Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  Five further chapters of the Great Dynastic Chronicle were devoted to the close relationship between King Petissa the Second of Lanka and King Asoca of India, in his later years styled Darmasoca. In the last chapter King Asoca’s reign of forty-four years had been summarised in one succinct paragraph:

  He had first conquered his enemies, and reigned four years without being crowned; and, after he was crowned, he had been succouring 60,000 impostors for three years; and on the fourth year that he was crowned, he was converted by the grand priest Niggroda, and embraced the religion of Budhu … and he had also commenced to build in the same year 84,000 temples, at the expense of ninety-six kelles in gold, which temples he completed within the time of three years. On the sixth year that he was crowned, he caused his son, the priest Mihindu, and his daughter Sangamittrah, to be created priest and priestess … On the seventeenth year, he caused to be compiled the law of Budhu, and had restored it to its original purity. On the eighteenth year that he was crowned, he had sent the bough of the holy tree to Ceylon. On the twelfth year after this, he solemnised the funeral ceremony of his Queen Asandimittrah by burning her corpse. On the fourth year after that, he was again married to a young queen, called Tissahraccah. On the third year of his second marriage, this Queen Tissahraccah, through malice, had pierced a prickle, called mandoe, in the holy tree, to kill it, after which he reigned but four years only.

  This remarkable story was first set down in print in England in 1833 – and ignored. However, notice of its appearance was published in Ceylon, where the news came as a shattering blow to a young Ceylon Civil Servant named George Turnour.

  George Turnour had returned to the land of his birth as a twenty-year-old Ceylon Civil Service cadet in 1820 and had spent his first six years as a junior administrator in a variety of posts in and around Colombo, the island’s capital. He had then been promoted to be Government Agent in the province of Saffragan, with his headquarters at the town of Ratnapura, a centre of Sinhalese Buddhist culture. He was by then thoroughly at ease with vernacular and written Sinhalese but not with its main root, Pali, the language in which the island’s Buddhist texts were written. Despite the opposition of the local monks, Turnour began to study Pali and within a year of his arrival was reading that ancient language. In the course of his studies he came to hear of a much-prized but rarely read Pali text, the Mahavamsa, said to detail the reigns of fifty-four Lankan kings of the Great Dynasty – the Mahavamsa of the title – and one hundred and eleven sovereigns of the Sulavamsa or Lesser Dynasty.

  Finding a copy of this Great Dynastic Chronicle was not the problem, since most monasteries on the island possessed what they claimed to be authentic copies. The difficulty was that the text had been so overlaid with mystical hyperbole that even the best Pali readers among the Buddhist priests found it well-nigh unintelligible. Hearing of Turnour’s quest, a Buddhist priest named Gallé came to him and explained that what was required was a tika or ‘commentary’ that could be applied to the poem to demystify it and transform it into a coherent narrative. Gallé then made it his business to find such a commentary, eventually tracking down a copy in the ancient rock monastery of Mulkirigalla, near Tangalle in the south of Ceylon.

  With this commentary and an authentic copy of the Great Dynastic Chronicle obtained from the same monastic source, Turnour was now able to cut through the verbiage to get to the heart of the matter: a coherent narrative of the Buddhist history of Lanka extending over a period of more than two thousand years. Turnour also discovered that to compile the earliest section of the island’s history the authors of the Great Dynastic Chronicle had drawn on an earlier chronicle known as the Dipavamsa, or ‘Island Chronicle’, subsequently described by Turnour as ‘the principal historical record in Ceylon … comprising the history of Ceylon from B.C. 543 to A.D. 301’.

  At Turnour’s behest, Gallé began a second search, which resulted in the discovery of a copy of the Island Chronicle. Thus armed, George Turnour in 1827 began to work on an accurate English translation of the Great Dynastic Chronicle – a project that he had frequently to put to one side as his official duties took him from Ratnagiri to Tamankudawa and then on to Kandy, where he served as revenue commissioner for four years from 1828 to 1832.

  The first that Turnour knew of Reverend Fox’s supposed translation of the Great Dynastic Chronicle was when he read an article in the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society in the form of ‘Remarks furnished by Captain J. J. Chapman of the R. E. upon the ancient City of Anarajapura or Anaradhepura, and the Hill Temple of Mehentale, in Ceylon’, published in 1834. While on a shooting trip in the great wilderness that made up the central plains to the north of Kandy, Captain Chapman had taken the opportunity to explore a series of man-made reservoirs and ruins that extended for many miles. The lakes alone, he declared, ‘rivalled the most remarkable labours of antiquity’, pointing to ‘an amount of population and a state of prosperity infinitely superior to what exists at present’.3 Another striking feature of this ruinous landscape was a number of bell-like brick mounds all buried in undergrowth, some standing more than 250 feet high.

  These were the remains of the ancient city of Anuradhapura, which had been known of for some years but had remained largely unexplored. Chapman had been amazed by what he saw and what he learned from the priests of the one functioning temple at Anuradhapura, a modest structure directly associated with one of the oldest legends of the island: the sacred Bo-tree under which Sakyamuni Buddha had attained enlightenment and which, it seems, had been miraculously transported from India to the island. Chapman was told that this was no miracle but historical fact, as set down in the island’s ancient chronicle, the Great Dynastic Chronicle, excerpts from which he now quoted. He had read Fox’s translation in its proof stage and had been given permission by its publisher to quote from it.

  We can only imagine what George Turnour must have felt when he first saw in print and in English a text he had spent the better part of six years translating, much of those years passed in isolation and with ‘the absence of all sympathy with his pursuits on the part of those around him’.4 He had himself just published a digest of the Great Dynastic Chronicle in the Ceylon Almanac for 1833, but it was just that, an outline, and it had excited little interest outside Ceylon. His response was to abandon his plans to publish his own translation of the Great Dynastic Chronicle.

  Over the previous two decades the armies of the EICo had continued to push ever deeper into the Indian interior in a series of campaigns: against the Marathas and the marauding gangs known as the Pindaris in central India south and west of the Gangetic plains; and against the Gorkhas of Nepal along the foothills of the Himalayas. It was from among their ranks that the next round of discoveries was made.

  In March 1814 two columns of troops entered North Bihar with orders to drive the Nepalese back into the Himalayan foothills. Their line of march took them past the stone column at Lauriya-Araraj, which was recorded for posterity in a water-colour drawn by Lieutenant J. Harris of the 24th Regiment of Foot. A peace treaty was subsequently signed which required the Nepalese to surrender North Bihar to the EICo and to accept the presence of a British Resident in Kathmandu.

  In 1818 a more striking discovery took place in central India when a military force led by Colonel Henry Taylor made camp under a small, neatly rounded hill in the open country north-east of Bhopal, not far from the village of Bhilsa (today Vidisha). The hill was known locally as the chaitya giri, or ‘hill of shrines’, but is today better known as Sanchi. As was the custom, Taylor’s officers ended the day with a spot of hunting to liven the pot. On climbing Sanchi hill to its summit they found themselves surrounded by the remains of a number of astonishingly well-preserved structures of brick and plaster of a kind generally spoken of as topes, a corruption of the Sanskrit stupa and the Pali thupa. The largest of these so-called topes was in the form of a hemispherical dome surrounded by a processional pathway enclosed within a massive balustrade of red stone. This balustrade
was divided into four quadrants by entrances at the cardinal points, each adorned by an intricately ornamented gateway. Three of these magnificent gateways were still standing and they were covered on every surface with ‘exquisitely finished sculptures’.

  At least three of the officers returned to make sketches of what they initially took to be a Jain temple, one of them – Lieutenant John Bagnold of the 14th Bengal Native Infantry – observing that a number of the stone images that littered the site appeared to have been deliberately defaced. However, it was the central monument’s magnificent gateways that chiefly caught Bagnold’s eye. On one such drawing he listed the main figures shown:

  A winged tiger … elephants male drawing a female seated behind … winged antelopes … and elephant … devee [devi, ‘goddess’] bathed by elephants … a wheel or sun on pedestal worshipped … figures on lions couchant … representations of the Building & 2 trees … trees & crowd of worshippers … procession in the centre a car drawn by four horses a crowd of armed men about it … A devee on a lotus … wheel or sun 2 females worshipping … figures on Bulls couchant … Building surrounded by worshippers … a female under a tree … figures having clubs on their shoulders … numbers of deities under them a train of worshippers … four elephants supporting a wheel.5

  For one of Bagnold’s superior officers, Major William Franklin, the chief attraction seems to have been the carved scenes on the gateway on the southern side of what they now named the Great Tope. This gateway had fallen, leaving its decorated pillars and cross-beams broken and scattered over the ground, making them more accessible than the others. Franklin evidently sat down to draw the panoramic scene depicted on one of these architraves, quite unaware that it was a key piece in the Ashokan jigsaw. His drawing shows a king in a horse-drawn chariot approaching a monument shaped rather like the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral with a pair of angels hovering above. On the other side a number of men and women wearing elaborate turbans appear to be making obeisance to the monument.

  ‘Sculptures at a Jeyne Temple in the province of Malwah AD 1820’; Major William Franklin’s watercolour based on a drawing made during his earlier visit to Sanchi. (Royal Asiatic Society)

  In that same year of 1818 a very different kind of discovery was made by a young administrator named Andrew Stirling in the district of Bhubaneshwar in Orissa, on the eastern coast of the subcontinent between Calcutta and Visakhapatnam. While on his official duties Stirling had come to a hill named Khandagiri five miles west of the Hindu holy city of Bhubaneshwar. It was honeycombed with rock-cut caves, many occupied by Jain and Hindu ascetics who informed Stirling that ‘the place had its origin in the time of Buddha, and that it was last inhabited by the Rani of the famous Raja Lalat Indra Kesari, a favourer of the Buddhist religion’.6 Halfway up the hill, on the overhanging brow of a natural rock cave known locally as the Hathigumpha or ‘Elephant’s Cave’, Stirling spotted that an area fifteen feet across and ten feet high had been smoothed and polished to create a base for an inscription extending over seventeen lines. He informed the Surveyor General, Colonel Colin Mackenzie. ‘The Brahmins refer to the inscription with shuddering and disgust’, Stirling wrote, ‘and to the Budh Ka Amel, or time when the Buddhist doctrines prevailed, and are reluctant even to speak on the subject. I have in vain also applied to the Jains of the district for an explanation.’

  Some months after Stirling’s discovery, Colin Mackenzie came to see the Elephant’s Cave inscription for himself and at once recognised the writing to be ‘in the very identical character which occurs on the pillars at Delhi’. Under his direction, Stirling made an eye-copy of the inscription, noting that the same writing was now being reported on a number of ancient monuments scattered far and wide across India: ‘Any reader who will take the trouble of comparing the Khandgiri inscription with that on Firoz Shah’s Lat at Delhi, on the column at Allahabad, on the Lat of Bhim Sen, in Sarun, a part of the Elephanta, and a part of the Ellora inscriptions, will find that the characters are identically the same.’

  Tucked away in this same account by Stirling is a reference to an enormous stone pillar seen by him inside the Hindu temple of Bhaskareshvara in Bhubaneshwar. It appeared to Stirling that the temple had been constructed around the stone column, which he described as being forty feet high. When the Bhaskareshvara lingam was next reported on, in the 1880s, it had shrunk to a mere stump, rising no more than four feet in height. Its significance might have been forgotten but for the discovery that would come in 1929 of the head and shoulders of a stone lion in a pit just forty feet north of the Bhaskareshvara temple, followed by the further recovery of a stone bell-capital and fragments of a pillar temple from an old tank or reservoir two miles west of Bhaskareshvara. These would add weight to the claim that all were parts of the same pillar, which had once stood on the site now occupied by the Bhaskareshvara temple.7 The sensitivities of the temple authorities have prevented the matter from being taken any further.

  It had always been Colin Mackenzie’s intention to publish a major work on the Amaravati stupa and much else besides, drawing on the hoard of manuscripts, coins, statuary, inscribed copper plates, drawings and copies of inscriptions he and his assistants had accumulated over the years. But he was already a sick man when he visited Stirling’s Elephant Cave on Khandagiri Hill. As the Hot Weather of 1821 came on he was advised to take in the sea air, and it was as he sailed down the Hoogly River towards the Bay of Bengal that Colin Mackenzie died. He was aged sixty-one.

  Thanks to the efforts of his friends and admirers Mackenzie’s collection was bought from his young widow for the then extraordinary sum of £10,000, the purchaser being Horace Hayman Wilson, acting on the instructions of the EICo. But Wilson’s only interest lay in the classical Sanskrit texts that formed the bulk of Mackenzie’s fifteen hundred manuscripts. The remainder, including 152 volumes of inscriptions and translations, 2630 drawings and 6218 coins, was stored away in the Asiatic Society’s basement, where it was allowed to moulder for decades before being sent to the EICo’s museum at its London headquarters in Leadenhall Street. Many of these documents fell victim to termites, but one that survived was an eye-copy made of an inscription carved on a rock above a waterhole in the countryside between the district capitals of Bellary and Kurnool in Madras Presidency, having been collected by Colin Mackenzie during his time as surveyor of the Madras region in the 1790s. The significance of the inscription would not be recognised until 1946, when the document caught the eye of a researcher who passed the details on to the government epigraphist for India. Thanks to the directions attached to the eye-copy the original rock inscription would be located in 1952, leading to the discovery of a hitherto unknown Ashokan Minor Rock Edict.8

  Another victim of Wilson’s telescopic vision was Major James Tod, who in the course of eighteen years’ service as Political Agent in the region known at this time as Rajputana (today Rajasthan) amassed a collection second only to Colin Mackenzie’s. Tod’s main focus of interest was the Rajput ruling clans of central India, but in his latter years of service he began collecting ancient coins, even going so far as to employ agents who during the rainy season went to Mathura and other cities located beside the Ganges to ‘collect all that were brought to light by the action of the water, while tearing up old foundations, and levelling mouldering walls. In this manner, I accumulated about 20,000 coins, of all denominations.’9

  In 1823 Tod was advised to leave India for the sake of his health. He chose to make his way down to Bombay by a circuitous route that took him to the celebrated Jain temples on the holy mountain of Girnar in the Kathiawar peninsula on the western seaboard. Here on its lower slopes he and his entourage came upon ‘a huge hemispherical mass of dark granite’ shaped rather like a kneeling elephant, almost its entire surface covered in writing.

  ‘The memorial in question’, Tod noted, ‘is divided into compartments or parallelograms, within which are inscriptions in the usual antique character … Each letter is about two inches long, most symmetri
cally formed, and in perfect preservation … I may well call it a book; for the rock is covered with these characters, so uniform in execution, that we may safely pronounce all those of the most ancient class, which I designate the “Pandu character”, to be the work of one man. But who was this man?’10

  The Girnar edict rock. A lithograph engraved by Captain Markham Kittoe, from a drawing by Lieutenant Postans, and published in the JASB in 1837.

  Like Stirling and Mackenzie at Bhubaneshwar, Tod was immediately struck by the writing’s affinity to ‘the inscriptions on the triumphal pillars at Delhi’. With the help of his Jain interpreter he copied down two sections of text.

  Tod’s notice to the Secretary of the Asiatic Society of his discovery failed to elicit any response. This was particularly unfortunate, since Andrew Stirling had just published at his own expense an illustrated account of his Elephant Cave inscription discovered at Khandagiri in Orissa on the eastern seaboard. As a result, thirteen years passed before anyone in India became aware of the close affinities between these two rock inscriptions on opposite sides of the Indian subcontinent.

  Tod took his entire collection with him when he returned to England, where he wrote a ground-breaking article on India’s Hellenistic coinage. However, he professed himself baffled by the writing on the coins of those who had succeeded the Greeks as rulers in north-west India. ‘The characters have the appearance of a rude provincial Greek,’ Tod wrote. ‘That they belonged to Parthian and Indo-Scythic kings, who had sovereignties within the Indus, there cannot be a doubt.’11 This article Tod published not in Asiatic Researches but in the first transactions of a new learned society set up in England, supposedly to complement the Asiatic Society but to all intents a rival body.