India

Until far into the 4th century BC, the north of India remained politically fragmented. In the northwest of the country in the 4th century BC, some influence of the Persian Empire still remained, but politically the power of the Persian king hardly extended to the river Indus and certainly not beyond. Everywhere in Indian society, meanwhile, the rise of the Brahmans could be observed, except where the new movement of Buddhism found many adherents, as was especially the case in the northeast. For the whole of North India, however, suddenly a new era dawned when in 327 BC from across the Hindu Kush, the invading army of Alexander the Great, who in the preceding years had conquered the Persian Empire as far as modern-day Afghanistan and Uzbekistan and had been lured by enticing information to explore this new world, entered the country. Indian rulers in the northern Indus valley and the Punjab voluntarily submitted or were forced into submission. Alexander’s army advanced as far as the eastern edge of the Punjab, where the Macedonian soldiers finally persuaded their king to turn back. The invasion then turned south. Partially on ships that Alexander had ordered to be built in the Punjab, the whole expeditionary force moved down the rivers of the “Country of Five Streams” (i. e., the Punjab) and then on and along the Indus river to the ocean. While the fleet sailed from the Indus estuary along the coast of Iran into the Persian Gulf, Alexander’s army in 325 BC marched through the desert of southern Iran back to the west. In India only two Macedonian satraps with a small numbers of troops were left behind.

Although the name of Alexander is nowhere mentioned in any written Indian source for this period, his appearance at this juncture of time decisively influenced Indian history. Already during Alexander’s lifetime, a political reaction against the foreign invasion set in, especially in the Ganges valley, which Alexander had not reached but where his advance had been feared. A certain Chandragupta Maurya succeeded in a short time in establishing a large, centralized empire with Pataliputra (modern Patna) as its capital. Within a few years after Alexander’s death in 323 BC, the Macedonian satrapies of the Punjab and the Lower Indus had been annexed by this Maurya Empire, and before the end of the 4th century Chandragupta had concluded a formal treaty with Seleucus, one of Alexander’s generals who had succeeded in uniting large parts of Iran and the Near East under his rule but was still entangled in conflicts with his fellow former generals over the inheritance of Alexander’s conquests. By this treaty, the Maurya ruler acquired vast areas west of the Indus in present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. Thus, the first Indian empire was founded, an empire respected by the Hellenistic kingdoms of western Asia and Egypt, which sent ambassadors to Pataliputra, and that steadily expanded across Central and South India, exerting its influence all over the subcontinent and beyond the Hindu Kush.

The Greeks had left their stamp on India. Alexander himself may have left no traces in the Indian record, but from the 3rd century BC onward, Greeks are mentioned in Indian sources: merchants visiting the harbors of the Indus estuary and, later, those on the west coast of the country; ambassadors calling at Pataliputra; mercenary soldiers entering the service of Indian princes; and finally Greek kings who ruled various larger and smaller kingdoms in Bactria and northwestern India from the 3rd till well into the 1st century BC. But the influence of Greek civilization remained largely limited to a few areas: astronomy and astrology, some medical knowledge, and the use of stone and stucco in sculpture and architecture, and the ways in which human and animal forms were rendered in the plastic arts. Indian civilization, like all great Asian civilizations of the time, was a culture that used wood and sun-baked bricks for building materials, and hence hardly any traces remain of the palaces and other buildings from the period before ca. 300 BC. The absorption of Greek technical and artistic influences was facilitated by a religious and philosophical change in the Maurya Empire in the 3rd century that would have far-reaching consequences.

Around 270 BC, Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka, according to his own account, from sheer aversion to the bloodshed caused by his latest military campaign, converted to Buddhism with its message of nonviolence and world renouncement. As a zealous convert, he started to preach: edicts in the Indian scripts and languages, and a few in Aramaic and Greek announced the desire of the king to bring the dharma or the message of the Buddha to his various subject peoples. Until then, Buddhism had been a minority movement in the northeast of India, but Ashoka’s propaganda made it the dominant religion of the Maurya Empire, although it did not become a state religion and other creeds were not suppressed. But Buddhism under Ashoka became the first missionary religion in world history, for the idea that one could preach a religion as a message of salvation to, in principle, all people everywhere, instead of only to one’s fellow tribesmen or compatriots, and that by sending out missionaries whole new parts of the world could be won for that message, was born in India in this period. Buddhism appeared to be well suited to such dissemination across different cultures. At the same time, its egalitarian character inevitably aroused the resistance of the Brahmans and, to a lesser extent, of the rulers and the warrior caste. This explains the reaction against Buddhism in India that emerged soon after the death of Ashoka. Whereas Buddhist monasteries were built in Bactria, the religion declined in India itself. Eventually, it would nearly disappear from its country of origin but take root in Afghanistan and Central Asia (to remain there until the arrival of Islam) and in the first centuries of our era in China and all over Southeast Asia.

For Indian civilization, the competition between Buddhists and Brahmans, though, yielded an important stimulus, for in the centuries just before and after the beginning of our era India saw a considerable literary production that was mainly religious or philosophical in content. The Upanishads as mystical speculations about the essence of the world had evolved from commentaries on the Vedas and were now, from the 4th century BC on, gradually put into writing. At the same time, a growing body of Buddhist scriptures was produced in Sanskrit and Pali, the vernacular language of South India. But other subjects too, such as grammar or the traditional laws and customs, were dealt with in systematical and scholarly ways. With all that, the Brahmans in particular became the custodians of learning, which enabled them to make themselves indispensable to the kings. Under the later successors of Chandragupta and certainly under later dynasties after around 200 BC, the association between kings and Brahmans, therefore, became firmer than ever before.