Introduction
Subhadrangi was a queen of Bindusara, named in the later Buddhist text the Ashokavadana as the mother of Ashoka, the Maurya Empire's most celebrated ruler.
Family
Mother of an Empire's Most Famous Emperor
As with several Maurya-era women, Subhadrangi's individual biography is thinly attested outside her role as Ashoka's mother; the Ashokavadana, composed considerably after the events it describes, is the primary source connecting her to this significant maternal role, and different textual traditions render her name and titles somewhat differently (Dharma, Janapadakalyani), reflecting the layered and sometimes inconsistent nature of the later legendary material surrounding Ashoka's early life.
This article records the Maurya Empire (c. 4th-2nd century BCE) as historical genealogy reconstructed from Ashoka's own rock and pillar edicts, Greek and Latin accounts of contact with the Mauryas, and later Buddhist, Jain and Puranic traditions composed well after the events they describe; where these traditions genuinely disagree, that disagreement is noted rather than resolved into invented certainty.