Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  A new chapter in India’s history had begun. The light of reason would now be brought to bear on each of Jones’s sixteen objects of enquiry, leading to a new understanding of Mother India as ‘the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human genius’. And included in that new understanding would be the recovery of India’s pre-Muslim history, its long-forgotten past.

  3

  Objects of Enquiry

  A Brahmin pandit expounding the Puranas in a Hindu temple in Varanasi. A lithograph by James Prinsep from his drawing made in the 1820s and published by him in his Benares Illustrated.

  In 1888 the up-and-coming young journalist Rudyard Kipling visited Calcutta as part of a series of articles on Bengal he was writing for the Allahabad newspaper The Pioneer. His preoccupation with death and disease led him to the city’s largest Christian cemetery, located at the wrong end of Park Street. ‘The tombs are small houses,’ he afterwards wrote. ‘It is as though we walked down the streets of a town, so tall are they and so closely do they stand – a town shrivelled by fire, and scarred by frost and siege. Men must have been afraid of their friends rising up before the due time that they weighted them with such cruel mounds of masonry.’1

  Under one of the most monumental of Kipling’s ‘cruel mounds’, in the form of a towering sixty-foot high obelisk (today cleaned and whitewashed thanks to the combined efforts of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA)), lie the mortal remains of Sir William Jones, ‘who feared God, but not death … who thought none below him but the base and unjust, none above him but the wise and virtuous’. The words were self-penned and give no hint of the extraordinary part their author had played in initiating the recovery of India’s history and culture, a work that had been cruelly cut short by his death on 27 April 1794 at the age of forty-seven.

  As a senior judge on the bench of Calcutta’s Supreme Court, Sir William Jones had exploited his elevated position to the full. It had given easy access to the EICo’s Governor General, Warren Hastings, an autocrat who nonetheless held enlightened views on the nature of British rule in India that Jones was happy to embrace. The two men found in each other a kindred spirit and within weeks Hastings and the man today recognised as the ‘father of Indian studies’ had co-founded the Asiatick Society (afterwards the Asiatic Society of Bengal, without the archaic ‘k’), so creating the machinery by which information of every kind could be gathered, centralised, cross-referenced, examined and interpreted, and the results disseminated through the Society’s journal Asiatick Researches (afterwards Asiatic Researches).

  Bengal’s reputation as a land of nabobs where younger sons of the English gentry came to bleed the locals dry had been well earned. They were there to ‘shake the pagoda tree’ (of its gold ‘pagoda’ coins). They were happy to embrace the local women but otherwise had little time for the native peoples over whom they found themselves in ever increasing authority. Even among those few who saw it as their duty to ‘secure the gratitude and affection of the natives’, the feeling was that they were dealing with a people crushed by centuries of oriental despotism and shackled by superstition, their minds ‘untaught by learning and experience, unstored by science and literature, and uncheered by a warm and benevolent religion’.2

  And yet, as news of Jones’s new enterprise and Hastings’s patronage spread, a handful of free-thinkers came forward to offer their support: fellow Orientalists who hitherto had followed their pursuits alone and often to the scorn of colleagues. Under the guidance of Sir William Jones as the Society’s first President, this small band of individuals applied themselves to the novel discipline of sharing the fruits of their researches, initially in the form of papers read at monthly meetings held in the Grand Jury Room of Calcutta’s Supreme Court building. By these means a long-lost India began to reveal itself, albeit slowly and by many small stages.

  The Supreme Court sat for eight months in the year, which allowed Sir William Jones four months away from the bench. He and his wife spent the first of these vacations in Benares but subsequently made a country home for themselves in a thatch bungalow in the district of Krishnagur, north of Calcutta. ‘Here,’ as a colleague of Jones later put it, ‘away from the strife of plaintiff and defendant, his mind went forth unrestrained on the pursuits that were dearest to it. The earnest investigation of Sanscrit lore, the study of botany and the conduct of literary and scientific correspondence never left him a vacant hour.’3

  At Krishnagur William and Anna Maria Jones embraced all things Indian with an openness of heart that dismayed as many of Jones’s colleagues on the bench of the High Court as it delighted the pandits and other Indians with whom Jones came into contact outside the courts. His closest friend in India, Sir John Shore, afterwards remarked on how unusual this was: ‘His intercourse with the Indian natives of character and abilities was extensive: he liberally rewarded those by whom he was served and assisted, and his dependants were treated by him as friends.’4

  The Joneses’ romance with India began with its music, the sophistication of which quite escaped their friends, but it soon widened to embrace Hindu and Muslim Sufi devotional literature, chiefly as revealed through Persian translations. ‘I am’, wrote William in an early letter to his fellow enthusiast Warren Hastings, now retired to England, ‘in love with the Gopia [the maiden cowherds with whom the mischievous god Krishna dallies], charmed with Crishen [Krishna], an enthusiastic admirer of Ram [hero of the Ramayana] and a devout admirer of Brimha-bishen-mehais [the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva]; not to mention that Judishteir, Arjen, Corno, and the other warriors of the M’gab’harat [Mahabharat] appear greater in my eyes than Agamemnon, Ajax, and Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad.’5

  That admiration led on to a desire to read these texts in the original, which became a reality when Sir William Jones secured the services of Pandit Ramlochan, who was himself highly unusual in that he was not a Brahmin but an agriculturalist of the Vaisya caste who had learned Sanskrit in the course of studying medicine. Within months Jones was declaring himself to be a delighted trespasser upon ‘the untrodden paths of Hindu learning’.

  Jones’s timing could not have been better. Five years earlier two of his old acquaintances from Oxford, Nathaniel Halhed and Charles Wilkins, had together produced the first Bengali typeface, which made possible the publication of Halhed’s Grammar of the Bengali Language. Hitherto they had faced a seemingly impenetrable wall of hostility from the Brahmin community whenever they had enquired into the sacred texts of the Hindus. It was not simply that Sanskrit was too sacred to be read or spoken by non-Brahmins. Centuries of subjugation to Mughal emperors and their predecessors had turned the Brahmins in on themselves. Their monopoly of Sanskrit was one of the few remaining vestiges of their authority and they had no intention of making it available to the latest representatives of the Mughal Emperors of Delhi – for at this stage the EICo ruled Bengal in the name of Emperor Shah Alam.

  That hostility ended with the appearance of the Bengali Grammar and the setting up of Wilkins’s vernacular press. The more far-sighted pandits in Bengal were aware that Brahmanical learning was in decline and Sanskrit itself in danger of becoming the language of ritual and nothing more. The same Brahmins who had turned Wilkins away now returned with offers to teach him Sanskrit, resulting in the publication within a year of the first English–Sanskrit Grammar. Under guidance, Wilkins had then set to work translating the Hindu scriptures, beginning with Bhagavad Gita – a work that was still far from complete when ill-health forced Wilkins to retire to England.

  It was Jones who now stepped in to take Wilkins’s place, his prodigious intellect enabling him to make such rapid progress that he was soon pronouncing Sanskrit to be precisely what the Brahmins claimed for it. And not only was it the language of the gods, it was a language with a close affinity to Latin and Greek –
too close to have been produced by accident: ‘So strong, indeed, that no philologist could examine all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source.’6 Assisted by Pandit Ramlochan and a second Brahmin, Pandit Radhacant, who had previously worked for Warren Hastings, Jones went on to bring into the public arena the first works of a vast corpus of sacred and semi-sacred literature hitherto unknown to the Western world.

  It was also part of Jones’s self-imposed brief to shed light on India’s unknown pre-Muslim history. The first obstacle he encountered was the absence of historical records as understood by European and Muslim historians. He was familiar with the histories of Muslim India written by Al-Biruni and the sixteenth-century Persian historian Firishta, but there seemed to be nothing comparable from the other side of the religious divide. The best that the Brahmans could offer were a collection of some eighteen puranic, or ‘ancient times’, religious texts known collectively as the Puranas, which concerned themselves chiefly with creation myths, Hindu cosmography and the activities of deities and quasi-mythical heroes of the Hindu pantheon. However, a number of the Puranas also included genealogical lists of the various gods, demi-gods and humans who since the beginning of time had ruled over the Indian subcontinent – known in early texts as Jambudwipa or ‘Blackberry Island’. From these genealogies Jones assembled what he described as ‘a concise account of Indian Chronology’.

  The human element of this chronology began with Manu, son of the god Brahma, whose posterity had divided into two branches: the Suryavanshi, or ‘Children of the Sun’, and Chandravanshi, or ‘Children of the Moon’. ‘The lineal male descendants in both these families’, wrote Jones, ‘are supposed to have reigned in the cities of Ayodhya, or Audh, and Partihara, or Vitora, respectively till the thousandth year of the present age, and the names of all the princes have been diligently collected by Radhacant from several Puranas.’

  This chronology showed that for centuries successive dynasties of Indian rajas had ruled kingdoms known as janapadas or footholds. There were traditionally fifteen such footholds in Blackberry Island, of which one stood out above the rest as being the most powerful and the longest-lasting: Magadha, a region that Jones had no difficulty in identifying as the western province of Bengal known as Bihar and the central Gangetic plains region centred on the city of Patna, today capital of Bihar State. According to the Puranas, the kingdom of Magadha had been established by King Brihadratha, whose descendants ruled over Magadha for a thousand years before giving way to the Pradotyas, who had ruled for 137 years before being replaced by the Haryankas. They had been replaced by the Shishungas, ten of whom had ruled until overthrown by the base-born Nandas. The first Nanda was a Sudra, lowest of the four varnas of the Hindu caste system. By usurping the throne of the Kshatriya king Shishunaga, this Nanda had upset the natural order of kingship by which only Kshatriyas (and very occasionally Brahmans) could rule. However, the Puranas were couched as prophesies and they foretold that the Nanda line would be overthrown by a righteous Brahman named Chanakya, who would select and anoint one Chandragupta as the lawful sovereign of Magadha.

  The name Nanda was already familiar to Jones from his extensive reading. ‘This prince,’ he wrote, ‘of whom frequent mention is made in the Sanscrit books, is said to have been murdered, after a reign of a hundred years, by a very learned and ingenious, but passionate and vindictive Brahman, whose name was Chanacya, and who raised to the throne a man of the Maurya race, named Chandragupta.’

  King Chandragupta had founded the dynasty of the Mauryas, consisting of ten monarchs who together ruled Magadha for 137 years. Chandragupta had ruled for twenty-four years and his son – listed variously as Varisara, Vindusara or Bindusara (but hereafter referred to as Bindusara) – for twenty-five years. The third of these Mauryan kings was Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka – sometimes referred to as Ashokavardhana, ‘Ashoka the Great’, who had ruled for thirty-six or thirty-seven years. As far as Brahmanical history was concerned, this Ashoka was unimportant. The compilers of the Puranas offered no explanation as to why he should have been named ‘great’, nor had they anything to say about any Mauryan ruler listed after Ashoka. Indeed (as the following genealogical tables show), the compilers of the Puranas seemed unable to agree as to who exactly had followed Ashoka to the throne of Magadha, only finding general agreement when it came to the last two rulers of the Mauryan dynasty:

  Vishnu Purana Matsya Purana Vayu and Brahmananda Puranas

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  Chandragupta Chandragupta Chandragupta

  Bindusara Bindusara Bindusara

  Ashoka Ashoka Ashoka

  Suyashas Kunala

  Dasharatha Dasharatha Bandhupalita

  Samgata Samprati Indrapalita

  Salishuka Devavarma

  Somavarman

  Shatadhanvan Shatadhanvan Shatadhanas

  Brihadratha Brihadratha Brihadratha

  All the genealogical tables agreed that Mauryan dynastic rule had ended with the assassination of the tenth and last of their line, Brihadratha, who had been killed in a parade-ground coup staged by his commander-in-chief, a Brahman named Pushyamitra Shunga. The latter had then established the Brahman Shunga dynasty, consisting of ten rulers who ruled altogether for 112 years until the last was assassinated by his minister Vasudeva Canna. The Canna dynasty apparently ruled for 345 years before being replaced by the Andhras, who lasted for 452 years, ending with the death of King Chandrabija – at which point, Sir William Jones noted, ‘we hear no more of Magadha as an independent kingdom’. Taking these statistics at their face value Jones computed that the Mauryan dynasty had ruled Magadha from 1492 to 1365 years before the birth of Christ.

  Greatly encouraged by his discovery of the ‘common source’ of Sanskrit and the European languages, Jones now began to look for further evidence of shared origins in these genealogical charts. For all his learning, Jones had been brought up to regard the Old Testament, with its stories of Adam, Noah and the Flood, as gospel truth. Convincing himself that India’s past was bound up with ancient Egypt and the Old Testament, he contrived a comparative chronology of Indian and biblical history in which the Indian Manu corresponded to the biblical Adam. This error led Jones and others into believing that Sakyamuni Buddha was an African conqueror and it would bedevil Indian studies for some decades.

  Reports of a religion in the Indies involving a warrior, prophet or philosopher named variously as Boudha, Bodh, Sakyamuni, Gautama, Godama or Fo had circulated in Europe since the return of Marco Polo. Yet in India itself there was no evidence to suggest that the worship of this deity – whose popular name Jones finally settled on as ‘Buddha’ – had anything to do with that country. The Hindu texts did indeed make occasional reference to one such Buddha but there were certainly no Buddhists in India and no Buddhist literature. Nor, it appeared, was there any known Buddhist monument.

  This state of ignorance soon began to change as the Asiatic Society gained more members, many of them stationed up-country: amateur antiquarians such as Thomas Law and John Harrington, who had both joined the EICo as teenage writers in the 1770s and went on to became part of the Company’s first generation of civil servants. Both had been posted to the province of Bihar to learn the ropes. In 1783 Law was made Collector of Gaya District in Bihar, where he endeared himself to the local Hindus by abolishing the pilgrim tax. He also drew up the first fixed settlement scheme upon which landowners were taxed, afterwards introduced as part of the land reforms known as the Cornwallis Permanent Settlement of 1789.8

  At one of the first meetings of the Asiatic Society Thomas Law presented a paper entitled ‘A Short Account of Two Pillars to the North of Patna’,9 illustrated with his own drawings. These were the same two pillars described by the Capuchin Father della Tomba, and Law now located one at Nandangarh, some seventeen miles to the north of the town of Bettiah, and the other at Araraj, approximately the same distance south of Bettiah. The first still had its capita
l, in the form of a seated lion (see illustration, p. 18), while the second was now bare. Both columns carried inscriptions written in characters that Law had never seen before. His paper led Jones to call for accurate copies of these Lat or pillar inscriptions to be made.

  John Harrington’s contribution concerned caves rather than pillars. He had explored two groups of hills lying about midway between Patna and Gaya in South Bihar. At the first, the Barabar Hills, he had been shown a number of rock-cut caves known locally as the ‘seven houses’, all with arched roofs, their polished surfaces covered in soot, their appearance being ‘very dismal even when lighted’.10 The entrance to one of the caves had an ornately carved doorway ‘very curiously wrought with elephants and other ornaments, of which I hope in a short time to present a drawing to the Society’.

  What Harrington overlooked at the Barabar Hills were a number of inscriptions cut into the rock beside the cave entrances. He did better when he moved on to the Nagarjuni Hills nearby, where he spotted two such inscriptions, ‘which my Moonshee [munshi, language teacher and interpreter] took off in the course of three days, with much trouble and sufficient accuracy’. The first inscription was in medieval Devanagri, which the interpreter had no trouble in reading. The second was ‘unfortunately of a different character, and remains still unintelligible’. Harrington’s report excited little interest.11 It was the monumental inscribed stone columns that had caught the imagination of Jones and his fellow antiquarians – and the curious script carved thereon.