To cement their friendship further, Seleucus appointed an ambassador to the Mauryan court at Pataliputra. This was Megasthenes, whose account of ‘Sandrokottos’ and his empire, as viewed from its capital, survives only in fragments quoted or paraphrased by later authors. As a first-hand description of anywhere in fourth/third-century BC India east of the Panjab, these fragments are nevertheless valuable. Indeed Megasthenes, in his emphasis on the bureaucratic and absolute nature of Mauryan rule and on the structure of its standing army, goes some way towards vindicating the utility of the Arthasastra as a possible source material. Back home in Greece, his work was seen as vindicating those who dismissed all descriptions of India as a pack of lies. To the floppy-eared and umbrella-footed monstrosities already on record were added such palpable fantasies as reeds which yielded syrup and trees that grew wool. Rocking, no doubt, with Attic mirth, his readers confidently rubbished such early accounts of sugarcane and cotton production as more tall stories from the impossible East.
Although Chandragupta certainly left his successor an empire which reached from Bengal to Afghanistan and Gujarat, there is no clear indication of how far south it extended. Jain tradition insists that, when he abdicated in favour of his son, Chandragupta retired to a Jain establishment in Karnataka. At Sravana Belgola, a picturesque little town nestling in the cleavage between two steeply swelling hills west of Bangalore, the emperor is said to have passed his final days in austerity and devotions. The pinnacle of one of the hills comprises a massive nude sculpture of Gomateshwara, an important Jain teacher; mostly free-standing and nearly twenty metres high, it is one of the sights of south India – ‘nothing grander or more imposing exists anywhere out of Egypt and even there, no known statue surpasses it in height.’5 But it is on the other hill, the less sensational Chandragiri, that Chandragupta is supposed to have resided. Inscriptions and reliefs dating back to the fifth century AD record his presence; and a low cave amidst the granite scarps is said to be where, in the ultimate act of Jain self-denial, the emperor finally starved himself to death.
Scholarly doubts, of course, remain, particularly since the imperial lifestyle as recorded by Megasthenes amidst the splendour and luxury of Pataliputra seems the very antithesis of Jain asceticism. But abnegation was not uncommon in Mauryan society and, in the light of subsequent evidence of Mauryan authority in the south, the story ‘may be accepted as proof of his acquisition of this part of the peninsula’.6
That it probably represented the frontier of his empire is evident from the prologue to the story. The emperor had chosen to abdicate (C297 BC) after receiving information about an imminent famine from the revered Bhadrabahu, who was reputedly the last Jain monk to have actually known the Jain founder Mahavira Nataputta. (Just such a famine is anticipated in two very early inscriptions, engraved on copper plates found in Bengal and UP, which have been dated to Chandragupta’s reign; and unless Bhadrabahu was extraordinarily long-lived, his connection with Mahavira, the Buddha’s contemporary, may be further evidence in favour of the Buddhist ‘short chronology’.) As a result of this prophecy not only Chandragupta but an entire Jain congregation is said to have migrated south. In what, judging by remarks in the Arthasastra, was a continuing pattern of settlement in lands newly conquered or on the margins of existing settlement, the Jains journeyed south till they reached Karnataka. There, where a stream slid between the twin hills of Sravana Belgola, they stopped and stayed, nourishing the legends beloved of generations of pilgrims and patrons whose donations would enable them to dig a fine tank, build a dozen neat temples, and whittle their granite surroundings into megalithic images of the starkest abstraction. The Jains have been there ever since; and to this day they tell much the same story of the emperor Chandragupta.
Such continuities are not uncommon in India. Sir William Jones had likened first meeting his brahman informants to discovering an isolated community of Greeks who, two thousand years on, still wore toga and sandals, worshipped Zeus, recited Homer, and stood guard over a written archive reaching back to the Stone Age. Even now historians of India continue to scrutinise their own surroundings and society for clues to the past. In one of the most compelling exercises in modern historical writing D.D. Kosambi, armed with his notebook and a stout stick (‘fitted with a chisel ferrule for prying artefacts out of the surface … it also serves to discourage the more ambitious village dogs’), conducts his reader on a short walk from his home on the outskirts of Pune (Poona). Chance finds, encounters with neighbouring social groups, careful scrutiny of domestic routines and patient enquiries about local images reveal a three-thousand-year panorama of settlement patterns, trade contacts, and Sanskritic acculturation. ‘There is no substitute for such work in the field for the restoration of pre-literate history,’ writes Kosambi.7 Most of India’s history prior to the arrival of Islam fits his definition of pre-literate; and no society retains a more rewarding consciousness of the past than India’s. Legend and oral tradition, when credible, may be quite as reliable as authentic contemporary documentation.
THE MAURYAS Probable Succession
THE GREATEST OF KINGS
In 1837, following years of conjecture and study by numerous other ‘Orientalists’, James Prinsep, the assay-master at the British mint in Calcutta, made what remains the single most important discovery in the unravelling of India’s ancient history. From inscriptions in an unknown script found on the stone railings of the great Buddhist stupa at Sanchi, he managed to identify two letters of the alphabet. One was ‘d’, the other ‘n’; when added to other letters already tentatively identified, they suggested words which convinced him that the language being used in these inscriptions was Pali. Pali was a Prakrit, one of several derivatives of Sanskrit, that was popular in Magadha in the Buddha’s time and was subsequently appropriated as the sacred language of much Buddhist scripture. Armed with his insight into the likely language, plus much of the alphabet, Prinsep proceeded to make the first ever translations from the neat ‘pin-man’ script now known as Ashoka Brahmi. He translated the short Sanchi inscriptions – they recorded the donation of the stupa’s individual stones and the names of their donors – and he began to tackle a series of much longer inscriptions.
Copies of these longer inscriptions had come from puzzled antiquarians as far afield as Orissa, Gujarat, Allahabad and Delhi. ‘The memorial in question,’ wrote James Tod in 1822 of the Girnar (Gujarat) inscription, ‘is a huge hemispherical mass of dark granite which, like a wart upon the body, has protruded through the crust of mother earth, without fissure or inequality, and which, by the aid of the iron pen, has been converted into a book’.8 Some of the inscriptions were engraved on cliff faces, others on colossal cylindrical pillars; and an odd thing about all of them was that, though found dotted over the length and breadth of the subcontinent, they seemed to contain similar phrasing and even the same message. It was as if, in Europe, chapter-length runes were to be found identically etched, squiggle for squiggle, in the marble of Carrara, the granite of the Grampians, a pillar in the Rhineland and the rock of Gibraltar. Given the obvious antiquity of both script and find-sites, curiosity about their significance was intense. The Harappan civilisation was not as yet even suspected. These looked to be India’s earliest monuments and, whatever their message, they must be of enormous historical importance. Some saw parallels with the Egyptian hieroglyphics; others were reminded of the Ten Commandments as found by Moses on Mount Sinai.
Announcing his translation in 1837, an exhausted and dying Prinsep also saw parallels with Moses: ‘we might easily cite a more ancient and venerable example of thus fixing the law on tablets of stone.’9 For, contrary to expectations, these were not obscure Vedic invocations of unfathomable import but hard statements of policy, and so historical documentation of an immediacy as yet unknown in India. Henceforth called Edicts, rather than Commandments, the inscriptions clearly announced themselves as the directives of a single sovereign. ‘Thus speaks Devanampiya Piyadassi’