Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas

Romila Thapar's Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, published by Oxford University Press in 1961, is the standard scholarly study of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka's reign and his patronage of Buddhism, built substantially on Thapar's own reading of Ashoka's edicts, the rock and pillar inscriptions that survive as his own words rather than later legend. Thapar is among the most influential historians of ancient India, and this early work established the critical, epigraphy first approach to Ashoka that later scholarship in the field has generally followed. Its strength is that grounding in Ashoka's own inscriptions rather than in the later Buddhist hagiographical tradition that surrounds him, letting the book separate what Ashoka himself claimed from what pious legend added afterward. Its limit is that it was written over sixty years ago and Thapar herself substantially revised parts of the argument in her own later work, so a claim about the Mauryan decline specifically benefits from checking against her subsequent revisions.