The Mauryan Empire

Chandragupta Maurya, guided by his brahmana minister Kautilya (Chanakya), overthrew the Nandas about 321 BCE and took Pataliputra. Kautilya's Arthashastra, the classic manual of statecraft, pictures a centralised monarchy sustained by taxes, spies, irrigation and a vast standing army. Chandragupta then turned west, and by 305 BCE had defeated Seleucus Nikator, Alexander's successor, gaining Arachosia, Gedrosia and the Kabul valley in exchange for five hundred elephants.

To the Mauryan court came the Greek ambassador Megasthenes, whose Indica describes Pataliputra's wooden palisades, its municipal committees and a land where famine and slavery were said to be rare. Under Bindusara the empire pushed into the Deccan.

Ashoka (c. 273–232 BCE) was crowned after a struggle, and in the eighth year of his reign stormed Kalinga. The Kalinga war (261 BCE) killed a hundred thousand and carried off a hundred and fifty thousand more — and Rock Edict XIII records that the slaughter filled the king with remorse, turning him from chandasoka, Ashoka the fierce, to dharmasoka, Ashoka the righteous.

Thereafter he governed by Dhamma: a public ethic of non-violence, tolerance among sects, courtesy to parents and teachers, and humane treatment of servants and animals. Officers called Dhamma-mahamatras carried it into the provinces; he built hospitals, rest-houses and wells, and sent missions of the Dhamma to Sri Lanka, Central Asia and the Hellenistic kings.

Ashoka's voice survives in his inscriptions — the earliest decipherable written records of India — engraved on rocks and polished pillars from Girnar to Kandahar, mostly in the Brahmi script, with Kharoshthi, Greek and Aramaic in the north-west. Deciphered by James Prinsep in 1837, they first revealed Ashoka to modern history. The lion capital of the Ashokan pillar at Sarnath is today the national emblem of India.

The empire was administered from Pataliputra through provinces under princes, districts under rajukas, and villages under gramikas, with a espionage network the Arthashastra calls the eyes of the king. Revenue flowed from the land tax (usually a quarter to a sixth of produce), tolls, mines and forests — for the state claimed ownership of all natural wealth.

Within fifty years of Ashoka's death the empire had broken apart — pressed by a costly bureaucracy, a shrinking treasury, Brahmana resentment of the Dhamma, weak successors and the centrifugal pull of a vast territory. In 185 BCE the last Maurya, Brihadratha, was murdered by his own commander-in-chief Pushyamitra Shunga, who founded the Shunga dynasty.