Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  (Above) A party of Europeans on the Gaya–Patna road, with the Barabar and Nagarjuni Hills in the background. A pen and ink drawing by Sir Charles D’Oyly, dated 1825. (APAC, British Library) (Below) The doorway of the rock-cut cave that became known as the Lomas Rishi Cave, or ‘Cave of the Long-haired Saint’. This early photograph was taken by the archaeologist Joseph Beglar in 1872–3. (APAC, British Library)

  Jones’s call for rubbings of the pillar inscriptions had been heard by the Swiss mercenary Colonel Antoine Polier, who had taken service with the Mughal Emperor in Delhi only to find his employer, the ill-starred Shah Alam II, so assailed by Marathas, Sikhs and Afghan Rohillas as to leave him ‘tossed about, like a child’s toy, from one usurper to another – a tool during their prosperity, a scapegoat in adversity’.12 Having seen the writing on the wall, Polier had booked a passage to Europe and was in the process of liquidating his assets and bidding farewell to his many local wives. However, before abandoning his begums and his employer to their fate – Shah Alam was blinded at the hands of the insane Afghan chief Ghulam Qadir and his Red Fort sacked – Polier took a rubbing of the inscriptions on Firoz Shah’s Lat and sent it to Sir William Jones in Calcutta.13

  Jones’s excitement at having the rubbing in his hands turned to disappointment and frustration when he found himself quite unable to decipher what was clearly the oldest of the three sets of inscriptions cut into Firoz Shah’s Lat. ‘The Nagari inscriptions are easy & modern,’ Jones declared in a letter to a friend, ‘but all the old ones on the staff of Firuz-Shah drive me to despair.’14

  This unreadable inscription was written in an alphabet made up of some thirty or so clearly defined characters that at first glance could be mistaken for Greek but patently were not. Jones’s Brahmin pandits who examined the script declared it to be Brahmi lipi, or ‘writing of the god Brahma’ – a suitably romantic appellation that failed to catch on among the Europeans until well into the next century.

  What Jones was able to establish was that the alphabet used on Firoz Shah’s Lat was the same as that found by Harrington at the Nagarjuni cave and on another set of rubbings sent to the Asiatic Society by a senior civil servant from western India. These had been taken from the walls of a number of man-made cave temples at Ellora, in the mountains inland from Bombay.15

  For no good reason, Jones now concluded that all three sets of inscriptions must in some way be associated with a conqueror or law-giver from Ethiopia: ‘I believe them to be Ethiopian, and to have been imported about a thousand years before Christ by the Bauddhas or priests and soldiers of the conqueror Sisac, whom the Hindus call the Lion of Sacya.’ This same Sisac or Sakya had, he supposed, travelled to India from Ethiopia ‘about a thousand years before Christ’, his title of Buddha, indicating an enlightened person, suggesting that he was ‘rather a benefactor than a destroyer of his species’.16

  What Jones also discovered was that his Brahmin pandits held strong views about this same Sakya or Buddha, declaring him to be not only a heretical leader of a false sect but also the ninth avatar or incarnation of the god Vishnu. This mirrored exactly what the Arab historian Abu al-Fazl had written in his Ain-i-Akbari, where he had remarked, ‘The Brahmans called Boodh the ninth Avatar, but assert that the religion which is ascribed to him is false.’

  This paradox greatly puzzled Jones: ‘He [Buddha] seems to have been a follower of doctrines contained in the Vedas; and though his good nature led him to censure these ancient books, because they enjoined sacrifices of cattle, yet he is admitted as the ninth Avatar, even by the Brahmens of Casi [Kashi, the ancient sobriquet for Varanasi].’17 His solution was to propose that there had been two Buddhas: the first a revolutionary who ‘attempted to overturn the system of the Brahmans, and was the cause of their persecution of the Baudhas’; the second a Buddha who came later, ‘assuming the name and character of the first’.

  Jones’s tentative thoughts on Buddha and Buddhism appeared in the first two issues of the Asiatick Researches, many times delayed but finally published in 1789. They provoked a flood of responses from friends and correspondents: among them, John Marsden in Sumatra, Captain Mahony in Ceylon, William Chambers in Madras, Lieutenant Francis Wilford in Varanasi, Henry Colebrooke in Mirzapur, John Harrington in Calcutta, and Francis Buchanan also in Bengal. These diverse correspondents were able to cite ancient Buddhist texts obtained in countries to the north, east and south of India, some written in Sanskrit but others in a language known as Pali, thought to have the same origins as Sanskrit, both apparently derived from a spoken language called Prakrit, ‘consisting of provincial dialects, which are less refined, and have a more imperfect grammar’.18

  All these foreign texts agreed that Buddhism had originated in India; specifically, the country of Magadha, ‘for above two thousand years a seat of learning, civilisation and trade’, and ‘the cradle of the religion of one of the most powerful and extensive sects of the world’.19 There was further agreement that the founder of Buddhism was a historical figure named Sakyamuni or Gautama Buddha who had lived and died in that same country of Magadha. And if these sources were correct, this Buddha’s death had occurred not in the eleventh century BCE, as Jones had suggested, but as late as the fifth century BCE. This new evidence also suggested that despite being ‘branded as atheists, and persecuted as heretics, by the Brahmans’,20 and despite persecution by various Hindu rulers, the Buddhists had not only flourished in India for many centuries but had continued to survive in some parts of the subcontinent as late as the twelfth century.21

  At this same time supporting evidence for Buddhism’s Indian roots began to emerge from the central Gangetic plain itself, beginning with an inscription found at a ruined temple known locally as Buddha-gaya just south of the town of Gaya in southern Bihar. It recorded a tenth-century donation made to the ‘house of Bood-dha’, honouring the ‘Supreme Being, Bood-dha’ who had ‘appeared here with a portion of his divine nature’.22 In Varanasi, too, startling evidence emerged suggesting that this most orthodox of Hindu cities had at one time contended with a rival religion.

  Varanasi in the 1780s was in the process of being Anglicised into Benares under the new authority of the EICo. In 1788 the Company appointed as its Resident and superintendent in that city thirty-two-year-old Jonathan Duncan, part of a select band of administrators known as ‘Warren Hastings’s young men’ and one of that minority whose empathy for Indian culture was combined with intellectual curiosity – the twin attributes of the Orientalist. Duncan shared Hastings’s view that to interfere with India’s ancient laws or its religious views would be an ‘unwanted tyranny’, while at the same time regarding it as his duty to oppose abuses of what would today be called human rights. These included the custom of female infanticide widely practised by the Rajput class, the most powerful landowners in and around Benares. By demonstrating to the leading landowners that it contravened the Hindu scriptures, Duncan was able to convince them to stop the practice. However, the city’s more conservative Brahmin class had also to be won over, which Duncan achieved by lobbying for a Sanskrit College in Benares, ‘for the preservation and cultivation of the Laws, Literature and Religion of the Nation at the Centre of their Faith’.23

  By such diplomacy Duncan won the support of all sections of the city. It meant that when in 1794 a green marble urn was unearthed from some ruins just north of Benares, it was brought to Duncan and his advice sought. The urn had come to light when a complex of ruins known as Sarnath was being excavated for building material.24 It contained cremated bone fragments, which was against Hindu custom, leading Duncan to speculate that the remains must have belonged to ‘one of the worshippers of Buddha, a set of Indian heretics, who having no reverence for the Ganges, used to deposit their remains in the earth, instead of committing them to that river’.

  Duncan’s surmise was confirmed when in the same ruins ‘a statue or idol of Buddha’ was uncovered bearing an inscription which, when translated by his friends from the Sanskrit College, proved
to be a record of an eleventh-century donation made by Basantapala, King of Gaur, who with his brother had come to worship there and had ‘ordered all those who did not follow the Buddhas, to embrace that sect’. Here was clear evidence that Buddhism had flourished under royal patronage in Upper Bengal well into the eleventh century.

  But what was now all too apparent to Sir William Jones and his fellow savants was that the recovery of India’s pre-Muslim past was being held up by the lack of what Jones called ‘the grand desideratum in oriental literature, Chronology’;25 specifically, some name or event which could be tied to European history – a methodology known today as synchronology. Perhaps sensing that he was getting nowhere with his biblical correlations, Jones turned to the classics of his childhood. He knew his Herodotus, his Strabo, and his Megasthenes; he had read Arrian’s Anabapsis, Ptolemy’s Geographia and Quintus Curtius Rufus’s Historiae Alexandri Magni in the original Greek and Latin – and much else besides. He now subjected these texts to the closest re-examination for any light they could throw on early Indian history, particularly with regard to the Indian kings encountered by Alexander the Great in the course of his invasion of India and by Alexander’s Macedonian successors in the east. He was convinced that hidden in these accounts was the key that would provide the missing synchronicity: a name or event common to both the Greeks and the Indians that could be identified and by doing so would unlock the past.

  4

  Enter Alexander

  A silver coin issued by Alexander the Great c.324 BCE on his return to Babylon to celebrate his victories in India. On the obverse (left) Nike, goddess of victory, holds a garland of laurels over Alexander, clad in full armour and Persian helmet. This is the only known image of Alexander to survive from his lifetime. On the reverse (right) a horseman engages in battle with two men mounted on an elephant showing the moment in the battle of Hydaspes when the Indian king Poros was wounded by a Greek Cavalryman. (British Museum)

  Alexander’s invasion of India had begun in the winter of 327–326 BCE. Over the preceding twenty months he had destroyed Darius, the last Achaemenid emperor, and proclaimed himself king of kings in his stead. He had hunted down and executed the rebel Bactrian satrap Bessos, who had killed Darius. Wherever he set foot he had planted new cities named after himself, including Alexandria in Arachiosa (modern Kandahar, more properly Iskandahar), Alexandria under Kaukasos (modern Begram, south of the Hindu Kush), and Alexandria Eschate, or ‘Furthest’ (in modern Tajikistan). But it was not enough, and his thoughts had turned to India – according to the historian Herodotus, the most populous nation in the known world and the richest.

  No army had ever been so well educated as that which marched to Alexander’s drum, particularly those cavalry officers known as the Companions who commanded the royal wing and the eight other squadrons of horse, and the infantry commanders known as the Shield-Bearers who spearheaded the right phalanx of Alexander’s army. Some had been friends of Alexander since childhood and had attended the school at Mieza at which the philosopher Aristotle of Stagira had presided over Alexander’s education, tutoring him from the age of thirteen in philosophy, morals, logic, science, mathematics, medicine and art. At Mieza Alexander had learned that what distinguished Greeks and Macedonians from other men was the spirit of enquiry. But his education had been cut short when his father King Philip went away to wage war against Byzantium. From that time onwards Alexander had been too busy either defending or enlarging Philip’s kingdom to give much thought to Aristotelian ethics.

  There was nothing morally uplifting about Alexander’s extraordinary advance into Asia but it did at least accord with Aristotle’s assertion that ‘All men by nature desire to know’. No less than sixteen of those who accompanied Alexander are known to have written accounts of that extraordinary journey eastwards. None of these eyewitness accounts have survived in the original but enough material was still accessible in the days of late republican and imperial Rome for Greek and Roman historians to plunder them for their own versions of Alexander’s eastern adventure, of which five survived to be read by Sir William Jones, together providing a detailed, if contradictory, account of Alexander’s invasion of India.1

  Having made his decision to press on, Alexander had sent envoys to all the local rulers calling on them to submit to his authority. Those whose territories lay in the plains had had ample time to reflect on Alexander’s relentless advance across Asia and responded with alacrity. There were even protestations of the warmest friendship from an Indian king whom the Greeks came to know as Omphis of Taxila, whose territories extended east from the River Indus to the River Hydaspes (the modern Jhelum). So eager was King Omphis to show his goodwill that he crossed the Indus to meet Alexander, bringing offerings that included twenty-five war elephants – no mean gift, for these were the battle tanks of the day.

  However, the mountain tribes of the Aspasioi and Assakenoi – names probably derived from Sanskrit aswa, or ‘horse’, and aswa-senis, ‘horse-fighters’, thus ‘horse-people’, and ‘horse-warriors’ – refused to submit. Alexander thereupon divided his army, sending one force down through the defile known today as the Khyber Pass to the winter capital of Gandhara at Peukelaotis (Pushkalavati, now Charsadda, just above the confluences of Swat River and Kabul River) while he himself led the best of his troops on a more northerly route into the mountains.

  The winter campaign that followed was swift and brutal in the Alexandrian manner. The first Aspasian town that lay across Alexander’s path failed to surrender and every inhabitant was put to the sword; the second held out only briefly before opening its gates. The Greeks renamed this second city Nysa, because it was overlooked by an ivy- and vine-covered mountain that reminded them of the mountain sacred to their god Dionysus. The historians Arrian, Justin and Curtius all tell the same story, which was that Nysa stood at the foot of a mountain called Meros, the summit of which was then occupied by Alexander’s forces for ten days of bacchanalian revelry. With his men thoroughly rested, Alexander continued his mountain campaign, which ended with his assault on the great rock of Aornos, a supposedly impregnable mountain that was said to have defeated Heracles himself. Here the last of the Aspasioi and Assakenoi had gathered to make a final stand.

  The name given to this great massif may come from the Greek aornos, ‘birdless’, but more probably derives from the Sanskrit awara, meaning ‘stockade’; thus the Fortress Mountain. Described by Arrian as ‘a mighty mass of rock … said to have a circuit of about 200 stadia [1 stadium = 607 feet] and at its lowest elevation a height of 11 stadia’,2 the Aornos massif overlooked the plains of Gandhara and the River Indus at its most northerly crossing-point. It meant that Aornos had to be taken before Alexander could contemplate going any further east.

  Alexander duly set about besieging the Fortress Mountain, building up an earthwork to bridge a ravine on one side while a party led by Ptolemy, one of the commanders of Alexander’s Shield-Bearers, set about scaling the cliffs at a second point. By the third day the earthwork was complete and Alexander himself led the main assault, resulting in a rout and a massacre. ‘Alexander thus became master of the rock,’ declares Arrian. ‘He sacrificed upon it and built a fort, giving the command of its garrison to Sisikottos, who long before had in Bactria deserted from the Indians to Bessos, but after Alexander had conquered the Bactrian land served in his army, and showed himself a man worthy of confidence.’3

  The Indian deserter deputed to govern Aornos ‘Greekified’ by Arrian as Sisikottos is Romanised by Curtius into Sisocostus. The two are clearly one and the same, for the Roman historian ends his account of the taking of Aornos in much the same way as the Greek: ‘Upon the rock the king erected altars dedicated to Minerva and Victory. To the guides who had shown the way … he honourably paid the stipulated recompense … The defence of the rock and the country surrounding was entrusted to Sisocostus.’4

  All the surviving accounts record that Indian mercenaries were employed by the Aspasioi, Assakenoi and oth
er mountain peoples and showed no scruples in switching sides. Alexander made extensive use of their military skills before coming to see them as a threat, at which point he disposed of them so ruthlessly as to lead Plutarch to accuse him of an act of treachery: ‘As the Indian mercenary troops, consisting, as they did, of the best soldiers to be found in the country, flocked to the cities which he attacked, he thus incurred serious losses, and accordingly concluded a treaty of peace with them; but afterwards, as they were going away, set upon them while they were on the road, and killed them all.’5

  Sisikottos/Sisocostus was one such Indian mercenary, initially fighting for the Persian satrap Bessos in Bactria against Alexander before switching sides to soldier for the Greeks, where his qualities of leadership evidently recommended him to Alexander as ‘a man worthy of confidence’. The significance of his name was missed by Sir William Jones, as it was by many students of Indo-Greek history who came after Jones.

  With Mount Aornos taken and his line of supply secured, Alexander was able to reunite his forces and cross the Indus, where he made the customary sacrificial offerings before marching on to Taxila, a ‘great and flourishing city, the greatest indeed of all the cities which lay between the river Indus and the Hydaspes’.6 Here he and his Macedonians were made welcome by King Omphis and his people, the Indian king showering upon Alexander gifts that included another fifty-six elephants, a number of sheep of extraordinary size, three thousand bulls, quantities of corn, gold crowns and eighty talents of coined silver. So gratified was Alexander by the Taxilan king’s generosity that he returned his gifts with thanks and added ‘a thousand talents from the spoils which he carried, along with many banqueting vessels of gold and silver, a vast quantity of Persian drapery, and thirty chargers from his own stalls’ – an act of statesmanship that, according to Quintus, caused ‘the deepest offence to his own friends’.