Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  Fateh Khan’s death was soon followed by the eruption of the Turco-Mongols under the leadership of Amir Timur of Khorasan, also known as ‘Timur the Lame’ (Tamberlaine), great-grandson of Genghis Khan and founder of the Timurid dynasty, which gave rise to the Mughals. Timur the Lame swept through the Punjab looting and burning, pausing briefly at Hisar to destroy what was left of Firoz Shah’s pillar.6 According to Shams-i Siraj ’Afif, Timur ordered every horseman in his army to gather two loads of firewood. This was heaped round the pillar and set on fire. The pillar still stands beside the mosque at Hisar, its lower section so badly fire-damaged that nothing remains of whatever pre-Muslim inscriptions it may once have carried.

  Having slaughtered one hundred thousand infidel prisoners who were slowing him down, Timur proceeded to assault and sack Delhi, acquiring so many new prisoners in the process that each man in his army came away with fifty to a hundred of them; men, women and children. ‘The pen of destiny had written down this fate for the people of this city … for it was the will of God that this calamity should fall upon the city.’7 These are the words of Timur himself, set down in his autobiography.

  One of the few buildings to survive the sacking was Firoz Shah’s fort and mosque, where Timur came to give thanks to God and went away full of admiration for the column of gold and its twin, declaring that ‘in all the countries he had traversed he had never seen any monument comparable to these’. After subduing Meerut and other centres of resistance, Timur ordered his army to begin the journey home ‘towards Samarkand, my capital and paradise’.

  Two and a half centuries later the trader William Finch was among the first Englishmen to prostrate themselves before the ‘Great Mogul’, Emperor Jehangir. Like his predecessors, Jehangir was a restless ruler and his court essentially peripatetic, which meant that those who wished the light of the Emperor’s countenance to shine upon them had to follow in his train. In doing so Finch got the opportunity to visit the new Delhi being laid out just to the north of the ruins of Firozabad (a city completed by Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan and named Shahjehanabad, better known today as Old Delhi). Here Finch and his companions inspected the column of gold, by now known as Firoz Shah’s Lat or ‘staff’, and concluded that its unintelligible lettering was some form of Greek, most likely set there by Alexander the Great to mark his victory over the Indian ruler Poros.

  When Emperor Jehangir and his court moved on downriver Finch followed, in due course arriving at the ancient town of Prayag, situated at the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna rivers. The emperor had renamed the town Allahabad and was in the process of converting into a fortress. Within its walls Finch was shown a pillar very similar in height, girth and appearance to Firoz Shah’s Lat in Delhi, which he ascribed to the same originator, describing it as ‘a piller [sic] of stone fiftie cubits above ground so deeply placed within the ground that no end can be found, which by circumstances of the Indians seemeth to have beene placed by Alexander or some other great conqueror’.8

  In 1670 it was the turn of another Englishman, twenty-six-year-old John Marshall, to record the existence of more monumental stone columns in the northern plains of India. Marshall had come out to India as a factor or trade agent in the employ of the still insignificant British mercantile concern known as the East India Company (EICo). In 1670 he was posted to one of the EICo’s more remote ‘factories’ or trading posts at Singhiya, set on the east bank of the River Gandaki, about fifteen miles upstream of the point where that river joined the Ganges above Patna (a settlement since washed away in one of the Gandaki’s frequent changes of course). His surviving papers show that at Singhiya the isolated Marshall began to study Hindu religion and philosophy, leading on to a wider enquiry into Indian astrology, medicine and science. This qualifies him as the first of that maligned species, the Orientalists.

  Some months after Marshall’s arrival at Singhiya he made an expedition into the hinterland, in response to a report of a curious standing pillar. His journal records that he set out northwards from Singhiya on 29 July and walked twelve miles to the village of Bannia, where he spent the night under a large tree. The next day he walked another six miles to reach his objective: a place known locally as Brinkalattee, which he understood to mean the ‘Staff of Brim’ – more accurately the giant Pandava Bhim. There Marshall was shown ‘a Piller of one stone as I conceive. On the top of this piller or Lattee is placed a Tyger ingraven, the neatliest that I have scene [sic] in India. His face looks North North East, ½ Easterly.’ He learned that the giant Bhim had long ago lived here and that ‘this pillar was his Stick to walk with, which is said to be twise [sic] as much under as above ground. Oft [when] man came into the world Brin did see them [as] so very little creatures and yet so cunning and so far exceeding him that hee was much troubled thereat, and went into the Tartarian Mountains and there betwixt two great mountains lay down and dyed and was covered with snow.’9

  The ‘Tyger ingraven’ capital and stone column seen by John Marshall in North Bihar, as drawn by an unidentified artist – probably Thomas Law – in about 1783. The column is today known as the Lauriya-Nandangarh pillar. (Royal Asiatic Society)

  Here was another of the great stone columns ascribed by Hindus to the giant Pandava Bhim. However, Marshall’s account of the giant Bhim going towards the Himalayas and dying between two mountains is a distant echo of the circumstances surrounding the death of Sakyamuni Buddha who fell fatally ill as he made his way homewards towards Kapilavastu and died lying between two great sal trees.

  In November 1676 Marshall was moved to a more senior post in Balasore in Bengal, where he died eight months later of a raging distemper that killed most of his colleagues and many townspeople. In his will Marshall left his manuscripts concerning India to two friends at Christ’s College, Cambridge (now part of the Harleian Collection at the British Museum). These papers included the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita and had Marshall or his friends gone into print the beginnings of Indian studies would have been advanced by the better part of a century.

  John Marshall’s brief sojourn in Bihar occured at a time when Emperor Jehangir’s puritanical grandson Aurangzeb was proving himself the most zealous of his line in the suppression of idolatry. As the centre of Shaivite Hinduism, the city of Varanasi was an obvious target for Aurangzeb’s iconoclasm. Already partially cleansed by Muslim rulers on four previous occasions,10 Varanasi was now subjected to a fifth round of demolitions on Aurangzeb’s orders. Hundreds of shrines were demolished, a number of temples replaced by mosques and the city renamed Muhammadabad.

  One of these temples was the ancient shrine of Bhairava (‘The Terrible One’, a wrathful manifestation of Shiva, the presiding deity of Varanasi), sited on the northern outskirts of the city and perhaps the most revered Shaivite temple in the city on account of the mighty stone lingam in its courtyard, worshipped for centuries as the Lath Bhairava, or ‘Staff of Shiva’. Aurangzeb had most of the temple demolished to make way for a mosque – and yet, unaccountably, left the great stone column standing, so prominently so that the new mosque became known as the Lath Imambarah, or ‘Mosque of the Staff’.

  When John Marshall’s contemporary, the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Tavernier, visited Varanasi in the mid-1670s, he found the stone column set on a raised platform beside a new-built mosque. Since there were several Muslim tombs in the vicinity, Tavernier assumed the pillar to be some form of obelisk:

  In the middle of this platform you see a column of 32 to 35 feet in height, all of a piece, and which three men could with difficulty embrace. It is of sandstone, so hard that I could not scratch it with my knife. All sides of this tomb are covered with figures of animals cut in relief on the stone, and it has been higher above the ground than now appears, several of the old men who guard these tombs having assured me that since fifty years it has subsided more than 30 feet. They add that it is the tomb of one of the kings of Bhutan, who was interred there after he had left his country to conquer this kingdom, from which he wa
s subsequently driven by the descendants of Tamerlane.11

  The clue misunderstood by Tavernier lies in the word Bhutan, which contains the Sanskrit root word budh, meaning ‘awaken’, as in Buddha, the ‘Awaked One’.

  Emperor Aurangzeb died in 1707 unlamented by the bulk of his subjects, and with his death the authority of the Mughals began to crumble, a process assisted by the power struggles between his sons, grandsons and great-grandsons. At some point in the next two decades the explosion of a powder magazine blew the pillar at Firoz Shah’s hunting lodge north of Delhi into fragments (painstakingly reassembled two and a half centuries later, with one neat slice missing – now in the British Museum in London). As the Mughals declined, other powers moved in to fill the political vacuum: most notably, the Sikhs from the Punjab, the Marathas from the Deccan and the EICo from Bengal.

  Under the patronage of the Maratha warlords and the saintly widow of one of their number, Rani Ahilya Bai Holkar of Indore, the city of Muhammadabad very soon reverted to Varanasi and underwent a spectacular rebirth. The colourful waterfront of temples and bathing ghats that tourists admire today owes its existence almost entirely to the plunder secured by the Maratha chiefs of the eighteenth century – and to their religiosity.

  It was at this time, as Varanasi’s Hindu majority set out to reclaim their city’s Shaivite identity, that the stone pillar seen by Jean Baptiste Tavernier in the courtyard of the Mosque of the Staff became the focus of an increasingly popular fertility cult and the scene of an annual festival known as the ‘marriage of Shiva’s lat’. It led, almost inevitably, to growing friction between the city’s Hindu and Muslim communities, which came to a head in the autumn of 1805 during the Muslim celebration of the Moharam festival. ‘It was under such a state of excited zeal’, wrote a local historian, ‘that a congregation at the Lat’h Imambareh, in 1805, was urged by some fanatic preacher to overthrow and defile the pillar and images of Hindu worship at the place.’12 The mob pulled the Staff of Shiva to the ground and broke it into several pieces.

  The enraged Hindus responded by setting fire to the great mosque erected by Aurangzeb beside the river, after which rioting engulfed much of the city. Varanasi’s young acting magistrate, William Bird, employed his police and two companies of sepoys as best he could but was unable to prevent mobs of Hindus from attacking the Muslim quarters of the town. In the words of the Benares Gazetteer, ‘The whole of Benares was in the most terrible confusion, as several bazaars were in flames and all of the Julaha quarter was a scene of plunder and violence. Order was not restored by the troops until some fifty mosques had been destroyed and several hundred persons had lost their lives.’13

  When the Reverend Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta, visited Varanasi in 1823 he found the Staff of Shiva ‘defaced and prostrate’,14 and guarded by Brahmin sepoys. At some time during the following three decades what was probably the largest surviving section of the broken column (or possibly its stump still in situ), measuring some seven or eight feet in height, was encased in a copper sheath and placed under armed guard. So it remains to this day, still unexamined by scholars, for tensions between the two communities in Varanasi remain as bad as ever.

  In the year of Aurangzeb’s death, 1707, a Capuchin mission reached Lhasa on the Tibetan Plateau, despatched from Portuguese Goa in the belief that deviant Christians were to be found north of the Himalayas. Eight years later the disappointed Capuchins were ejected from Tibet and settled in Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, where they maintained a mission for over half a century until again expelled. This second expulsion came by order of the new ruler of Nepal, the Hindu Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha, who was not one for religious tolerance and initiated a programme of caste discrimination that saw his country’s non-Hindu communities reduced to the status of outcastes or slaves.

  The Capuchins and their few converts found refuge near the town of Bettiah in the plains of Bihar, about 150 miles north-east of Varanasi. This now became the centre of the Tibet-Hindustan Mission of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith in Rome under the leadership of the scholarly Italian Father Marco della Tomba.

  In about 1769 Father della Tomba reported the existence of two stone columns in the vicinity, both carrying inscriptions and both topped by carved stone lions (one being the Tirhut ‘tyger’ seen by Marshall a century earlier):

  They stand 27 cubits high up to the capital, on the top of which there is a lion, which looks very natural. The circumference of the column is 7 cubits, as I myself measured. The column seems to consist of a single stone. I struck it several times with a hatchet, and fired some bullets without being able to make out that it was otherwise. These two columns are as if covered with a certain writing, which I traced on paper and then sent to the Hindu Academy of Benares and to some Tibetan scholars; but not one of them could read or understand a word of them … These characters appear to be some ancient Greek.15

  This same period saw the doughty Jesuit priest Joseph Tiefenthaler criss-crossing the Gangetic plains, nominally as a propagator of the Gospel but with scholarship as his prime motivation. After the Pope’s suppression of the Jesuit order in the mid-1750s, Tiefenthaler had stayed on in India to devote himself to the study of India’s languages, religions and natural sciences. He was most probably the first European to learn Sanskrit, the hermetic language in which all the sacred texts of the Hindus were written – hermetic in that it was considered the language of the gods and thus accessible only to Brahmins by virtue of their god-ordained status as intermediaries between the gods and men.

  In 1756 Tiefenthaler made the first known copy of what he believed to be the oldest inscription on Firoz Shah’s golden pillar, afterwards despatched with other papers to his fellow pioneer Indologist the Frenchman Abraham Anquetil du Perron. However, du Perron was then in the process of being expelled from India along with all his countrymen following the EICo’s capture of Pondicherry. As a result it was not until long after Tiefenthaler’s death that his scholarship became known through the publication of du Perron’s three-volume Recherches historiques et géographie sur l’Inde, published in 1786.16

  Tiefenthaler and du Perron together brought the first seeds of the European Enlightenment to the shores of India. But with France’s imperial ambitions baulked by growing British naval superiority on the high seas, it fell to the latter power to continue that process – in the person of a Welsh polymath. It was William ‘Oriental’ Jones, jurist, scholar and philologist extraordinaire who now laid the ground for those same seeds to germinate.

  The son of a well-known mathematician, William Jones was a child prodigy gifted with a quite breathtaking capacity for learning languages. By the time he graduated from Oxford in 1768, Jones was fluent in thirteen languages and familiar with another twenty-eight. Like his father before him, he turned to the aristocracy for patronage, becoming tutor to the young son and heir of Lord Spencer. Having taught himself Arabic and Persian, he embarked on a number of translations that earned him the sobriquet of ‘Persian’ or ‘Oriental’ Jones and led him to declare that the works of Persian poets such as Firdusi were as worthy of admiration as the works of Homer.

  A constant shortage of funds led Jones to enrol at the Middle Temple but failed to stifle his ambition. By the time he was called to the Bar in 1774, ‘Harmonious’ Jones – to give him his third popular title – had become one of the leading lights of the Royal Society and of Samuel Johnson’s club at the Turk’s Head in Soho, to say nothing of his entanglement in Whig politics. His ambition suffered a severe setback when he failed to secure the professorship of Arabic at Oxford, which he believed to be rightly his. It forced him to look further afield, leading to his acceptance of a seat on the bench of the newly established Supreme Court in Bengal.

  From the European perspective India was considered at this time to be little more than a charnel house, a fatal shore from which few returned. Furthermore, Jones shared the Whig view that the EICo was a corrupt and despotic institution best dismantled. What help
ed William Jones overcome his scruples was the salary. The newly created post of supreme court judge in Bengal paid £6000 a year (worth some £200,000 today), which by Jones’s calculation meant that even if he lived very comfortably in India he could return home in ten years’ time ‘still a young man with thirty thousand pounds in my pocket’.17 The post also made it possible for Jones to marry the clergyman’s daughter he had been courting since his days as an undergraduate – and it came with a knighthood.

  But what also attracted Jones was that India presented possibilities all but undreamed of in England. Captain Cook’s three voyages to the Pacific had shown what could be accomplished and the companion of Cook’s first voyage, Joseph Banks, had demonstrated how a system of scientific endeavour on the grand scale might be set up – provided there was patronage, sufficient men of like mind and someone capable of directing that enquiry at the centre.

  Sir William Jones shortly before his untimely death in 1794. An engraving from a drawing by the Calcutta artist Arthur Devis.

  So it came about that in September 1783 Sir William Jones stepped ashore at Calcutta as the very embodiment of the European Enlightenment. He was aged thirty-six, newly married, newly knighted and carried two lists in his coat pocket. The first set out sixteen ‘Objects of Enquiry during my Residence in India’, while the second concentrated on how those objectives might be achieved: by the setting up in India of a learned body modelled on the Royal Society, its brief to enquire into man and nature in general and Asia in particular, including the investigation of ‘the annals, and even traditions, of those nations, who from time to time have peopled or desolated it’, so as to ‘bring to light their various forms of government, with their institutions, civil and religious’.18