Maurya and Sunga Period Clothing: From Alexander to Ashoka

Ancient Indian clothing tells a story of drape, not stitch. Long before tailored garments became common, people wrapped, folded, and knotted a few simple lengths of cloth into everything from everyday wear to royal court dress. The Maurya and Sunga period, roughly 321 to 72 BCE, sits at a fascinating crossroads in this story. It is the stretch of history when Alexander of Macedonia’s brief campaign in the northwest brushed up against India’s first pan-subcontinental empire, and when unstitched garments began carrying increasingly elaborate jewellery and headwear as clear markers of rank.

Historical context and Greek influence 🔗

In 327 BCE, Alexander the Great crossed into the Kabul valley and pushed toward Punjab, defeating King Porus at the Hydaspes before his own soldiers refused to march further east. He never conquered the subcontinent, and by 325 BCE his forces had withdrawn from the Indus region entirely. Yet the campaign opened trade routes and cultural contact between the Greek world and northwestern India that far outlasted the invasion itself. Greek artistic and craft influence on Indian sculpture became especially visible through the Mauryan period that followed, continuing for centuries through Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek contact. Trade, garrisoned settlements, and inter-marriage between Greek and Indian ruling families all played a part in this exchange.

Chandragupta Maurya founded India’s first great empire around 320 BCE, after overthrowing the Nanda dynasty and defeating the Greek governors Alexander had left behind in the northwest. When Seleucus, one of Alexander’s former generals, tried to reclaim that territory around 305 BCE, Chandragupta defeated him instead. Rather than continue the conflict, the two rulers negotiated a settlement: Seleucus ceded border territories in exchange for 500 war elephants, and the alliance between the two courts was sealed through the kind of marital ties common between neighbouring dynasties of the period.

Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka became the most celebrated Mauryan emperor. Early in his reign, he waged a brutal war to annex Kalinga on India’s east coast. The devastation this campaign caused is said to have moved him to renounce armed conquest altogether, in favour of what he called conquest through dharma rather than force. He converted to Buddhism and spent the rest of his reign focused on peace, public works, and the spread of his ethical principles across the empire. Historians continue to debate parts of this traditional account, but Ashoka’s edicts remain among the earliest surviving inscriptions left by any Indian ruler, and the shift in his policy after Kalinga is well documented in them.

The Mauryan empire declined within about fifty years of Ashoka’s death, and the Sunga dynasty took over the Mauryan heartland, ruling through roughly 72 BCE. Much of what we know about clothing across both dynasties comes from surviving relief sculpture at Bharhut, Sanchi, and Pitalkhora in the Deccan, rather than from written descriptions of dress. These stone carvings, worn and weathered as they are, remain the primary record of how people actually dressed at the time.

Clothing conventions from this period also changed relatively slowly compared to later centuries. Because of this, sculptures from the Maurya and Sunga era are often treated as a general reference point for understanding how people dressed across several centuries of ancient India, not just within these two dynasties. That makes the period especially useful for anyone studying the roots of Indian drape, long before stitched garments became the norm.

Men’s costume: uttariya, antariya and kayabandh 🔗

Men continued wearing the same three unstitched garments familiar from the earlier Vedic period, but how each piece was draped, and what it was made of, said a great deal about a person’s rank and profession.

The uttariya 🔗

Upper-class men and courtiers draped their uttariya, a length of fine cotton, muslin, or silk, over one or both shoulders, diagonally across the torso, or wound loosely around the elbow. This upper wrap had little to do with warmth and everything to do with signalling refinement. The fabric and the particular fold made all the difference between a courtier’s drape and a farmer’s.

The antariya 🔗

The antariya was the lower garment, and for the wealthy it was made of white cotton, linen, or fine muslin, sometimes worked with gold thread and set with precious stones. It was typically draped kachcha style, passed between the legs and tucked in at the back, and fell anywhere from calf to ankle length depending on the wearer’s status. Working people and villagers wore shorter, plainer versions in coarse, unbleached cotton.

The kayabandh 🔗

The kayabandh was the sash that held the antariya in place at the waist, and it came in a surprising number of styles. Recorded names for these sashes include vehaka for a simple wrap, muraja for a broadened band, pattika for an elaborately embroidered version, and kalabuka for a multi-stringed sash. A sash could be as plain or as ornate as its wearer’s budget and standing allowed, making it a quiet but effective marker of wealth.

Women’s costume and headwear 🔗

Women wore a similar uttariya, usually in thinner material with decorative borders, though it was more often worn as a covering for the head than draped across the shoulders.

Draping the antariya 🔗

The antariya as a garment appears in Indian literature going back to the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and by the Maurya-Sunga period it could be opaque or, as fashions shifted, increasingly transparent for women of means. It was tied in two main ways. In the kachcha style, a narrow strip called the langoti was passed between the legs and tucked in at the back, echoing the men’s draping. In the lehnga style, the cloth was simply wrapped snugly around the hips to form a tube-like skirt, without being drawn between the legs at all.

The patka and female bodyguards 🔗

Women also wore the patka, an ornamented strip of woven cotton, wool, or leather tucked in at the front of the waist. A striking detail from this period is the presence of female royal bodyguards at the Mauryan court. Greek and West Asian contact left its mark on court life in the northwest well beyond the battlefield, and accounts describe these guards wearing helmets and armour, with belts crossing the chest and fastened by buckles, an arrangement that clearly echoes military dress from further west following Persian and Hellenistic influence in the region.

Headwear: the uttaraya 🔗

Women’s everyday headgear was called the uttaraya, fastened to the hair and left to hang down the back. It served a decorative purpose similar to the men’s turban, though without the elaborate coiling that developed later in the period.

Elaborate headwear and ornaments of the Sunga period 🔗

Headwear grew considerably more elaborate through the Sunga period, and this shift shows up repeatedly in surviving relief carvings. Men’s hair was coiled and twisted together with the turban cloth to form a distinctive protrusion at the front of the forehead. Priests could be identified by a similar protrusion, positioned on top of the head rather than the front, marking them out at a glance. Wealthier men added ornamented bands to their turbans, fitted with brooches and a fringe called jhalar for extra decoration.

Necklaces, armlets, and bracelets 🔗

Necklace styles fell into two broad types: the kantha, short, broad, and flat against the throat, and the lambanam, a longer piece strung with anywhere from three to seven strands. Armlets worn on the upper arm were called baju, and bracelets worn at the wrist were known as kangan. Worn together, these pieces built up a layered look that grew steadily richer as the Sunga period progressed, a shift art historians have linked to greater refinement in craftsmanship across the era.

Jewellery of the Maurya and Sunga period 🔗

Jewellery became noticeably more refined during the Sunga years compared to the Mauryan period before it. Craftsmen worked with gold and silver for wealthy patrons, along with coral, rubies, sapphires, agate, and crystal. Pearls and glass beads were popular too, which meant people of more modest means could still wear decorative jewellery even without access to precious stones. Sculptors of the period paid close attention to these pieces, carving individual beads, clasps, and pendant shapes with a level of detail that lets modern art historians reconstruct exactly how each ornament was worn.

Girdles and hip belts 🔗

Women wore a girdle called the mekhala around the hips, along with a separate hip belt known as the kaksha. Finger rings were common across social classes. Interestingly, nose rings, a staple of later Indian jewellery traditions, do not appear in records from this period at all, suggesting the style developed later in Indian fashion history.

Anklets and forehead ornaments 🔗

Anklets came in several distinct designs. The kara was a plain circular ring. The ghungru was a decorative ring fitted with small bells that would have chimed with every step. The sankla was a heavier design made of chains. Forehead ornaments included the star-shaped sitara and the simpler bindi, both worn along the hairline to frame the face.

Earrings 🔗

Earrings, known collectively as karnika, came in a few recognisable types: the simple kundal, the circular dehri, and the flower-shaped kaan-phul. Combined with the necklaces, armlets, and anklets described above, this jewellery turned even a plain unstitched drape into a considerable display of wealth and craftsmanship, one that a viewer could read at a glance from across a court or a marketplace.

What do you think? Given how much of this period’s fashion history survives only through stone carvings rather than written texts or actual garments, how reliable do you think our picture of Maurya and Sunga clothing really is? And does the idea of unstitched drapery carrying so much social meaning through fabric quality and jewellery alone change how you think about clothing and status today?

References

1. https://www.livius.org/articles/dynasty/maurya/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_influence_on_Indian_art
3. https://www.fabriziomusacchio.com/weekend_stories/told/2025/2025-11-07-greeks_in_india/
4. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ashoka
5. https://www.worldhistory.org/Ashoka_the_Great/
6. https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/61094/3/Unit-2.pdf
7. https://swarajyamag.com/culture/fashions-of-the-past-haute-couture-and-more-from-ancient-india
8. https://historified.in/2022/02/28/mauryan-empire-clothing/
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antariya