Nanda dynasty

The first empire of the plain

Mahāpadma Nanda is described in the Purāṇic lists as the destroyer of all the kṣatriyas, a formula that registers the elimination of the surviving old ruling houses across northern India. Under the Nandas the Magadhan state reached from the Punjab borderlands to the Bengal delta and southward at least into Kalinga, where a later inscription of Khāravela refers to a canal built by a Nanda king and to an image carried off by one.

Their revenues were evidently exceptional. Every strand of the tradition — Brahmanical, Buddhist, Jain and Greek — dwells on Nanda wealth, and the Jain sources in particular treat the accumulation of treasure as the dynasty's defining trait.

Low birth

The sources are unanimous that the Nandas were of low origin — the son of a barber in one account, of a courtesan in another — and equally unanimous in disapproval. This is the judgement of texts written by and for the classes the dynasty displaced, and it is not evidence about the Nandas so much as about the anxiety their rise produced. What it does record is that a family outside the recognised lineages could take and hold the leading state of northern India.

Alexander and the fall

It was the reputation of the Nanda army — the Greek sources give figures of two hundred thousand foot, twenty thousand horse and several thousand elephants — that halted Alexander's advance at the Beas in 326 BCE, when his troops refused to march further east against it. The figures are almost certainly inflated, but the deterrent was real.

Within five years the dynasty was gone. Candragupta Maurya, advised in the tradition by the brahmin Cāṇakya, took Pāṭaliputra and founded the Mauryan house. The details of that campaign come from much later sources — the Sanskrit play Mudrārākṣasa above all — and are literary rather than documentary.