Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  At the end of the Great War Marshall resigned on doctor’s advice, leaving his unfinished work at Sanchi with a long sigh of regret. The sweetener of a knighthood helped to change his mind and after some months’ leave he returned reinvigorated and ready to serve as Director-General of the ASI for another decade. This extra term allowed Marshall to work intermittently with Foucher at Sanchi for another two years until the latter was made director of the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan in 1921. It meant that almost two decades passed before their joint masterwork, the massive three-volume The Monuments of Sanchi, was ready for publication, not helped by the death of their third collaborator, killed while providing new readings of the Sanchi inscriptions by robbers who believed him to be digging for buried treasure. Another Marshall protégé, the Sanskritist N. G. Majumdar, stepped in and a limited printing of the book appeared at the outbreak of war in 1939, with a second and equally limited printing in 1947, just as India was in the throes of independence and partition.

  Marshall and Foucher showed in The Monuments of Sanchi that the Buddhist stupa cult could be traced back directly to the relic stupas erected by Emperor Ashoka and that his stupas and his Rock and Pillar Edicts ‘came to be invested with a peculiar sanctity of their own … as accepted emblems of the Faith’. They further demonstrated that the Great Stupa’s four gateways were Ashokan in spirit and in kind – in particular, the South Gateway, the first to be completed and in their estimation the finest of the four despite its damage.

  The South Gateway had been erected beside Ashoka’s pillar and was itself intrinsically Ashokan, beginning with the two lion capitals on its two pillars, patently copied from the Ashokan pillar’s lion capital right down to the geese and acanthus leaves on the drum. What is now the outer panel of the middle architrave shows Emperor Ashoka himself in a two-horse chariot visiting the Buddha relic stupa at Ramagrama and being met by its guardian deities, the Naga kings, here shown ‘in human form with serpent hoods, worshipping at the stupa, bringing offerings, or emerging from the waters of a lotus pond’.5 This is precisely the scene that Major Franklin and Captain Murray had drawn in the early nineteenth century (see pages 108, 159 and 240).

  The middle architrave of the incorrectly restored South Gateway. It shows Emperor Ashoka visiting the Buddha stupa at Ramagrama to claim its relics, only to find it guarded by the Naga kings. (Photograph by Andrew Whittome)

  The story continues on the inner face of the bottom, damaged crossbeam. This shows the other scene that Captain Murray drew and submitted to James Prinsep back in 1837. On the right a king stands in a chariot with an escort on an elephant, in the centre a city is under attack, and on the left a king is shown apparently directing the siege. This is usually interpreted as a scene from the so-called ‘War of the Relics’, when eight rulers fought over Sakyamuni Buddha’s relics, other and more clear versions of the same story occuring on the architraves of the North, West and East Gateways. But what Murray had failed to show in his drawing is that the giant elephant is actually carrying away a relic casket, which a turbaned raja rests on his head as shown on Lieutenant Fred Maisey’s later drawing.

  A detail from Fred Maisey’s finished drawing of the inner panel of the bottom architrave on the South Gateway at Sanchi, showing King Ashoka seated on a giant elephant bearing away the Buddha relics from Rajgir. (From Maisey, Sanchi and its Remains, 1892)

  What is actually being portrayed here is Ashoka’s attack on the city of Rajgir with a ‘fourfold army’ and his removal of its Buddha relics back to Pataliputra, as related in the Legend of King Ashoka. He then proceeded to the Ramagrama stupa, which was originally shown on the panel immediately above but was accidentally reversed during restoration so that it now appears on the outer side. It is no coincidence that the scene portrayed on the inner side of the top architrave shows a row of stupas and Bodhi trees being worshipped by a Naga king, a yakshi fertility goddess and, on the left, a human king, presumably King Ashoka (see original photo of fallen South Gateway on p. 239).

  Other scenes portrayed on the same South Gateway strengthen the case for its being raised specifically as an act of homage to King Ashoka; in particular, two adjacent panels on its west pillar. Again a king is shown riding a two-horse chariot preceded by a giant guard holding a club. The same king then reappears on the next panel, now flanked by his two queens. They stand directly underneath the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya and the pavilion constructed around it by Ashoka. His posture, his right arm over one queen while the other queen holds his right arm, is most unusual. ‘There we see only a royal personage apparently supported by two of his queens,’ writes Alfred Foucher of this crucial scene. ‘But … he can only be Aoka. Hence we cannot fail to be reminded, by his tottering attitude, either of the immense grief which overcame him when he was told that his beloved tree was perishing – he declared that he would not be able to survive it – or, in another simpler version of the pilgrimage, of the emotion which seized him at sight of a spot so sacred.’

  A modern photograph of this scene shows what Lieutenant Maisey’s drawing from 1851 (see p. 241) failed to show, which is that the Ashoka here is short and fat, with a balloon-like head. The sculptor could not have seen Ashoka himself but memories of Ashoka would still have been green in the area, which suggests that this image is based on the emperor’s actual physical appearance. It is surely no coincidence that the Brahmi inscription carved on the panel immediately below records that this was the work of the ivory workers of the nearby town of Vidisha.

  Other gateways show more Ashokan scenes. At the East Gateway the outer panel on the bottom architrave again shows Ashoka paying homage to the Bodhi tree. ‘He is wearily getting off his elephant, supported by his first queen,’ writes Foucher. ‘Then both go forward in devout posture towards the same Bodhi-tree surrounded by the same stone-enclosure … From the other side, to the sound of music, people are advancing in procession to the tree; and the figures in the foreground are plainly carrying pitchers for watering it.’

  Emperor Ashoka faints into the arms of his queens at the sight of the Bodhi tree. A modern photograph capturing the detail that earlier depictions missed. (Photo by Andrew Whittome)

  Foucher leaves it to John Marshall to provide the explanation: ‘This is the ceremonial visit which Aoka and his queen Tishyarakshita paid to the Bodhi tree, for the purpose of watering it and restoring its pristine beauty after the evil spell which the queen in a fit of jealousy had cast upon it.’

  On the West Gateway several panels may represent Ashoka on his pilgrimage to the holy places of Buddhism, one showing the same corpulent figure as that depicted fainting at the Bodhi tree on the South Gateway, here seen praying beside a much simpler Bodhi tree. Fred Maisey unwittingly drew this same scene back in 1851 (see p. 242). The panorama on the back of the middle architrave shows another of the ‘War of the Relics’ scenes, which can equally be read as representing Ashoka collecting his Buddha relics – an interpretation strengthened by the fact that one end of that same beam shows a melon-faced king riding in a chariot, and the other end that same king looking exhausted and resting on a very modern-looking chair. He is being looked after by a bevy of women attendants and holds in his right hand what looks like a ball or fruit. Neither Marshall nor Foucher were prepared to speculate on what this might be intended to represent, but it is tempting to see it as the dying Ashoka and his last possession, the myrobalan or cherry plum fruit.

  A modern photograph of the outer panel of the bottom architrave on the East Gateway shows Emperor Ashoka (standing) with his queen (kneeling) as they worship the Bodhi tree, having dismounted from an elephant. On the left side of the panel musicians play and standard bearers watch as pitchers of milk are brought to pour over the Bodhi tree to revive it. The tree itself is depicted within the enclosure built for it by Ashoka, which also covers the Diamond Throne. Carved on the supports above are three distinctive Ashokan symbols: (left to right) an edict pillar topped by a four-lion capital; the Wheel of the
Moral Law symbol; and the Bodhi tree. (Detail of a photo by Andrew Whittome)

  Because of its delays and bad timing, the revelations contained in Marshall and Foucher’s The Monuments of Sanchi were largely overlooked by a generation of historians in India – and continue to be viewed with suspicion by those who find Foucher’s views on Greek influence too much for their patriotic sentiments.

  Indeed, it is striking – even downright disheartening – how this quintessentially Indian monarch still fails to be accorded a wholehearted welcome in the land of his birth more than a century after he first emerged as a subject fit for biography. To start with, Ashoka was ill-served by the English historian Vincent Smith who in writing Asoka: The Buddhist Emperor of India (1901) rejected the two prime Buddhist sources as ‘the silly fictions of mendacious monks’. This work was swiftly denounced by the Welsh Pali scholar T. W. Rhys Davids, whose own book Buddhist India (1903) reflected a growing fascination with Buddhism in the West. That in turn led the writer and social reformer H. G. Wells to declare in his popular work The Outline of History that Ashoka was the very paradigm of the model ruler:

  In the history of the world there have been thousands of kings and emperors who called themselves ‘their highnesses,’ ‘their majesties,’ and ‘their exalted majesties’ and so on. They shone for a brief moment, and as quickly disappeared. But Ashoka shines and shines brightly like a bright star, even unto this day.

  Indian nationalists, looking for pre-colonial models of government, were quick to seize on this idea, among them Dr Radhakumud Mookerji, whose lectures on early Indian history at Lucknow University in the early 1920s became the basis for the first truly scholarly account of Ashoka and his times. He, too, sought to put Ashoka in a wider historical context:

  In his efforts to establish a kingdom of righteousness after the highest ideals of a theocracy, he has been likened to David and Solomon of Israel in the days of its greatest glory; in his patronage of Buddhism, which helped to transform a local into a world religion, he has been compared to Constantine in relation to Christianity; in his philosophy and piety he recalls Marcus Aurelius; he was a Charlemagne in the extent of his empire and, to some extent, in the methods of his administration, too; while his Edicts, ‘rugged, uncouth, involved, full of repetitions,’ read like the speeches of Oliver Cromwell in their mannerisms. Lastly, he has been compared to Khalif Omar and Emperor Akbar, whom also he resembles in certain aspects.6

  Hot on Mookerji’s heels came a new wave of home-grown Ashokan scholarship that continued into the post-independence era. Almost without exception these Indian historians took a patriotic line, presenting Ashoka as untainted by foreign influences, his philosophy totally in keeping with the ideals of ahimsa, or ‘non-violence’, and satyagraha, or ‘soul-force’, promoted by the political and spiritual leader M. K. Gandhi as the moral basis of the freedom struggle against the British Raj. Perhaps for the same reason these same historians tended also to downplay Pali sources in favour of Sanskrit, with more than a hint of Brahminical bias. They also ignored the new evidence presented by Sir John Marshall and Alfred Foucher of Emperor Ashoka’s commemoration on the Sanchi gateways.

  Since independence three more Ashokan edict sites have been found in Karnataka State: Minor Rock Edicts at Nittur and Udegolam, found in 1977 and 1978, and a Rock Edict at Sannati in 1989. All are sited near major rivers, the first two beside the Tungabhadra River, the third on a bend of the River Bhima in Gulbarga District of South Karnataka. This last came to light when an abandoned Hindu shrine beside the village’s Candralamba temple was being cleared for restoration. When the workmen came to remove a large stone slab upon which the deity had stood, they found it inscribed on both sides: parts of Ashoka’s RE 12 and RE 14 on one side and the Kalinga Separate Rock Edicts 1 and 2 on the other. It was clear that the slab had originally stood upright along with other slabs carrying the remaining edicts but now missing. To date no more such slabs have been found.

  Up to that point these particular major edicts had only been found carved on large rock boulders, hence their naming as Rock Edicts, but here was evidence that in some parts of Ashoka’s empire these same edicts had been carved on slabs as well as boulders.

  Mention must also be made of four Minor Rock Edict sites discovered in northern and central India in the post-war period: at Gujarra in the Datia District of Madhya Pradesh in 1953; at Ahraura, in Mirzapur District, Bihar, in 1961; at Bahapur in the east of Kailash District in New Delhi in 1965; and at Panguraria, Sehore District, Madhya Pradesh, in 1971. This last site has to be considered as very special indeed.

  Panguraria is the name of a tiny hamlet sited on the northern bank of the River Narmada, which the British knew as the Nerbuddha. This is one of the largest rivers in India, and because it flows westwards for some eight hundred miles across the subcontinent’s widest point, it has traditionally been seen as a natural boundary between North and South India. It helps that the Narmada flows along a rift valley with the Vindhya mountain range to the north and the Satpuras on the south. Panguraria village lies within this rift, between the river and a spur jutting out from the main Vindhya range. These hills contain a great many natural caves and rock shelters, and in this instance the find was made by a survey party of archaeologists from the Nagpur Circle of the ASI, who were looking for evidence of early human settlement.

  What drew them to the Panguraria site were the remains of nine small stupas placed along the spine of a low ridge overlooking a side valley. The largest of these stupas was the highest, and just above it was a rock shelter, in which was found an Ashokan inscription in the form of a Minor Rock Edict crudely cut into the rock face. The MRE’s opening preamble is only partly readable, but enough survives to show it to be significantly different from the usual opening statements of other MREs in that it was addressed by Ashoka to a prince named Samva. Whether this Prince Samva – the word means ‘concord’ in Sanskrit – was one of Ashoka’s sons is open to speculation, since the name is found nowhere else. From all the surviving evidence, the monastery at Panguraria over which Prince Samva was placed in authority was a typical early monastic centre where the monks slept in rock shelters rather than monastic cells. Yet the place clearly had a very special significance for Emperor Ashoka, for just to the left of the cave containing the MRE is a second rock shelter set into the same low cliff, and on its brow is another, shorter inscription, set high up on the rock face in big bold letters.

  Unlike the MRE next door, this inscription has not been incised using a mallet and chisel but clumsily tapped out, probably by the writer standing on a rock and using a chisel attached to a stick. It is not so much a planned edict as a piece of casual graffiti, albeit one carried out on the orders of a powerful ruler. According to one of the outstanding epigraphists of our own times, Professor Harry Falk, it reads:

  Piyadasi nama

  rajakumara va

  samvasamane

  imam desam papunitha

  vihara(y)atay(e)

  This Falk translates as:

  The king, who (now after consecration) is called Piyadassi, (once) came to this place on a pleasure tour while he was still a (ruling) prince, living together with his unwedded consort.7

  Panguraria is just forty-five miles due south of Vidisha, the district in which Sanchi and its surrounding Buddhist sites falls – and from which Ashoka’s first wife hailed. Ashoka’s graffiti at Panguraria is a sort of informal memento, placed there when the emperor returned to a place he had visited in his youth, when as viceroy of Ujjain he had toured these parts with his girlfriend, the woman who would bear him his eldest son and daughter Mahinda and Sanghamitta. It is a touchingly human document that shows the emperor with his guard down.

  Panguraria may also mark the moment when Ashoka first began to use the new Brahmi alphabet to spread his edicts across the land, beginning with his Minor Rock Edicts, which in nearly every instance tell us – most obligingly – that this process was initiated two and a half years after he had conver
ted to Buddhism and while he was on tour: ‘This proclamation (was issued by me) on tour. Two hundred and fifty-six nights (had then been) spent on tour.’8

  To date sixteen complete and incomplete sets of MREs have been found, well spread out but with a cluster of eleven in the Karnataka region of South India. Together they form the oldest certain examples of Brahmi writing – and thus the oldest examples of written Prakrit, precursor of Pali and Sanskrit. They represent the first wave of Ashoka’s proclamations set in stone. Although the order went out while Ashoka was out on tour, it seems logical to suppose that the earliest of these MREs went up in the Magadha region and the Gangetic plains, as at Ahraura and Sassaram. And indeed, only at Ahraura, Sassaram and Rupnath do the MREs actually state how Ashoka’s commands are to be spread: ‘And cause ye this matter to be engraved on rocks. And where there are stone pillars here (in my dominions), there also cause (it) to be engraved.’9 The later MREs have dropped this order.

  Nearly all of these sixteen known MRE sites are associated with caves or rock shelters on rocky outcrops or small hills, and always away from population centres, even if close to roads or river crossings. Ashoka may have chosen these sites deliberately as places where crowds might gather at annual religious fairs, so that his promotion of Buddhism might become associated with local cults.10 It can equally be argued that Ashoka in the early days of his conversion to Buddhism chose not to challenge directly the powerful forces of the Brahman establishment, who would have been concentrated in the big towns. However, we have no idea to what degree Ashoka’s monumental decrees were targeted by those who came after him. If they were attacked, the first to be pulled down or broken up would have been those sited in or near population centres. His pillars would have made the most visible targets and would have been the first to go. The edicts we see today – with considerable difficulty since the majority are so isolated – must be seen as the survivors of many.