writing about four hundred years later, calls him Androcottus. As an old man, Plutarch says, he used to tell people that Alexander could easily have taken the whole country, because its king was hated for his wickedness and his low birth. That king was the Nanda ruler of Magadha, whose huge army had helped frighten Alexander’s men into turning back.

The Roman writer Justin, summarising an older history, calls him Sandracottus and gives him a fairy tale: a man of humble birth, who once fell asleep exhausted and woke to find a huge lion licking the sweat off him, and who was later carried into battle by a wild elephant that walked up and knelt for him. After Alexander died in 323 BC, Justin says, Sandracottus freed India from the Greek governors, and then turned that freedom into slavery for the people he had freed.

Indian memory is no more agreed. Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicles make him a Kshatriya of the Moriya clan. Brahmanical texts hint that he was low-born; one commentator names his mother as Mura, of the Nanda household. The Jain writer Hemachandra puts his birth in a village of peacock-tamers. Each tradition gave him the birth it needed.

The hard evidence is thinner. Greek writers agree he took Punjab and the Indus lands from Alexander’s men, most historians think around 317–312 BC, and he overthrew the Nandas at Pataliputra around 321 BC. Plutarch credits him with an army of 600,000. Centuries later, a rock inscription at Junagadh in Gujarat still remembered that the Sudarshana lake there was built by his governor Pushyagupta. By about 300 BC, the boy from Alexander’s camp ruled from Afghanistan to Bengal.

Every Indian child knows the scene, though no one alive at the time recorded it. A Brahmin of sharp mind and ugly face comes to the Nanda court and is thrown out in disgrace. He swears to bring the dynasty down. He finds a boy with the marks of a king and trains him. Together they do it.

That is the outline of the tradition, told in Buddhist, Jain and Hindu versions that disagree on almost every detail. Buddhist and Hindu legend make him a teacher at Taxila, the great centre of learning in what is now Pakistani Punjab, where he finds the young Chandragupta. In the Mudrarakshasa, a play written many centuries later, he is the cold, brilliant planner behind every move.

Here is the difficulty. No Greek writer mentions him. Nothing written in his lifetime names him. Every source for Chanakya was set down long after the Mauryas had gone.

Then there is his book. In 1905 a palm-leaf manuscript reached the Mysore Oriental Library. Its librarian, R. Shamasastry, recognised the lost Arthashastra, the science of statecraft, and published it in 1909, in English in 1915. It has rules for taxes, mines, courts and prisons, for spies disguised as monks and merchants, for when to make peace and when to strike. It made Kautilya, its named author, India’s Machiavelli.

A verse at the end says Vishnugupta wrote it. The name Chanakya does not appear in it at all. When it was written is one of the liveliest arguments in Indian history.

Around 305 BC Seleucus, Alexander’s general and now king from Syria to Afghanistan, crossed the Indus to win India back. No account of a battle survives. The deal does.

Seleucus gave up lands west of the Indus; how much is still argued. Chandragupta gave him 500 war elephants. The two houses agreed a marriage alliance, though no source says who married whom. Four years later, at Ipsus in Asia Minor, Seleucus’s Indian elephants helped him win the battle that decided Alexander’s inheritance.

And Seleucus sent an ambassador, Megasthenes, to live at Chandragupta’s court. His book, the Indica, is lost, but writers like Strabo, Arrian, Diodorus and Pliny quoted it so often that we can still walk through his Pataliputra.

It was a long city on the Ganga, he wrote, about 80 stadia by 15, roughly fifteen kilometres by three. A wooden wall ran round it, with slits for archers, 570 towers and 64 gates, and a deep moat in front. Early twentieth-century digs in Patna found lines of heavy timber palisade, just as he described.

Megasthenes divided Indians into seven hereditary classes, and said a law forbade any Indian to be a slave, which the Arthashastra’s own rules on slaves contradict. He also passed on tales of gold-digging ants. Strabo had no patience with him.

No faith whatever can be placed in Deimachos and Megasthenes.Strabo, Geography, early first century AD

Modern scholars are kinder: he saw only a small part of India and believed too much of what he heard, but much of what he saw holds up.

Chandragupta’s end is a story only one tradition tells. According to the Digambara Jains, he gave up his throne, walked south with the monk Bhadrabahu to Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, and fasted to death there. Those accounts were written down well after AD 600, the Greeks describe him performing Vedic sacrifices, and some historians think the story has blended him with a later namesake. But Shravanabelagola still keeps his memory.

His son Bindusara, who ruled from about 297 to 273 BC, is the quiet middle of the story. The Greeks called him Amitrochates, from a Sanskrit title meaning slayer of foes. A Tibetan historian writing in the sixteenth century credits him with taking sixteen towns. We do not know where.

We do know what he wanted from the West. The Greek writer Athenaeus tells how Bindusara wrote to the Seleucid king Antiochus I asking for three things: sweet wine, dried figs and a sophist, a Greek philosopher. Antiochus sent the wine and the figs. Philosophers, he replied, could not be bought and sold under Greek law.

The Buddhist text called the Divyavadana has Bindusara send one of his sons north to Taxila, where the people had risen. The prince arrived expecting a fight. The townspeople came out to meet him, the story says, and told him they had no quarrel with the prince or the emperor, only with the wicked ministers who oppressed them.

The prince was Ashoka. Sri Lankan tradition makes him governor of Ujjain instead, and an inscription found at Saru Maru in Madhya Pradesh fits that. Either way, he learnt to rule in the provinces.

How he came to the throne is darker, and here the legends take over. Bindusara died around 273 BC; Ashoka, the Sri Lankan Mahavamsa says, was anointed four years later. Historians suspect the gap hides a war of succession. The Mahavamsa says Ashoka killed 99 brothers. The Ashokavadana tells of a feud with his elder brother Sushima, calls him Chandashoka, Ashoka the Fierce, and describes a torture prison, Ashoka’s Hell, run by an executioner named Girika.

Treat all of it with care. These are Buddhist books written centuries later, and they have a lesson to teach: the blacker the sinner, the brighter the saint. Ashoka’s own Rock Edict V, cut while he ruled, speaks of the households of his brothers and sisters in Pataliputra and other towns. Some of the 99, it seems, were still alive.

Kalinga was the coast of what is now Odisha: rice fields, river mouths, ports facing the Bay of Bengal. The Nandas had once held it. By Ashoka’s time it was a free kingdom on the flank of the largest empire in Asia.

Around 261 BC, eight years after his anointing, Ashoka took it. We have no Kalinga account of the war, no Maurya chronicle, no Greek report. We have one witness: the conqueror himself.

In Rock Edict XIII he gives the count: 150,000 carried off, 100,000 killed, and many times that number dead, most likely from hunger and disease. Then he does something no conqueror of his age is known to have done in public. He says he is sorry.

What pains him most, he writes, is that good people suffered: Brahmins and ascetics, families who were kind to their servants and respectful to their elders, people whose friends and relatives were caught up in the disaster. Even a hundredth or a thousandth part of that suffering, he says, would weigh on him now. From then on, he declares, the only conquest worth making is conquest by dhamma, the right way of living. He has the edict written so that his sons and great-grandsons will not seek new conquests.

Conquest by Dhamma ... is the best conquest.Ashoka, Rock Edict XIII, in S. Dhammika’s translation

Now read the rest of the same edict. He did not give Kalinga back. He tells the forest peoples on his borders that even in his remorse he has the power to punish them, so they should be ashamed of their wrongs and not be killed. And in Kalinga itself, at Dhauli and Jaugada, the confession was left off; two separate edicts, addressed to his officers at Tosali and Samapa, stand in its place.

All men are my children.Ashoka, Separate Kalinga Edict at Dhauli and Jaugada

They are what a conqueror says to a conquered province: you are mine, and I mean to rule you well.

Ashoka’s first rock edict begins in the palace kitchen. Once, he says, hundreds of thousands of animals were killed every day for curry. Now only three are killed: two peacocks and a deer, and the deer not always. Soon, he promises, not even those.

Dhamma was not one religion. It was a code of conduct: be kind to animals, obey your parents, be generous to Brahmins and ascetics, treat servants decently. He planted trees and dug wells along the roads and, he says, provided medical care for people and animals. He wanted the people’s business brought to him at any hour, even while he was eating. He sent officers of dhamma among every community, including the Greeks and Gandharas of the north-west, and protected animals from parrots and bats to tortoises.

His Rock Edict XII is as fresh now as it was then. People of every sect deserve honour, it says; whoever praises his own faith and runs down another’s, out of devotion, only harms his own. He backed it with stone: caves in the Barabar hills of Bihar carry his gifts to the Ajivikas, a rival sect to the Buddhists.

But he did not abolish the army, and he did not abolish death. His Pillar Edict IV grants prisoners already sentenced to death a stay of three days, so their families can appeal or they can prepare for the next world. That is mercy inside a system that still executed people.

No earlier Indian ruler is known to have spoken to his subjects like this, in their own language, on the rocks by their roads. More than thirty of his inscriptions survive, on boulders, cave walls and polished pillars, mostly in Prakrit in the Brahmi script. In the north-west he changed scripts. At Shahbazgarhi, near Mardan, and at Mansehra, in today’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the edicts, Kalinga confession and all, are cut in Kharoshthi, the script of Gandhara and Punjab, written right to left. At Kandahar in Afghanistan he spoke Greek and Aramaic to Greek settlers and old Persian clerks. Another Aramaic inscription was found at Taxila.

Taxila was the Mauryas’ window on the north-west, the seat of a prince. One of Ashoka’s own Kalinga edicts orders the princes at Ujjain and Taxila to send their officers on tour every three years to make sure no one is jailed or tortured without cause. Tradition credits him with the Dharmarajika stupa just outside the city, built over relics of the Buddha. Its ruins are now part of a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Taxila also has the saddest Ashoka legend. In the Buddhist tellings his son Kunala, governing the city, was blinded on a forged order sent by Ashoka’s young queen Tishyarakshita. The stupa now called Kunala’s was built centuries later, and the story is legend.

Then the script died; within a few centuries nobody could read the old letters. In 1356 Sultan Firoz Shah Tughlaq had an Ashokan pillar brought from Topra, in today’s Yamunanagar district of Haryana, to his new city in Delhi. His chronicler Shams-i Siraj Afif describes a carriage with 42 wheels and the pillar wrapped in silk-cotton and hides. Nobody in the Sultan’s court could read a word of it.

Calcutta, the 1830s. At the silver mint, the assay master tests the purity of coins. His name is James Prinsep, and in his spare hours he is secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Copies of inscriptions pour in from surveyors, soldiers and collectors all over India. He tries to read them all.

He had already cracked Kharoshthi using Indo-Greek coins that gave a king’s name in Greek on one side and Kharoshthi on the other. Brahmi was harder. Then he noticed that dozens of short inscriptions from the railings of the Sanchi stupa ended with the same two letters. They were, he guessed, gifts from donors, and the two letters spelled danam, gift.

It was the thread that unravelled the whole script. In 1837 he read the edicts on the Delhi pillar, the one Firoz Shah had dragged from Topra. They were the proclamations of Devanampiya Piyadasi.

But who was Piyadasi? Prinsep first thought he was a king of Sri Lanka. The answer came from Sri Lanka itself. George Turnour, a British official there working on the Pali chronicles, found in the Dipavamsa that Piyadasi was a title of Ashoka, the Buddhist emperor of the chronicles. A king known only from pious legend now had his own words.

Prinsep had little time to enjoy it. He fell ill in 1838, sailed for England that November, and died in London on 22 April 1840. Calcutta raised Prinsep Ghat on the Hooghly in his memory.

The final proof waited until 1915. A British mining engineer, C. Beadon, prospecting for gold near Maski in the Raichur district of Karnataka, found an edict cut into a rock face. It began not with Piyadasi but with Devanampiya Asoka. The name was there in Ashoka’s own words at last.

Sarnath, outside Varanasi, where tradition says the Buddha gave his first sermon. In the winter of 1904–05 F.O. Oertel, an engineer with the Archaeological Survey of India, uncovered the top of a broken Ashokan pillar.

Four lions sit back to back, facing the four directions. Beneath them, on a round drum, an elephant, a bull, a galloping horse and a lion walk between wheels with 24 spokes. A bigger wheel once crowned the lions; only fragments survive. Scholars still argue how much its carvers owed to Persian and Greek art.

When India became a republic on 26 January 1950, the lions became its State Emblem, with the words Satyameva Jayate, truth alone triumphs, from the Mundaka Upanishad, beneath them. The wheel from the drum went onto the national flag. A new country chose, as its face, the work of an emperor who had said sorry for a war.

In July 2022 the lions became a quarrel. A 9.5-tonne bronze emblem went up on the new Parliament building. Opposition parties said its lions looked menacing; Congress called the Sarnath originals graceful and regally confident, and the historian Irfan Habib asked why they had to look ferocious. Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri said the difference was scale and angle: 1.6 metres at Sarnath against 6.5 metres on the roof.

Beauty is famously regarded as lying in the eyes of the beholder.Hardeep Singh Puri, Union minister, July 2022

Ashoka died around 232 BC, aged about 72. Within fifty years his empire was gone.

His successors are names in lists: Dasharatha, who like his grandfather gave caves to the Ajivikas; Samprati, remembered by the Jains as a patron; and others who barely leave a mark. The empire may have split in two, and Greek kings from Bactria pressed into the north-west.

The end came on a parade ground. Around 185 BC Brihadratha, the last Maurya, came out to review his army. His commander-in-chief, Pushyamitra Shunga, cut him down in front of the troops; the seventh-century poet Banabhatta remembered the king as weak of purpose. Pushyamitra founded the Shunga dynasty. A century or two later, a king of a free Kalinga, Kharavela, boasted in his Hathigumpha inscription near Bhubaneswar of humbling the king of Magadha.

Why so fast? H.C. Raychaudhuri blamed Ashoka: dhamma, he argued, broke the empire’s military backbone. Romila Thapar replied that Ashoka’s pacifism has been grossly exaggerated. Others point to weak heirs, a top-heavy state run from one distant capital, and invaders. Most historians now see several causes at once.

The Buddhists who kept Ashoka’s memory alive also embroidered it, making his youth monstrous so his conversion would shine.

All Maurya dates are approximate; scholars differ by a few years on most of them.

Strip away the legends, and the Mauryas still leave an astonishing record. A ruler of untraceable birth built a state from Kandahar to Karnataka. His grandson made war on a free people, killed and carried them off by the hundred thousand, and then did what almost no conqueror does: wrote down the cost in his own name and told his heirs not to do it again.

He was not a saint. He kept the land he had stolen, the army that stole it, the gallows and the threat to the forest peoples, and the people of Kalinga never got to read his apology. But he also told an empire to honour every faith, to be gentle with animals and fair in its prisons, and he meant enough of it to carve it on rocks from Mansehra to Maski.

India forgot him for two thousand years. It took a coin-tester in Calcutta, a British official in Ceylon and a gold prospector in Raichur to bring him back. When the Republic needed a face, it chose his lions. It is worth remembering why they are there: not for the conquest, but for the sorrow that came after it.