The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  When Ashoka eventually became king (he was perhaps now in his thirties), Devi stayed in Vidisa rather than moving to Patna. Some said this was because the court did not favour Buddhism, though it is more likely (if any of these tales have a kernel of truth) that she may have stayed in Ujain because she wasn’t a legal wife and was inferior in social status. But when he became king, Ashoka married other women, including one of high rank, Asandhimitta, who became his chief queen.

  At his father’s death, Ashoka, it appears, was not the designated heir, and in some versions of the tale there was a four-year power struggle for the throne. One later legend says that his father’s guru, an Ajivika holy man, told Bhimbisara that Ashoka was the most able of his sons, and prophesied he would be a great king. A Chinese story says the Buddha himself appeared to Bhimbisara in a dream and foretold Ashoka’s rule, during which he would unite all of India. Some key ministers at court supported him as the best candidate, but his brothers opposed him, and later legends say he put down their revolts and killed ninety-nine of them, sparing only the youngest. A less dramatic, and perhaps more plausible, version says he had six of his half-brothers put to death. Fairy tale or not, in the light of the murderous succession struggles between royal brothers in later times, the basic story is certainly plausible enough.

  Let’s stay with the legends for a little longer. In the early part of his reign the Buddhist stories say that Ashoka spent many years in a life of pleasure, and gained the nickname Kamashoka, a pun on his name that loosely translates as ‘Follower of Desire’, or perhaps even ‘Lover Boy Ashoka’. Then came a period of extreme violence and wickedness, as a result of which they called him Candashoka, ‘the Cruel’. Only after that, in this exemplary moral fable, does he convert to Buddhism and lead a life of piety, giving rise to his being called Dhammashoka, ‘the Just’, the follower of the divine law. Such stories were no doubt fabricated by later Buddhist apologists, though they were in existence in the first two centuries AD, and the stories of his cruelty were surprisingly long-lived and widespread if there is no truth whatsoever in them. ‘Intensely wicked’ as a young man, he even had some of the women of his harem killed when they told him how ugly he was!

  In the most famous story Ashoka’s chief minister tells him that to be a great king he has to be cruel, and that he needs a staff of torturers as it is unseemly for kings to do the dirty work themselves. So he made a ‘hell on Earth’ in the form of a prison in Patna, with torturers and fiendishly ingenious implements of torture. The scene of these events, according to a still-current legend, was the Agam well in Patna. Ashoka himself went there, watched, and invented his own methods of interrogation. Then, according to one version of the story, his conversion to Buddhism took place when a Buddhist monk being tortured in the ‘hell’ was unmoved by his treatment and the king became fascinated by the man’s almost miraculous powers. The Jains, of course, have their own version, making the torture victim one of their own.

  How to untangle history from all this? Historians regard the portrayal of Ashoka as an extremely wicked man who suddenly turned to the good as pure fantasy. Like all really great rulers in history, from Alexander and Genghis Khan to Napoleon, Ashoka gathered an incredibly fertile afterlife of legend. All we can say is that at his father’s death there may have been a power struggle and that Ashoka, like some of the Mughal rulers, may have killed one or more brothers who opposed him. There is, though, no sign in the early years of his reign of the ruler who would emerge. That comes with the dramatic events eight years later.

  Like all early empires, the Mauryan state was aggressive. It demanded tribute from its neighbours, and its kings were expected to be warlike. Ashoka’s grandfather and father were both conquerors, and early in his reign he followed in their footsteps. In his eighth year on the throne he moved against the independent kingdom of Kalinga on the eastern seaboard in present-day Orissa (a kingdom that Greek sources say, only a generation before Ashoka, could muster 60,000 infantry, 1000 cavalry and 200 elephants). The date was probably 262–261 BC. The story we have is in Ashoka’s own words on stone edicts he raised later, but until 2006 there was no evidence of the actual battle on the ground. Then a dramatic archaeological discovery offered a possible solution to one of the most fascinating questions in Ashoka’s tale. Where was the site of the battle that changed the course of Indian history?

  ORISSA AND THE KALINGA WAR

  Night is falling on the National Highway 300 miles south of Kolkata, on the old coast road that winds its way from the Ganges valley in Bengal down to the southern tip of India. It is one of the great routes in Indian history, and one of the best Indian journeys – one to savour over several days, if you have the time, exploring the byways that lead to sleepy little backwaters once frequented by Greek, Roman and Arab traders. The journey takes you along a fertile alluvial coastal plain backed by the jungle-clad blue hills of the Eastern Ghats. Orissa is one of the most enchanting landscapes in India. On its surf-beaten shores are magical inlets, such as Chilka Lake, 50 miles long, dotted with islands and crowded with migrating birds in winter. It is criss-crossed by flat-bottomed boats with lateen sails of bamboo matting. Further to the south is ancient Kalingapatnam, the ‘port of the Kalingas’, situated on the southern border with Andhra Pradesh and the Dravidian-speaking lands. It consists of just a little beach and a British lighthouse today, but in the ancient world Orissans traded from here with Tamils, Sinhalese and Romans, and with kingdoms straight across the ocean in Java and Sumatra. As late as the nineteenth century there was a steamer service from here to Rangoon. So Kalinga was an ancient kingdom with ancient contacts, and throughout its history Orissa has remained a distinct geographical unit with its own distinct cultural and political history.

  With darkness coming on, we cross the Mahanadi river and come into the flat green coastal plain, still covered by monsoon floods. It is night before we reach the country town of Jajpur. Our small hotel is hung with a waterfall of fairy lights for the festival of the goddess Durga, and wild firecrackers thump late into the night as the townsfolk celebrate in the streets. That night I reread Ashoka’s own account of his Kalinga war.

  ‘After he had been anointed for eight years, King Devanampiya Piyadasi [‘the beloved of the gods’, as Ashoka was known] attacked the Kalingas. Then 150,000 living persons were carried away captive, 100,000 were killed in the war, and almost as many died afterwards …’

  After the testosterone-fuelled rush of war came the body count. Kalinga had been crushed. Then came the great moment, the turning point …

  ‘After the Kalingas had been subjugated there arose in the king a striving or a conflict, a yearning for law [or meaning?], now a remorse for the conquest. For a free people to be conquered means killing, massacres and the enslavement of human beings. Now the king finds this a source of anguish, a profoundly serious matter.’ (Rock Edict XIII)

  Thinking today of the current murderous events in Darfur or the sectarian disasters in Iraq, it is clear that Ashoka’s words remain as relevant as ever. He had hit on one of the most dangerous ideas in history: that aggressive war is wrong. As he goes on to point out, we are all bound together by the common bond of humanity.

  The many people who live here – Brahmins, Buddhists and other sects, the householders – all share the same basic human values, among which are respect for parents, being well disposed, respecting their elders, showing kindness and firm attachment to friends, acquaintances, companions, kinsmen – and to slaves and servants – but they will all suffer injury and killing, cut off from the ones they love. This is a tragedy for everybody, and to the king it is a desperate matter.

  And so, the king tells us, he decided to renounce violence and resolved to conquer ‘by persuasion alone’. ‘He desires for all creatures non-violence, self-control, detachment, happiness.’ One should never take politicians’ words at face value of course, but Ashoka’s edicts are so personal, so idiosyncratic and self-recriminating, that it is hard to think this is not his voic
e. The tale has echoed down the ages, through the violent histories of India and the world, down to Gandhi and the freedom movement. In modern times it would lead to Ashoka’s lions being chosen as the emblem of modern India, and his wheel of dharma (law), which topped his monuments, to be set on the Indian flag against a white band (signifying peace) between the orange and green fields of Hinduism and Islam.

  But where was Ashoka’s place of destiny? The kingdom of Kalinga extended nearly 300 miles south of the Ganges mouths. The war must have been fought over a wide area, but the chief battles must have been for royal centres, and there were two of these: one near the present temple city of Bhubaneswar, the other to the north near Jajpur, controlling the river crossings from the north of India. And this is where Orissan archaeologists have made a dramatic discovery.

  SITE OF THE KALINGA BATTLE?

  In the early light we cross the Brahmani river and turn south on a winding country lane towards the sea. Soon we find ourselves in a soft, hazy green plain fringed by three dramatic domed hills. In the fields there are long-horned cattle pulling wooden ploughs, and ox-carts with wooden wheels. Later Buddhist pilgrims described ten great stupas built here by Ashoka, and in Queen Victoria’s day British district officers made finds of Buddhist sculpture, especially near Udaigiri, ‘the hill of dawn’. Now Dr Debraj Pradhan has uncovered the base of a great square stupa on a high hillside over the plain and, nearby, Buddhist rock-cut figures with dozens of small, commemorative stupas. Even more exciting, cut into the rock is the name of Ashoka.

  ‘We think we have found Ashoka’s stupas mentioned by the later Chinese travellers,’ says the archaeologist, bursting with excitement. ‘But then came the crucial discovery. It was right under our noses. Following the trail of earlier finds and local oral traditions, we surveyed the fields around a little village recorded in the old gazetteers as Rajanagar, which means “the enclosure of the kings”. And there it was.’

  It would have been so easy to miss, but in the low, early sunlight we can make out the line of the defences snaking through the paddy fields; a rampart with two gates protected by large, projecting entrance bastions, and nine other tower bases. All in all it is a rough, irregular square about 1300 yards along each side. Under the trees are brick defences over 40 feet wide and still in places 20 feet high.

  ‘Inside it in the ploughed fields the deposit in places is 26 feet deep!’ says Dr Pradhan, breathless with excitement:

  Then the final clue. So far we have only made one trial excavation on the rampart, but we got immediate results. The place had been founded in the sixth century BC and had lasted for about a thousand years. People were still living here in the fourth to fifth centuries AD. In fact, of course, they still are. It’s shrunk, but there is still a little village here by the lotus pond. Inscriptions on the polished black ware give the name Tosali, which we know was the name of the Kalinga capital. And, even better, we found a terracotta image of a king, one with earrings, turban and an inscription identifying ‘Raja Ashoka’.

  He saved the key find to the last. Back in the dig hut, as the August heat of Orissa turned the storeroom into a stifling oven, he unwrapped plastic bags full of corroded metalwork. Inside was a mass of arrowheads and spearheads from the Mauryan period. As he turned them over, he nodded reflectively: ‘All this came from one small area of a few square feet on the ramparts. It must have been a blitzkrieg, a blizzard of arrows.’

  ASHOKA’S CONVERSION AND THE LAW OF LIFE

  Piecing the story together from the dates on Ashoka’s edicts, we can recover something of what happened next. The following year, and now ten years into his reign, Ashoka went on a countrywide pilgrimage to the sacred places of Buddhism, ending up in Bodhgaya at the foot of the bodhi tree. This became his own personal pilgrimage place in the legend too, with the added twist that the tree would be the cause of a fateful dissension with his queen, Tissarakha (see here). One legend says he asked for a guru to resolve his questions, and a Buddhist monk Upagupta came forward, the son of a perfume-seller in Mathura. Contemporary texts say nothing of this, simply that at Bodhgaya Ashoka gave charitable gifts to the poor and conferred with his leaders about ‘how to implant good in a kingdom’. In his mind was forming a kind of political order, which had never been seen before.

  This marked the beginning of the new order. What Ashoka would try to do was take the Buddhist ideas of compassion and self-possession, and the Jain ideas about nonviolence, and use them as the basis not just of personal morality but of politics too. The record of his thoughts and actions survives in a series of often garrulous edicts carved first on rocks in prominent places across the empire, and later on great polished stone pillars – some already standing, some newly erected. About sixty have been found so far, twenty of them, astonishingly, discovered in the last five decades. They begin in year thirteen of his reign (c.258 BC), announcing his ‘conquest through dharma [righteousness], not violence’, and there are twenty-five separate edicts over the next sixteen years. The early ones are ecumenical; the later ones more Buddhist in tone. Ashoka seems to have got more heavily into Buddhism as he grew older, though he never converted and was only ever a lay member. In that he was a typical of the Mauryan dynasty, whose members, whatever their personal leanings, had no interest in pushing what we would call a state religion. The edicts are found from the Bay of Bengal to Kandahar in Afghanistan, and from the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan to below the Krishna river in southern India. They give us a sense of the extent of the territories over which Ashoka claimed to rule. Building on his grandfather’s kingdom, his is the first state in history that ruled the majority of what is India today.

  In the edicts, the nuts and bolts of his new ideas on politics are enunciated in detail. The first key idea is the sanctity of all life, which is especially a Jain idea. The king does not renounce violence in self-defence, but the death penalty was removed, as also appears to have been the case under some later dynasties, such as the Guptas. Meat-eating was widespread in early India, so the king tried to limit it rather than ban it altogether. Remarkably, Ashoka’s laws also attempted to stop environmental destruction. ‘Forests must not be needlessly destroyed,’ he said. Other injunctions call for the preservation of many species, from the Ganges porpoise to the rhino, and even the white ant.

  Another key idea was toleration for, and sympathy with, the beliefs and practices of other religions. Speaking of the diversity of India, Megasthenes says there was a huge number of ‘nations’, and many sects that often violently disagreed among themselves. A special edict (XII) is concerned with just this. People must abstain from speaking ill of a neighbour’s faith, Ashoka said, ‘for all religions aim at the same thing in the end: that is, gaining self-control and purity of mind’. Thus they agree about the essentials, however much they may differ in externals, so ‘All extravagance and violence of language should be carefully avoided’. It hardly needs pointing out that every ruler of India has grappled with this issue since ancient times. It was a key issue for the greatest Mughal, Akbar (1542–1605), and for the framers of India’s modern constitution. Of course, such ideas are still painfully relevant today to the wider world as a whole, where absolute truths are claimed by one faith or another, and where death threats are issued every day for perceived religious insults, real or imagined.

  Practical ideas for good governance are also contained in Ashoka’s edicts, among them civic amenities and provisions for travellers. The Mauryans were great highway builders. One assumes that the Grand Trunk Road must go back to them, and on the road up to Lumbini from Patna there are still Ashokan columns in four places. Megasthenes had already been impressed by this aspect of Mauryan rule. He wrote: ‘… every ten stadia there are placed pillars showing the by-roads and distances’, and fifty years later Ashoka tells us: ‘On the roads I have planted banyan trees to shade men and beasts.’ Wells were dug by the main highways, groves of mangoes planted and rest houses erected, and there were watering places with distance markers on pilla
rs. It was an old Indian tradition, still widely followed, to feed, shelter and look after merchants and pious travellers, who then, as now, moved around India in a constant circulation.

  Of course, there is a world of difference between what a government says it wants to do and what it actually does, between its ideals and how it enforces them. The edicts suggest that Ashoka’s was, in our terms, a very moralizing nanny state in which you could think or believe what you wanted, but you had to do what you were told. It is unlikely that Ashoka relaxed the surveillance state of his grandfather with all its mechanisms of state control, such as the Special Ministry of Censors, to enforce not only the rules on the sanctity of animal life, but ‘respect for elders’, the food laws the sacrifice laws and even ‘female morals’.

  It is probable that some aspects of this customary law have come down to the Indian society of modern times. In Kashmir even into the last century there was a special court of five Hindu pandits, hereditary officers from the deep past, maybe descended from Ashoka’s, who tried breaches of the Hindu scriptures. And hereditary Brahmin officers specifically supervising breaches of caste rules existed in many places in the Deccan during Queen Victoria’s day. One tiny detail of the Mauryan state will be familiar to anyone who has attended a rally in today’s India. When the ruler was on the move through the streets, Megasthenes reports, attendants stretched out ropes to keep the crowd back and ‘to cross the rope was punishable by death’. While the death penalty no longer applies, even today the crowd obeys the rope.