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Chandragupta Maurya: The Creation of a National Hero in India by Sushma Jansari (review)

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cch.2023.a915308

1532-5768

David Arnold,

Indian History and Philosophy

Reviewed by: Chandragupta Maurya: The Creation of a National Hero in India by Sushma Jansari David Arnold Chandragupta Maurya: The Creation of a National Hero in India. By Sushma Jansari. London: UCL Press, 2023 Who creates a national hero, why and to what effect? In many cases the rise to herohood might be so lost in obscurity as to be uncoverable; in others the literary and historical evidence makes it possible to recover the reasons why, and the stages by which, the heroic figure emerged. Thought to have reigned in northern India from circa 320 BC, Chandragupta provides, as Sushma Jansari shows, a fascinating example of how a hero for the modern age was crafted from fragmentary ancient sources. The very paucity of reliable information about the founder of the Maurya dynasty gives license to a plethora of varying, contradictory, interpretations. The early chapters of Jansari's book take us back to the smattering of Graeco-Roman sources from which we learn only that around 305 to 303 BC, Chandragupta encountered the Greek ruler Seleucus on the banks of the Indus: Seleucus transferred several provinces to Chandragupta, they agreed to a marriage settlement (about which no further details are known) and Chandragupta gifted the Greek 500 elephants. Jansari details the extant Graeco-Roman sources, especially Megasthenes (an intermediary between the Seleucid and Mauryan empires) and his seminal text Indica, and compares these with what is known from later Buddhist and Jain sources. Given how little of substance the South Asian sources provide, Graeco-Roman texts served as the primary basis for all subsequent versions of the Chandragupta story. But the decisive moment in the modern making of Chandragupta came, centuries after his death, with Sir William Jones's address to the Asiatic Society in 1793 in which he identified the "Chandragupta" of the Sanskrit texts with the "Sandrocottus" of the Greeks. From that point on, Chandragupta became an increasingly prominent figure in India's colonial historiography, based, as Jansari notes, not on the sources themselves so much as individual historians' ideas about the contemporary relationship between Britain and India. While not all colonial writers shared the same interpretation, from the time of James Mill in 1817 onwards British historians tended to see Seleucus, in an early version of European hegemony, as triumphing over his Indian rival. Conversely, later Indian historians like R.C. Dutt in 1900, writing at the highpoint of empire or during the nationalist struggle against British rule, inverted this view, making Chandragupta the victor, repelling a foreign invasion and uniting India under his rule. The shadowy figure of Chandragupta thus emerged as a proto-nationalist hero, just as Seleucus (seen now, in an act of subservience, giving his daughter Helen in marriage to Chandragupta) represented the soon-to-be vanquished imperialist. The later chapters of Jansari's book move into a different register as she considers how Chandragupta has been depicted in India since the 1940s. She gives an intriguing account of how a bronze sculpture of Chandragupta as a young shepherd boy by the London artist Hilda Seligman came to installed in the parliament buildings in Delhi, and analyses the representation of Chandragupta, along with his Brahmin adviser Canakya and his Greek wife, as they appear in murals in the Birla temples in Delhi and elsewhere. There is an interesting interplay here between ideas of Chandragupta as a warrior king and the reworking of Buddhist ideals of non-violence derived rather more from Chandragupta's grandson Ashoka and from Gandhian beliefs than from anything known about the ruler himself. The mythologising of Chandragupta is carried a stage further by his extensive portrayal in plays, films, novels, popular histories and even comics in recent decades in ways that further advance the idea of the Greeks as foreign "baddies" and Chandragupta as a national hero. This is an absorbing tale and Jansari does well to carry the reader from ancient Greek texts to present-day Indian films and comics and to engage critically with visual as well as textual material. Nor is she afraid to deplore the many distortions of historical fact to be found in contemporary works or the anti-foreigner prejudices that underly representations of Helen...