We have all read about Alaxander The Greats Military campaign and how he managed to reach up to the north western part of the Indian Subcontinent. Alexander’s brief incursion into the Indian subcontinent had an unintended consequence. A scholar called Chanakya and his protégé Chandragupta Maurya took advantage of the political confusion caused by the invasion to carve out a power-base in India’s north-west. After several attempts, they defeated the Nanda king of Magadh and created the foundations for the powerful Mauryan empire.

In 305 BC, Chandragupta defeated Seleucus Nikator, the general who had taken over most of Alexander’s Asian possessions. The treaty between Seleucus and Chandragupta handed the Indians a large chunk of territory extending over Afghanistan and Baluchistan. Chandragupta abdicated in 298 BC (or 303 BC, according to another source) in favour of his son Bindusara who ruled till 273 BC. Bindusara had inherited an empire that was already very large— from Afghanistan to Bengal. He seems to have extended the realm further south till the empire covered all but the southern tip of the peninsula. For the most part, his rule seems to have been peaceful except for a few rebellions. He also seems to have maintained diplomatic and trade links with the kingdoms carved out from Alexander’s empire.

In 274 BC, Bindusara fell ill and died. The crown prince Sushim was away fending off incursions on the north-western frontiers and rushed back to the imperial capital Pataliputra, present-day Patna. However, on arrival he found that Ashoka, one of his half-brothers, had taken control of the city with the help of Greek mercenaries. It appears that Ashoka had Sushim killed at the eastern gates. The crown prince may have been roasted alive in the moat! This was followed by four years of a bloody civil war in which Ashoka seems to have killed all male rivals in his family. Buddhist texts mention that he killed 99 half-brothers and only spared his full brother Tissa. Hundreds of loyalist officials were also killed; Ashoka is said to have personally decapitated 500 of them. Having consolidated his power, he was finally crowned emperor in 270 BC.

All accounts agree that Ashoka’s early rule was brutal and unpopular, and that he was known as “Chandashoka” or Ashoka the Brutal. According to mainstream textbook narratives, however, Ashoka would invade Kalinga a few years later and, shocked by the death and destruction, would convert to Buddhism and become a pacifist.

The reader will be surprised to discover that the popular narrative about this conversion is based on little evidence.

Ashoka would invade Kalinga in 262 BC whereas we know from minor rock edicts that Ashoka had converted to Buddhism more than two years earlier. No Buddhist text links his conversion to the war and his conversion predated the Kalinga war. Moreover, he seems to have had links with Buddhists for a decade before his conversion. The evidence suggests that his conversion to Buddhism was more to do with the politics of succession than with any regret he felt for sufferings of war.

The Mauryan followed Vedic court rituals (certainly many of their top officials were Brahmins) but had eclectic religious affiliations in personal life. The founder of the line, Chandragupta, seems to have had links to the Jains in old age while his son Bindusara seems to have been partial to a heterodox sect called the Aajivika. This is not an unusual arrangement in the Dharmic (i.e. Indian) family of religions. This eclectic approach remains alive to this day and lay followers of Dharmic religions think nothing of praying at each other’s shrines. You will find many Hindus at the Golden Temple in Amritsar just as Bangkok is full of shrines dedicated to the Hindu god, Brahma. The coronation of the king of Thailand is still carried out by Brahmin priests.

It is likely that when Ashoka usurped the throne, he was opposed by family members who had links to the Jains and the Aajivika. He then responded by reaching out to their rivals, the Buddhists, for support. The power struggle may even explain his invasion of Kalinga. The mainstream view is that Kalinga was an independent kingdom that was invaded by Ashoka but there is some reason to believe that it was either a rebellious province or a vassal that was no longer trusted.

We know that the Nandas, who preceded the Mauryas, had already conquered Kalinga and, therefore, it is likely that it became part of the Mauryan empire when Chandragupta took over the Nanda kingdom. In any case, it seems odd that a large and expansionist empire like that of the Mauryas would have tolerated an independent state so close to its capital Pataliputra and its main port at Tamralipti. In other words, Kalinga would not have been an entirely independent kingdom under Bindusara—it was either a province or a close vassal. Something obviously changed during the early years of Ashoka’s reign and my guess is that it had either sided with Ashoka’s rivals during the battle for succession and/or declared itself independent in the confusion.

Whatever the real reasons for attracting Ashoka’s anger, a large Mauryan army marched into Kalinga around 262 BC. The traditional view is that the two armies met on the banks of the river Daya at Dhuli near modern Bhubaneswar. It is possible that Dhuli was the site of a skirmish but recent archaeological excavations point to Yuddha Mruda being the site of the main battle followed by a desperate and bloody last stand at the Kalingan capital of Tosali. The site is at a place called Radha Nagar, a couple of hours’ drive from Cuttack. It is situated in a broad fertile plain watered by the Brahmani river and surrounded by low hills. The remains of the city’s earthwork Defenses suggest that Tosali was built in the middle of the plains; arguably a poor choice as the city’s Defenses would have been better served if they were wedged more closely to one of the hills. Archaeologists have only excavated a small section of the walls but have found it riddled with arrowheads; a blizzard of arrows must have been unleashed by the Mauryan army. The Kalingan’s never stood a chance. Ashoka’s own inscriptions tell us that a 100,000 died in the war and an even larger number died from wounds and hunger. A further 150,000 were taken away as captives.

According to the official storyline, Ashoka was horrified by his own brutality and became a Buddhist and a pacifist. But, as we have seen, he was already a practicing Buddhist by then, and from what we know of his early rule, he was hardly a man to be easily shocked by the sight of blood. The main evidence of his repentance comes from his own inscriptions. It is very curious, however, that this “regret” is mentioned only in locations far away from Odisha (such as in Shahbazgarhi in Pakistan). None of the inscriptions in Odisha express any remorse; any hint of regret is deliberately left out.
The Ashokan inscriptions at Dhuli are engraved on a rock at the base of a hill. What will strike anyone reading them is how they specifically leave out any sign of regret. The silence is deafening. If Ashoka was genuinely remorseful, he would have surely bothered to apologize to the people whom he had wronged. Far from it, he doesn’t even offer to free the captives. Even the supposedly regretful inscriptions include a clear threat of further violence against other groups like the forest tribes who are unequivocally “told of the power to punish them that Devanampriya possesses in spite of his repentance, in order that they may be ashamed of their crimes and may not be killed”. This is no pacifist.

It is likely that Ashoka was using his inscriptions as a tool of political propaganda to counter his reputation for cruelty. As with the words of any politician, this does not mean he changed his behavior. Perhaps like many politicians, he made grand high-minded proclamations but acted entirely differently. Moreover, many of the inscriptions are placed in locations where the average citizen or official of that time would not have been able to read them. Is it possible that some of the inscriptions were really meant for later generations rather than his contemporaries?

The Buddhist text, Ashoka-vadana, tells us of more acts of genocide perpetrated by the emperor many years after he supposedly turned pacifist. These were directed particularly at followers of the Jain and Ajivika sects; by all accounts he avoided conflicts with mainstream Hindus and was respectful towards Brahmins. The Ashoka-vadana recounts how Ashoka once had 18,000 Ajivikas in Bengal put to death in a single episode. If true, this would be the first known instance of large-scale religious persecution in Indian history (but, sadly, would not be the last).

This is not the only incident mentioned in the text. A Jain devotee was found in Pataliputra drawing a picture showing Buddha bowing to a Jain tirthankara. Ashoka ordered him and his family to be locked inside their home and for the building to set alight. He then ordered that he would pay a gold coin in exchange for every decapitated head of a Jain. The carnage only ended when someone mistakenly killed his only surviving brother, the Buddhist monk Vitashoka (also called Tissa). The story suggests frightening parallels with modern-day fundamentalists who kill cartoonists whom they accuse of insulting their religion.

In addition to the references of his continued cruelty, we also have reason to believe that Ashoka was not a successful administrator. In his later years, an increasingly unwell Ashoka watched his empire disintegrate from rebellion, internal family squabbles and fiscal stress. While he was still alive, the empire had lost all the north- western territories that had been acquired from Seleucus. Within a few years of Ashoka’s death in 232 BC, the Satvahanas had taken over most of the territories in southern India and Kalinga too had seceded.

This fits with the fact that he is not remembered as a great monarch in the Indian tradition but in hagiographic Buddhist texts written in countries that did not experience his reign. He was “rediscovered” in the 19th century by colonial era orientalists like James Princep. His elevation to being “Ashoka the Great” is even more recent and is the result of political developments leading up to India’s independence.

After Independence, it appears academic historians were further encouraged to build up the legend of Ashoka the Great in order to provide a lineage to Jawaharlal Nehru’s socialist project and inconvenient evidence was simply swept under the carpet. This is not so different from how the medieval Ethiopians created a Biblical lineage for the Solomonic dynasty. What is more worrying is how easily modern Indians have come to accept a narrative based on such little evidence.

As one can see, Ashoka does not look like such a great king on closer inspection but a cruel and unpopular usurper who presided over the disintegration of a large and well-functioning empire built by his father and grandfather. At the very least, it must be accepted that evidence of Ashoka’s greatness is thin and he was some shade of grey at best.