Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  The brick and stone monument at Sarnath as drawn by Shaikh Abdullah for Colin Mackenzie in January 1814. Described as the ‘Samaudh [cenotaph] of Rajah Booth-Sain’, it is better known today as the Dharmekh stupa. (APAC, British Library)

  When Colin Mackenzie next returned to Madras it was as the EICo’s first Surveyor General and with the rank of a full colonel. He now had the authority and the resources to do more or less as he pleased and in March 1816 he returned to the mound at Amaravati with an eleven-strong team of draughtsmen and surveyors. Mackenzie still believed it to be an early Jain monument, but his travels had now alerted him to the possibility that he might be wrong. To his dismay, he found the site all but gutted, its entire central core dug out to make a hundred-foot-square ‘tank’ or reservoir. In the process, three-quarters of its decorated stone surround had gone, leaving only one segment untouched. Of the sculptured slabs that he had seen being uncovered in 1797, some had been used to construct a flight of steps at a nearby tank, others as building material at three temple structures and some mosques: ‘In short,’ Mackenzie complained, ‘these valuable stones of antiquity have been used in various buildings both public and private; those in particular applied to Mussulman mosques have first been carefully divested of every carving by rubbing them on harder stones.’18

  From what little remained Mackenzie was able to make out that the structure must originally have resembled the cenotaph he had seen at Sarnath – but on a far grander scale, and with the addition of an encircling processional pathway with an inner and an outer stone railing. From the remaining section of this railing he and his men extracted more than a hundred exquisitely carved stone slabs and pillars, many portraying complex scenes from history or mythical scenes involving not only kings and queens but also the worship of a quite remarkable range of objects: trees, thrones, parasols, cartwheels, pairs of footprints, deities seated under the protection of cobras and, above all, great dome-like structures similar to the edifice Mackenzie had seen at Sarnath and which appeared to be modelled on the Amaravati mound itself as it might have appeared in its heyday.

  Fortunately for posterity, Mackenzie’s draughtsmen made some excellent drawings (now preserved in the British Library in one album) before they moved on, while Mackenzie himself arranged for some eighty-two slabs and pillars to be moved down to Masulipatam for shipment on to Calcutta. Seven reached the Asiatic Society’s museum, many of the remainder being commandeered by the Assistant Collector of Masulipatam to decorate a curious structure in the town square that became known as ‘Mr Robertson’s Mount’. By the time the next antiquarian visited Amaravati, much of what remained had been ‘carried away and burnt into lime’.19

  One of some ninety drawings of the Amaravati sculptures made by Murugesa Moodaliar in Madras in 1853. It shows three objects of worship: a stupa (top), a Dharmachakra, or ‘Wheel of the Moral Law’ (middle), and the Bodhi tree with the Vajrasana, or ‘Diamond Throne’, at its base. (APAC, British Library)

  It was left to future generations to establish the full significance of Amaravati, perhaps the finest Buddhist monument ever erected in India. Mackenzie and his contemporaries had no idea what to make of the iconography shown on its magnificent sculptures. They also failed to note that many of the earliest of the decorated slabs had been recycled, turned over and new scenes carved on their backs, so that the earlier scenes were hidden from view.

  One of these early slabs is now in the Musée Guimet in Paris (see below). Although badly damaged and incomplete, enough survives to show a king flanked by two lesser male figures who face him with their hands pressed together in the anjali mudra, the ‘gesture of reverence’. The king – who quite clearly has something of a beer-belly hanging over his waist-cloth – has assumed a striking pose, with his right hand raised and his left clenched by his breast. A multi-spoked cartwheel is displayed behind him on the top of a pillar, together with a second, far taller pillar broken at the top but closely resembling Firoz Shah’s Lat and other such columns. A saddled but riderless horse stands at the king’s feet. On one side part of a shrine-like structure and part of the figure of a buxom woman grasping the branch of a tree have survived. The faces of all three male figures appear to have been deliberately defaced.

  The defaced Chakravartin bas-relief, showing a ‘Wheel-turning Monarch’ bestowing universal good government based on the Dharma. (Musée Guimet, Paris)

  A simpler version of this curious scene is shown in a wash drawing by a local draftsman, Murugesa Moodaliar. In the upper panel, a king is shown supported by two male figures on his left and two female figures on his right, with an elephant and a horse in attendance. The king has his right hand raised and his left fist clenched, just as in the first carving. Here, too, his face has been defaced. The acute observer will note other similarities. In the lower panel a king is seated on a throne with a queen below him, with an umbrella bearer in attendance (the parasol denotes royalty). What we should now call the Dharmachakra, or ‘Wheel of the Moral Law’, is displayed behind him and at his feet two monks present a begging bowl which he has filled. Again, an elephant and a horse are in attendance. Clearly, there is a link between the upper and lower panels.

  The importance of these particular slabs as historical documents only began to be realised after a much later round of excavations at Amaravati and the surrounding region, carried out by the professional archaeologist James Burgess in the early 1880s. It was he who first noted that a number of the remaining stone slabs had been carved on both sides and that the structure itself had suffered ‘some violent destruction’ at an early stage, probably in the second century BCE when the Satavahana dynasty was in the process of moving in to fill the vacuum left by the Mauryas. The monument had then been restored and a surrounding colonnade with four gates added, only to be further enlarged some centuries later when the nearby city of Dhanyakataka had become the capital of the Satavahana rulers of Andra.

  Two panels from the Great Stupa at Amaravati, drawn by Murugesa Moodaliar in Madras in 1853. The original bas-relief is in the Chennai Museum. (APAC, British Library)

  Disappointed by what he had found at Amaravati, Burgess moved on to survey the extensive ruins found on both banks of the Krishna River upstream of Amaravati. Many turned out to be Buddhist monastic sites which, in Burgess’s opinion, had suffered the same fate as the Amaravati stupa. One Buddhist monument at Jaggayyapeta, some thirty miles upstream of Amaravati, was less damaged than the rest. Known locally as the ‘Hill of Wealth’, it proved to be a smaller version of the Amaravati structure. Its four gateways, surrounding colonnade and most of its slabs had gone, but a number of slabs that had fallen flat had been overlooked. ‘On a few’, wrote Burgess in the briefest of reports, ‘there were carvings in very low relief and of an archaic type … Some letters on other slabs are of the Maurya type and must date about 200 to 170 B.C.’20

  Burgess made a drawing of the best of these carved slabs which he added to his official report. It is a far more sophisticated version of the scenes shown on the damaged slab from Amaravati in the Musée Guimet and on the upper panel of the Amaravati slab in the Chennai Museum.

  These three scenes all portray a Chakravartin or ‘Wheel-turning Monarch’. The concept of the world-conquering Wheel-turning Monarch has its roots in early Vedic literature as the sovereign who creates an age, and from whom flows moral order, happiness and power based on the cosmic law underpinning the universe. In the Brahmanical context he wields a chakra, a disc-like weapon, to destroy his enemies, which becomes the instrument of Vishnu with the evolution of Hinduism. However, these images from Amaravati and surrounds show the Wheel-turning Monarch as taken over by the Buddhists and made their own. Here the Chakravartin is a secular counterpart to the Buddha who by following his Dharma conquers by moral force alone.21

  The Jaggayyapeta bas-relief shows a Chakravartin, or ‘Wheel-turning Monarch’, surrounded by various symbols: at his feet, a saddled horse and elephant, both symbolising the Buddha; over his head an umb
rella symbolising royalty; on his left his counsellor and treasurer; on his right a yakshi fertility figure; and in the background a Dharmachakra wheel on a pillar and a Buddhist ratna or jewel symbol on a second pillar. The Chakravartin has raised his hand to cause gold to fall from the clouds.

  A fourth slab from Amaravati completes the picture. This now forms part of the Amaravati marbles gallery at the British Museum and dates from Amaravati’s last phase. Here the Wheel-turning Monarch is magnificently ornamented and wears a cloak of the finest filigree or gauze, his status indicated by the royal umbrella held by the female attendant behind him. Now he has only one counsellor and his queen has been outranked by the fly-whisk-bearing yakshi, or fertility goddess, who stands at the king’s left shoulder.

  What is different about this portrayal of the Wheel-turning Monarch is that he is shown in an act of reverence – and he is facing outwards, towards the viewer. The object of his reverence is missing. That was carved on the panel directly above him – which has failed to survive the damage done to Amaravati. This magnificent piece of marble first went on display at the Paris Exhibition in 1867 but its full significance only became apparent sixty years later.

  The Chakravartin bas-relief, probably dating from the first century CE, a masterpiece now in the British Museum’s Amaravati marbles gallery. (British Museum)

  What these surviving images from Amaravati tell us is that the cult of the Wheel-turning Monarch was well established within the Mahayana Buddhist tradition in India at an early age. From India it would spread north to China and beyond.

  6

  The Long Shadow of Horace Hayman Wilson

  The so-called Great Tope at Sanchi, with details, as drawn by William Murray and engraved by James Prinsep for publication in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1837.

  The old fortress at Jaffna, on the northernmost tip of Sri Lanka, was once said to be the strongest in Asia. Today it lies in ruins, having suffered bombardment from land, sea and air. It had been built originally by the Portuguese to control the sea lanes leading to and from the Spice Islands of the East Indies, including the island of Lanka itself – which they renamed Ceilao, from the local Sinhalana or ‘Land of the Lion’. In 1658, Portuguese survivors of the siege of Colombo briefly found refuge here before being expelled from the island by its new rulers, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, known to the British as the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch further strengthened the fortifications, so that by the time the British took over in 1796 there was very little for them to do but change flags.

  What became known as the Dutch Fort remained in an excellent state of preservation until the insurgency initiated in July 1983 by the separatists popularly known as the Tamil Tigers developed into a civil war. Jaffna and its fort became the scene of some of the fiercest fighting, twice changing hands in the course of a bitter, long-drawn-out war that only finally came to an end in May 2009.

  Somewhere in all the rubble is the grave of Major the Hon. George Turnour, the younger son of an Irish earl, Lord Winterton. George Turnour had taken part in the capture of Jaffna from the Dutch as a lieutenant in the 73rd Regiment of Foot and had stayed on as the fort adjutant. He had married the daughter of a refugee French aristocrat and in March 1799 their son, also the Hon. George, was born in Jaffna Fort. Here the boy remained for some years before being sent to England to be educated. The father stayed on.

  When the British took possession of the island they Anglicised Ceilao into Ceylon. It might have become part of the EICo’s Indian possessions but for the scruples of the British government, increasingly vexed by its inability to rein in its Governors General in India. So Ceylon became a crown colony with its own administration, the Ceylon Civil Service, which was fortunate in having as its first governor the Hon. Frederick North. Like his contemporary in India, Marquess Wellesley, North was an aristocrat and an Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, man, and although he lacked Wellesley’s ambition he shared his view that the best administrators were men who aspired to work with the natives rather than over them. These included the French botanist Joseph de Joinville, the first foreigner to make a study of Buddhism in Ceylon, and Captain George Turnour himself, who served as a local administrator in and around Jaffna until his death in 1813 at the age of forty-five.

  Another able member of North’s administration was the lawyer Alexander Johnston, Ceylon’s first advocate general and later chief justice, a man of great erudition but incapable of uttering a single sentence when two or three would do. Johnston might with some justification be termed Ceylon’s answer to Sir William Jones. He had spent his boyhood up to the age of eleven in Madras and Madurai and at one stage had been tutored informally by Colin Mackenzie, which may explain why as an adult in Ceylon he was said to have had an ‘insatiable curiosity about Tamil Saivism and Sinhalese Buddhism’.1 As advocate general, Johnston played the leading role in the abolition of the slave trade on the island and the establishment of trial by jury, and he paved the way for universal education. Like Jones in Calcutta, he was determined that local law should have its place within the judicial system and to this end he made a study of ‘all the customary laws of the various religions and casts [sic] of Ceylon’, before drawing up what became the Ceylon Judicial Code.

  In the course of pushing through his reforms Johnston formed a close friendship with a former slave-owner named Rajah Pakse, said to be the most powerful man on the island. When Johnston needed the cooperation of the elders of the Buddhist Sangha, or church, it was Rajah Pakse who interceded on his behalf and who afterwards secured for him three manuscripts together said to contain ‘the most genuine account which is extant of the origin of the Budhu religion, of its doctrines, of its introduction into Ceylon, and of the effects, moral and political, which those doctrines had produced upon the native government’.2

  Two of these texts were written in Sinhalese (today Sinhala) but the third – called by Johnston the Mahavansi, but more correctly the Mahavamsa, or ‘Great Dynastic Chronicle’ – was in the original Pali. When Sir Alexander Johnston retired from Ceylon in 1819 these gifts went with him.

  This same period saw the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries on the island. They included the Reverend William Buckly Fox, a Wesleyan who made it his business to translate biblical tracts into the local tongues and to this end assembled a Dictionary of the Ceylon-Portuguese, Singalese and English Languages, published in 1819. When he returned to England in 1823 Fox was declared by Johnston to be ‘the best European Pali and Singhalese scholar at present in Europe’. But how he had acquired his knowledge of Pali – if indeed he could read Pali at all – is a mystery, since Pali was at that time as hermetic a language as Sanskrit had been in India before the Wilkins–Halhead breakthrough, although in this case it was the Sinhalese Buddhist monks who refused to share its secrets. Nevertheless, it was Fox to whom Johnston turned when it was decided that his three Ceylonese texts should be published in English.

  Fox’s purported translation of the Great Dynastic Chronicle was duly published in England in 1833 as the first volume of The Mahavansi, the Raja-Ratnacari and the Raja-vali, forming the Sacred and Historical Books of Ceylon. However, the only name to appear on the book’s title page was that of its publisher, Edward Upham, who had died the year before – and to further muddy the waters, the Reverend Fox himself died within months of the book’s appearance. For reasons that have never been explained, Fox’s translation attracted very little public notice in Britain. It may be that the project’s chief supporter, Sir Alexander Johnston, had begun to have doubts. Yet the fact remains that here was the first published English translation of that Lankan epic, the Great Dynastic Chronicle – albeit one made from what was almost certainly a Sinhalese translation of an imperfect copy of the original Pali.

  Even more remarkably, this translation stated that in the very earliest days of the island’s history a strong connection had existed between a Lankan king, named by the chronicle’s translator as ‘Petissa the
Second’, and an Indian monarch, ‘King Darmasoca of Jambu-dwipa [the Indian mainland]’. These two rulers had ‘lived in friendship, and loved each other’. They had exchanged gifts and letters, and the Indian king Darmasoca had written to Petissa to say that he kept the commandments of ‘Budhu’ and desired the king of Lanka to do the same. The consequences of this royal friendship had, it seems, been profound, for it was during the reign of these two monarchs that Buddhism had been established in Lanka, changing the entire course of that island’s history.

  As a demonstration of the importance of this alliance, the compilers of the Great Dynastic Chronicle had devoted several chapters to the Indian monarchs who had ruled over Magadha from the time of Sakyamuni Buddha down to the reign of King Darmasoca. Indeed, the chronicle’s fifth chapter was entirely given over to an account of Darmasoca’s rule, beginning with an account of the rise to power of his grandfather Chandragupta with the help of the Brahman Chanakya very much as given in the Sanskrit verse-drama The Minister’s Signet Ring translated by Sir William Jones. It went on to describe how Chandragupta’s son Bindusara had appointed as his heir his eldest son, Prince Sumana, but that among King Bindusara’s other ninety-nine children was a son called Priyadase. According to Fox’s summary, this prince Priyadase had as a youth been sent away by his father to the city of Wettisa [Vidisha], where he ‘married the princess, called Wettisa, of the royal family called Sacca [Sakya] … and became king of the city Udeny [Ujjain]: he had one son and a daughter by this Queen Wettisa. As this king was very prosperous in every thing, he was styled Asoca Prince.’

  This single passage established a clear link that no one at the time noticed, which was that King Bindusara’s eldest son by his second queen was named ‘Priyadase’ but later came to be known as ‘Asoca’. As told in Fox’s summary, this same Prince Priyadase/Asoca had gone on to sieze the throne of Magadha for himself following the death of his father. Whereupon his brother Prince Sumana ‘made war against the new king, called Asoca of Cusumepura, and Asoka was the conqueror. This conqueror became sovereign king over the whole Jambu-Dweepa.’