About twenty-five words in an inscription of Asoka have succeeded in almost wholly suppressing the thousands in the rest of the epigraphy and the whole of Sanskrit literature which bear testimony to the incorrigible militarism of the Hindus. Their political history is made up of blood-stained pages. Asoka himself said that in order to conquer Kalinga, that is, to make a small addition to the conquests’ of his father and grandfather, he had to wage a war in the course of which fifty thousand people had to be deported, one hundred thousand were killed, and many times this number perished in other ways. Though Maurya imperialism was certainly imitative of the Achaemenian, the kings of the dynasty did not imitate the humanity of Cyrus. Their methods of war were Assyrian, and recall in the killings and deportations the ferocity of an Ashur-nasir-pal.
Asoka added, seemingly without even any unconscious irony, that after the annexation of the region his mind turned to Dharma. He could let it do so, for there was nothing left to conquer in Aryan India. There was also no other way open to him to expiate for the bloodshed except by reducing the number of animals slaughtered for the royal kitchen. From many thousands they were brought down to three — two peacocks and one gazelle, and it was promised even this would be stopped. It seems possible that the practice in the Hindu Bania or commercial order of atoning for their methods of earning money by feeding ants and preserving bed-bugs was derived from this exalted precedent.
Between this unnecessary proclamation of non-violence in the third century b.c. and its reassertion, largely futile, in the twentieth century by Mahatma Gandhi, there is not one word of non-violence in the theory and practice of statecraft by the Hindus. Read all the inscriptions, and you will find that when they are not bare records of gifts or genealogy, they are proclamations of the victories and the conquests of the kings concerned.
The martial boasting is found not only among the Hindu kings, but equally among the Buddhist: Harsha, Dharmapala, or Devapala, who were no less warlike than the Guptas. Mudgagiri-samavasita-jayaskandhavarat — from the camp of victory pitched at Monghyr, Dharmapala announced that his cavalry was raising the dust to the skies.
The whole of Sanskrit literature, from the epics down to the latest long poems, is full of accounts of battles and exultation over war and conquest. These were the business of Hindu kings. They were always praised for having exterminated all their enemies, and one uniform formula of glorification for them is that they raised universal lamentation among the wives of the enemy folks.