Nanda’s daughter? What if she’s not willing? Why wouldn’t she be willing? You are the Emperor of all India. I killed her father. She will make the appearance of being torn for a while, before finally making the appearance of recognizing your righteousness and declaring complete wifely loyalty to you. That is the nature of women. Recall when I spoke of the pretense of honor among men? As for whether this appearance is a pretense or genuine emotion is unclear to me, but it is clear that if people were simply able to predict what they would feel in future and skip everything in between, they would live a more honest life.
Chanakya meets Sakadala. Messenger: If you are afraid that I will be dishonorable and capture or execute you on false pretenses, please be assured that I am not foolish enough to jeopardize the trustworthiness of the Maurya dynasty’s word. I only resort to such cunning when I am weak, not when I have already won.
What did you wish to tell me Vishnugupta?
I would like to ask your opinion on a quote I’ve been mulling including in my yet-unpublished Arthashastra. In my doctrine of sama-dama-danda-bheda (convincing, price, punishment, deceit), the first item in sama. And there are many forms of sama. A man of pride can be won through flattery, a stupid man can be won through poetic and irrelevant words. But a scholar is won by the truth, and only by the truth. Despite having said so myself, I am aware that this is an idealized daydream – in fact, I have often observed scholars to be the most stubborn and irrational when it comes to changing their mind, because they have placed so much intellectual effort and capital into believing and promoting their professed ideology, that accepting its falsehood becomes more painful than continuing to believe something they know deep down to be false.
So I will not attempt to convince you to betray Magadha and to support Chandragupta, that would be futile except on the most enlightened of minds. If you think I would fall for such an obvious trap, Professor, if you think that I am so foolish, then you are mistaken. No, Minister, I believe you are so foolish that you will not recognize the truth of my words and will see it as a trap.
However, I believe you can still be convinced of this much, which is also true: The Nanda dynasty has lost the war. Their resistance is a futile exercise in the waste of time, blood and other forms of wealth. Even if you eliminate myself and Chandragupta, and somehow win the loyalty of our army, it is clear that Kaivarta and Panduka are not capable kings in any sense of either word. You are not protecting the rule of the Nanda dynasty but of some future usurper, perhaps a general, or a cousin of the Nandas, or the leader of a new rebellion; in this regard, it is foolish for you to bias against Chandragupta as that usurper.
Thus your loyalty to the Nanda dynasty is not only immoral, but a meaningless pretense. You may say that Chandragupta has killed Magadhas, well, so have the Nandas. The only difference from this perspective is that Chandragupta has killed Magadhas loyal to the Nandas – if you weren’t loyal to the Nandas, that would thus be an irrelevant factoid.
Your loyalty must be to your knowledge, to your beliefs. And you must consider which employer would value such knowledge and beliefs the most. If you disapprove of Chandragupta’s rule in future, the best play for you is still to accept lower your head for now and plan your coup.
What do you want from me?
Several things.
One. When it becomes clear to you that every aspect of Kaivarta and Pandukas’ cause is intenable, that it is impossible for Magadha to hold onto even an inch of its former territory, I want you to surrender immediately rather than shed more blood of the Magadhan army and then
Two. Once Kaivrata and Panduka are ousted and Chandragupta’s rajyabhishekha is complete, I wish that you offer your loyalty to Chandragupta as the new emperor of Magadha, and offer your complete and total support in the transition of power – on issues of administration, politics, and general know-how.
And third, and more immediately … Chandragupta will be meeting Princess Durdhara exactly three days from now on the edge of the Rajagiri cliff that faces a lake. I want you to convey this message to Kaivarta and Panduka and make sure it happens.
Three days from now, on a cliff’s edge? That is the night of the full moon, indeed an interesting time and location to be meeting a young woman.
It was actually so she can’t see the suicide nets.
Should I also lower the princess’s inhibitions with alcohol perhaps, Vishnugupta? Do you wish for me to be a priest at the wedding as well? That would be quite appreciated, actually. The second thing, not the first.
Very well, Vishnugupta. I shall do what is right.
Minister: The Mauryas have asked for a meeting with Durdhara on neutral ground – a cliff edge. I feared at first that they might have wished to hold her hostage, but Vishnugupta is not so foolish to think that we would be so weak. Nonetheless she’s an impressionable girl and he may wish to turn her, I do not recommend agreeing. Three days later, Chandragupta threatens to cut off all food supplies to Pataliputra, and Durdhara agrees to meet.
Chanakya is the first to talk with her, plays bad cop.
Durdhara asks: Professor Vishnugupta. Kautilya Vishnugupta. I have some intellect of my own too, Professor. I know you are here to take me hostage. To exact intolerable emotional cruelties on my brothers and to force them to succumb.
If you had any intellect, young woman, you would know that if that was my objective, you would not be meeting with me, but with two goons, and you would not be walking free on a hill top, you would already be a prisoner. The reason you are being treated with such dignity is far more noble, and if you had any intellect, it would have been quite clear to you already, from the fact that I asked to meet with you, rather than with either of your brothers, who hold the political power.
Chandragupta will shortly be commencing on the Ashwamedha Yajna after taking Pataliputra, and that ritual needs a wife. I am here to ask, on his behalf, for your hand in marriage.
Durdhara horrified: I will marry the man who killed my father? Etc.
OK, then what will be your brideprice? Durdhara horrified: You heartless economist, you think any price—any price—
Not even the lives of your brothers? Durdhara horrified again.
Chanakya: if you had any intellect, young woman, you would be overjoyed to hear this. Until I suggested this possibility to you, the only future in your mind was the complete annihilation of your family. By giving you this choice I am doing a great kindness to your family, one that is frankly undeserved. You can curse me for subjecting you to a difficult choice, but I have given you a choice nonetheless – one that you did not have prior.
You do not truly value the lives of your brothers, only honor. That is why you would rather wish your brothers dead than have the choice to save them with both choices degrading to your honor.
Durdhara looks down. Don’t even think about it. Your death will not save your brothers’ lives. In any case, and perhaps more relevant to you, I have placed nets to rescue you if you do jump off, and guards below so the whole thing would simply be an exercise in embarrassment.
How dare you? To accept my offer will be a difficult choice, and it will be followed by many similarly difficult choices. When your brothers are in exile in Dandaka, will you live with them at the expense of your comfort, or live in the palace at the expense of your honor? Death is always easier. But at least you will be living true to the morals you profess. You may condemn the choice, but the truth of the matter is that you do have a choice. And by condemning the choice so far as to reject it, you are still making a choice – to let me kill your brothers. What I am offering you is a far greater mercy than is usually offered to those whom we call the losing side.
Chandragupta goes next, good cop.
Chanakya tells him: go with two bodyguards, then two seconds after stopping next to her, dismiss them asking for privacy. According to my assessment of her character she will be moved by that gesture.
Look at that city – it houses 250,000 people. Each man, each woman, each child, living their own lives. Lives that will never be recorded in poetry or literature. The verses of history, do not care about the lives of commoners, wealthy or poor. They will record and romanticize every minor inconvenience in the life of a noblewoman, turn noblemen into heroes or villains based on such conveniences and inconveniences they cause to other nobles, yet will barely condemn him for the civilians lives he takes, nor celebrate him for the prosperity he brings to civilian lives.
By my achievements so far, by my popularity among the academics and ousted noble dynasties of Aryavarta I am already guaranteed to be immortalized by history. But that is not all I want. I do not want bloodshed.
You do not want bloodshed? Then don’t wage war!
My Professor says there are two fundamental values worth protecting: human life, and the meaning of human life. I do not wish to cause you any further pain by speaking ill of your deceased father, but you cannot honestly say that his people had any meaningful life under his reign. The expansion of Magadha has taken countless lives, and the meaning out of the lives of those who survived. My war is a war to end all wars, at least for some period, and to create a peaceful India of perpetually increasing prosperity under which humans can pursue higher and higher goals.
You are a student of Vishnugupta, and are just as heartless.
My professor has a cold demeanor, but this is his intent as well. The Ashwamedha can be done without our marriage – our marriage is not for the purpose of advancing my political goals, it is to put an end to a war whose outcome is already known, to reduce bloodshed.
All his strategy, all his cunning, is with this very goal. In conquering the entirety of Northern India, I have shed no civilian blood, and less blood in total than the Nandas shed in acquiring a single fort.
Durdhara: It is not about whose governance is better, it is about loyalty to my family. You killed my father.
And your father killed both my parents. So must we despise each other then? But what was your fault in that? Be loyal, to the living: to your brothers, and more importantly to the people and soldiers of Magadha who have suffered enough through these endless wars. Help me create a new era of peace and prosperity.
Durdhara: Peace and prosperity? Preventing bloodshed? What would you have done if I hadn’t agreed to meet you. Would you have kept the barricade on Pataliputra until the entire city – its men, women, children, cattle – starved to death?
I would’ve chosen whichever route would minimize the suffering of the people of Pataliputra. If that would have meant invading the city by force, or waiting further to pressure Magadha to surrender, would be a matter for my professor to calculate. In any case, I do not claim to have caused no pain in my battles. I do not think even heroes from poetry and plays could live up to that standard.
But by asking this question, princess, and in complaining about the relatively little bloodshed that I have caused in my wars, and by calling my professor by such words that you would never have dared speak to your father or even to your brothers, you have already admitted the higher expectations you hold of me, and thus confessed to the superiority of my morals and my ways, over theirs.
I wish I could be more perfect in my ways, princess, in a way that even heroes of poetry are not, but it is an impossibility. I wish I could promise to treat even your brothers to a life of comfort after my victory, but political considerations make it an unthinkable risk. But their lives I will spare.
And Durdhara, whether our marriage means anything to you in itself, I will always treat you with dignity, as my queen, the prime daughter of Magadha, the land from which I will rule, not as a prisoner of war. This I swear.
Chandragupta says: she’s a good person. And I was honest with her.
Chanakya says: A girl has the right to choose her groom?
Chandragupta: That is the truth.
Yes, but it shows your awareness that she wasn’t being honest with you.
You said that because you believed – and correctly so – that to influence her decision. But if it influenced her decision simply as a matter of information, she would have pretended to decline, wait a few days and measure your response.
No, it influenced her decision by virtue of being romantic, of making her decision seem honorable, giving her plausible deniability to protect her dignity. She is the sort of pretentious woman who will go to fraudulent unorthodox ascetics and saints asking them to solve her problems, who will then exploit such opportunity for their political gains, and if she does realize this eventually, will pass off her pretentiousness as her “gullibility” or “innocence” and pretend as if that were a noble quality.
I advise you, Chandragupta, that you treat this marriage as one only as a matter of political expedience, and to never make her your principal wife or to pay any heed to her words on any matter. It is likely that a child born of her will not be a suitable candidate for your heir, and so you must marry a more appropriate woman in future.
You have married two women already. Have you also assessed them for being non-pretentious? I received both in Brahma marriage – the form of marriage that arises from the desire of the groom, bride and bride’s parents alike. Thus they will know to not attempt to interfere with my work in any way … on the other hand, Durdhara will consider herself to be your creditor, and you, in a bid to win her affections, will open your own mind to her influence. Keep heed to observe if this is to happen, and when it does, avoid it.
