How the Mauryan Empire was Governed?

When we talk about the Mauryan Empire, it is the different Mauryan rulers we mostly discuss. But the question of how the Mauryan Empire was governed is rarely discussed. So, in this video, what I will do is I will talk about how different historians and scholars have tried to understand the question of how the Mauryan Empire was governed. Now, before talking about this question, I think it is important to understand that historians have started to tackle this question only in the 20th century. As we all know, it was in the 19th century that James Princep deciphered Brahmi script. With this decipherment, scholars and historians were able to read and understand the Ashokan Edicts. These Edicts of Ashok provided us information about some aspects of the Mauryan Another step in our understanding of the Mauryan Empire was taken in 1909 AD. It was at this time we find that R. Shamashastri discovered Arthashastra, which was written by Cotillion. Now, these two discoveries, first the decipherment of the Brahmi script and second the discovery of Arthashastra, provided us valuable information about the governance of Mauryan Empire. There are some scholars who argue that Arthashastra could not be used to understand how the Mauryan Empire was governed. This is mainly because Arthashastra is a prescriptive text. It talks about how a state ought to function. There is no evidence according to these scholars to suggest that the governance structure that is mentioned in Cotillion's Arthashastra was adopted by the Mauryan Emperors. So, this is the objection which some scholars make. Although there are some scholars who have used Cotillion's Arthashastra to understand the governance of the Mauryan Empire. So, either way what we find is that with these discoveries, historians began to tackle the question of how the Mauryan Empire was governed. So, the first theory which some scholars put forward in this whole debate was that the Mauryan Empire was a centralised entity and it was uniformly governed. In other words, it was argued that the Mauryan Emperor was the main head of the Mauryan state and his orders were carried out from the centre to different parts of the empire up to the village level by a highly organised state machinery. So, in this view, it would appear that the Mauryan state was similar in some aspect to the modern state. It had a decision-making body in the name of the king and there was a uniformly organised state bureaucracy that functioned in every part of the empire. So, this was the model which was presented first by some scholars. Later what we see is that other historians expanded on this theory. So, they argued that the centre of this empire was the city of Pataliputra which was the capital of the empire. Then we find that there were four provincial capitals where provincial governors used to reside. These four provincial capitals were first Takshashila which controlled the northern province. Then there was the western province capital Ujjain. In the south, we had the capital Suvarnagiri which is located in the Koppal district of Karnataka and in the east, it was the city of Toshali which was the provincial capital of the eastern province. So, this would seem that the Mauryan empire was highly organised and hierarchical. The king in the centre had taken a decision and this decision was then passed from the governor to the village level. So, you have a very highly organised and centralised state in the name of the Mauryan empire. So, this is the whole view which was presented by some scholars when they talk about the Mauryan state. Now, we find that later some scholars objected to this whole view. They provided us a different understanding of how the Mauryan empire was governed. These historians pointed out that when we look at the sources, we find that there is no mention of the four provincial capitals of the Mauryan empire and these sources from which we get our information about the Mauryan empire does not also indicate about the presence of a highly integrated administration. These sources also does not provide us any indication of the presence of a highly organised bureaucratic setup which the proponents of a centralised theory has taken for granted. So, these are some of the points which were presented by those historians who do not agree with this whole view that Mauryan empire was centralised and highly organised. These scholars have pointed out that if we look at for example the Ashokan edicts, it would appear that the Mauryan emperor was not an absolute ruler. The Mauryan emperor did not have an absolute authority to implement his decisions. In other words, he did not have the coercive power to implement his decisions. That is why we find that Ashok in his edicts uses moralistic language. What we also find about these edicts is that these edicts are not uniform throughout the empire. By this I mean that you will find that in some cases some edicts are in abridged form, some are of medium length and some are of longer length. So, this variation in the size of the Ashokan edicts suggest that the Mauryan officials who were tasked to inscribe these edicts were free to change the word of the emperor as they saw fit. So, this suggests that the Mauryan officials were autonomous or they had a great decision-making authority. This kind of freedom which these officials seem to enjoy does not point to an absolutist state where it was the king who was the sole decision-making authority. Then we also find is that when we look at the punch-marked coins of the Mauryan period, we find that these coins are not uniform. It appears that the Mauryan state did not have monopoly on the minting of coins. Governors and in some cases guilds had the authority to mint their own coins. So, all of this suggests an absence of a centralized Mauryan state. What we also find is that some scholars have pointed out that if we look at for example the Achaemenid Empire, we will find that in the ancient times the states were not highly centralized. We find that the governors of the Achaemenid Empire who were called satraps had great autonomous authority. They could issue their own coins, they had their armies and they also collected taxes. The Achaemenid state was able to control these autonomous satraps through the army which was primarily formed by median troops and this army was the main source of the Achaemenid authority and this army was also highly centralized. Then there was a highly efficient bureaucracy and also the royal route that allowed the Achaemenid emperor to have some control over these different satraps. So, here it is quite apparent that the Achaemenid empire was not a highly centralized state. So, if that is the case, how can we argue that the Mauryan empire was highly centralized and organized? Now, recent scholarship has argued that to understand how the Mauryan empire was governed, we can divide the Mauryan empire into three different parts. So, first we have the metropolitan state. Here the metropolitan state was the region of Magadh. Here the authority of the emperor was supreme. The best example of this comes from the Ashokan edict. Here in these edicts, Ashok calls himself Raja Magadhe. He does not call himself Raja of Jambudweep. This suggests that the Mauryan emperor considered himself as the king of Magadh, which means that the base of the empire or the region where the authority of the emperor was supreme was the region of Magadh. After the metropolitan state, we have the core region of the Mauryan empire. These regions were, for example, Gandhar, Kalinga, Saurashtra etc. Here what we find is that the authority of the Mauryan emperor was not that pervasive and these regions included the kingdoms which were earlier conquered by the Mauryan empire. So, that is why we find that the administration here was not the Mauryan administration and the penetration of the Mauryan authorities was also not that deep. After the core regions, we have the peripheral regions. These included large parts of southern India and also some parts of northern India. Here what we find is that the state has not emerged yet. So, there were small localities in these regions and these localities were governed by local leaders. So, the Mauryan state interacted with the local leaders and in this way, the intervention of the Mauryan state in these regions was very minimal. We can also argue that in these peripheral regions, there was no surplus agriculture. This would mean that the Mauryan state could not collect agricultural products from these regions. It collected these agricultural products as taxes from the core and the metropolitan regions. Instead, from the peripheral regions, the Mauryan state most likely collected natural resources. For example, pearls, gold, ivory etc. So, the picture which we get here is a picture where the authority of the Mauryan state is not uniform and the penetration of the Mauryan authorities varies from region to region. So, this new understanding about how the Mauryan was governed is drastically different from the earliest understanding of the Mauryan government where it was thought that the Mauryan empire was centralized and uniform. So, we can clearly see that how the understanding about the Mauryan government has evolved over time. Now, I have done an extensive talk about this topic. So, if you want to know more about this topic, do watch this video. Thank you for watching.