Around 320 BCE, a young man named Chandragupta Maurya overthrew the Nanda dynasty that ruled the kingdom of Magadha, the strongest of the Mahajanapadas of the Gangetic plain, and within a few decades built the first empire to bring most of the Indian subcontinent under a single authority. Later tradition credits much of this rise to Chandragupta's advisor Chanakya (also known as Kautilya), a strategist to whom the political treatise Arthashastra is traditionally attributed (NCERT, section 3.1, p. 32[1]). Historians caution, though, that the detailed stories of their partnership come from sources written well after the events they describe, and cannot all be verified. Inscriptions and later records are clearer about the scale of what Chandragupta built: an empire stretching from Afghanistan in the northwest across most of northern and central India (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Mauryan empire"[2]).
How the empire was held together
Chandragupta's son Bindusara (reigned c. 297-273 BCE) extended Mauryan authority further south into parts of the Deccan, while the Tamil kingdoms of the far south remained independent. Historians describe Mauryan administration as uneven: control was probably strongest around the capital and provincial centres, with land and river routes connecting them. The diversity of the regions makes a uniform system unlikely (NCERT, section 3.2, pp. 32–34[1]). This is one reason historians still debate exactly how centralized Mauryan rule really was, and how much its apparent unity depended on the personal authority of a strong ruler.
The Kalinga War: what Ashoka's edicts say about the death toll
Bindusara's son, Ashoka, took the throne around 268 BCE and became the most famous ruler in the dynasty (NCERT, sections 3–3.1, p. 32[1]). Early in his reign, Ashoka continued Mauryan expansion by conquering Kalinga, a kingdom on the eastern coast, in and around modern Odisha, that had resisted Mauryan control. The war, fought around 261 BCE, was, by Ashoka's own account carved into rock, devastating: Rock Edict XIII, in S. Dhammika's translation[4], reports 100,000 killed, 150,000 deported, and further deaths from other causes. These are the inscription's figures, not an independently verified count. The same edict expresses remorse and presents conquest through dhamma as preferable to military conquest, while still asserting the king's power to punish. Ashoka promoted dhamma, a term usually translated as moral law or righteous conduct, encompassing respect for all living beings, honesty, and religious tolerance (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Ashoka"[3]).
Ashoka spread this message unusually directly for an ancient ruler: he had edicts inscribed on rock faces and on tall polished sandstone pillars erected across his empire, from Afghanistan to the Bay of Bengal, written in accessible regional scripts and languages such as Prakrit rather than in the more restricted Sanskrit of priestly texts (NCERT, "Languages and scripts," p. 32[1]). The pillar at Sarnath, topped by four back-to-back lions above a wheel (chakra) and other animals, is the most famous survival of this program; a version of its lion capital is now independent India's national emblem (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Ashoka"[3]). These rock and pillar edicts are among the oldest deciphered original texts to survive from the Indian subcontinent, and they remain a primary source for what we know of Ashoka's reign. Because they are Ashoka's own official statements, though, they present his rule and motives in the best possible light, and historians read them as a ruler's self-presentation (NCERT, section 7.3, p. 47[1]).
Decline after Ashoka
Ashoka died around 232 BCE (S. Dhammika, The Edicts of King Asoka, introduction[4]), and the empire did not long outlive him in its full strength. A series of weaker or shorter-reigned successors struggled to hold together the vast, loosely integrated territory Ashoka had inherited and expanded, and the last Mauryan emperor, Brihadratha, was killed around 185-180 BCE by his own military commander, Pushyamitra Shunga, who founded the Shunga dynasty in Magadha (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Mauryan empire"[2]). Historians continue to debate how much of the empire's fragmentation should be attributed to Ashoka's turn away from military conquest, weakening its coercive core, versus simple administrative overreach in governing such a large and diverse territory with the tools available in the third century BCE (Romila Thapar, Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas[5]). For roughly a century and a half, the Mauryan Empire brought a larger share of the Indian subcontinent under a single political authority than any state before it (NCERT, section 3.3, p. 35[1]), and Ashoka's edicts remain, in his own carved words, one of the earliest surviving voices of any Indian ruler.
