Nanda Empire

The barber's son

formationDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

Every surviving account of how the Nanda dynasty began agrees on one point and disagrees on almost everything else: the man who founded it had no legitimate claim to the throne he took.

What the traditions agree on

Mahanandin, last king of Magadha's ruling Shishunaga line, is said to have fathered a son by a woman of low caste — a Sudra, in the Puranic telling. That son, Mahapadma, grew up outside the succession and took the throne anyway: killing the king he served, exterminating the rest of the ruling family under the pretence of acting as guardian to its heirs, and then begetting the sons who would eventually inherit what he had seized. The Vishnu Purana brands him an avaricious usurper whose reign marked the end of Kshatriya, high-born, rule in Magadha and the beginning of rule by men of low degree. The Buddhist tradition, less concerned with caste than with the family's wealth, dubs the last king of the line "Dhana" — Riches — a name that reads as a pointed comment on where the dynasty's priorities lay from the start.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Avantiputra7 · CC BY-SA 3.0

An empire nobody can date

Beyond the fact of the usurpation, the sources fall apart. The Puranas count two generations — Mahapadma and eight sons — reigning a full century. The Jain tradition stretches the same two generations to a hundred and fifty-five years. The Buddhist chronicles add contradictory legends on top of both. None of these figures can be reconciled with anything else known about the period, and modern reckoning settles, faute de mieux, on something closer to forty years for the whole dynasty — long enough for one energetic usurper and a handful of short, disputed reigns among his sons, and no longer.

What survives clearly enough to trust is the shape of the thing: a family of ambiguous, probably genuinely low birth, that took an already dominant Magadhan kingdom by force and held it for two generations before losing it to force in turn.

The army Alexander did not meet

peakDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

In 326 BC, on the banks of the Hyphasis — the modern Beas, the furthest point east Alexander's army would ever reach — the Macedonian advance stopped for good. The immediate cause was exhaustion: years from home, in monsoon rain, Alexander's own veterans refused to go further. But the intelligence that reached the camp about what lay ahead did nothing to change their minds.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Edward Bunbury · Public domain

What the Greeks were told

A native chieftain, reported by the Greek sources as Bhagala or Phegelas, told Alexander of a kingdom on the Ganges ruled by a monarch the Greeks transliterated as Xandrames or Agrammes — a name that can only be a garbled rendering of one of the Nanda kings, since the capital of the people in question, the Prasii, was unmistakably Pataliputra. The information was confirmed independently by Porus, whom Alexander had already defeated and had every reason to trust on this point rather than resent it.

The army this king could field was reported at twenty thousand cavalry, two hundred thousand infantry, two thousand chariots, and between three and four thousand elephants — a force on a scale nothing Alexander had fought in Persia or the Punjab approached. The reigning king, the same report added, was widely hated for his wickedness and his base origin: the son of a barber who had seduced the previous queen, engineered the old king's death, and murdered his way to the throne under cover of a false guardianship. It is, in every particular but the names, the same story the Puranas tell about Mahapadma Nanda.

A battle that never happened

Whether the army's size alone decided anything is impossible to know; the mutiny in Alexander's own ranks had been building before the report arrived. But the two facts landed together, and Alexander turned back without ever testing whether the numbers he had been given were real.

Magadha's reputation for overwhelming force was thereby fixed in the Greek record by a battle that was never fought — the largest army west of the Ganges never learning firsthand whether the largest army east of it could actually have stopped them, and choosing, on secondhand report alone, not to find out.

Nine Nandas

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

Ask how many Nanda kings there were, and every tradition that survives gives a different, confident, incompatible answer.

Four sources, four dynasties

The Puranas count Mahapadma and eight sons: two generations, "the nine Nandas" of later Sanskrit reference, reigning a combined century. The Jains extend the same two generations to a hundred and fifty-five years. The Buddhist Mahavamsa and Dipavamsa, and the Asokavadana on top of them, add their own contradictory stories, none of which can be reconciled with the others or, in most particulars, with anything independently verifiable. Even the Kharavela inscription — a genuinely contemporary-adjacent epigraphic source, cut on a rock at Udayagiri within a century and a half of the dynasty's fall — mentions "Nanda Raja" twice without clarifying which Nanda, or how many there were.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Kevin Standage · CC BY-SA 2.0

What might explain the distortion

No single, obvious motive accounts for why every tradition mangles the same nine decades so thoroughly. What can be said is that the dynasty's low birth made it an uncomfortable subject for exactly the class of people who wrote the surviving accounts down — Brahmanical, Jain and Buddhist authors alike, each with reasons of their own to treat a barber's-son dynasty as an aberration rather than a line worth recording carefully.

A usurpation that ends the age of high-born kings is the kind of story a tradition remembers as a moral rather than as a chronology.

What is left when the numbers are set aside

Strip out the irreconcilable regnal lengths and what remains is a consistent core: an illegitimate founder, a reign built on an existing kingdom's wealth and army rather than on new conquest, two generations of rule, and an end by the same method as the beginning. The forty years modern scholarship settles on is not a fact recovered from the sources so much as the smallest span the surviving contradictions can be made to fit inside — an estimate offered for want of anything better, on a dynasty whose own certain history is shorter than the argument about how long it lasted.

What Chandragupta inherited

endDrafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)

Whatever the truth of the Nine Nandas, no source disputes how the dynasty ended: the last king, Dhana Nanda in Buddhist memory, was deposed and killed by Chandragupta Maurya around 322 BC.

An ending that mirrors the beginning

Chandragupta himself, by the tradition Smith finds most credible, was an illegitimate member of the Nanda family — connected closely enough to claim a stake in what he was taking, distant enough to have no path to it except by force. The revolution that put him on the throne is said to have involved the extermination of everyone else related to the fallen king, a detail no more surprising here than it had been when Mahapadma did the same thing to the Shishunagas two generations earlier. A dynasty founded by killing a king and clearing out his family ended the same way, at the hands of a man with almost exactly the same kind of claim its own founder once had.

The inheritance itself

What Chandragupta actually took possession of was not a country to be built from nothing but a fully assembled state: the wealth later generations remembered as proverbial, an army whose reported size had once turned back Alexander's advance without a battle, and a capital, Pataliputra, already the unquestioned centre of power in the Gangetic plain. The work Mahapadma and his sons had spent two generations accumulating — by force, on top of what Bimbisara and Ajatashatru's earlier conquests had already built — became, with a single change of ruling family, the foundation the Maurya empire was built on rather than an empire it had to conquer for itself.

Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904) · Quezerque · CC BY-SA 4.0

The dynasty that left the least respected name in the tradition left the largest single inheritance any successor in early Indian history received ready-made.