Category History

          Up until the war with Kalinga, Ashoka was quite a bloodthirsty king, with a fierce urge to conquer the world. The battle- fields of Kalinga changed Ashoka’s life; a power-hungry king who believed in the mantra of ‘conquer and rule’ became a follower of Buddha, who firmly believed in the ultimate victory of Dharma.

          Kalinga was an independent kingdom in present-day Orissa and lay in the path of many important trade routes. It was not difficult for a ruler like Ashoka to conquer Kalinga. Once the war ended, Ashoka ventured out to roam around the countryside. Though he expected to see glory around, all he could find were burnt houses and scattered corpses. The inscription on his thirteenth rock edict says, ‘One hundred and fifty thousand people were captured, one hundred thousand were killed and many times that number perished’.

          The war of Kalinga transformed him. The vengeful king became a stable and peaceful emperor. Realizing that the real conquest was the conquest of the heart, he became a patron of Buddhism.

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          During Ashoka’s reign, the Mauryan Empire stretched across present-day Afghanistan in the west to Bangladesh in the east. With its capital in Pataliputra, his empire had provincial capitals at Taxila and Ujjain during his rule from 268 to 232 BC. There was not a similarly large empire, so majestic in the Indian subcontinent again until the medieval period. The grandson of the founder of the Maurya dynasty, Ashoka the Great is considered by many to be one of India’s greatest emperors.

          King Ashoka wanted his words to be remembered and known for as long as the sun and the moon existed. Therefore, his words were engraved on rock pillars. We know a lot about Ashoka from these edicts, found across present-day Afghanistan in the north-west, to Karnataka in the south. Ashoka wanted the common man to understand these inscriptions, so they were written in Pali, rather than Sanskrit.

          Ashoka died in 232 BC and just fifty years after his death, the last Maurya ruler, Brihadratha, was assassinated.

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          After Chandragupta Maurya’s death, Bindusara ascended the throne of the Mauryan Empire in 297 BC. His fancy name made way to a lot of legends. A popular one is as follows:

          His mother was poisoned before he was born, so the unborn child was placed in the womb of a goat. When he was born, his body was covered with spots and hence the name Bindusara, the spotted one. Among the Greeks, Bindusara was known as Amitrochates. This Greek-sounding name came from the Sanskrit ‘Amitra-ghata’ which meant the slayer of foes’.

          Unlike his father Chandragupta or son Ashoka, Bindusara’s life has not been well documented, and most of what we know about him comes from legends. He is said to have conquered parts of south India. The works of early Tamil poets tell us about Mauryan chariots with white flags racing across their land.

          He preferred the Ajivika philosophy over Jainism; the Ajivikas were considered atheists then.

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