Chandragupta Maurya and the Founding of the Maurya Empire

Chandragupta Maurya founded the Maurya Empire around 322 BC by overthrowing the Nanda dynasty of Magadha, in north-eastern India. Guided, according to tradition, by the Brahmin strategist Chanakya, he went on to drive out the Macedonian garrisons left by Alexander the Great and to defeat Seleucus I. By his death around 298 BC, he ruled the first empire to unite most of the Indian subcontinent, from Afghanistan to Bengal.

Background: India after Alexander

In the 4th century BC, northern India was dominated by the kingdom of Magadha, ruled from Pataliputra by the Nanda dynasty. The Nandas were rich and militarily strong but, according to both Greek and Indian sources, unpopular.

In the north-west, Alexander the Great had conquered the Punjab and the Indus valley in 327–325 BC. His soldiers refused to march further east, and when he died in Babylon in 323 BC his Indian provinces were left in the hands of Macedonian satraps (governors) and allied Indian kings. The region was unstable, and the Macedonian hold soon weakened.

The sources

No inscription of Chandragupta himself has been found, so his story must be pieced together from later and often contradictory sources. Greek and Roman writers, including Strabo, Plutarch, Appian, Justin and Arrian, preserve fragments of the account of Megasthenes, who lived at his court, as well as reports from Alexander’s campaign.

Indian sources are later. The Puranas list the Maurya kings and the lengths of their reigns. Buddhist chronicles from Sri Lanka, especially the Mahavamsa and its commentary, tell of his youth and of Chanakya. The Jain tradition, set down most fully in Hemachandra’s Parishishtaparvan in the 12th century, describes his rise and his death as a Jain monk. The play Mudrarakshasa, probably written in the Gupta period or later, adds dramatic but unreliable detail.

Two kinds of inscription from later centuries mention him or his officials: the Junagadh rock inscription of the Saka ruler Rudradaman, dated around AD 150, and later Jain inscriptions at Shravanabelagola. Historians weigh all these sources carefully, and many details of his life remain uncertain.

Chandragupta’s origins

Little is known for certain about Chandragupta’s early life. He was probably born around 350–340 BC. Buddhist sources say he belonged to the Moriya clan of Pippalivana, a Kshatriya family. The Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa, written centuries later, calls him vrishala, a term that may mean low-born, and a late tradition links the name Maurya to a mother called Mura. Historians do not agree on his background.

Greek and Roman writers called him Sandrokottos or Androcottus. Plutarch reports that as a young man he met Alexander, and later said that Alexander could easily have conquered the Nanda kingdom because its king was hated. The Roman historian Justin says that he offended a king, probably Alexander, by his boldness and had to flee.

Chanakya, the king-maker

Indian tradition gives a central role to Chanakya, also known as Kautilya or Vishnugupta, a Brahmin associated with the city of Taxila. According to legend, Chanakya was insulted at the Nanda court and swore to destroy the dynasty. He found the young Chandragupta, trained him and planned the campaign against Magadha.

Chanakya is traditionally named as the author of the Arthashastra, a detailed manual of government, economy, diplomacy and war. Many scholars now think the surviving text was compiled and expanded between the 2nd century BC and the 3rd century AD, though it may preserve older material. It is therefore not a straightforward guide to how Chandragupta ruled.

Overthrowing the Nandas

The details of Chandragupta’s rise come mostly from later legends. The conventional date for his capture of Pataliputra is around 322–321 BC, although some historians prefer a date a few years later. He seems to have built an army in the north-west and then advanced on Magadha.

One later story, preserved in Buddhist and Jain traditions, says that Chandragupta first attacked the heart of the Nanda kingdom and was defeated. He then changed strategy and conquered the outer provinces first, gradually closing in on the capital. Whatever the course of the war, Dhana Nanda was overthrown and Chandragupta became king of Magadha.

Historians also debate the order of his campaigns. Some argue that he first expelled the Macedonians from the Punjab and then marched east, while others think he took Magadha first. The last Macedonian commander in India, Eudemon (often called Eudemus), left around 317 BC to join the wars among Alexander’s successors, and the north-west came under Mauryan control.

Building an empire

With Magadha’s wealth and army in his hands, Chandragupta expanded rapidly. Plutarch says he overran the whole of India with an army of 600,000 men, and Pliny the Elder gives a later Mauryan army as 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry and 9,000 elephants. These figures cannot be checked but show how vast his forces appeared to the Greeks.

Around 305 BC, Seleucus I, who had seized Alexander’s eastern territories, crossed the Indus. The Seleucid-Mauryan War ended in a treaty around 303 BC, under which Seleucus ceded lands corresponding to parts of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan, including Arachosia and Gedrosia, in exchange for 500 war elephants. A marriage agreement sealed the alliance.

The empire’s southern limits are less clear. Some later Tamil sources mention a “Mauryan” expedition to the south, and the Jain tradition of his death in Karnataka suggests his authority reached the Deccan. A 2nd-century AD inscription at Junagadh in Gujarat records that a reservoir there, Lake Sudarshana, was built by his provincial governor Pushyagupta, confirming Mauryan rule in western India.

Government and the capital

Chandragupta ruled from Pataliputra, which the Greek envoy Megasthenes described as a vast city surrounded by a timber wall with 570 towers and 64 gates. Megasthenes also described a large bureaucracy, with officials responsible for roads, irrigation, markets, foreigners and the collection of taxes.

The king, according to these Greek accounts, lived amid elaborate security, rarely slept in the same room on consecutive nights and left the palace only for war, justice, sacrifice and hunting. Such details may be exaggerated, but they suggest a powerful, centralised monarchy with a standing army paid by the state.

The economy rested on agriculture in the fertile Ganges plain, taxed by the state, and on trade along the rivers and overland routes. Greek writers drawing on Megasthenes describe a royal road running from the north-west frontier to Pataliputra and beyond, with markers indicating distances. Silver punch-marked coins, stamped with symbols rather than portraits, circulated across the empire, continuing a tradition of the Nanda period.

Megasthenes also reported that the king controlled horses and elephants as royal property and that farmers were left to work their fields even in time of war. Whether or not this was always true, it reflects an ideal of an orderly state protecting its tax-paying peasants.

Abdication, death and legacy

According to Jain tradition, Chandragupta became a follower of the Jain teacher Bhadrabahu. When a long famine struck northern India, he gave up the throne and travelled south with Bhadrabahu to Shravanabelagola in Karnataka. There, on the hill now called Chandragiri, he is said to have died by sallekhana, a ritual fast to death, around 298–297 BC.

Inscriptions at Shravanabelagola, the earliest from around the 7th century AD, record this tradition. Many historians accept it as plausible, though it cannot be confirmed by contemporary sources. Buddhist and Hindu sources say nothing about a Jain conversion, and the Puranas simply give him a reign of 24 years.

Chandragupta was succeeded by his son Bindusara, known to the Greeks as Amitrochates, who ruled until about 273 BC and extended the empire further south, and then by his grandson Ashoka, whose conversion to Buddhism after the Kalinga War made the dynasty famous across Asia. The Maurya Empire lasted until about 185 BC.

Chandragupta’s achievement was to unite the rich Ganges plain with the north-west frontier and create the first pan-Indian empire. Historians also stress the continuity of his achievement. He took over the Nanda kingdom’s treasury, tax system and army, and joined them to the frontier lands that Alexander had briefly held. The resulting state controlled the main routes between the Ganges plain, the Indus valley and Iran, and was strong enough to deal with the Seleucid kings as an equal. Its diplomatic contacts with the Greek world, begun under Chandragupta, continued under his son and grandson.

His story, and that of Chanakya, has been retold in Sanskrit drama, Jain and Buddhist literature, and modern Indian novels, films and television.

Timeline

• c. 350–340 BC: Probable birth of Chandragupta.
• 326 BC: Alexander the Great campaigns in the Punjab; his army turns back at the Hyphasis.
• 323 BC: Death of Alexander in Babylon.
• c. 322–321 BC: Chandragupta overthrows the Nandas and takes Pataliputra.
• c. 317 BC: The last Macedonian commander leaves India.
• c. 305–303 BC: War and treaty with Seleucus I; 500 elephants change hands.
• c. 302 BC: Megasthenes arrives as Seleucid ambassador.
• c. 298–297 BC: Chandragupta abdicates and, according to Jain tradition, dies at Shravanabelagola.

Why it matters

Chandragupta Maurya created the first state to bring most of the Indian subcontinent under one government. His empire set patterns of administration, diplomacy and imperial ideology that later Indian rulers looked back to, and it provided the framework within which Ashoka spread Buddhism across Asia.