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By Root 748 0

established its canon. Previously, it appears that the language of government was the common speech of the ruling city, notably the Magadhi Prakrit of Pataliputra: 250 years after Panini, when Aśoka had set monuments all over north and central India, they were written in this Magadhi Prakrit. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that Sanskrit had already penetrated to the highest levels in the state: the great handbook of Indian statecraft, the Arthaśāstra of Kautilya, is written in Sanskrit, not Magadhi. This is traditionally attributed to the chief minister of Candragupta (’Moonsecret’) Maurya, Aśoka’s grandfather, who had established his northern Indian empire shortly after Alexander’s brief foray along the Indus, but it could have been written at any time in the five centuries to AD 150. By then, certainly, the primacy of Sanskrit in political records was assured.47

Regardless of the cultural unity signalled by Sanskrit, India was not nearly as successful as Rome and Persia to the west, or China to the east, in establishing a large-scale political unit that could defend its borders and secure orderly succession beyond a half-dozen generations at most. From the fifth century BC to the fifth century AD, indigenous dynasties such as the Nandas, Mauryas, Shungas, Satavahanas and Guptas rose and fell with a persistent rhythm, their capital often at Pataliputra, but with no sense of direct succession: usually these larger empires collapsed into a couple of generations of decentralised feudal melee, before the next would-be cakravārtin, ‘wheel-turner’, i.e. universal monarch, emerged. Sometimes major incursions from the north-west would get as far as Pataliputra, for example when the Yavana kings (such as Menander—Buddhism’s Milinda) swooped down from Swat, or when Kanishka, a Bactrian-speaking Iranian, founded the Kushāna empire, in the first to second centuries AD. But they never lasted any longer.*

All the invaders in this period—they also included Scythians (Śaka) speaking Iranian, and Xiongnu (Hūa) speaking Turkic—conformed to the pattern of Mongols in China or Germanic tribes in western Europe. They did not establish their own cultures, but after a first period of rapine simply adopted the existing culture and settled down as the new aristocracy, with no lasting linguistic effects. Sanskrit, and the Prakrits, were thus transmitted to new generations and new peoples. The tradition was not politically unified, though the Arthaśāstra shows that it was highly organised and self-conscious, legally and economically.

There was no apparent technical or military innovation in this period, and communications must have remained difficult, two reasons which explain why the various cities and regions retained so much independence, with the centralised power of the cakravārtin largely an unrealised dream.

The Arthaśāstra has an elaborate theory of foreign policy, implying a large number of smallish states. Most of the states were monarchies, but there were in fact also republics, ruled by councils of men of substance. The Licchavi, living in Vaiśalī north of the Ganges, are said to have had 7,707 rājās or ‘kings’, all in the tribal assembly. The Buddha himself had grown up in one such community, not far away among the Śākya of the Himalayan foothills. This tradition is said to have inspired the noticeably democratic practice of the sangha, the full community of Buddhist monks.

As for the social limitations of Indian society, it must be seen as overwhelmingly stratified, with one’s caste, and hence status, determined by birth. Sanskrit-speaking theorists, usually referring back to the Vedas, had no difficulty in justifying and rationalising flagrant inequalities—even if, from time to time, natural leaders who happened to be low-caste made themselves into kings without too much scruple over Hinduism’s taboos. The status of women was also not a matter for discussion, with the Sanskrit word satī, originally just the feminine of the adjective meaning ‘true, correct, good’, coming to be understood as best applied to a wife willingly