Autonomous Southern Kingdoms within a Mauryan-Centred Order AND Emperor Aśoka's Relations with the Cholas, Pandyas, Keralaputras and Satiyaputras in the Third Century BCE

This paper examines whether the Cholas, Pandyas, Keralaputras and Satiyaputras stood under Mauryan authority during the reign of Aśoka (r. 268/272–232/235 BCE), and if so, in what sense. It assembles five bodies of evidence — Aśokan epigraphy, the Pali chronicle tradition, Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions, Sangam poetry, and the later tradition of Aśokan presence in the Tamil country — and tests eleven propositions advanced in support of the hypothesis of Mauryan overlordship. The epigraphic evidence is decisive in an unexpected direction: Major Rock Edict II names the Cola, Pāṇḍya, Satiyaputra (identified as the Kośars of Tulanāḍu), Keralaputra (the Ceras) and Tambapaṇṇi as the southern neighbours of the Mauryan realm and as recipients of medical and welfare measures, in the same grammatical register as the yavana king Antiochus, and applies to them no category of frontier dependency whatsoever (Dwivedi, 2019; Varier, 2020). The vocabulary of the frontier belongs instead to Rock Edict XIII, where the dhaṃma-conquest is described as won "here and among all the borderers (aṃteṣu), six hundred yojanas away, where the Yona king Antiochus is named," alongside four further Hellenistic monarchs — a discourse directed north-westward at the Greek world and demonstrably not a claim of sovereignty over it (Charpentier, 1931). The chronicle evidence places Aśoka in a relationship of alliance and religious patronage with Devanampiya Tissa of Sri Lanka, transmitted through the port of Tamralipti, with a shared royal epithet between the two courts, but the missionary register of the Third Council omits the Tamil polities entirely (Coningham, 1995; Laizet, 2021; Lanh, 2025). Jambudvīpa, the term Tissa applies to Aśoka's realm, is shown to be the emperor's own inscriptional vocabulary, occurring in the Maski recension of Minor Rock Edict I (Gaál & Tóth, 2018). Tamil-Brāhmī is demonstrably adapted from the Brāhmī of Aśoka's Prakrit inscriptions, yet the resulting corpus records Pandya and Chera kings with their own genealogies and subordinates, and Mahadevan's analysis of 96 Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions finds 72.82% Dravidian stems against 24.55% Indo-Aryan (Francis, 2021; Paneerselvam, 1970; Subbarayalu, 2023). The later tradition completes the picture: Xuanzang's seventh-century record preserves the memory of Aśoka as a builder of a stūpa and a vihāra in the Chola country at Nagapattinam, a tradition echoed in the Pali commentarial literature of the Mahāvihāra, whose scholar-monks were in documented contact with the Coḷa country (Andhifani et al., 2025; Revire, 2016; Sankar, 2021). The paper concludes that the evidence supports a fourth model — neither annexation nor isolation, but asymmetrical alliance within a Mauryan-centred political order — and that the category "under the Mauryan empire" should be replaced by the more precise formulation the hypothesis itself proposes: politically autonomous kingdoms within a Mauryan hegemonic field.