Dhana Nanda

Dhana Nanda was the last king of the Nanda dynasty of Magadha, and his army was large enough that the Greek accounts say Alexander's men refused to march against it. He ruled the greatest state in northern India from Pataliputra, and what the sources agree on is the wealth and the unpopularity: the name itself means rich, the dynasty was said to be of low birth, and its revenue came from taxation described as rapacious by every tradition that mentions it - Buddhist, Jain and Brahminical alike, which is unusual agreement. Greek writers report that when Alexander reached the Beas in 326 BC his troops heard that the Gangaridai and the Prasii could field two hundred thousand infantry, twenty thousand cavalry and thousands of chariots and elephants; the mutiny at the Hyphasis followed, and the invasion of India stopped there. The end came from inside. Chandragupta Maurya, with the brahmin Chanakya, raised a force in the northwest and took Magadha some time around 322 BC, and the traditions describe Chanakya as personally motivated by an insult from the king. The Mauryan empire that followed was the largest state the subcontinent had known. Nothing about Dhana Nanda is fixed: his dates, his name, whether he was one king or several, all vary by source, and the whole dynasty is known mainly through the literature of the people who overthrew it and had reason to describe it as it did. The Mudrarakshasa, a Sanskrit play of perhaps the fourth century AD, dramatises the overthrow and is a main source for the Chanakya story. Megasthenes visited the Mauryan court a generation later and described Pataliputra as walled in timber with sixty-four gates. Nothing written by the Nandas themselves survives.

• Lived: 360 BCE – 321 BCE
• Nationality: Indian
• Roles: ruler