A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century by Upinder Singh

Author:Upinder Singh [Singh, Upinder]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9788131711200
Publisher: Pearson India
Published: 2009-12-13T18:30:00+00:00

The Nature and Structure of the Maurya Empire

The problems posed by the major sources for the Maurya period have implications for our understanding of the nature and structure of the empire. There is the Arthashastra, a theoretical treatise, not composed in its entirety in the Maurya period, which talks of a potential state within the framework of an established tradition of scholarship on statecraft. Just how much of what it says can be connected to the manner in which the Maurya empire was governed is difficult to assess. Second, there are different versions of fragments of a lost text, Megasthenes’ Indica, replete with several discrepancies and inaccuracies. The third major source, Ashoka’s inscriptions, have the advantage that they are securely dated to the reign of Ashoka, but as they mostly deal with Ashoka’s dhamma, they offer only fleeting, incidental references to administration. The political implications of the numismatic finds and the archaeological evidence have not yet been properly explored.

The question is not whether the Maurya state was an empire or not, but what sort of empire was it? What did it mean for a territory or people to be absorbed into its fold? What were the strategies and degrees of control over different areas? How effective was this control? The three major sources for the Maurya period may actually mask the ground realities. All of them were, in one way or another, connected with the Maurya court. They project the point of view of the political–intellectual elites at the centre and perhaps exaggerate the level of central control.

The idea of a highly centralized Maurya empire was based partly on an assumption that empires and centralization go together. It was also based on an uncritical reading of the Arthashastra, which presents a state that controls the people, produce, and resources of its domain with all-encompassing and robotic precision. More recent writings on the Maurya state have gone to the other extreme. Gerard Fussman (1987–88) has argued that given the extent of the empire and the communication networks of the time, the Maurya empire could not possibly have been centralized. Maurya rule was superimposed over a number of existing political units, which must have been allowed to continue to exercise varying degrees of autonomy. Ashoka’s personal supervision applied only to the propagation of dhamma, not to details of routine administration. Initiatives at the provincial and local administrative level are evident in the script, language, content, and location of the inscriptions. For instance, the fact that the Greek and Aramaic inscriptions in the northwest are not literal translations of the standard edicts suggests that considerable initiative was left in the hands of local officials.

Romila Thapar ([1963], 1987) initially presented the Maurya empire as a new form of government marked by centralized control and planning. Her subsequent re-consideration of the issue (1984) suggests that the Maurya empire was not a homogeneous whole, and that it subsumed different sorts of economies, polities, and life-ways. Using the framework of world systems theory, Thapar suggests that the empire should be considered as consisting of metropolitan, core, and peripheral areas.

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