Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Mauryan kings embraced Buddhism, and ran their empire on Greek and Roman im-
perial practices that had seeped across the spinal route of migration in the temperate zone
from the Aegean basin and West Asia into India. Nevertheless, it required all manners of
human ingenuity to hold the Mauryan Empire together. Chandragupta's advisor might have
been one Kautilya, who penned a political classic, the
Arthashastra
, or “Book of the State,”
which shows how a conqueror can create an empire by exploiting the relationships between
various city-states: any city-state that touches one's own should be considered an enemy,
because it will have to be subdued in the course of empire building; but a distant city-state
that borders an enemy should be considered a friend. Because holding such an immense
subcontinental empire together was difficult, Kautilya believed in complex alliance net-
works, and in benevolence toward the conquered, whose way of life should be preserved.
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The Mauryan was a decentralized empire, to say the least, with a heartland in the eastern
Gangetic plain and four regional centers by the time of Chandragupta's grandson Ashoka:
Taxila in the northwest, outside the Pakistani capital of Islamabad; Ujjain on the Malwa
plateau in western-central India; Suvarnagiri in the southern Indian state of Karnataka; and
Kalinga along the Bay of Bengal south of Kolkata.
It was an extraordinary achievement this early in history, with only primitive means of
transport and communications available, for one empire to cover so much of the subcon-
tinent. The Mauryans demonstrated the potential for a single state to employ geograph-
ic logic over a vast area for quite some time. Alas, the decline of the Mauryans led to
the familiar invasions from the northwest, notably through the Khyber Pass: Greeks in
the second century
B.C
. and Scythians in the first century
B.C
. This encouraged the redivi-
sion of the subcontinent into regional dynasties: Sunga, Pandyan, Kuninda, and so on. The
Kushan Empire emerged in the first century
A.D
. in Bactria, where northern Afghanistan
meets Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and its Indo-European rulers conquered territory from
the Ferghana valley in the demographic heart of Central Asia to Bihar in northeastern In-
dia. The very map of the Kushana domain is mind-boggling to our modern sensibilities,
overlapping as it does former Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and much of
northern India's Gangetic plain. The Kushan Empire follows river valleys on one hand, but
crosses mountain ranges on the other, so that it both follows and contradicts geography. It
also constitutes a signal lesson in the fact that current borders may not necessarily indicate
the last word in political organization of Central and South Asia.
The Gupta Empire (
A.D
. 320-550) restored a semblance of unity over the subcontinent,
governing from the Indus in the west to Bengal in the east, and from the Himalayas in the
north to the Deccan plateau in the center, albeit most of the south was outside its control,
even as the Gupta rulers suffered incursions from Central Asian horsemen driving down
from the northwest into Rajasthan and the western Gangetic plain. Moreover, as in the way
of the Mauryan, the Gupta was less a unitary state than a weak system of client states united
