India Discovered

by John Keay

  With the help of a distinguished pandit he immediately set about the long pillar inscriptions. It was June, the most unbearable month of the Calcutta year; to concentrate the mind even for a minute is a major achievement. By now the Governor-General and the rest of Calcutta society were in the habit of taking themselves off to the cool heights of Simla at such a time. Prinsep stayed at his desk. The deciphering was going well but he had at last acknowledged the unexpected difficulty of the language not being Sanskrit. As Hodgson had suggested, it was closer to Pali, the sacred language of Tibet, or in other words it was one of the Prakrit languages, vernacular derivations of the classical Sanskrit. This made it difficult to pin down the precise meaning of many phrases. Prinsep also had, himself, to engrave all the plates for the script that would illustrate his account.

  Nevertheless, in the incredibly short space of six weeks, his translation was ready and he announced it to the Society. As usual he treated them to a long preamble on the discoveries that had led up to it and on the difficulties it still presented. But, unlike other inscriptions, these had one remarkable feature in their favour. There was an almost un-Indian frankness about the language, no exaggeration, no hyperbole, no long lists of royal qualities. Instead there was a bold and disarming directness:

  Thus spake King Devanampiya Piyadasi. In the twenty-seventh year of my anointment I have caused this religious edict to be published in writing. I acknowledge and confess the faults that have been cherished in my heart &

  The king had obviously undergone a religious conversion and, from the nature of the sentiments expressed, it was clearly Buddhism that he had adopted. The purpose of his edicts was to promote this new religion, to encourage right thinking and right behaviour, to discourage killing, to protect animals and birds, and to ordain certain days as holy days and certain men as religious administrators. The inscriptions ended in the same style as they had begun.

  In the twenty-seventh year of my reign I have caused this edict to be written; so sayeth Devanampiya; ‘Let stone pillars be prepared and let this edict of religion be engraven thereon, that it may endure into the remotest ages.’

  Something about both the language and the contents was immediately familiar: it was Old Testament. Even Prinsep could not resist the obvious analogy – ‘we might easily cite a more ancient and venerable example of thus fixing the law on tablets of stone’. Perhaps it was just out of reverence that he called them edicts rather than commandments. But the message was clear enough. Here was an Indian king uncannily imitating Moses, indeed going one better; as well as using tablets of stone, he had created these magnificent pillars to bear his message through the ages.

  But who was this king? ‘Devanampiya Piyadasi’ could be a proper name but it was not one that appeared in any of the Sanskrit king lists. Equally it could be a royal epithet, ‘Beloved of the Gods and of gracious mien’. At first Prinsep thought the former. In Ceylon a Mr George Tumour had been working on the Buddhist histories preserved there and had just sent in a translation that mentioned a king Piyadasi who was the first Ceylon king to adopt Buddhism. This fitted well; but what was a king of Ceylon doing scattering inscriptions all over northern India? One of the edicts actually claimed that the king had planted trees along the highways, dug wells, erected travellers’ rest houses etc. How could a Sinhalese king be planting trees along the Ganges?

  A few weeks later Tumour himself came up with the answer. Studying another Buddhist work he discovered that Piyadasi was also the normal epithet of a great Indian sovereign, a contemporary of the Ceylon Piyadasi, and that this king was otherwise known as Ashoka. It was further stated that Ashoka was the grandson of Chandragupta and that he was consecrated 218 years after the Buddha’s enlightenment.

  Suddenly it all began to make sense. Ashoka was already known from the Sanskrit king lists as a descendant of Chandragupta Maurya (Sandracottus) and, from Himalayan Buddhist sources, as a legendary patron of early Buddhism. Now his historicity was dramatically established. Thanks to the inscriptions, from being just a doubtful name, more was suddenly known about Ashoka than about any other Indian sovereign before AD 1100. As heir to Chandragupta it was not surprising that his pillars and inscriptions were so widely scattered. The Mauryan empire was clearly one of the greatest ever known in India, and here was its noblest scion speaking of his life and work through the mists of 2000 years. It was one of the most exciting moments in the whole story of archaeological discovery.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Black and Time-Stained Rocks

  Having broken the Ashoka Brahmi code, Prinsep was now in full cry. If mind and body could stand it, he would round onto the cave temple inscriptions, try the coins again, and finally double back to the long rock inscriptions. Only then would it be possible to assess the full importance of his discovery and to set Ashoka in perspective. But even as he worked, more monolithic finds were accumulating.

  Thanks largely to Hodgson’s discoveries along the Nepalese frontier, Prinsep knew of five Ashoka columns. As he deciphered their messages a sixth came to light in Delhi (the second to be found there). Broken into three pieces and buried in the ground, it was thought to have been the casualty of an explosion in a nearby gunpowder factory sometime in the seventeenth century. The inscription was badly worn, though evidently the same as that on the other pillars. In due course the whole pillar was offered to the Asiatic Society for their new museum. They accepted it but found the difficulties and cost of transporting it to Calcutta to be prohibitive; eventually they settled for just the bit with the inscription on it.

  The question of how these pillars had originally been moved round India, and whether they were still in their ordained positions, was an intriguing subject in itself. It was now appreciated that they were all of the same stone, all polished by the same unexplained process, and therefore all from the same quarry. Prinsep thought this was somewhere in the Outer Himalayas, although we now know their source to have been Chunar on the Ganges near Benares. Either way, they had somehow been moved as much as 500 miles, no mean feat considering that the heaviest weighed over forty tons.

  Presumably river transport was the answer. An interesting sidelight on this had just been shed by the study of the Mohammedan histories of India. These revealed that neither of the Delhi pillars had originally been erected in Delhi; they had evidently been moved there to adorn the capital of the early Mohammedan kings or Sultans. The first pillar was in the ruins of the palace of Feroz Shah, a Sultan of the fourteenth century. According to contemporary chronicles he had ordered the pillar to be brought there from a site up the Jumna river near Khizrabad.

  When the Sultan visited that district and saw the column in the village of Tobra, he resolved to move it to Delhi, and there erect it as a memorial to future generations. After thinking over the best means of lowering the column, orders were issued commanding the attendance of all the people dwelling in the neighbourhood & and all soldiers, both horse and foot. They were ordered to bring all materials and implements suitable for the work. Directions were issued for bringing parcels of the cotton of the silk-cotton tree. Quantities of this silk cotton were placed round the column, and when the earth at its base was removed, it fell gently over on the bed prepared for it. The cotton was then removed by degrees, and after some days the pillar lay safe upon the ground. The pillar was then encased from top to bottom in reeds and ram skins so that no damage might accrue to it. A carriage with forty-two wheels was constructed, and ropes were attached to each wheel. Thousands of men hauled at every rope, and after great labour and difficulty the pillar was raised onto the carriage. A strong rope was fastened to each wheel and 200 men pulled at each of these ropes. By the simultaneous exertions of so many thousands of men, the carriage was moved and was brought to the banks of the Jumna. Here the Sultan came to meet it. A number of large boats had been collected, some of which could carry 5000 and 7000 maunds [ten tons] of grain. The column was very ingeniously transferred to these boats and was then conducted to Firozabad [De
lhi] where it was landed and conveyed into the palace with infinite labour and skill.

  Re-erection of the column was also a ticklish business, especially since Feroz Shah had ordained that it should stand on the roof, nine storeys up. After much more shunting about on beds of cotton, and an ingenious system of windlasses, ‘it was secured in an upright position, straight as an arrow, without the smallest deviation from the perpendicular’. Feroz Shah then proudly showed off his new acquisition and asked for an explanation of the strange inscriptions. ‘Many Brahmins and Hindu devotees were invited to translate them, but no one was able.’ Prinsep could feel justly proud.

  The Feroz Shah column still stands in Delhi, and Hodgson’s at Lauriya Nandangarh, though not the most elegant, is the only one that still retains its original capital. Others have fared less well. Of the Bihar columns two appear to have been used for cannon target practice during the Moghul period. And in the 1840s the remains of at least two more pillars were dug up at Sanchi. Local tradition had it that they had been broken up by an Indian industrialist for use as rollers in a gigantic sugar cane press. Of one only the base remained; the other was found in three pieces with the chisel marks still visible where it had been intentionally broken.

  For British antiquarians a potentially more embarrassing case of vandalism was the persistent rumour that the road roller being used by a zealous engineer at Allahabad was actually an Ashoka pillar. If there was any substance in this, it is to be hoped that it was just a broken fragment. The only pillar that was quite definitely thrown down by the British was the other, much studied one at Allahabad. It had evidently been in the way of a new embankment which was part of an eighteenth-century refortification programme. Filled with remorse, the Asiatic Society, and even the government, arranged for its re-erection. Captain Edward Smith, the man who had procured for Prinsep the vital facsimiles from Sanchi, designed a new pedestal for it, which came in for much praise. Unfortunately, he went further and also designed a new capital. It was meant to be a lion in the style of that of Lauriya Nandangarh; but it was not exactly the ‘neatliest engraven’. According to Alexander Cunningham ‘it resembles nothing so much as a stuffed poodle on top of an inverted flower pot’.

  We now know of at least nine inscribed Ashoka columns, but these are considerably outnumbered by the Ashoka inscriptions carved on convenient rocks. The pillars naturally claimed attention first, but in fact the rock inscriptions proved more interesting both in content and location. The pillars were found only in the north of India (Sanchi was the most southerly), widely scattered round the Ganges basin. The rock inscriptions were found much further afield, from Mysore in the south to near Peshawar in the extreme north-west; and from near the coast of Orissa in the east to the coast of Saurashtra in the west. These last two, the first at Dhauli in Orissa, the second at Girnar in Gujerat, were the only ones known to Prinsep. Luckily they were two of the most informative.

  The Orissa inscription had been discovered in early 1837. Lieutenant Markham Kittoe had been sent into the wilderness of Orissa to search for coalfields. Left much to his own devices he also searched for antiquities and soon stumbled on a whole network of ancient caves and sculptures. He described his find to the Asiatic Society:

  I have further great pleasure in announcing the discovery of the most voluminous inscription in the column character that I have ever heard of&. There is neither road nor path to this extraordinary piece of antiquity. After climbing the rock through thorns and thickets, I came of a sudden on a small terrace open on three sides with a perpendicular scarp on the fourth or west from the face of which projects the front half of an elephant of elegant workmanship, four feet high; the whole is cut out of the solid rock. On the northern face beneath the terrace, the rock is chiselled smooth for a space of near fourteen feet by ten feet and the inscription, neatly cut, covers the whole space.

  He spent a day taking a facsimile and returned to the spot again in November of the same year to complete the job. In places the rock was badly worn but he found that the shadow thrown by the evening sun enabled him to pick out letters that were not otherwise apparent. In spite of several gaps, Prinsep immediately attempted a translation and made out a number of intriguing phrases. But he gave up the task in early 1838 when a copy of the much better preserved Girnar inscription came to hand.

  This had first been noticed by Colonel James Tod, another legendary figure in this story, who had been on a tour of Gujerat in 1822.

  The memorial in question, evidently of some great conqueror, is a huge hemispherical mass of dark granite, which, like a wart upon the body, has protruded through the crust of mother earth, without fissure or inequality, and which, by the aid of the ‘iron pen’, has been converted into a book. The measurement of the arc is nearly ninety feet; its surface is divided into compartments or parallelograms, within which are inscriptions in the usual character.

  In Tod’s time the script was still, of course, a mystery. The Colonel was one of those who thought it might be Greek. But he was nearer the mark when he confidently predicted that, sooner rather than later, someone at the Asiatic Society would solve the problem. Meantime he had taken copies of only two short sections.

  Fifteen years later, a Bombay antiquarian, hearing of Prinsep’s translation of the pillar inscriptions, quickly headed for Girnar. He wanted to see if the new code would work on Tod’s inscription. ‘To my great joy, and that of the Brahmins with me, I found myself able to make out several words.’ The engraving was still amazingly sharp; it was possible to make an impression, filling the letters with ink and pressing a cloth over them. From this he made a reduced copy – on the original each letter was nearly two feet high – and sent it off to Calcutta.

  Prinsep, turning from the Orissa inscription to this new one, again experienced that shiver down the spine. Bar two extra paragraphs on the Orissa inscription, the two were identical. Ashoka was proclaiming his edicts from one corner of India to the other, across an empire far greater than that of British India and comparable only to that of the Moghuls. But still more surprising was a claim made in one of the edicts. If Prinsep’s reading was right, Ashoka had set up hospitals for men and animals throughout his kingdom, including the extreme south of the peninsula ‘and moreover within the dominions of Antiochus the Greek’. He also claimed that the gospel of non-violence and respect for all living creatures was being acknowledged even ‘by the kings of Egypt, Ptolemy and Antigonus and Magas’.

  This said a great deal for Ashoka’s international standing. But, more important, here at last was another point of contact – the first since Jones’s identification of Sandracottus – between India’s ancient history and that of the West. As Prinsep leafed through the classics to discover which Ptolemy and which Antiochus these might be, he sent an urgent message to Kittoe who was still in Orissa. Would the coal prospector quickly go to Dhauli and recheck the edicts in which these names appeared? Kittoe reacted at once.

  On my arrival at Cuttack I received a letter from my friend the Secretary of the Asiatic Society, informing me of his discovery of the name of Antiochus in the Girnar and Dhauli inscriptions, and requesting me to recompare my transcript and correct any errors. I instantly laid my dak [organized transport] and left at 6 p.m. for Dhauli, which curious place I reached before daybreak and had to wait till it was light; for the two bear cubs which escaped me there last year, when I killed the old bear, were now full grown and disputing the ground. At daybreak I climbed to the Aswastuma [the rock] and cutting two large forked boughs of a tree near the spot, placed them against the rock; on these I stood to effect my object. I had taken the precaution to make a bearer hold the wood steady, but being intent on my interesting task I forgot my ticklish footing; the bearer had also fallen asleep and let go his hold, so that having overbalanced myself the wood slipped and I was pitched head foremost down the rock, but fortunately fell on my hands and received no injury beyond a few bruises and a severe shock; I took a little rest and then completed the job.

/>   Simultaneously Prinsep tried to get the Girnar inscription rechecked. The vital edict containing the mention of Ptolemy was badly damaged with many of the letters missing altogether. Tentatively he approached the government, an unthinkable idea only a few months previously. But by now the excitement caused by his revelations was considerable. The government agreed to help and, within a couple of weeks, a Lieutenant Postans was on his way to Girnar.

  Mrs Postans went too, anxious like everyone else to be in on the elucidation of what she called ‘this black and time-stained rock’. Funded by the government, the operation was conducted with unheard-of thoroughness. The great rock was swathed in sturdy ladders and scaffolding; an awning was erected overhead to shade the workers from the sun; the whole inscription was then divided into numbered sections, and for three weeks Postans and his men crawled about on its vast surface taking impression after impression.

  As my first plan, the letters were carefully filled with a red pigment (vermilion and oil), every attention being paid to the inflexions and other minute though important points. A thin and perfectly transparent cloth was then tightly glued over the whole of one division, and the letters as seen plainly through the cloth, traced upon it in black; in this way all the edicts were transcribed and the cloth being removed, the copy was carefully revised letter by letter with the original. The very smooth and convex surface of the rock on this side was highly favourable to this method, but it is tedious and occupied ten days of incessant labour.