THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRESmahajanapadas in the triangle Delhi-Pataliputra-Ujjain. Campaigns of
conquest had added the northwest, Kalinga, and an enclave in the south to
the empire. Control of major trade routes and of the coasts was of major
importance for the access to mercantile wealth which must have been
essential for imperial finance.
Ashoka’s greatness was due to his insight into the futility of further
expansionist warfare which would not have added much to the empire but
would have impeded its consolidation. In order to conquer the vast areas in
the interior, Ashoka would have had to fight many more bloody wars.
About 2,000 years later the Mughal empire broke under the strain of
incessant conquest when Aurangzeb tried to achieve what Ashoka had
wisely avoided. In consolidating his empire, Ashoka adopted revolutionary
methods. As emphasised by the Indian historian Romila Thapar, he must
have realised that such a vast empire could not be based simply on the
naked power polities of the Arthashastra but that it required some deeper
legitimation. Therefore he adopted the doctrine of right conduct as the
maxim of his policy. For the spread of this doctrine, he relied on the
spiritual infrastructure provided by the new Buddhist community which
was in ascendance in those days. But he carefully avoided equating his
doctrine of right conduct with Buddhism as such. He also included the
Brahmins and the sect of the Ajivikas in his religious policy.
After a period of unscrupulous power politics under the earlier rulers of
Magadha, Indian kingship attained a moral dimension in Ashoka’s reign.
But in the means he adopted, he was influenced by the tradition of statecraft
epitomised by Kautalya. The Dhamma-Mahamatras which he put into the
entourage of his relatives—from whom challenges to his power would be
expected to come—were different in name only from Kautalya’s spies. This,
of course, should not detract from the greatness of his vision which
prompted him to strive for an ethical legitimation of his imperial rule. His
success was nevertheless not only due to his ideology and the strength of his
army and administration but also to the relative backwardness of central
and southern India in his day. When regional centres of power emerged in
those parts of the country in the course of an autochthonous process of state
formation in later centuries, the course of Indian history was changed once
more and the great regional kingdoms of the early medieval period arose. In
that period the old tradition of the legitimation of Hindu kings was revived
and Ashoka’s great vision was eclipsed.
THE END OF THE MAURYA EMPIRE AND
THE NORTHERN INVADERS
The history of the Maurya empire after the death of Ashoka is not very
well recorded. There are only stray references in Buddhist texts, the Indian
Puranas and some Western classical texts and these references often