THE MAURYAN ADMINISTRATION

There are some issues in history that elicit a sort of Pavlovian response among historians: the reaction is immediate and familiar. The structure of the Mauryan empire is one such, with the battlelines clearly drawn, and the respective arguments of the opposing sides already known to all and sundry. However, if one were to set down each and every point thereof, this work would take on the unwelcome dimensions of a standard textbook. Therefore, we will confine ourselves to the basics and, in this case, it is whether the empire was centralised or not.

The first stumbling block is that of the sources and the maddening uncertainty that cloaks them as regards their dating and content, and, consequently, their pertinence to the Mauryan empire—although all of them were intrinsically connected to the Mauryan court. The Arthashastra, as discussed earlier, is, technically, a theoretical work, of how a state should be in an ideal world. Therefore, how much of it actually reflects the functioning Mauryan state is unclear. And then, of course, we have the Indica, whose numerous exaggerations and errors have already been noted, so one can hardly hold it up as a source par excellence! Ashoka’s inscriptions are, indisputably, brilliant historical sources as their dating is beyond question and they contain his authentic voice. There is one problem, though: they talk extensively about Ashoka’s dhamma but rather cursorily about his administration, so we return to the realm of conjecture again. And then there is the small matter of the numismatic and archaeological finds not having been hitherto analysed from the point of view of their political implications.

The initial view was that the Mauryan empire was a very highly centralised entity and was largely derived from a surface reading of the Arthashastra, which presents a state that has a stranglehold over its people and resources. Then, as is usually the case, some people went over to the opposite side altogether. Gerard Fussman’s view is regarded with much reverence, in this regard.1 He argues that the Mauryan empire could not have been so centralised given the expansive nature of the realm and the communication networks at the time. The picture is this, instead: several existing political units who already govern themselves but who have Mauryan rule superimposed on them anyway. That the local officials and administration had a generous measure of agency is clear from the fact that the script, language and content of Ashoka’s inscriptions, for instance, change according to the exigencies of the province in question. And let us not forget that the choice of location of these missives was left to the local officials—Ashoka was definitely not scrambling over hilly terrain and scouting suitable surfaces himself!

Romila Thapar, the renowned Indian historian who has done stellar work vis-à-vis the Mauryas, first adhered to the centralised control theory and then revised her views to posit an image of the Mauryan empire as a behemoth of sorts, encompassing varied economies, polities and ways of living.2 So she believes that the empire itself consisted of metropolitan, core and peripheral areas. The core included existing states, the periphery included pre-state societies and Magadha was the metropolitan state.3 While the empire definitely had some central control, there must have also been delegation of authority at all other levels—provincial, district and village, given its massive size, covering practically all of the subcontinent and extending into the northwest, so it is not entirely necessary to dub it centralised or decentralised. It was an exceedingly sophisticated and cultured empire, too, with its monumental sculpture and architecture, and its relations with other courts—Hellenistic for diplomatic purposes and Ceylonese, among others, for religious ones, the latter underscored by Ashoka’s boast of having attained dhamma-vijaya (victory through dhamma) in the realms of other rulers.

So how do we approach this tangled mess of sources, and figure out which ones to use more with regard to the question at hand and which to approach with caution? The problems with the Indica and Ashoka’s inscriptions have already been pointed out but let us first accord the Arthashastra a closer look. We know that we cannot use it as a straightforward rendition of the Mauryan state and its ramifications in prose but we do know that at least a part of it, most probably the core, was written in this period. It is safe to presume that Kautilya had an astounding brain but to further assume that he concocted an image of such a powerful and immaculately-run state with such an advanced knowledge of politics without encountering it anywhere else than in his mind is bending the bounds of credulity somewhat. Therefore, he must have based his work on something that he saw around him, on political institutions and political thought that was contemporary, something—in all likelihood—that he had helped set up.

Here is the bottomline, the crux, as it were: the Arthashastra is the first Indian text to define a state (as noted earlier) and, moreover, adds seven components to its definition as being essential for the latter’s existence4—in other words, the saptanga rajya or seven-limbed state. We will come to the seven parts in due course but it should be noted that this picture of the state was adopted with minor changes by several other texts, such as the Dharmashastras (or law books), the Puranas and the Mahabharata. And this is precisely why we need to know what these seven aspects are—they underpin every idea of the state as we know it in our prescriptive and epic/narrative literature.

So we start off with the swami, the lord/king—or, in more fanciful imagery, the spider at the heart of the political web. The instructions in the Arthashastra are, in fact, addressed to this very personage, ranging from the acquisition and maintenance of political power by the vijigishu or aspiring conqueror to the general obligations of a king. Incidentally, Kautilya’s ruler is always a male; there is no room for a woman ruler in his scheme of things unless matters go horribly wrong. And in this, he mirrors the sentiments of other lawgivers and prescriptive texts who shudder at the prospect of a woman at the helm. The Mahabharata, for instance, darkly observes that any polity ruled by a woman, a child or a gambler ‘sinks helplessly as a stone raft in a river’.5

So the ideal Mauryan state envisaged was a monarchy with a powerful king at the centre of the polity. Also, as we know—and just to shore things up a little, Ashoka makes an attempt to link his mortal self with divinity by dint of his titles. Kautilya’s king is impossibly exposed and vulnerable, however, and needs to be guarded at all times from attacks launched, particularly, by women and other close relatives. Meanwhile, he is to maintain and increase his power while also indulging in a sort of paternalistic rule whereby he looks after his subjects like a father would his children, protecting them from calamities, for one, and ensuring their spiritual salvation, on the other. Being a father also involved wagging one’s finger in reproof at rebellious entities who sought to break rules and generally act tough, as Ashoka so splendidly did in Rock Edict 2.

The second limb in Kautilya’s grand state plan was the amatya, which is usually—and loosely—translated as the minister but could also be a senior official, counsellor or departmental head. There is a plethora of information, in this regard, from Ashoka’s inscriptions alone. There seem to have been two consultative bodies of these officials (again, all male) that met regularly to deliberate on important matters and this, coupled with Ashoka’s assertion of being available night and day for any matter, conveys an image of a well-oiled system where portfolios were clearly allocated and everyone knew what they had to do with the ruler hovering above them all. And we even have textual corroboration, in this case, which is a cause for rejoicing whenever it occurs in history. Patanjali’s Mahabhashya, that invaluable compendium of Sanskrit grammar of the second century BCE, refers to Chandragupta’s sabha, and Megasthenes to a similar body via the words sumbouloi and sunedroi (the latter meaning ‘those who sit together’).

Luminaries existed, too: the samahartri (chief revenue collector), the samnidhatri (treasurer and royal storekeeper), the antaravamshika (chief of the palace guard—and the potential preventer of treacherous assassination bids) and the purohita (royal priest who—talking of unfair job expectations—was meant to prevent both divine and human calamities!). If we needed clues as to the influence some of these men wielded, we have only to look at Radhagupta, Bindusara’s minister, who purportedly—and singlehandedly—swung the entire succession battle in Ashoka’s favour. And then, of course, we have the elite group of mahamatas/mahamatras in Ashoka’s time who had various assigned tasks, a particularly significant one being the itthijhakka-mahamatas or mahamatas in charge of women’s welfare, and the most exalted of them all—the dhamma-mahamatas, a core group specially created by Ashoka thirteen years into his reign to spread dhamma all over the Mauryan realm.

Incidentally, being an officer in the Mauryan court was not exactly a cakewalk. Apart from the stringent intellectual and other requirements, there was a code of conduct to be observed at all times in which seriousness and gravity were paramount, and no room at all for levity.6 In fact, laughing loudly ‘when there is nothing to laugh about’ or, conversely, laughing too loudly ‘when there is cause’ were unacceptable. So, too, were indulging in unseemly gestures like ‘winking, biting the lips and frowning’. Imagine, if you will, an official with a carefully-schooled deadpan expression, thinking carefully over anything that emerges from his mouth and endeavouring to provide nothing but the strictest satisfaction to his royal employer—and you have the Mauryan court minion, who was clearly made of very stern stuff, in a nutshell!

Kautilya’s third required limb is janapada, a term that indicates the territory and the people. The Mauryan realm was so huge as to be positively unwieldy but there is nothing like a bit of order to infuse sense into things. Accordingly, it was divided up into four basic provinces, each with its administrative base and governor—the north under Taxila, the south under Suvarnagiri, the west under Ujjayini and the east under Toshali. If you remember, Ashoka cut his teeth in two of them—Taxila, which, being a somewhat rebellious province, could not have been an easy sojourn for him; and Ujjayini, where he met the love of his life (or, at least, one of them). These were administered by governors, usually the royal princes—and we know this from Ashoka’s inscriptions where they are addressed as kumara or aryaputra. (Incidentally, there is not much evidence of the provinces under Chandragupta but if we use a method of inference, Ashoka does not claim any of the provinces in his inscriptions to be his own creation. And where he does meddle and/or change the machinery handed down to him, he specifically mentions it in his records. Hence, it is safe to assume that he continued the same provincial divisions as his worthy grandfather and father.)

And there were more official minions to back up the governors—the pradeshika, rajuka and yukta of Ashoka’s edicts, for instance. Of these, the rajukas seemed to have shouldered a fair share of the administrative burden: under Ashoka, they were senior officials who had to deal with public welfare measures, judicial duties and the propagation of dhamma. The Arthashastra only mentions the yukta and not them but Kautilya had a great deal to say about the structure of administration, which being a complicated mathematical formula can be a little hard to comprehend.

Sample this: he advises the king to establish a base called the sthaniya to administer each unit of eight hundred villages, a dronamukha in a unit of four hundred villages, a karvatika in a unit of two hundred villages and a samgrahana in a unit of ten villages. The sthanika administered units similar to districts and the gopas, who commanded units of five to ten villages, were under them, and then the village headmen or gramikas. And the list goes on but we will stop here before your heart quails at the thought of tackling more intricate categories. Before we turn away, though, we should note that Megasthenes talks about city administration but his account is probably pertinent to Pataliputra, the capital. There were six committees of five members each, in this regard, and these grandees monitored the following things: arts, the comings and goings of foreigners, births and deaths, trade and commerce, and the sale of goods and collection of taxes thereof.

The fourth ideal Kautilyan limb was the durga or fortified capital, which can be interpreted in manifold ways. In fact, Kautilya’s intense preoccupation with looming danger and betrayal and imminent treachery makes one wonder why this was not heralded as the foremost requirement of a state. Much has been said about his elaborate plans to circumvent these (to him) ghastly eventualities. A well-run intelligence system was pivotal to Kautilya’s conception of the state, and the amount that is said about espionage and counter-espionage and the machinations thereof in the text would have made the greatest spy novelists retire, abashed. He would have heartily disapproved of James Bond, the legendary one-man spy machine, for instance—the onus should never be on one man alone, in Kautilya’s view, but there ought to be spies stationed in one place (sanstha) and those who roamed around (sanchara), as well as a mechanism to track their efficacy.

You could not just take on this job because you fancied yourself in a beard and wanted to satisfy your wanderlust. No, you had to prove yourself, and your credentials and progress were monitored closely. Ashoka goes a step further and talks of the pativedakas, who seem to have been spies or reporters, and the pulisani (incidentally mentioned by Megasthenes as the episcopoi), who were of higher rank and had more wide-ranging duties. Together, they kept the ruler informed of everything that was happening around him.

Kautilya takes an unexpected plunge into architecture, at this juncture. He draws up plans for the construction of the main fort in the capital, recommending a mud rampart with brick or stone parapets, and three moats filled with lotuses and crocodiles (exceedingly odd combination, this!) surrounding the fort walls. The fort, which ought to have secret escape routes, was to be stocked with supplies to tide over sieges. Having demonstrated his designing skills, Kautilya now immerses himself in military strategising. He advises the construction of a series of frontier posts, the recruitment of a fort garrison, the placing of troops along the approaches to the fort, and a standing army maintained by the state.

Infantry, cavalry, chariots and elephants were to be the four divisions of the army to be placed under particular officials (with the rather pompous-sounding titles of ashvadhyaksha, rathadhyaksha and so on). Megasthenes adds his somewhat dubious two-bit here. He seems to have had a fascination for the six-committees-and-five-members trope because he uses it again with regard to the Mauryan defence: the departments, in this case, were of the navy (not even hinted at by Kautilya!), transport, infantry, cavalry, chariots and elephants. On the other hand, the army administration remains cloaked in silence in Ashoka’s inscriptions, although there is no evidence that he actually disbanded his army in his pursuit of pacifism.

The fifth limb was the kosha or treasury, a category to be treated with much reverence in Kautilya’s eyes. After all, the title of his text and much of his advice is inextricably linked with wealth, and its acquisition and enhancement, even if the path to it seems intimately connected with power. The more there is in a treasury, the greater is your capacity to expend it in power-and-wealth-related ventures—such was his timeless logic. Land, as always, was paramount—the most critical state and revenue resource.7 There is much frenzied speculation among the Greek writers on the specific taxes levied and the relevant fractions and the state’s share and so on, which, if recounted here, would not add much to a general comprehension of the Mauryan empire.

Suffice it to say that Kautilya mentions a whole lot of taxes (kara, bali and bhaga, among others). The king’s share was one-sixth of the produce and additional levies that could be imposed if the treasury were ever to be depleted. And here is an interestingly radical method employed by the Mauryans, as noted by the venerable grammarian, Patanjali, to raise revenue. Apparently, when the need arose, they took to manufacturing images of deities and trading them for profit. The images used in these transactions (and so, tainted, in a sense) were named differently from those that were worshipped.8

Kautilya also has some extremely sensible, revenue-related ideas to share, such as the recommendation that the king grant land unsuitable for cultivation in the wilderness to ascetics for their use and the maintenance of a grain buffer stock for lean times. The overall state control of and participation in every aspect of the economy—markets, trade, sale of goods, price fixation, guilds, weights and measures and so on (basically, all agriculture, industry and trade)—that he envisages is startling, even remarkable, but as Upinder Singh, for one, cautions, it is highly unlikely that the Mauryan state actually functioned in this exact manner.9 On the one hand, to visualise such overweening control over the society and economy in an ancient context is far-fetched but on the other, some of what Kautilya says must have been partially based on the existence of a powerful state in this period that had the potential to do so. He seems to have extrapolated his utopian ideal onto the Mauryan state but the very fact that such an identity existed, at least in part, is a significant fact to consider.

The sixth Kautilyan limb was danda, interpreted as force or justice, not necessarily punishment, which is, quite literally, what the word otherwise means. Justice seems to have been one of Kautilya’s pet subjects because he pontificates on its administration, particularly with reference to crime, redressals for which could range from fines to bodily mutilation to outright death. And here is the sensitive part—the nature of punishments did not just depend on its type and the circumstances thereof but also on the varna or caste of the wrongdoer and the aggrieved. Predictably, the higher varnas got off lightly. Let us presume for the sake of argument that a kshatriya has committed a crime in Kautilya’s world. He could, quite conceivably, escape with a hefty fine but the very same offence could result in a vaishya being divested of his property and a shudra being burnt to death. However, as Kautilya’s strictures always veered towards the strict and severe, it does not necessarily imply that this was what, in fact, happened on a daily basis.

As far as judicial officers were concerned, Ashoka narrowed (or expanded, depending on which way you look at it) the job credentials somewhat. Rock Edict 1 notes that every five years, the king would send a gentle officer, who was neither fierce nor harsh, on a tour of inspection to ensure that the mahamatas of the city were being impartial and sympathetic, and that no one was being unfairly or unjustifiably harassed or imprisoned. One wonders how the entire recruitment process in the Mauryan realm would have panned out. On the one hand, Kautilya was looking for those who were naturally suspicious, cautious, and adept at spying and disguising themselves, to shore up the state’s security. And then there was Ashoka, looking for mild, tender-hearted individuals to keep a benign eye over the populace. Also, one can’t help wonder whether the ascription of these qualities was on the basis of outward appearances or probing interviews.

Either way, the system clearly worked; there is no evidence, for instance, of a judicial officer claiming to be gentle and then unleashing his hidden malevolence on the hapless subjects! However, Ashoka had other checks and balances in place. The same edict notes that the prince/governor of Ujjayini should despatch an inspection team every three years, and that mahamatas from Taxila should add this to their other duties. And here is a classic example of a sugar-coated pill: Pillar Edict 4 talks of a three-day respite for those on death row so that they could appeal against their verdict, meet their relatives and generally prepare themselves but this clearly indicates that even though Ashoka had raised his own gentleness quotient by several notches, he did not do away with the death penalty. Take this in conjunction with his warnings to his subjects to toe the line and we know that this ruler meant business and his mildness, if any, could be cast aside when needed.

So now we come to Kautilya’s seventh and final state prerequisite—mitra or ally; literally, friend. Here again, he lapses into convoluted, near-mathematical permutations and combinations that can be hard to comprehend right away, requiring several reads and re-reads for his logic (which is, nevertheless, of the best kind!) to sink in. It is not possible to skim over this because it is one of the most remarkable parts of Kautilya’s political philosophy and gives you more insights into his genius, maverick mind. A chessboard world of would-be conquerors and kings, whose mutual—and intrinsically slippery—equations should, in his view, be assessed and revised all the time, according to the political exigencies of the moment.

Kautilya starts off with a basis circle of kings (raja-mandala) of whom the main players are the vijigishu (aspiring conqueror), ari (enemy), madhyama (middle king) and udasina (the indifferent, neutral king). ‘This is a Game of Thrones scenario!’ you cry. ‘We know who each one is.’ Once you have nobly resisted the temptation to compare worlds, you can understand the sheer brilliance of Kautilya’s plotting and appreciate what a pioneer he was, in this regard. After laying out the players, he comes up with six policies or guidelines (shad-gunya), as it were, that a king (any king, just not a woman) should follow depending on the circumstances.10 If one is weaker than the enemy, the policy of sandhi (devising a peace treaty) should be adopted. If, on the other hand, one is stronger than the enemy, the policy of vigraha (hostility) should be followed. However, if one’s power is equal to that of the enemy, then one should follow the policy of asana (keeping quiet).

And if one is considerably stronger than the enemy, then yana (embarking on a military expedition) is the policy to be followed. If one is extremely weak, though, then one should follow the policy of samshraya (seeking shelter with another king or in a fort). Finally, if it is possible to fight the enemy with the help of an ally, then one should adopt the dual policy of dvaidhibhava (sandhi/peace with one king and vigraha/ hostility with another). So, if you follow his logic, your enemy’s enemy is, in fact, your friend with whom you can team up and defeat your original foe. But the friend of your enemy’s enemy can turn out to be your enemy, too, if they combine forces and turn against you, in turn.

If your head is (justifiably) reeling by this time, it might help to reiterate that the Arthashastra projected a theoretical reality and we do not know how much of its intense pragmatism was translated into action, although—and this cannot be discounted—it could very well have been based on real tussles between contemporary rulers that Kautilya might have observed or even helped resolve. We know, for instance, that Chandragupta Maurya led most of the Mauryan military triumphs but we have no idea whether this was the policy (or policies!) he followed.

And while on the subject of this very king, we must add that despite him having apparently left Pataliputra for Karnataka in the wake of a prolonged famine, the Arthashastra, in fact, stipulates a very rigorous famine code, which, therefore, raises the whole reality versus theory spectre, as regards the text, again. Kautilya envisages all sorts of famine-related contingencies and offers a range of remedies that range from the standard (providing food and/or employment to the people) to the truly innovative (moving the famine-stricken to another country).11 This begs the question of whether these measures were actually employed during Magadha’s famine (probably not if it lasted for twelve long years!) or merely remained within the pages of the text.

Questions and more questions but the answers aren’t exactly pouring in!