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Alexander the Great's invasion of North-Western princedoms of India had both a shocking and also a clotting effect on the military relations in India. The shock effect in terms of Alexander's rapid string of victories in the Indus Valley and the complete foreigness of the Greco-Macedonian culture needs no explanation. But it also had an immediate clotting effect on the state of military affairs in the sub-continent.
For nearly a hundred years before Alexander - starting from Cyrus the Great himself, the Persian Empire had breached and bled India's natural frontiers in the North-West. The princes of the North, though militantly independent had a vague sense of responsibility of guarding the sub-continent from the invaders. That vague sense had rested on bonds of shared culture and education. The conquests of Cyrus the Great had made them Persian vassals first and Farso-philes as Persians established their own grand culture. The Persian Empire rested as a leach on the sub-continent - slowly bleeding India and growing stronger in the process. Alexander's destruction of the Achemenids momentarily loosened the leach's grips and allowed Indians to defend their frontiers. The analsegic was quickly washed away and hard boundaries clotted between India and Persia.
The greatest exploiters of the disturbances caused by Alexander's storm and the vacuum that followed, the disarray of the North-Western princedoms, and the instability of the Nandas deep in the Indian heartland were the teacher-student duo of Kautilya and Chandragupta Maurya. Kautilya had been a teacher at the University of Takshashila (modern Pakistan's Taxila) who had been alarmed by the weak state of Indians in the rapidly Persinized North, and even more so by Alexander's easy victories. Chandragupta Maurya was an exiled rebel, an iterrant student of Kautilya.
The Mauryas first forged an alliance of the disparate and masterless feudatories of Alexander in the North and the West. With a timely rebellion in the heartland he was able to use force from within and allies from without to establish himself as a king in his own right. Within two decades his teacher - now his prime minister - had engineered the submission or annihilation of all his allies in the sub-continent. Chandragupta himself had routed two armies of Selecus Nicator and secured the North-West frontiers from central India.
Interstingly enough, Kautilya had no formal military training - being an economist and a teacher by profession. Correspondingly his works on non-economic matters appear too micro-managing aand too pedantic. Not a master strategist like Sun Tzu or Machevelli, his works are more like the master chemist writing the exact formula to achieve an exact compound he desires. In effect, while Sun Tzu and Machevelli failed their immediate patrons. . . Kautilya delivered the goods. In this case the goods were whole of Northern Indian sub-continent in just 20 years, and foundations of an empire that lasted more than 200 years ruling all of the sub-continent. It was his only failing that while he did his ruthless best to secure all that was good and prideful about India, he ended up defending many of its ancient vices and prejudices as well. |
