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Administration, economy, society and decline

The Mauryan empire · Part 3 / 3 · Fact-checked on 8 November 2026 · how we check

Written with AI from the sources listed at the bottom of this page, then fact-checked by a separate AI.

How the Mauryas governed: the saptanga state, the council, superintendents, the samaharta and sannidhata, spies and the two kinds of courts; provinces under princes and the officers of districts and villages; Megasthenes' six boards; land, taxes, crafts, guilds, coins and trade routes; the seven classes of Megasthenes; the later Mauryas, Pushyamitra Shunga and the explanations of the decline; and the Mauryan legacy in the State Emblem and the national flag.

Parts 1 and 2 followed the Mauryan kings; this part looks at the machinery they ruled through and at how it came apart. Governing a realm that reached from Kandahar to Karnataka needed officials, revenue and roads on a scale India had not known before. Three kinds of evidence describe that machinery, and they do not always agree. The Arthashastra sets out how a king ought to govern, so it gives an ideal rather than a record. Megasthenes reports what a foreign envoy saw, or believed he saw, at Pataliputra. Ashoka's edicts name real officers and real orders. The part moves from the king and his ministers to the provinces and villages, then to taxes, trade and society, and ends with the fall of the dynasty and what it left behind.

At the centre stood the king. The Arthashastra describes the state as a body with seven limbs, the saptanga theory: the king (swami), the ministers (amatya), the territory and its people (janapada), the fortified capital (durga), the treasury (kosha), the army or power to punish (danda) and the ally (mitra). The king is the first limb, but the treatise expects him to consult a council of ministers (mantriparishad) and a small circle of trusted advisers before he acts. Ashoka's edicts confirm that a council (parisa) existed. Major Rock Edict VI shows how closely the king meant to follow public business: reporters (pativedakas) were to bring him news of the people at any time and wherever he was, even while he was eating. Mauryan rule was personal and centralised, yet it rested on a large body of salaried officers.

The Arthashastra fills its pages with departments, each under a superintendent (adhyaksha). It names superintendents of trade, of weights and measures, of agriculture on crown land, of mines, of shipping, of tolls, of forests, of weaving and of liquor, among many others. Two great officers stand above the revenue system. The samaharta was the chief collector, answerable for income from every source, and the sannidhata was the treasurer and keeper of stores, who built and ran the treasury and the granaries. The treatise even fixes salaries in silver panas: 48,000 panas a year for the highest office-holders, such as the chief minister, the royal priest, the commander of the army and the crown prince. The plan shows how much of economic life the state hoped to manage.

A large secret service watched officials and subjects alike. The Arthashastra describes spies (gudhapurusha) disguised as ascetics, students, householders or traders; some were posted in one place and others kept moving. Justice was handled by two kinds of courts. Dharmasthiya courts heard disputes between people, over contracts, debts, marriage or inheritance, while kantakashodhana courts, literally the courts for 'removing thorns', dealt with crimes and threats to public order. The punishments in the treatise are harsh, from fines to mutilation and death. Ashoka softened this system without taking it apart. Pillar Edict IV gives the rajukas independence in judging and punishing, asks that procedure and penalties be the same for all, and allows three days' respite to prisoners sentenced to death, so that their relatives could plead for them or the prisoners could prepare for the next world.

The empire was too large to be governed from Pataliputra alone. The lands around Magadha were ruled directly, and the rest was divided into provinces, each with its own capital. Ashoka's inscriptions name four of these: Taxila in the northwest, Ujjain in the west, Tosali in Kalinga, and Suvarnagiri in the south, whose exact site is still uncertain. Princes of the royal house (kumaras or aryaputras) governed them as viceroys, as Ashoka himself had done at Taxila and Ujjain. The Separate Kalinga Edicts mention the princes at Ujjain and Taxila sending officers out on inspection tours, and the minor rock edicts at Brahmagiri and Siddapur in Karnataka are issued from Suvarnagiri in the name of the aryaputra and the mahamattas there. Princes at the provincial capitals were the threads that tied the distant regions to the court.

Below the provinces came districts and villages. Major Rock Edict III orders the yuktas, rajukas and pradeshikas to go on tour every five years, to teach dhamma as well as to do their ordinary work. The rajukas, whose title is linked with the rope (rajju) used to measure fields, seem to have been senior rural officers who also judged cases; the pradeshikas were probably in charge of districts; and the yuktas were junior officers who kept accounts and records. Mahamatta was a general word for a high officer at any level, and Ashoka added a new kind, the dhamma mahamatta. In the village the headman (gramika) looked after local affairs. The Arthashastra adds the gopa, who kept the records of a group of five or ten villages, and the sthanika, who supervised a quarter of a district.

Megasthenes paints a tidier picture of the capital. He says Pataliputra was run by thirty officers divided into six boards of five members each. One board looked after the industrial arts, a second cared for foreigners, a third registered births and deaths, a fourth supervised trade and the weights and measures, a fifth oversaw the sale of manufactured goods, and a sixth collected a tax of one-tenth on the price of goods sold. The army, he says, was managed in the same way, by six boards of five dealing with the navy, transport and supplies, the infantry, the cavalry, the chariots and the elephants. The Arthashastra knows nothing of these boards and places a single city superintendent (nagaraka) over the capital, one reason historians handle the boards with care.

Land was the main source of the state's income. The Arthashastra separates crown land (sita), farmed under the superintendent of agriculture with hired workers and convicts or given out to sharecroppers, from land held by ordinary cultivators. The chief tax was the king's share of the harvest (bhaga), normally one-sixth in the treatise, though Megasthenes reports that farmers paid a quarter. On top of it came bali, a further levy whose exact nature is debated, and a charge for water from state irrigation works. The Rummindei pillar shows these taxes in practice: when Ashoka visited Lumbini, the Buddha's birthplace, he made the village free of bali and reduced its bhaga to one-eighth. The state also built and repaired irrigation works, as the Sudarshana lake in Saurashtra, met in Part 1, makes clear.

The state was a producer and trader as well as a tax collector. The Arthashastra keeps mines, salt and the making of weapons under royal control, runs state workshops for spinning and weaving, and wants forests guarded for their timber and elephants. Private crafts were organised in guilds (shreni (guild)) of artisans and merchants, each with its own rules and headmen. Payments were made in silver punch-marked coins, called karshapanas or panas, and in copper coins, and the treatise names a superintendent of the mint (lakshanadhyaksha). Merchants travelled the great northern route (uttarapatha), which ran from Taxila across the Ganga plain to Pataliputra and on towards the port of Tamralipti in Bengal, while the southern route (dakshinapatha) led into the Deccan. Northern Black Polished Ware, the glossy pottery of the age, spread along these roads.

Megasthenes divided the people of India into seven classes: philosophers, farmers, herders and hunters, artisans, soldiers, overseers who reported to the king, and councillors who advised him and filled the high offices. These seven classes are not the four varnas; they are groups sorted by occupation, the way a foreign visitor saw them. He was also wrong to say that India had no slaves, since the Arthashastra lays down rules for slaves (dasa), and Ashoka's edicts ask for proper treatment of slaves and servants (dasa-bhataka). Women appear in royal service as well: the treatise speaks of armed women guarding the king and of women working as spies and as spinners in state workshops, and Major Rock Edict XII mentions mahamattas who looked after the affairs of women.

Ashoka died around 232 BCE, and the empire did not long outlive him. The later Mauryas are known mainly from king-lists that do not agree with one another. Dasharatha, a grandson of Ashoka, gave caves in the Nagarjuni hills of Bihar to the Ajivikas and, like Ashoka, called himself Devanampiya in the inscriptions there. Jain tradition remembers another grandson, Samprati, as a great patron of Jainism. Different branches of the family seem to have held different regions, and Kalhana's Rajatarangini names Jalauka, a son of Ashoka, as a ruler of Kashmir. Greek kings from Bactria began to push into the northwest. The last Mauryan king, Brihadratha, was killed around 185 BCE by his own commander-in-chief, Pushyamitra Shunga, while the king was reviewing the army, as Bana's Harshacharita tells it, and the Shunga dynasty took over Magadha.

No single explanation of the fall satisfies historians. Haraprasad Shastri saw a Brahmanical reaction against Ashoka's pro-Buddhist policy, yet Ashoka honoured Brahmanas and all sects. H. C. Raychaudhuri blamed Ashoka's pacifism for weakening the army, yet Ashoka kept his army, and the end came half a century later. Romila Thapar points to a government so centred on the king that it worked only under able rulers, and D. D. Kosambi read money trouble in debased later punch-marked coins. The legacy outlasted the dynasty. The lion capital of Ashoka's pillar at Sarnath became the State Emblem of India on 26 January 1950, with Satyameva Jayate from the Mundaka Upanishad beneath it, and its 24-spoked wheel sits at the centre of the national flag adopted by the Constituent Assembly on 22 July 1947.

Exam traps

• The Arthashastra describes how a king should rule; it is a treatise, not a record that every rule was practised. Megasthenes survives only in quotations by later writers.
• Samaharta = chief collector of revenue; sannidhata = treasurer and keeper of stores. Do not swap them.
• Dharmasthiya courts heard civil disputes; kantakashodhana ('removing thorns') courts dealt with crimes.
• The six boards of five for Pataliputra (and six more for the army) come from Megasthenes, not from the Arthashastra, which has a single city superintendent (nagaraka).
• Bhaga is usually one-sixth in the Arthashastra, a quarter in Megasthenes; at Lumbini Ashoka cut it to one-eighth and removed bali.
• Megasthenes' seven classes are occupational groups seen by a foreigner, not the four varnas; his claim that India had no slaves is wrong.
• Brihadratha, the last Mauryan, was killed by his own commander Pushyamitra Shunga about 185 BCE, not by a foreign invader.
• The State Emblem comes from the Sarnath lion capital (adopted 26 January 1950); Satyameva Jayate is from the Mundaka Upanishad, not from an Ashokan edict.

Recap

• Three sources: the Arthashastra (an ideal), Megasthenes (an outsider's view, second-hand) and Ashoka's edicts (real orders).
• Saptanga: king, ministers, territory, fort, treasury, army, ally; the king consulted a mantriparishad (parisa in the edicts).
• Adhyakshas ran departments; samaharta collected revenue, sannidhata kept the treasury; top salary 48,000 panas.
• Spies in disguise; dharmasthiya (civil) and kantakashodhana (criminal) courts; Pillar Edict IV: rajukas, equal justice, three days' respite.
• Provincial capitals: Taxila, Ujjain, Tosali, Suvarnagiri, under princes (kumaras, aryaputras).
• Yuktas, rajukas, pradeshikas toured every five years (Major Rock Edict III); gramika, gopa and sthanika lower down.
• Megasthenes: six boards of five for the city and six for the army.
• Taxes: bhaga (usually one-sixth), bali and water charges; Lumbini freed of bali, bhaga cut to one-eighth.
• Ashoka died about 232 BCE; Brihadratha killed by Pushyamitra Shunga about 185 BCE; Sarnath lion capital is the State Emblem.

Practice questions

Sources

• Centre for Cultural Resources and Training (Ministry of Culture): material on Mauryan administration, economy, society and art — https://ccrtindia.gov.in
• Archaeological Survey of India: site notes on the Ashokan edicts (Brahmagiri, Siddapur, Dhauli, Jaugada, Rummindei), the Nagarjuni hill caves and the Sarnath lion capital, and the texts in the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, vol. I — https://asi.nic.in
• State Emblem of India (Prohibition of Improper Use) Act, 2005; Constituent Assembly Debates, 22 July 1947 (resolution on the National Flag) — https://www.indiacode.nic.in