Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  Diodotos Soter and his successors prospered. By about 240 BCE the Graeco-Bactrians had annexed a hefty slice of Indian territory east of the Indus. Meanwhile, Parthia to the north had also broken away and under the Parthian chief Arsaces had formed an alliance with the Bactrians that prevented Seleukos II from reclaiming his great-grandfather’s eastern territories. With the rise of the Parthians the overland links established by Alexander between the Mediterranean world and India were all but severed.

  Here was the sum of the information available to Sir William Jones from the Greek side. To achieve that much desired point of synchronicity he had now to link this to something in the new material emerging from his researches into the Sanskrit record. He knew that the war between Seleukos and Sandrokoptos must have taken place in or very soon after 305 BCE, the year in which the former declared himself ruler of Alexander’s Persian empire. ‘If we can fix on an Indian prince, contemporary with Seleucus’,18 he declared, they would have that common fixed point in history.

  The shoreline at Patna, drawn from the terrace of the Patna Customs House, looking upstream towards Bankipore. A pen-and-ink drawing by the EICo’s Opium Agent, Sir Charles D’Oyly, dated 24 October 1824. (APAC, British Library)

  One of the many authorities consulted by Sir William Jones before he set sail for India was the geographer, map-maker and pioneer oceanographer Major James Rennell, known today as the ‘father of Indian geography’. Rennell had been forced to retire in 1776 when in his early thirties after being attacked and badly injured by a group of Hindu fanatics while surveying on the Bhutan frontier. Most of his thirteen years in India had been spent mapping the EICo’s newly acquired territories in Bengal, in the course of which Rennel had built up a unique understanding of its terrain and the forces that had shaped it. When Jones had last seen him in his house just off Portland Place in London he had been in the process of completing what would be the first accurate map of India. Now in 1787, just as Jones began his search for the missing link between India and ancient Greece, he received a letter from Rennell concerning the identity and location of ancient Palimbothra. This was the city about which Megasthenes and his successors had written in such detail, placing it 425 miles downstream from the confluence of the rivers Ganges and Yamuna, 638 miles upstream from the mouth of the Ganges, and, quite specifically, at a confluence ‘where the Ganges and the Erranoboas unite’.

  Jones and his pandits had searched in vain in their Sanskrit texts for any mention of a city named Palimbothra or the river Erranoboas. What they had found, however, were frequent references to the great city of Pataliputra, for centuries the capital city of Magadha.19 Then came Rennell’s letter, containing his account of how while surveying in and about the modern town of Patna more than a decade earlier, he had learned from the local townspeople that an ancient city named ‘Patelpoot-her’ had once stood there but had long ago been washed away.

  Rennell’s subsequent surveys had then revealed that the EICo’s new civil and military lines of Bankipore, which were then in the course of being built alongside the Ganges just upstream of the ‘native’ city of Patna, were being laid out over an old river bed (a disastrous bit of civic planning that continues to bedevil modern Patna every year when the monsoon rains begin). This former river bed, he realised, must have been the original course of the River Soane (today written Sone), which now entered the Ganges twenty-two miles further upstream. What Rennell had also discovered was that this original course of the River Soane had at one time split just before joining the Ganges, so as to create a long oval-shaped island, the length and breadth of which were large enough to contain the rectangular walls of the city of Palimbothra as described by Megasthenes, as well as providing the city’s wide moat. Furthermore, the proportions of the mileages given by Megasthenes fitted, placing the ancient city roughly where the modern town of Patna now stood. Was it possible, Rennel wanted to know, that Patna, Pataliputra and Palimbothra were all one and the same?20

  Yet Rennel’s theory failed on one count – why the Greeks had named the river that flowed into the Ganges at Palimbothra the Erranoboas. The explanation came to Sir William Jones from a quite serendipitous reading of a hitherto unread Sanskrit text. In it the River Soane was described as Hiranyabahu, or ‘golden armed’. This, he realised, had been ‘Greekified’ by Megasthenes into Erranoboas, or ‘the river with a lovely murmur’. Here was literary proof that the rivers Soane and Erranboas were one and the same, and that modern Patna was indeed the site of the Greeks’ Palimbothra and ancient India’s Pataliputra.

  This first discovery led on directly to a second, also found in two hitherto unread Sanskrit texts. One took the form of a ‘very long chain of instructive and agreeable stories’ written in verse by a poet named Somadeva. It told the story of ‘the famed revolution at Pataliputra by the murder of King Nanda, with his eight sons, and the usurpation of Chandragupta’.21 The other text was a verse drama entitled The Coronation of Chandra and it dealt with precisely the same subject, the Chandra of the title being ‘the abbreviated name of that able and adventurous usurper Chandragupta’. This was in fact the first half of a much longer verse drama entitled Mudrarakshasa, or ‘The Minister’s Signet Ring’, written by a fifth-century playwright named Vishakhadatta.

  The Minister’s Signet Ring told the story of two rival ministers, Rakshasa and Chanakya, both serving King Nanda, ruler of Magadha. King Nanda has become a tyrant in his old age, leading Chanakya to accede to the plans of the ambitious prince Chandragupta to usurp the king. Nanda learns of the plot and sends Chandragupta into exile, together with his eight friends. Chandragupta finds sanctuary with the lord of the Himalayas, Parvateswar, who has allies among the Yavans (Greeks), Sacas (Scythians), Cambojans (Gandharans) and Ciratas (Kashmiris). Parvateswar provides Chandragupta and his friends with money and troops in return for half the empire of King Nanda. They advance on King Nanda’s capital of Pataliputra, which falls after a brief battle. Chandragupta kills all his half-brothers and he and Parvateswar divide up Nanda’s kingdom between them. Parvateswar is then poisoned by Nanda’s daughter and is succeeded by his son Malayaketu, who with the advice of Nanda’s former minister Rakshasa attacks Chandragupta at Pataliputra. However, Chandragupta fortifies the city with his Greek allies, while Chanakya uses his guile to bring Rakshasa over to Chandragupta’s camp. Malayaketu’s coalition collapses and Chandragupta goes on to reign over Magadha ‘for many years, with justice and equity, and adored by his subjects’.

  This was a play about Brahmans putting things right, written by a Brahman for Brahmans. But from Jones’s point of view the real value of The Minister’s Signet Ring was that it was based on a real historical event: the overthrow of the Nanda dynasty by Chandragupta Maurya. He already knew the bare bones of the story from his readings of the Puranas, but what the play added was detail; in particular, the fact that the exiled prince Chandragupta had overthrown Nanda after forming an alliance with a king from the mountains and a number of peoples from India’s North-West frontier. That was precisely what Sandrokoptos had done. Patently, the Greek Sandrokoptos was the Indian king Chandragupta.

  The final confirmation – the clincher – came with the later recognition that the two names Sisikottos and Sandrokoptos were both Greek versions of the same name: Chandragupta. The meaning of Chandragupta was plain to every Sanskrit scholar, being derived from two words: chandra, ‘moon’; and gupta, ‘protected’. Sisikottos, less obviously, was a Greek rendering of Sashigupta, which also meant ‘moon-protected’, sashi being an alternative Sanskrit word for ‘moon’. The young Indian exile and mercenary Sashigupta had simply evolved with age into the older monarch Chandragupta.

  Obvious as these connections seem today, it had taken a happy combination of chance and scholarship on the part of Sir William Jones to make the all-important breakthrough. ‘I cannot help mentioning a discovery which accident threw in my way,’ he announced in a now-famous speech marking the Asiatic Society’s tenth anniversary, delivered in Cal
cutta on 28 February 1793. He first announced the resolution of the Palibothra-Pataliputra-Patna puzzle, then went on to describe how this had led on to an even greater discovery: ‘Chandragupta, who, from a military adventurer, became the sovereign of Upper Hindustan … was none other than that very Sandrocottus who concluded a treaty with Seleucus Nicator.’22

  With this breakthrough ancient Indian history secured its first positive dating from which to develop its own internal dateline and a contemporaneous chronology. Alexander the Great had died in Babylon in 323 BCE. By the time Seleukos the Victor had begun his Indian campaign in 305 BCE, Chandragupta Maurya was already firmly established as a great king of northern India. He must therefore have won the Nanda throne after the death of Alexander in 323 BCE and before Alexander’s satraps Eudemos and Peithon had been forced to withdraw from the conquered Indian territories in 317 BCE. Jones plumped for the latter date.

  According to the Puranic ‘Table of the Kings of Magadha, Emperors of India’ as published in Asiatick Researches,23 Chandragupta had reigned for twenty-four years. Assuming the length of reigns given in the Puranas to be correct, it followed that Chandragupta had ruled from about 317 to 293 BCE. His son Bindusara had ruled for twenty-five years, giving him a period of rule from about 292 to 268 BCE. Bindusara had been followed by his son Ashoka, who had ruled for thirty-six or thirty-seven years, so about 267–230 BCE. The Mauryan dynasty had lasted for a total of 137 years, so approximately 317–180 BCE.

  In the two centuries and two decades since these datings were first arrived at, little has changed to question their general validity.

  5

  Furious Orientalists

  A carved slab from Amaravati, showing a highly decorated stupa and its surrounding colonnade and four gateways. This was one of a number of drawings made by Colin Mackenzie’s draftsmen following his partial excavation of the site in 1816. (APAC, British Library)

  The dramatic progress in Indian studies that had been achieved since the arrival of Sir William Jones in Calcutta came to a sudden halt on 27 April 1795.

  Jones had agreed to serve a term of ten years and no more, and that ten years was completed in November 1794 – by which time both William and Anna Maria Jones were seriously unwell. However, Jones was determined to complete his Digest of Hindu and Muslim Law on which he had been working intermittently for some years and which he considered to be his most important legacy. The idea of helping the ‘twenty-four millions of black British subjects in these provinces … by giving them their own laws’, was, he wrote, ‘more flattering to me than the thanks of the King’.1 Anna Maria was too ill to stay on and she sailed with the autumn fleet, but her husband remained in Calcutta, despite suffering severe pain from an inflammation of the liver. On 20 April 1795 he called on Lord Hastings’s successor as Governor General, his old friend Sir John Shore, but felt too unwell to stay long. A week later Shore was sent for and reached Jones’s mansion on Garden Reach in time to see Jones breathe his last.

  No one was better placed to appreciate what Jones’s death meant than his friend and disciple Henry Colebrooke: ‘His premature death leaves the result of his researches unarranged, and must lose to the world much that was committed to memory … None of those who are now engaged in Oriental researches are so fully informed … and I fear that in the progress of their enquiries none will be found to have such comprehensive views.’2

  These fears proved to be well founded. The death of Sir William Jones left the Asiatic Society like a ship at sea without a navigator. Presidents, secretaries and editors came and went while the Society drifted for want of a guiding hand at the helm. Yet its scattered correspondents continued to gather information and Asiatick Researches continued to be published, albeit less frequently. These contributors included a Captain James Hoare, who presented the Society with a book of drawings of the Firoz Shah’s Lat in Delhi and the Lat at Allahabad, together with eye-copies of their inscriptions.

  This was fortuitous because very soon after Hoare’s visit to Allahabad the stone column was ‘wantonly taken down by that enemy to Hindustani architecture, Colonel Kyd, at which time the capital of it was destroyed’.3 The EICo had sent troops to garrison the fort at Allahabad following a devious treaty of alliance drawn up with the Nawab of Oude. Then in 1801 the Nawab had formally ceded Allahabad to the EICo, and its military engineers had moved in under the command of Colonel Kyd to strengthen the fort’s defences. In doing so Colonel Kyd and his military engineers had not only uprooted the pillar but had left it broken and in pieces by the roadside.

  Captain Hoare was dead of fever before his report could be read to the Asiatic Society but in 1800 his copies were examined by Henry Colebrooke, who was now the only European in Calcutta with a thorough knowledge of Sanskrit. But when presented with Hoare’s eye-copies of the Delhi and Allahabad pillar inscriptions Colebrooke had to confess that he could make no more sense of their pseudo-Greek characters than his distinguished predecessor.4

  By 1800 the EICo had rid itself of the worst of the abuses that had made it a byword for corruption, but these reforms had failed to halt the growing power of the EICo’s Indian Army, a power that the ambitious Lord Wellesley, appointed Governor General in 1798, now exploited to the full. It was said of Lord Wellesley that ‘he was instructed not to engage, if possible, in hostilities with any native power; and yet he waged deadly war with every one of them. He was desired not to add by conquest a single acre to the Company’s territory, and he subdued for them all India from the Himmaleh to Cape Comorin.’5 After using the French Jacobin threat as a pretext to overthrow Tipu Sultan in Mysore, he took on the Marathas of the northern Deccan in what became a hard-fought struggle for power in central India.

  In the course of what became known as the Second Maratha War, Lord Wellesley’s equally ambitious younger brother Arthur Wellesley – the future Duke of Wellington – secured a famous victory that helped break the Maratha confederacy. Fought on 23 September 1803, the battle of Assaye was, in the opinion of the victor, the bloodiest and the finest he ever won. Five days later his battered army brought their wounded north to the little village of Ajanta, at the very heartland of India, where a small mud-walled fort was put to use as a field hospital. The army remained in and around Ajanta for a month, and soon rumours were heard in the officers’ messes of wonderful things to be seen in the caves less than a mile to the south, where a small river had worn through the rock to create a narrow, winding gorge. Known locally as ‘Tiger Valley’, this gorge was said to be the haunt of tigers and best avoided, which may be why the caves and their contents had remained undisturbed for centuries. Then the army moved north, a peace treaty was signed and the caves of Ajanta were forgotten.

  Unashamed imperialist though he was, Lord Wellesley was also determined that India should have administrators who knew the country they were sent to govern. Behind the backs of the EICo’s Court of Directors in London he set up a college in a corner of Calcutta’s Fort William where new recruits to the Indian Civil Service (ICS) could study Indian languages and customs. By 1818 no fewer than a hundred Indian linguists were employed at Fort William College, providing, in Wellesley’s words, ‘the best method of acquiring a knowledge of the manners and customs of the natives of India’. The college had also built up the finest oriental library in the world, amounting to almost twelve thousand printed books and manuscripts. But what Wellesley could never have anticipated was the impact his college had on Bengal itself, where it helped initiate what became known as the Bengal Renaissance, inspiring men such as Ram Mohan Roy to work for reforms that would eventually bring about the end of British rule in India.

  Among those closely associated with Fort William College in its early days, as Professor of Sanskrit and Hindu Law, was Henry Colebrooke. In 1801 he was elected President of the Asiatic Society and held that position until he retired from India in 1814. It was during his tenure that the natural heir to Sir William Jones arrived in Calcutta: John Leyden, a shepherd’s son from the Scotti
sh borders who had studied for the ministry but had shown more aptitude for languages than for theology. Leyden’s friends had found him a position as an EICo surgeon in Madras, where it soon became clear that his talents lay elsewhere. ‘I had determined at all events to become a furious Orientalist’, he wrote to a friend in Scotland two years after his arrival in India.6 His opportunity came when he was appointed medical assistant to the Mysore survey, with a brief ‘to carry on inquiries concerning the natural history of the country, and the manners and languages, &c., of the natives of Mysore’. In the course of his duties Leyden found time to teach himself thirteen Indian languages in as many months.

  Leyden was a curious character. A ‘disposition to egotism’7 was accompanied by uncouth manners, a grating voice and a Scots brogue so broad that only his fellow countrymen could fully understand him. Yet his evident genius won the patronage of Lord Wellesley’s successor, Lord Minto, and he was appointed Professor of Hindustani at Fort William College. A second post as Assay Master of the Calcutta Mint provided him with the means to devote himself to his Indian studies. ‘I may die in the attempt,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘but if I die without surpassing Sir William Jones a hundred fold in oriental learning, let never a tear for me profane the eye of a borderer.’ These were brave words, coming as they did from a man who suffered one bout of sickness after another.

  After completing the first translation into English of the Mughal emperor Babur’s autobiographical Baburnama, John Leyden was asked by Henry Colebrooke to take on the Secretaryship of the Asiatic Society, since the then incumbent was about to retire. The post was unpaid but it had become the Society’s most important position and it would allow Leyden to step into the shoes of his idol, the late Sir William Jones. However, at this point the fate that Leyden had so boldly challenged intervened: he was invited by Lord Minto to accompany him to Java as his interpreter. Arriving at the Dutch settlement of Batavia on 25 August 1811 Leyden lost no time in visiting a library reputed to contain rare Indian manuscripts. He emerged shivering and declared the atmosphere of the room to be enough to give any mortal a fever. Three days later he was dead.