The Mauryan Empire (321-185 âñå) has a unique place in India's history.

It is celebrated as the first empire established across large parts of South Asia and extending into modern Afghanistan. More importantly, its memory continued to be invoked in Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit writings of Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu affil­iation, throughout the historical periods.

Jain sources also know of Asoka, but he is not as central in Jain accounts as he is in Buddhist ones. Instead, Jain histories focus more on Asoka's grandfather and founder of the dynasty, Candragupta, who they say became a Jain. Historians of one of the Jain sects, the Digambaras, credit him with leading a migration south to avoid a great famine, and eventually dying in meditation at the holy shrine of Sravana Belgola in the modern South Indian state of Karnataka. Asoka's grandson and suc­cessor, Samprati, is honored as a Jain ruler who actively spread Jainism to different parts of South Asia. Medieval Jain writers, such as the twelfth-century polymath Hemacandra, described the king's good deeds in glowing terms. Samprati and his temples and icons thereby came to occupy a prominent place in the Jain history of western India closely analogous to that occupied by Asoka in the Buddhist history of India.

Buddhist texts such as the Mahavamsa, the earliest Pali chronicle of Sri Lanka, dated to the late fourth or early fifth century ñå, are the most consistent in emulating the notion of kingship propagated by Asoka. In the Sri Lankan chronicles, the em­phasis is on the purification of the Buddhist Sangha by Asoka, as well as the dis­patch of Buddhist missionaries not only to different parts of the subcontinent, but also to Suvarnabhumi—often identified with parts of Southeast Asia—and most of all to Sri Lanka.

The Mauryas, and particularly Candragupta, the founder of the dynasty, are re­ferred to prominently in early Greek accounts of the eastern empire of Alexander the

¹ Geiger 1950; Olivelle, Leoshko, and Prabha 2012, 1-16.

Himanshu Prabha Ray, The Mauryan Empire In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0007.

Great. The Greek historian Arrian of Nicomedia states that the Greek ambassador Megasthenes went further than Alexander and his men, and visited Candragupta (or, to the Greeks, Sandracottus), the greatest king of the Indians. He also vis­ited Pataliputra, but did not travel further east or south.^[529] Scholars have debated the veracity of Megasthenes's reports, considering that his writings survive only in fragments. These writings acquired primacy in the search for the chronology of the Mauryas by the Asiatic Society, founded in 1784 by Sir William Jones, an English philologist and judge based in Calcutta. Based on his study of the Sanskrit Puranas, Jones tabulated a detailed history of the kings of Magadha, one of the an­cient kingdoms of North India. The members of the ruling dynasty of the Nandas are said to have been killed by the clever brahmana Canakya who then established Candragupta Maurya as king.^[530] On the death of the tenth Maurya king, his place was usurped by his commander-in-chief, Pusyamitra Sunga.

While Chandragupta founded the Mauryan dynasty and expanded its rule in large parts of the Ganga Valley and the northwest, it was his grandson Asoka who established supremacy over the subcontinent, as evident from his edicts that inform us of his empire. Asoka's epigraphs, inscribed on pillars and rocks, are found over an extensive area from Gandhara in the northwest (now Pakistan) to Karnataka in South India.

In Rock Edict XIII, which is the largest in the group, Asoka expresses remorse at the loss of life that occurred during the conquest of Kalinga, identified with the coastal areas of the modern Indian state of Odisha, which took place in the ninth year of his reign. Interestingly, Rock Edict XIII is not found at the two sites of Asoka's edicts in Odisha and is replaced by two separate edicts at both Jaugada on the north bank of the Rishikulya River, in Ganjam district, and at Dhauli on the banks of the river Daya, eight kilometers south of Bhubaneswar, the present capital of Odisha. The Dhauli and Jaugada edicts are addressed to the officials at Tosali and Samapa, respectively, indicating the names of ancient settlements near the two sites. The sep­arate edicts exhort the officers to gain the affection and confidence of the people, whom Asoka regarded as his children, and to promote dhamma among them.

In the southeast section of Bhubaneswar, about five kilometers from the rock edict at Dhauli, several seasons of archaeological excavations have been conducted at the fortified site of Sisupalgarh, roughly one square kilometer on plan. A striking feature of the Sisupalgarh fort, quadrangular in outline, is the alignment of 13

Map 7.1. The Mauryan Empire.

Source: Olivelle, Leoshko, and Ray, 2012, Reimagining Asoka: Memory and History, p.

In the past, scholars have constantly tried to reconcile information contained in the edicts with those from other sources, such as the biography of Asoka in Buddhist texts, like the Asokavadana written 500 years after Mauryan rule, in the second century ce, in Sanskrit. In the Asokavadana, compiled in northwestern India, Asoka is described as an ugly prince who quelled the revolt in Taxila (in present-day Pakistan) and ascended the throne after killing his brothers. His fierce and malevolent nature was tamed by the Buddhist monk Upagupta, who is said to have converted him and inspired him to visit places associated with the life of the Buddha. Asoka then built 84,000 stupas throughout his empire. The text also includes the tragic story of his son Kunal, who was blinded by a jealous stepmother. A second text that popularized the story of Asoka was the Ceylonese chronicle, the Mahavamsa, which was discussed earlier. The text, however, presents a very dif­ferent perspective on the king and does not mention Asoka's ugliness or his violent nature.

It is evident, therefore, that Asoka's reign, as recounted in the Sri Lankan chron­icles, was considered to be a model for future rulers and continued to inspire later kings well into the present day. The afterlife of the Mauryan Empire entered its latest phase in the mid-twentieth century, as the 284 men and women involved in framing the Constitution of India accepted the importance of the Mauryas, and their most famous king, Asoka (268-232 bce). The Constitution of India was adopted by the Constituent Assembly on November 26, 1949, and came into effect on January 26, 1950, announcing India's birth as a Republic. In the next section, I discuss the unique features of the Mauryan Empire, features that perhaps added to its appeal for successive rulers, as well as to the longevity of its reputation.