THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRESAjatashatru had barely established his hegemony over the Gangetic plains
he was challenged by King Pradyota of Ujjain (Avanti) in western India
who even conquered Kausambi and held it for some time. But Magadha
was already so powerful that such challenges could not dislodge it any
more from its eminent position.
The meteoric rise of Magadha within the lifetime of two generations has
remained an enigma to all historians who have tried to explain the origins
of ancient India’s first empire. The main problem is not the sudden
emergence of a successful dynasty—Indian history is replete with such
success stories—but the fact that a vast state of hitherto unprecedented
dimensions was born at the periphery of the Gangetic civilisation without
any recognisable period of gestation. Historians who believe in the theory
of diffusion of imperial state formation from a centre in Western Asia point
to the fact that the rise of Magadha closely paralleled the Persian conquest
of northwestern India. The knowledge of the new style of imperial
administration practised in the Persian provinces on the river Indus must
have spread to eastern India, too. But the availability of this knowledge
would not suffice to explain the actual rise of Magadha. We have to delve
back into India’s history in the seventh and sixth centuries BC in order to
find clues for the emergence of this new type of state formation.
Early state formation in India usually proceeded in three phases. In the
Gangetic region the first phase of this process was characterised by the
transition of the small semi-nomadic tribes (jana) of the period of Vedic
migration to a large number of tribal principalities of a definite area
(janapada). During the second phase in a period of competition sixteen
major mahajanapadas emerged in the late sixth and early fifth centuries
BC. The third or imperial phase was reached when one of these
mahajanapadas (in this case, Magadha) annexed a few neighbouring
principalities and established its hegemony over the others. This three-
phase development can be considered as an autochthonous evolution,
especially since the first two phases are certainly not due to external
influences. They were accompanied by a marked social and political
change in the Gangetic civilisation, and it is this change which contributed
to the emergence of the empire in the third phase.
Indian Marxist historians insist that the introduction of iron implements
in the seventh century BC, which enabled the people to clear the jungle and
reclaim the fertile land of the eastern Gangetic plains, led to the rise of the
powerful mahajanapadas and finally to the emergence of the great eastern
empire. But hitherto there has been little archaeological evidence and there
are only a few references in the ancient texts which would clearly support
this Marxist thesis of economic change as the main reason for the rise of
Magadha. Iron, however, must have indeed played an important yet
different role in this period. But it seems that even in this period iron was
mostly used for the making of weapons and Magadha may have had a