The Mauryas 8

 CHANDRAGUPTA MAURYA

PART II

And so to the mother of all battles—Dhana Nanda’s colossal army against Chandragupta’s comparatively small one—but the former’s back had been broken with tales of the latter’s astonishing success, and the entire thing was a bit like the parable of the elephant and the ant whereby the former succumbed and quite quickly at that. We have highly exaggerated figures of this clash (one hundred crore soldiers, ten thousand elephants, one lakh horses and five thousand charioteers are supposed to have died, according to the Milindapanho, a Buddhist text)1 but there are no real corroborative accounts to verify the facts. Chandragupta’s army varies from adequate to massive depending on who is telling the tale but the size can be inferred by a process of intelligent deduction.2 So here goes: the Greek account of Dhana Nanda’s army estimates it as two lakh infantry, twenty thousand cavalry, three thousand elephants and eight thousand four-horsed chariots, so Chandragupta’s army would have had to be roughly comparable in number or, perhaps, even larger in order to triumph.

And here we have Arrian’s astute mathematical observations: each chariot in Chandragupta’s army carried two soldiers and the driver; and each elephant carried three archers, besides the mahout; therefore, the total number of soldiers in his army would have been six lakh infantry, thirty thousand cavalry, thirty-six thousand men on elephants and twenty-four thousand men in chariots, with the staggering total of six lakh ninety thousand—and this excludes camp followers and attendants at large. Or we could discard the complicated calculations and just trust Pliny who says that Chandragupta had six lakh infantry, thirty thousand cavalry and nine thousand elephants, and probably eight thousand chariots like the Nandas. The non-mathematically inclined need not concern themselves with these figures but to those who love numbers and their tales, these statistics are infinitely fascinating!

Also, this obsession with elephants vis-à-vis battles was completely warranted on account of their sheer size and volatile nature, which routinely resulted in the (perhaps unfortunate) trampling of the enemy—and this, incidentally, is a feature that remains constant in warfare all the way down to the Mughals. But pertinent to our purpose is the fact that Magadha was the undisputed leader in elephant procurement, training and deployment. Kautilya himself talks of the east (prachya) as the region with the best elephants, while the Mahabharata echoes his sentiments, claiming that the Prachyas/easterners were brilliant at elephant-fighting.3

Megasthenes was an elephant-noter, too: he says that the largest elephants in the land were of the Praisian, or of the land of the Prasii/eastern people—in other words, Magadha. In fact, the elephants that Chandragupta later gave Seleucus Nikator despite being ‘past their sell-by date’ apparently helped the latter in his struggles against the other Greek generals, resulting in him being one of the prime winners.4 The presumption, therefore, is that Chandragupta had considerably more elephants than Dhana Nanda and they probably swung the battle his way.

And of course, Chandragupta must have acquitted himself honourably in this defining battle of his life. This had a little to do with his training, and obviously a lot to do with his courage and grit and determination and ambition—for too often, what is lost in accounts of Chandragupta are these very qualities. The accent is usually on Kautilya who, being the overpowering figure that he is, dominates the entire narrative in most instances, reducing Chandragupta to a silent, passive figure who tags along with him, falls in with his plans and mutely becomes the next Magadhan king, seemingly without a single original thought in his head. Yet, let us remember that his was no easy task: to take a leap of faith and trust a virtual stranger with your destiny requires a sort of mental toughness and resilience that is not immediately evident in most people—and, moreover, he was extremely young when he put his life in the hands of the redoubtable Kautilya.

Lots changed after the battle—the Nandas vacating the throne and Kautilya finally tying up his hair, for a start. A dispirited Dhana Nanda apparently offered his apologies to Kautilya and asked that his wife and daughters be spared, which set the wily mentor’s brain on another track altogether. Accordingly, when the dust had settled and Dhana Nanda had left Pataliputra (incidentally, it is a bit odd that Kautilya spared his life; logically, he should not have left any rebellious elements around to foster problems at a later stage but we do not know anything for certain, so we just have to assume that he was in a particularly charitable mood then), Kautilya proposed that Chandragupta marry Durdhara, the exiled king’s youngest daughter (in one version, Chandragupta’s maternal cousin), who, when the prospect was mentioned, was, it seems, none too loath to marry the young man—and Chandragupta, too, wasn’t averse to the idea, so all was well.

Again, odd that love would blossom in the heart of one whose father had just been shoved off his throne but perhaps pragmatic considerations were uppermost in Durdhara’s mind—and perhaps Chandragupta was irresistible. Also, it made supreme political sense, at this point—the Nanda rule would meld seamlessly into the Mauryas, making one happy family, as a result. Uniting two ruling lines by the replacer marrying into the displaced was a ploy that was used time and time again through the ages. Let us move away from India for a change and consider world history. Think of the unison of the warring families of the Yorks/Plantagenets and Lancasters in medieval England, for instance, with the marriage of Henry of Lancaster with Elizabeth of York, thereby starting the Tudor dynasty, in which their son, Henry VIIIth, had a starring role, at a subsequent point, with his wife-killing penchant (this fact is expressly mentioned for those who have little idea of English history but who would have read about this impossibly eccentric king somewhere or the other, so it puts the whole thing into context!).5 Anyway the point is that Kautilya was employing this diplomatic device much before this time—and it was eminently successful except that Durdhara eventually died in a dramatic way (mentioned later) due to the former’s machinations.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves here, so back to the marriage and Kautilya’s satisfaction at pulling off this diplomatic masterstroke. If we go by the stories, the atmosphere was marred a bit by the news of Dhana Nanda having been set upon by robbers while on his way out of the city and killed. This was unfortunate but not entirely regrettable—it meant one less thorn in the flesh for the duo to worry about for their attention was completely occupied by a potential mess: it was not only that random Nanda adherents were hatching plots to murder Chandragupta—or so it seemed to the ever-suspicious Kautilya—but also that the question of who should actually sit on the vacant throne had not quite been settled. When Parvataka and other powers had been roped in as allies, this delicate issue had been skirted and so, everyone thought they would be king after the Nandas, particularly the mountain ruler who fancied himself as the main contender. Accordingly, his clamours grew shriller and more insistent till the point when Kautilya regretfully informed his protégé that they couldn’t risk an open rupture with Parvataka and would have to make arrangements for his crowning.

Needless to say, Chandragupta was deeply chagrined. The Magadhan throne was always supposed to have been his—and he had endured much in his pursuit of it. So to be told at the very last minute that plans had changed must have stirred up all sorts of violent emotions in his breast. Luckily, his training was immaculate and stood him in good stead now. Where a normal man would have raged, he remained deadpan and impassive. Besides, his years with Kautilya had taught him to expect the unexpected and read through the latter’s doublespeak—and there was something very suspicious in his master’s sudden and meek capitulation to Parvataka, so he wisely decided to hold his counsel. Also, Kautilya had a lot on his plate, at the moment. Prominent among the Nanda flagbearers was his erstwhile prime minister, Rakshasa, who indicated through every single expression and word that he heartily disliked the change of guard, and was going to cause trouble.

Accordingly, Chandragupta withdrew to focus on his domestic change of scene while Kautilya immersed himself in the findings of his massive spy network (grown from a small and dedicated band to an ungainly behemoth), emerging now and then to pacify the restive Parvataka. Meanwhile, the citizens of Pataliputra and the larger Magadhan realm wondered what on earth was going on. What was going on was something nasty and convoluted, something that Kautilya, however, was able to pounce on and thereby divert events from taking a tragic turn to a more cheerful outcome (at least, for him!) altogether. It seems that Rakshasa, brooding over the state of affairs and sorely missing his former employer, had devised the perfect solution. Astutely divining that it was Chandragupta among the many claimants to the throne whose cause was the strongest, he decided to focus on getting rid of him. Once Chandragupta disappeared from the scene, all would be well.

And the perfect ploy presented itself in the form of a much-feared and much-deployed figure: the vishkanya or snake-maiden—basically, a girl who had been fed small amounts of poison from childhood so that, in time, her very touch was fatal. As you can imagine, such people were in great demand for use against enemies, although, in all probability, not in possession of a great personal life—there would have been an obvious paucity of friends, for one! Making a lot of money was, perhaps, the only benefit of this profession. That—and presumably the ability to stroll through reptile-infested areas with an air of cool nonchalance! Predictably, these girls—who seem to have been around in Nanda times and even earlier—had made their way irrevocably into lore and legend where the very mention of them would make everyone’s hair stand on end.

And it was one such girl whom Rakshasa decided to employ against Chandragupta. He had not reckoned with Kautilya, though, who had spent a lifetime anticipating precisely such attacks from people around him. To cut a long and rather complicated story short, Kautilya sniffed out the plot, intercepted the vishkanya in question while on her way to Chandragupta’s chambers and promptly despatched her to Parvataka’s instead where, to the court’s shock and horror (and one person’s jubilation), he was found dead the following morning. This was another brilliant move; two enemies had been defanged in one stroke—Parvataka, to contemplate his life in his afterlife and Rakshasa, to contemplate his elderly but very dangerous opponent who was clearly miles ahead of him. All fight momentarily oozed out of the latter; other minor contenders to the throne hurriedly opted for the discretion-over-valour policy and rehearsed their speeches of loyalty to Chandragupta. And with his perfect resolution of this potentially sordid mess, Kautilya began to soar even higher in Chandragupta’s estimation.

Everything fell into place very quickly after that. Chandragupta became the new ruler of Magadha and Kautilya, his hair firmly knotted and his thrill of sweet revenge firmly suppressed, began to devote his extraordinary mind to getting the kingdom together and, basically, keeping everything in place. If we go by the Mudrarakshasa, though, it was not exactly easy. The populace was bewildered and annoyed at having to keep up with these constant changes at the helm, and Parvataka’s son, Malayaketu, suddenly became fractious and demanded that the throne go to him as his father’s heir. Fortunately, the ambiguously-worded treaty that the duo had concluded with Parvataka while initially roping him in had not mentioned an heir (Kautilya thinking several steps ahead, as usual!) and this was now waved in Malayaketu’s face. However, Rakshasa, the inveterate brooder, chose this moment to join Malayaketu’s ranks and revive his ‘anyone-but-Chandragupta’ campaign.

However, fortune favours the brave—or the wily, depending on how you choose to interpret the word—and Kautilya (who was both!) threw his all into forcing these two main irritants off the scene. What happened, thereafter, is full of intricate detail and would make your head swim but suffice it to say that Kautilya managed to get hold of Rakshasa’s signet ring (hence, mudrarakshasa, the title of the play) from his unsuspecting wife and used it on a forged letter to convince Malayaketu that the minister had ordered his father, Parvataka’s death. This had a predictable end: Rakshasa could not argue his way out of this and the two allies had an acrimonious parting of ways. Subsequently, Kautilya, in recognition of Rakshasa’s stubborn determination and dogged loyalties (however misplaced!), co-opted him onto Chandragupta’s side, intending to use his special skills for the latter’s benefit, at some future date.

While all these political permutations and combinations were going on, the people were running riot in every sense of the term. It is a simple equation (and always has been through the ages)—when there is no tangible leader, small-time thugs will emerge and create chaos. And the populace of the erstwhile-Nanda-now-Maurya realm, to begin with, was as variegated a mix as one could find, comprising foreigners at the north-western end, jostling with people in different stages of social evolution in the heartland and elsewhere—tribes, nomads, townsfolk, rural folk, religious sects, linguistic cultures and so on and so forth. No easy matter to rule this unwieldy entity whose denizens were, in any case, irritable and bewildered with the political changes and general chaos!

And so it was, at that point, and the victorious duo hastened to mend matters on a war footing. Anyone recruited in Chandragupta’s cause had to be incorruptible and principled and intelligent—and, presumably, there were loads of such people around because the ranks filled up quite quickly with Kautilya keeping an eagle eye over them all. His spy network was already doing yeoman service in keeping plots and pretenders at bay, freeing him to scout around for a suitable person to employ as Pataliputra’s mayor (nagar-adhyaksha)—a key position deserving of a worthy incumbent.

Kautilya’s methods and motives were always rather odd and this case, too, was no exception. The story goes that while he was walking around the city (no doubt keeping an eye on everyone and everything), he came upon a weaver who was, inexplicably, setting fire to large portions of his own house. This demanded a closer scrutiny and Kautilya interrogated the man. It turned out that this was the weaver’s radical solution to ridding his house of a bug infestation—and Kautilya immediately knew that he had found his man, the logic being that if he could burn his own house to stamp out bugs, then he could, equally, go to drastic lengths to stamp out lawlessness. This was a bit of a shot in the dark but the weaver took over his new responsibility with fervour and ferocity, justifying Kautilya’s foray into human psychology. Of course, there is a parallel Buddhist story that talks of Chandragupta summoning a former acquaintance, Maunitapasvi/Maniyatappo, to restore order in the city, which he promptly succeeding in doing.

And that, as they say, was that. The rest of the Magadhan realm followed Pataliputra’s example and settled down to a normal life, presumably gossiping about their young and charming king, and enjoying their release from Dhana Nanda’s exactions. Chandragupta, in turn, settled down to the onerous duties of rulership with, of course, Kautilya breathing down his neck but in a different way. As noted elsewhere, we presume that he followed Kautilya’s rigorous regimen, which demanded a lot of discipline and self-restraint, and became an immensely successfully ruler—both within, where he managed to keep excellent control over his administration and subjects; and externally, where he balanced equations vis-a-vis other powers with the finesse of a fencing pro.

At the very least, this is what seems likely. Most of the stories surrounding the Mauryan founder are not all accorded historical veracity, especially those penned in a later period. But they also point to possibilities, events that could very well have happened, so we cannot entirely discount them. After all, there is always a kernel of truth in tales, however miniscule this may be. And in the absence of detailed corroborative information, this is all we have. But this is also the reason why Chandragupta and Kautilya are often touted as the country’s first empire-builders, assembling their political spaces on the basis of broad religious and linguistic freedoms, and enabling subsequent heirs—or, at least, the first two—to slip easily into their seats and seamlessly wield the reins of Mauryan governance.

The fairly unanimous conclusion drawn by historians is that as Ashoka inherited an empire that extended over almost the entire subcontinent and even into the Karnataka region, it is very likely that all the major conquests had been made by his grandfather. He definitely controlled the Indus and Ganga plains, as also the far northwest—a formidable empire by any standards! In addition, Chandragupta’s trans-Vindhyan conquests are indicated by Graeco-Roman sources. Plutarch notes that Sandrocottus overran and subdued all of India with an army of six lakh. The Junagarh inscription of Rudradaman suggests that Chandragupta’s reach extended upto Saurashtra in Gujarat—and this very fact attests to his tremendous power; Saurashtra was virtually unconquerable and it was only the Mughal emperor, Akbar, who was able to emulate Chandragupta’s feat, in this regard. We have already referred to Chandragupta’s clash with Seleucus Nikator, the inheritor of Alexander’s eastern provinces, and the territories he acquired thereby. All these indirect references indicate that Chandragupta was chiefly responsible for the massive extent of the Mauryan empire.

There is slightly more specific evidence with regard to Chandragupta and the south. A poem in the Akananuru/ Ahananuru, a classical Tamil poetry collection, written by a Sangam poet, Mamulanar, makes a cryptic reference to the Koshar achieving many successes against their enemies but being assisted by the Moriyas and their huge army to defeat the Mokur who stood out against them. The poet describes the Moriya chariots rolling across a swathe cut in the mountain for their onward march. Another poem by the same poet states that the warlike Vadugar formed the vanguard of the Mauryan army on its southern march. The word means ‘northerners’ and refers to the people of the Andhra-Karnataka region and to the north of the Tamil country. Reading between these random and somewhat disconnected references, the storyline is clear: the Mauryans actively interfered in the politics of the south, they had an alliance with a southern power called the Koshar of north Karnataka, and local troops of the Deccan formed part of the Mauryan army.

However, what usually excites most historians are the intriguing references in later inscriptions and Jaina texts that seem to connect Chandragupta to Jainism and, more specifically, Karnataka. The Jaina tradition speaks eloquently of the relationship between Chandragupta and the Jaina saint, Bhadrabahu. A severe famine in the Magadha area prompted Bhadrabahu to lead a Jaina migration southward (he predicted it would last twelve years); Chandragupta followed him as his disciple, later the chief one, and after an ascetic existence of some years on a hill in Shravana-belagola named Chandragiri (apparently in his honour), died of ritual starvation. An inscription of c. CE 600 links Bhadrabahu with ‘Chandragupta muni’ and there is other epigraphic evidence in the same vein.6 (Subsequently, Ashoka is also connected to the area through his inscriptions, further corroborating this fact.)

Odd that the king would abandon his throne and people so precipitately but, as noted elsewhere, he was probably sick and tired of politics and its machinations, the endless strategising and plotting. Besides, Kautilya’s general hysteria and paranoia would have tried the patience of a saint. Embracing the life of one could quite conceivably have appeared to Chandragupta as a more attractive option. And perhaps this was the only excuse for his leaving Magadha that Kautilya would accept, however unwillingly. Chandragupta is eventually supposed to have observed sallekhana or the Jaina ritual of death by starvation. Later texts mention this story, and if one adds the inscriptions in the Shravana-belagola hills of the period between the fifth and fifteenth centuries CE that mention Chandragupta and Bhadrabahu to this, one can speculate that there might be a historical basis to this persistent Jaina tradition that links Chandragupta to Karnataka.

With his death, though, we proceed into a rather shadowy phase of Mauryan history. Admittedly, Chandragupta was himself a somewhat elusive figure but there are so many legends and stories, as well as oblique and straightforward references to him, that he has captured the public imagination in a way that very few rulers of the past have managed to do. Television adaptations of his tale abound, highly satisfying sagas of revenge and vindication, with several blue-and-green-eyed Greek women thrown in for good measure. Whether these versions possess any modicum of historical truth is a different story altogether!

Chandragupta’s son and successor, Bindusara, on the other hand, inhabits the peripheral realm of known Mauryan history despite clearly being a man of much charisma and a powerful ruler of a very large kingdom to boot. Why that should be so is ascribable to one of the most enduring and intractable mysteries of history and its writing whereby some figures slip easily into perpetual obscurity while others remain larger-than-life entities whose presence is faithfully recorded in every single narrative and historical reconstruction. All we can do is try to resurrect some of the former figures so that they rise, triumphant and phoenix-like, from the ashes.

And so, we shall put this into effect with Bindusara.