Kalinga War

The Kalinga War was fought around 261 BCE between the Maurya Empire, under the emperor Ashoka, and the independent kingdom of Kalinga on the eastern coast of India, in what is now Odisha and the north of Andhra Pradesh. The Mauryas conquered Kalinga at a terrible human cost. According to Ashoka's own inscriptions, remorse over the suffering led him to renounce wars of conquest and to promote a moral code, or dhamma, influenced by Buddhism.

The Maurya Empire had been founded in about 321 BCE by Chandragupta Maurya, who overthrew the Nanda kings of Magadha and expanded his rule over most of northern India. His son Bindusara pushed further into the south. By the time Ashoka came to the throne, around 268 BCE, almost all of the subcontinent except the far south was under Mauryan rule or influence. Kalinga, a prosperous land with fertile river deltas and ports trading across the Bay of Bengal, remained outside it. It controlled routes between northern and southern India, and its independence was both a strategic and an economic obstacle to the empire.

Very little is known about the course of the fighting. No detailed narrative survives, and the main evidence is a single passage in one of Ashoka's own rock edicts. It states that the war took place eight years after his consecration as king, which most historians place around 262 to 261 BCE. Later local tradition places a major battle near the Dhauli hills, on the Daya River close to modern Bhubaneswar, but this cannot be confirmed. Kalinga was annexed and became a province of the empire.

Ashoka's thirteenth major rock edict gives figures for the war's human toll: 150,000 people carried off as captives, 100,000 killed, and many times that number dying afterwards, presumably from hunger, disease and displacement. Historians cannot check these numbers, and some treat them as rounded or symbolic, but they show that the emperor himself regarded the conquest as a catastrophe. The edict also expresses his grief for the suffering of ordinary people, including priests, ascetics and families separated by the war.

In the same edict Ashoka declared that conquest by dhamma, meaning righteous conduct, was the only true conquest, and urged his descendants not to seek new territorial gains by force. Over the following years he had his principles carved on rocks and pillars across the empire, calling for tolerance between religious groups, respect for parents and teachers, kindness to servants and animals, and restraint in punishment. He supported Buddhist communities and is credited in Buddhist tradition with sending missionaries beyond India, including to Sri Lanka.

Scholars debate how sudden and complete this change was. Ashoka did not disband his army or give up Kalinga, and the version of the edicts set up in Kalinga itself, at Dhauli and Jaugada, omits the passage of remorse, replacing it with instructions to officials on governing the province fairly.

The Kalinga War marked the end of the major expansion of the Maurya Empire. After Ashoka's death around 232 BCE the empire weakened and broke up within about half a century. Kalinga regained its independence and, in the second or first century BCE, became a significant power again under King Kharavela. In modern India, Ashoka's lion capital from Sarnath is the national emblem, and the wheel of dhamma appears on the national flag.

Our 300 BCE map shows the Maurya Empire shortly after its foundation, and the 200 BCE map shows the situation soon after Ashoka's death.