Who was the founder of the Maurya Empire ?

Question

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Correct — B, Chandragupta Maurya. Chandragupta founded the Mauryan empire in about 321 BCE by overthrowing Dhana Nanda, the last ruler of the Nanda dynasty of Magadha, and taking Pataliputra — the city that is now Patna and that would remain the imperial capital for a century and a half. His guide in the enterprise was the brahmana Chanakya, also called Kautilya or Vishnugupta, the presumed author of the Arthashastra. Having taken Magadha, Chandragupta turned west into the power vacuum Alexander's departure had left in the Punjab and Sindh, and then met Seleucus Nicator, Alexander's successor in the east, in about 305 BCE; the settlement gave Chandragupta the satrapies of Arachosia, Gedrosia and Paropamisadae — broadly eastern Afghanistan and Baluchistan — in exchange for five hundred war elephants, and sent Megasthenes to Pataliputra as Seleucid ambassador. Megasthenes's account, the Indika, survives only in quotation but is the fullest foreign description of Mauryan India that exists. Jain tradition holds that Chandragupta abdicated in favour of his son and went south with the Jain teacher Bhadrabahu to Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, where he died by the ritual fast of sallekhana. The three other names on this page are all genuinely Mauryan, which is what makes the question a test of sequence rather than of recognition: Bindusara was Chandragupta's son and successor, Ashoka his grandson, and Brihadratha the last of the line. The empire at its height under Ashoka covered almost the whole subcontinent apart from the far south, and it is the first Indian state to have done so.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The most famous Mauryan, and therefore the reflex answer — but he was the third ruler of the line, Chandragupta's grandson, who came to the throne around 268 BCE and inherited an empire already built. What Ashoka added was the Kalinga war of about 261 BCE and the dhamma policy that followed it, together with the pillars and rock edicts by which the dynasty is now known.  (c) The trap at the opposite end of the dynasty, and the option that catches a candidate who recognises the name without placing it. Brihadratha was the LAST Mauryan ruler, assassinated in about 185 BCE by his own commander-in-chief Pushyamitra Shunga, who then founded the Shunga dynasty. First and last are exactly the two positions a question like this plays with.  (d) The second ruler, Chandragupta's son, who reigned for roughly a quarter of a century from about 297 BCE and was known to Greek writers as Amitrochates. He extended Mauryan control southwards and maintained the diplomatic contact with the Hellenistic world that his father had opened, but he inherited the empire rather than founding it.

Concept: The Mauryan empire is the first pan-Indian state and the reference point for everything that follows in ancient Indian political history. Its heartland was Magadha in south Bihar, whose rise had been under way for two centuries through the Haryanka, Shishunaga and Nanda dynasties before Chandragupta took it — Magadha's advantages being iron ore in the surrounding hills, elephants from its forests, fertile alluvium and control of Ganga river traffic. Our knowledge of the empire comes from an unusually varied set of sources: Kautilya's Arthashastra on statecraft and administration, the fragments of Megasthenes's Indika, Ashoka's own inscriptions, the Buddhist Divyavadana and Sri Lankan chronicles, the Jain tradition on Chandragupta's last years, and archaeology at Kumhrar in Patna, where the pillared hall of the Mauryan palace was excavated. The state it describes was highly centralised, with provinces under royal princes, a network of officials and spies, state monopolies in mining and liquor, and a standing army.

State PCS 2025 Q37 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q37 — History PYQ with Answer