THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRESstrategic advantage due to its access to the deposits of iron ore in Chota
Nagpur and its better armament. Thus it was perhaps no accident that
Magadha’s first great campaign was directed against neighbouring Anga
which was equally close to these deposits of iron ore and perhaps
controlled the trade routes through which iron would reach northern India.
In this way, Magadha eliminated the most dangerous competitor at the
very beginning of its imperial career.
The period of Ajatashatru’s successors is not very well documented as
yet. Buddhist texts refer to the four rulers who followed him as parricides
just as he himself and his contemporary Virudhaka, the king of Koshala,
were accused of that crime. These reports may not have been completely
reliable but they seem to indicate that a new type of unscrupulous and
ambitious ruler emerged at that time. This type was then succinctly
described in the famous book on statecraft, Kautalya’s Arthashastra.
Among the rulers of Magadha, Shishunaga deserves special attention
because he defeated the Prayota dynasty of Avanti, a major threat to
Magadha for quite some time, and annexed its territories of Avanti and
Kausambi. In the reign of Shishunaga’s son Kakavarna the second
Buddhist council was held which has been mentioned above. Kakavarna
was assassinated and this time even one of the queens is supposed to have
contributed to the violent death of the king.
The usurper who emerged from this intrigue as the new ruler of
Magadha was Mahapadma who founded the short-lived but very
important Nanda dynasty. Mahapadma was the son of a Shudra woman
and later Purana texts refer to him as the destroyer of the Kshatriyas—
obviously a reference both to his low birth and his victories over the kings
of northern India. Mahapadma energetically continued the aggressive
policies of his predecessors. He subjugated most of northern India, parts of
central India and even Kalinga on the east coast. He rates as the greatest
Indian ruler before the Mauryas and in the royal lists of the Puranas he is
the first who bears the imperial title Ekachattra, meaning ‘he who has
united the country under one umbrella’, the symbol of overlordship.
Greek and Roman authors report that the Nandas, who had their
capital at Pataliputra when Alexander the Great conquered northwestern
India, had a powerful standing army of 200,000 infantrymen, 20,000
horsemen, 2,000 chariots drawn by four horses each, and 3,000 elephants.
This is the first reference to the large-scale use of elephants in warfare.
Such war elephants remained for a long time the most powerful strategic
weapons of Indian rulers until the Central Asian conquerors of the
medieval period introduced the new method of the large-scale deployment
of cavalry.
The Nandas could maintain their large army only by rigorously
collecting the revenues of their empire and plundering their neighbours.
Their name became a byword for avarice in later Indian literature. The