Sumedha V. Ojha's Blog: The World of Urnabhih

As the explanatory sub-title of Urnabhih states, Sumedha V Ojha’s story of palace intrigue and military conspiracy is set in the 4th century BCE, at the dawn of the Mauryan period, with a young Chandragupta doing whatever it takes to establish an empire in the northern regions of the Subcontinent. The protagonist of this tale, littered as it is with handsome, virile and skilled warriors, is a dancer. More correctly, she is that fabled creature, a ganika, a highly sophisticated courtesan of ancient times, fit to share the company of noblemen and kings. She is their equal in terms of refinement and intellectual training, but often, she surpasses them in native cunning and the instinct to survive.

Our ganika, Misrakesi, comes to Magadha from Ujjain to avenge the death of her equally gorgeous and skilled sister. But before she can make her killer move, she is persuaded by the ‘Acharya’ (no prizes for guessing who that might be) to become part of the Urnabhih, his spider- web-like network of spies that lurk within the newly usurped kingdom as well as outside it.

Misrakesi embarks on a journey that takes her from the sheltered Apsara Sabha that she creates for the entertainment of Magadha’s finest to the kingdom of Kaikeya, teetering on the brink of chaos as its aged monarch lies dying. Along the way, she falls in love and has a lot of earth-shaking sex but she manages to ensure that the Acharya’s complex plans—to elevate the charismatic goatherd Chandragupta to Samrat of Jambudweepa—bear ripe and abundant fruit.

Ojha has a fluency and ease with the historical material that she manipulates in order to tell this rollicking tale. The Greeks, like the overthrown Nandas, hover in the background, not yet a spent force. The Sungas have been assimilated into the new administration by the young Maurya, ably advised by Chanakya. The formidable empire with its base of loyal satraps has yet to cohere around a single, undisputed monarch—all this is part of the fourth century history we know. Ojha’s solid research, the exuberance of her writing and her clear passion for the period allow her to animate and actually render clear this period of murky turbulence, churned as it was by many contenders for power. She does this by creating believable (if excessively heroic) characters set against a backdrop of entirely plausible conspiracies and intrigues.

The fact that we see this male world through the eyes of a woman is, for me, a compelling narrative strategy. Choosing the courtesan, the woman who belongs to no one, who is simultaneously inside and outside social structures, is a master stroke. Misrakesi can have the courage and the adventures of a warrior, the contrivances and intelligence of an advisor and the ambition of a courtier on the rise, but as a ganika, she remains eternally seductive, eternally ambiguous, all things to all people at all times.

Ojha’s author’s note tells us she was born in Patna and therefore, she returns to her roots to tell us a story set in Pataliputra—the jewel of the East, a thriving and conniving metropolis in a sea of less alluring urban settlements. Further, she says that she has a ‘cherished dream of writing to bring the beauty and nuances of ancient India before the world’.

I’m not sure that Ojha is on her way to mission accomplished when early on, she writes such sentences as: ‘The date of the marriage has been fixed for one month from today, during the shuklapaksha, on the auspicious muhurat of the Shiva-Parvati vivaha’. Even by Ojha’s liberal reckoning, in a book that she sprinkles with Sanskrit words, a single sentence like this one requires two glossary entries. Nonetheless, Ojha has a good story to tell and she tells it well.

Prominent on the back cover of the book is a box that tells us that the book is ‘soon to be a major TV production.’ That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, this story is headed straight for the small screen—and there’s already a sequel in the works. From your favourite chair, in your own living room, you can look forward to bevies of bejewelled ladies, battalions of topless men and a multitude of opulent palaces as Misrakesi’s adventures in love and power continue. n

(Arshia Sattar is a teacher, critic and the author of abridged translations of Kathasaritsagara and Valmiki’s Ramayana, as well as Lost Loves: Exploring Rama’s Anguish)

One of the characters in the book, Chandramukhi, is based on a story from the Vetaal Pachisi or the ‘Vetaal Panchvinshati’ familiar and beloved as Vikram aur Vetaal .
This forms one of the cycle of stories of the Bad Kaha written by Gunadhya in paisachi prakrit in the court of King Satvahana ( maybe around 494 bce). He wrote 700,000 shlokas in 7 years but, hurt by the neglect of his sovereign threw away most of them (but that is another enchanting story altogether!). It was translated into Sanskrit as the Vrihat Katha by King Durvinit . Unfortunately both of these are now lost.
Kshemendra, a Kashmiri poet, abridged the Vrihat Katha into the Brihatkathmanjari.
A little later, in the 11th century AD, the court poet of the King of Kashmir, Somadeva, wrote the Kathasaritasagar based on the Bada Kaha. It consisted of 21,388 shlokas. The Vetaal Panchvinshati and the Singhasan Dvatrinshika ( Singhasan Battisi) are both part of this vast ocean of stories.
In medieval times the court poet of Sawai Raja Jai Sing, Sorath, translated this into Braj Bhasha. It was also translated/freely adapted by some English writers .
There are also Tamil and Marathi versions.
It has enjoyed vast popularity over the centuries and may even be the source of most of the world's oldest stories. However, the attempt to cast these stories as children’s stories may have been misguided. These are very much stories of the world for adults.
I hope to use more of these stories in my forthcoming books.

The importance of being a Mauryan elephant!
Elephants were a crucial part of the Mauryan war machine.The Mauryan administration had a special department, with a superintendent, exclusively for elephants. The methods for catching, training and looking after them as well as their classification and work have been carefully detailed in the Arthashastra. War elephants were taught to stand in attendance, go around, march together, kill and trample, fight with other elephants and assault towns. Megasthenes’ Indica has also detailed how wild elephants were captured during those times.
How critical were these war elephants in actual fact?
In the fight for supremacy in Asia, Seleucus, one of Alexander’s generals who took over his possessions in India after the latter’s death, came to the land east of the Indus to try conclusions with Chandragupta.
He marched to Kabul in 305 bce after securing Babylon. 2 years went by face to face in battle with the Mauryans but he was not able to secure any advantage.
Meanwhile, there was a growing threat to his Asia Minor kingdom from Antigones, another of Alexander’s erstwhile generals, and his allies, Ptolemy of Egypt and Lysimachus of Thrace (modern Greece) became increasingly restive and worried about this threat in the messy theatre of Eurasian politics.
Finally Seleucus gave up. He concluded a treaty with Chandragupta where he ceded Kandahar, Kabul, Herat and Baluchistan to the Indian King in return for what else but 500 war elephants!
Chandragupta thus extended his empire to the borders of Iran and as for Seleucus he won a decisive victory over Antigones in the Battle of Ipsus in Phrygia (modern Turkey) in 301 bce! Never again did he look to the east of the Indus. The decisive factor in the departure of the Greeks from India was these elephants.
After this there was a demand for these war elephants from kingdoms in the area. From Pyrrhus of Epirus who took them to Italy in 281 bce to the 2nd Punic War when they were used by the brothers Hannibal and Hasdrubal war elephants often tilted the balance of war!

A controversial subject in all its aspects; when did it originate, was it indigenous or borrowed, where did the earliest deciphered script ( Brahmi) come from and of course, what do the Indus inscriptions mean and can they ever be deciphered. Are there any continuities between the Indus script and any of the later scripts? Was Sanskrit ever written in the Indus script?
So many questions and so many different answers.
For your consideration a short excerpt from a 2005 article bySubhash Kak in the journal ‘Migration and Diffusion’ discussing all these issues:

" It is generally known that modern Indian scripts, such as Devanāgarī, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, are less than two thousand years old and that they sprang from Brahmi, which, in turn, is at least 2,500 years old. Early writings of Brahmi, discovered in Sri Lanka, have been dated tentatively to about 500 BC; the more commonly known Brahmi records belong to the reign of the Mauryan King Aśoka (250 BC). According to B.B. Lal11, some marks that are apparently in Brahmi on pottery in India go back to about 800 or 900 BC. The Indus script (also called Harappan or Sarasvati) was used widely during 2600-1900 BC. Its starting has been traced back to 3300 BC and its use continued sporadically into the late centuries of the second millennium BC.
We know that writing was used in India prior to 500 BC. Written characters are mentioned in the Chāndogya and the Taittirīya Upanisad, and the Aitareya Āranyaka refers to the distinction between the various consonant classes. The voluminous Vedic texts also contain hints of writing in them. For example, Rgveda 10.71.4 says:

utá tvah páśyan ná dadarśa vācam utá tvah śrnván ná śrnoty enām
(One man has never seen Vāk, yet he sees; one man has hearing but has never heard her.)

Since Vāk is personified speech, it suggests knowledge or writing. Another verse (RV 10.62.7) mentions cows being marked by the sign of “8”. The Atharvaveda (19.72) speaks of taking the Veda out of a chest (kośa), and although it may be a metaphor for knowledge coming out of a treasure-house, it could equally have been meant in a literal sense.
The traditional date for the Rgveda is about 3000 BC, with the later Vedic texts and the Brāhmanas coming a few centuries later. The Āranyakas, Upanisads and the Sūtras are, in this view, dated to the 2nd and early 1st millennia. The astronomical evidence in the texts is in accord with this view. Furthermore, the currently accepted date of 1900 BC for the drying up of the Sarasvati river, hailed as the mightiest river of the Vedic age with its course ranging from the mountain to the sea, implies that the Vedas are definitely prior to this date. It is also significant that the Brāhmana texts speak of the drying up of the Sarasvati as a recent event.
This brings the Vedas to the period of the use of the Indus script in India. It is also significant that the geography of the Harappan region corresponds to the geography of the Rgveda.
Even if one accepted the colonial chronology of ancient India, the period of the Rgveda corresponds to the later period of the Harappan culture. This means that the Indus script is likely to have been used to write Sanskrit and other languages spoken in the 3rd millennium India just as Brahmi was used to represent north and south Indian languages 2,500 years ago.
There are many competing theories about the nature of the Indus script. The main difficulty with “proving” any decipherment is that the texts are very short.
Some historians believe that Brahmi is derived from one of the West Asian scripts and, indeed, there are interesting similarities between their characters for several sounds. On the other hand, there is a remarkable continuity between the structures of Indus and Brahmi. Since a script can be used to write a variety of languages—even unrelated--, the question of structural relationship is particularly interesting.
Indus and Brahmi connections become evident when one considers the most commonly occurring letters of the two scripts. In a series of articles in Cryptologia, I examined these connections for similarity in form, case-endings for inscriptions, and the sign for “ten”. The parallels are extraordinary and the probability that they arose by chance is extremely small.
Since the technical arguments related to the relationship between the two scripts are beyond the scope of this article, let me only reproduce an analysis of the 10 most common letters from the two scripts.
Notice that the three most commonly occurring letters in both the scripts are the “jar”, the “fish”, and the “man”. The number of matches in the ten signs is 7; the probability of this happening by chance is less than 10-12.
It is also remarkable that the “fish” sign is used as a symbol for “10” in the Indus (used without the gills; its use was determined by a statistical analysis) and the Brahmi scripts, although the Brahmi “fish” for “10” is shown sideways.
Regarding the similarities between Brahmi and early Semitic scripts, it should be noted that Indic kingdoms, in which Sanskrit names were used, were prominent in West Asia in the second millennium BC. Just as in the Vedic system, the Ugaritics, a people closely related to the Phoenicians and the Hebrews, have 33 gods. More importantly, Yahvah, the name of God in the Judaic tradition, occurs as an epithet for Agni in the Rigveda a total of 21 times (yahva in RV 10.110; yahvah in RV 3.1, 3.5, 4.5, 4.7, 4.58, 5.1, 7.6, 7.8, 9.75, 10.11; yahvam in RV 1.36; 3.3; 4.5; 5.16; 8.13; 10.92; yahvasya in RV 3.2 and 3.28). Indian ideas on writing may thus have, through the agency of the powerful Mitanni kingdom of Syria, influenced the various Semitic traditions of the second and first millennia BC.
Food for thought?

Were the Mauryans the first globalisers?
Robert Kaplan, an international strategic thinker in his 2002 book, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos says, “The empire established by Chandragupta, with the help of Kautilya, guaranteed security over an extraordinarily large area in which trade flourished. It was an area, because of the slowness of land and sea travel, (which) was …equivalent to today’s entire world.”
This issue is dealt with in the book To Uphold the World’ by Bruce Rich , an international policy and environment commentator and I discuss some of it below.
The India of the time was one of the first examples of a large region undergoing large scale rapid technological, social and political change. Urban populations were growing and international trade routes proliferated.
Economic expansion and integration within the sub-continent ( and up to Afghanistan) were accompanied by greater specialization in occupations, the rise of the precursors of merchant banking and new forms of financial management, detailed and explained in the Arthashastra. The originality of Chanakya in this regard continues to be discovered. The Arthashastra, for example, describes the world’s first custom’s tariff, one that a contemporary Indian analyst argues was, 2300 years in advance, fully in conformity with the customs valuation principles of current international trade as codified in the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT)!
The Mauryan Empire was a multicultural mix of Persian, Greek, Scythian, Gurkha, Cambodian and Bactrians among others. As I have noted in a previous post, the wars of the Mauryans had reverberations in all of Eurasia.
To put it in international perspective, between 800 and 200 bce there was a unique period of worldwide psychological and spiritual transformation, something dubbed as the Axial Age by German philosopher Karl Jaspers. It was literally the axis or hinge of history, marking the coming of age of much of the world’s population in the world’s major civilizations; China, India, Greece and the Near East.
Although many peoples and cultures initially lay outside the Axial cultures( the relatively uncivilized people of northern Europe for example), Axial religions and ethics over the next millennia came ot be the core values of nearly all the peoples on the planet.
If the Axial period was the ethical coming of age of humanity, the Mauryans were one of its greatest manifestations.