Avanti

Ujjayinī

Avanti covered the Malwa uplands and the Narmada valley, divided between a northern half centred on Ujjayinī and a southern half around Māhiṣmatī. Ujjayinī sat where the road from the Ganga plain to the western ports crossed the north–south routes, and it became one of the great commercial cities of ancient India — later the seat of a Mauryan viceroy, a Śaka satrapal capital, and by the classical period a byword for urban sophistication in Sanskrit literature.

The city's position on the prime meridian of Indian astronomical reckoning gave it a further significance: Ujjayinī is the reference longitude in the siddhāntas.

Pradyota and the four kingdoms

In the sixth and fifth centuries BCE the Buddhist sources describe a system of four leading powers — Magadha, Kosala, Vatsa and Avanti — and Avanti under Pradyota, called Caṇḍa, the fierce, is presented as the most aggressive of them. He is a standing threat to Vatsa, and Bimbisāra of Magadha is said to have sent his physician Jīvaka to attend him, which implies a relationship of managed hostility rather than open war.

Avanti was also an early centre of both the Jain and the Buddhist communities. The Pali canon records monks from Avanti asking for a relaxation of monastic rules suited to conditions in the western country, and the exchange is one of the clearest signs of the order's spread beyond its heartland.

Absorption

Avanti held out longer than Kosala or Vatsa. The Purāṇic tradition credits Śiśunāga of Magadha with its conquest, which would place the end of Avantian independence in the fifth or early fourth century BCE. Ujjayinī then served the Mauryas as the provincial capital of the west — Aśoka governed there as prince before his accession.