Kota Venkatachelam and the Conundrum of Ancient Indian Chronology

Pt. Kota Venkatachelam

Few debates in Indian history have been as charged or as enduring as the argument over our antiquity. How old India’s civilisation truly is, and who gets to decide that? Long before social media polemics and political appropriation hardened positions over the Aryan Migration theory and its counter, the ‘Out of India,’ a small group of scholars waged a more forbidding war over dates, dynasties and inscriptions.

Among the most uncompromising of them (though by no means the first) was Pandit Kota Venkatachelam (1885-1954). His works, especially ‘The Plot in Indian Chronology’ (1953) and ‘Age of the Mahabharata War’ (completed 1959) read like an early rehearsal for the civilizational battles being fought in online and offline platforms today. In them, Venkatachelam mounted one of the most sweeping challenges ever posed to the foundations of modern Indian historiography.

He posited that the accepted chronology of ancient India rested on a single catastrophic error committed by European Indologists, primarily Sir William Jones, that had distorted millennia of Indian history.

Wrong ‘Sheet Anchor’

In 1793, in a sensational address before the members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (which he had founded in 1784), Sir William Jones identified the Greek name ‘Sandrocottus’ (or Sandracottus/Sandrokottos) with the Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya. Jones made this announcement in an address to the society, linking the Sandrocottus who met Alexander the Great to the Maurya dynasty.

Jones correlated the Sandrocottus described by the Greek historians of the Indian campaigns of Alexander the Great in the years 327-5 B.C. and of his successor, Seleucus Nicator, in 305 B.C. - specifically Arrian, Justin and Plutarch who gave some account of the rise to power of an Indian adventurer whom they called ‘Sandrokottos’  - whom Jones identified with Chandragupta, the founder of the Mauryan Empire who established his capital at Pataliputra.

From this identification, which became the ‘sheet anchor’ of Ancient Indian chronology, flowed the entire accepted framework of India’s ancient past which was synchronised with Mediterranean chronology.

It was this sheet anchor that was emphatically rejected by Venkatachelam.

According to Venkatachelam, the supremely erudite Jones had committed a ‘Himalayan blunder’ in conflating two distinct historical figures: Chandragupta I of the Gupta dynasty, and Chandragupta of the Maurya dynasty.  

He argued that it was Gupta Chandragupta who flourished around 327 BCE and was the true contemporary of Alexander the Great, while Maurya Chandragupta lived far earlier, around 1534 BCE - nearly 1,200 years earlier than currently accepted.

He said that the figure whom the Greek accounts called ‘Sandrocyptus’ corresponded to Samudragupta, the son of Gupta Chandragupta I.

By wrongly identifying Alexander’s contemporary as Chandragupta Maurya, European orientalists had thus upended the entire Puranic chronological framework and had committed the original sin of Indology.

This single misidentification, Venkatachelam claimed, had caused scholars to compress Indian history artificially by making the vast corpus of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist literature appear anachronistic or fabricated.

Venkatachelam showed that Jones’ mis-identification could not considered and established fact but must be treated as fanciful conjecture, which later became elevated into dogma in Indian historical studies. He considered it a sacrilege to discard the Puranas.

The Riddle of Indian Time

In defence of India’s own chronological systems, Venkatachelam insisted that Bharatavarsha possessed not one but several coherent eras, all internally consistent and historically meaningful.

Venkatachelam insisted that Indian chronology rested on three distinct and well-attested eras. At the heart of his reconstruction lay the Mahabharata war, which he argued, occurred in 3138 BCE, followed shortly by the beginning of the Kali Era or ‘Kaliyuga’ in 3102 BCE, traditionally associated with the death of Krishna has remained in continuous use by Indian astronomers and survives in almanacs to this day. The ‘Yudhishtira Era,’ which commenced in 3138 BCE after the Mahabharata war, marked the political reordering of the subcontinent. And the ‘Yudhishtira-Kala’ or ‘Saptarshi Era’ (3076 BCE) which marked the death of the Pandava king, and also known as the Kashmirabda, was and still is used in Kashmir.

His dating the Mahabharata war to 3138 BCE was based on exhaustive astronomical calculation and followed the work of earlier dissenters such as Moritz Troyer (translator of the ‘Rajatarangini’) and Indian scholars like T. S. Narayana Sastry.

What irked Venkatachelam was that the great Western Indologists like Jones, Max Müller, Alexander Cunningham and others had acknowledged them as calendrical systems and yet systematically ignored when writing history. He regarded this manoeuvre as an act of intellectual violence. He contended that these eras were set aside because they pointed to an antiquity that sat uneasily with Biblical chronologies.

Girivraja and Pataliputra

To buttress his contention that it was the Gupta dynasty that was contemporaneous with Alexander’s invasion, Venkatachelam, through his thorough study of the Puranas, observed that they uniformly mention Girivraja and not Pataliputra as the capital of Magadha. (Girivraja had been the capital of Magadha ever since the foundation of that kingdom, six thousand years ago)

All the Puranas unanimously state that before and after the Mahabharata war, till the dismemberment of the Andhra Satavahana empire, the capital of the Magadha emperors was Girivraja. Chandragupta Maurya, Bindusara, Asoka and other Maurya kings had Girivraja but never Pataliputra as their capital.

Eight successive dynasties - Barhadradha, Pradyota, Sisunaga, Nanda, Maurya, Sunga, Kanva and Andhra - ruled from Girivraja. The Puranas ended their Magadha narrative with the Andhras.

In Venkatachelam’s reconstruction, Pataliputra rose to prominence only under the Guptas. The Puranas were explicit in describing the Guptas as former Andhra-bhrityas (subordinate official) who later carved out power along the Ganga from Prayaga to Pataliputra.

Chandragupta of the Gupta dynasty killed Chandrasri and his minor son Puloman III, the last Magadha emperors of the Andhra dynasty, and annexed a portion of Magadha to his own kingdom including Pataliputra but could not get mastery over the Magadha empire. Thus, in Venkatachelam’s contention, he left Girivraja (which lay beyond his control) and was anointed at Pataliputra.

It was this Chandragupta I and his son, Samudragupta, who had encountered Alexander and later Seleucus - and not Chandragupta Maurya. It was under the Guptas that Pataliputra became an imperial metropolis, hosting Greek ambassadors such as Megasthenes, whose glowing description of the city fits the Gupta, not Mauryan, power.

Why, then, had Pataliputra been retrojected into Mauryan history?

Venkatachelam blamed later literary confusion, particularly the Sanskrit play ‘Mudra rakshasa’ (signet ring of the Minister Rakshasa). This play by Vishakhadatta - dated variously between the 5^th and 11^th centuries CE - set the drama in Pataliputra and purported to a narrative of the intrigue surrounding the ascent of the Emperor Chandragupta Maurya.

But scholars as varied from Kashinath Trimbak Telang to Vincent Arthur Smith have warned that the play reflected the geography of its own time, not that of Chandragupta Maurya. To build the Mauryan chronology on drama, while discarding the Puranas, inverted every rule of evidence, Venkatachelam argued.

He pressed the point further. Megasthenes, in his writings, had famously claimed that slavery did not exist in India. Yet Kautilya’s Arthashastra devotes an entire chapter (chap. 65 entitled ‘Dasakalpa’) to slavery. This contradiction, Venkatachelam concluded, explained why Megasthenes could not have been a contemporary of Chandragupta Maurya and Kautilya.

He further observed that Megasthanes would not have failed to mention Kautilya or his ‘Arthasastra’ if Kautilya had indeed lived in the 4th century B. C. (at Gupta Chandragupta’s court) contemporaneously with him or a bit prior to him.

The Yona Mystery  

Another of Venkatachelam’s provocative arguments concerned the Asokan inscriptions that made references to Yona (Yavana) kings. Modern historians identify these rulers with Hellenistic monarchs of the third century BCE, fitting Asoka neatly into a Mediterranean-connected world. Venkatachelam rejected this outright.

The Yona kings mentioned in the edicts, he argued, were not Greeks of the Hellenistic age but Yavana Kshatriyas who ruled regions such as Abhisara, Uraga, Simhapura, Divyakataka and Uttara Jyotisha in the fifteenth century BCE.

In his telling, these Yonas were indigenous rulers - excommunicated Kshatriyas - who had allegedly established kingdoms in north-western India long before Alexander. The land later known as Greece, he claimed, was then called ‘Ionia’ because it was occupied by these Yavana Kshatriyas while the modern Greeks were a mixed population that emerged much later. By extension, the Huna kings – Toramana and Mihirakula – were not ‘foreign’ rulers but indigenous ones, asserted Venkatachelam.

Venkatachelam’s deepest ‘heresy’ was to chastise scholars for discarding the Puranas out of intellectual cowardice. He contended that the regnal lists of Nepal, Magadha and Kashmir, when read without preconceptions, converge on the same chronological anchor.

The Puranas, far from being the mythological muddles dismissed and disdained by European Orientalists, offered remarkably coherent dynastic sequences provided one was willing to take them seriously.

The Bhagavata Purana, he noted, had already been used by Jones himself to sketch dynastic chronology up to Ashoka, only for its implications to be quietly abandoned.

Why this reluctance? Venkatachelam’s unsparing answer was that European scholars, raised on Biblical chronologies and Greco-Roman timeframes of a few thousand years, were stunned by Indian texts that spoke casually of tens and hundreds of thousands of years.

European Indologists were influenced by imperialistic motives in their attempt to minimise the hoary antiquity and greatness of India which was just then becoming a subject nation. He contended that the British feared that a ‘superiority complex’ in the subject nation might one day lead to a rebellion against its masters and an attempt to regain its greatness.

Today, many of his arguments pertaining to indigenous chronologies, Western Oriental prejudice and the politics of dating have returned with force.

While Venkatachelam was sidelined by the academic mainstream of his time and had to endure ridicule and obloquy, he pursued his project with what single-minded devotion across sixteen volumes.

Even detractors had to concede that his assault exposed the uncomfortable truth that the chronological foundations of ancient Indian history, laid in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were far less secure than their authority suggested.

Pandit Venkatachelam's ‘plot’ in Ancient Indian chronology may have failed to convince the academic mainstream, but the unease he provoked continues to endure.