This new body was the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (RAS), founded in 1823 following a meeting held at the London home of Henry Colebrooke, who since his retirement from India had gathered about him a circle of other retired ‘Indians’ who shared his Orientalist interests. At the inaugural meeting of the RAS, held at the Thatched House Tavern in St James’s Street on 7 June 1823, Henry Colebrooke followed the example of his mentor Sir William Jones in delivering his own ‘discourse’ on the new society’s aims, declaring that since the origins of Western civilisation were to be found in Asia and England’s success as a world power owed so much to India, it followed that England had a duty to repay this debt. This included making a study of Asia in all its aspects.
Among the many luminaries present on that occasion were the pioneer Sanskritist Charles Wilkins, the Ceylon jurist Sir Alexander Johnston and the retired Colonel James Tod, who agreed to serve as the RAS’s first Librarian. Tod’s first concern was to write up his monumental two-volume Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, which took him the best part of five years. Ill-health then prevented him from completing his Travels in Western India, which was not published until four years after his death in 1835. It meant that Tod’s remarkable discovery of the Girnar rock inscription would remain unknown until 1839.
There is nothing in the records of either the Asiatic Society or the RAS that suggests a rift between these two learned bodies. Indeed, it can be argued that the founding of the RAS in England in 1823 was in direct response to the establishment of the Société Asiatique in France in 1822, and that having two societies that concerned themselves with Asian affairs was better than having one. But there are hints that suggest a distinct froideur between the two societies, one being a brief notice in the journal of the older body that it had rejected a proposal from the younger that it should rename itself the ‘Asiatic Society of Bengal’ and become affiliated to the RAS, another a note in the first issue of the RAS’s journal that copies of its aims had been sent to the EICo’s Madras and Bombay Presidencies – but not to Bengal.
Despite their differences, these two learned bodies were united in their opposition to the creeping Anglicisation that was now taking place in India, under pressure from the evangelical movement and other reformers. Milords Hastings and Wellesley – both founder members of the RAS – and their successors as Governors General had stood firm against the thunderings of the Claphamite Sect and its determination to exchange India’s ‘dark and bloody superstition for the genial influence of Christian light and truth’.12 But with the passing of the India Act in 1813 the evangelicals got their way. Calcutta became a bishopric and the missionaries began to stream in. ‘The thin edge of the wedge being thus fairly inserted in the stronghold of idolatry, the force of truth drove it home,’ was how a contemporary evangelical historian put it, using words that might equally have come from a Muslim historian writing centuries earlier. ‘The Scriptures were now openly distributed. Toleration was no longer conceded only to Hindooism and other idolatries.’13
Female infanticide, slavery and sati (the practice of immolating widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres) were now prohibited by law, but such reforms went hand in hand with a growing contempt for Indian culture in general. In a despatch written by the EICo’s Court of Directors in London in 1821 to Lord Hastings (serving a second term as Governor General), Hastings was warned that ‘in teaching mere Hindoo or Mohammedan learning, you bind yourselves to teach a great deal of what is frivolous, not a little of what is purely mischievous, and a small remainder indeed in which utility is in any way encouraged’. Nine years later the Court of Directors proposed that the ‘Oriental scheme of education’ should be replaced by English: ‘We think it highly advisable to enable and encourage a large number of natives to acquire a thorough knowledge of English, being convinced that the high tone and better spirit of European literature can produce their full effect only on those who become familiar with them in the original language.’14
Orientalists and their allies both in England and in India resisted these moves vociferously, but they were few in number and became fewer still with each passing decade.
At this time fresh accounts began to circulate once more in military circles of caves filled with wondrous paintings on the eastern frontiers of the Bombay Presidency. The rumours were finally confirmed in 1824 when a young cavalry lieutenant, James Alexander of the 16th Lancers, returned to his regiment with news of just such a site: at Ajanta, some sixty miles northeast of Aurangabad. He had taken local leave to go hunting and, ignoring local warnings, had entered the tiger-infested gorge below Ajanta town, accompanied by a local guide. He had soon found himself on the floor of a natural amphitheatre formed by a great bend in the River Waghewa. Above were a series of twenty-six rock-cut caves set into a cliff face of black basalt in two tiers like rows of boxes in a theatre.
Clambering up the face of the cliff, Alexander and his guide reached the lower tier of the caves, occupied only by bats. The branch of a conveniently sited tree gave Alexander access to the upper tier, where the largest and most elaborately decorated caves had been cut. It was clear that they had remained unoccupied for centuries. ‘That these excavations served for the retirement of some monastic society I have no doubt,’ the young cavalryman would afterwards observe. He had seen something quite similar at the well-known Kanheri caves outside Bombay. But what set these caves apart only became apparent when he began to explore their interiors by the light of a brushwood torch. The walls and ceilings of virtually every cave were adorned with paintings of astonishing quality, ‘as exhibiting the dresses, habits of life, pursuits, general appearance and even features of the natives of India perhaps two thousand or two thousand five hundred years ago, well preserved and highly coloured, and exhibiting in glowing tints, of which light red is the most common, the crisp-haired aborigines of the sect of the Buddhists, who were driven from India to Ceylon by the advent of Brahminism’.15
(Above) The interior of Cave 10 at Ajanta, dating from the second century BCE. Modelled on a wooden roofed prayer hall, this was the first cave to be cut into the rock in the Waghewa gorge. A lithograph by Thomas Dibdin reproduced in James Fergusson, Illustrations from the Rock Cut Temples of India, 1845. (Below) A ruler surrounded by his queens and concubines. A drawing by James Burgess of part of a wall painting in the same Cave 10, from his Original Drawings from the Buddhist Rock Temples of Ajanta. (APAC, British Library)
With this discovery Lieutenant Alexander threw open a window into the past to reveal a brightly lit world peopled by gods, demi-gods and lesser beings of flesh and blood, every aspect of whose living and dying was depicted, from the king in his palace harem to the solitary hermit in the jungle: scenes of love and war, triumph and adversity, pageantry and poverty – each crowded scene rendered the more authentic by the details of hairstyle, dress, ornament, utensil, weaponry, musical instrument and much else besides. Many of the paintings had an obvious religious content, showing haloed Buddha figures meditating, teaching and reclining, always watched over by floating beings that could be construed as angels, but the most striking images were those of bare-breasted men and women of exceptional grace and beauty: sad-eyed monarchs clasping lily-flowers in one hand and consorts in the other; queens and princesses riding in state on elephants or being pampered by handmaidens who giggled and gossiped as they went about their duties.
News of Lieutenant Alexander’s discovery was initially confined to military circles and for the next five years the site remained undisturbed. Ajanta’s extraordinary secret was finally revealed to the wider world when a lecture given by Alexander to his brother officers at Sandhurst Military Academy in August 1828 was reprinted in 1830 in the second volume of Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, the official organ of the RAS – soon afterwards retitled the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (JRAS).
Some six months after Lieutenant Alexander’s Sandhurst lecture a Captain Gresley and
a Mr Ralph visited the Ajanta caves, coming away with copies of inscriptions from its walls ‘which were in vain shewn to the pandits of Benares and to the Secretary of the College there’. Mr Ralph also jotted down a vivid stream-of-consciousness account of what they had seen, which became the subject of a ‘most animated and scenic correspondence’. Who the other party in this correspondence was remains unclear but a later reference suggests that Mr Ralph tried and failed to get the Secretary of the Asiatic Society interested.16
It was not until 1837 that the first notice of the Ajanta caves was published in India, in the form of Mr Ralph’s colourful account. This appeared in the pages of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the new organ of the Asiatic Society, now modernised as the Asiatic Society of Bengal – and under entirely new management, having at last emerged from under the long shadow cast by Horace Hayman Wilson.
7
Prinsep’s Ghat
A view of the Ganges from Benares. A lithograph by James Prinsep based on a drawing made during his ten-year residence in Benares as Assay Master of the EICo’s Mint in the city. (From Prinsep’s Benares Illustrated)
Since 1992 an elegant cable-stayed bridge has spanned the River Hooghly, linking the suburb of Howrah and the city of Kolkata, the former Calcutta.1 Officially known as the Vidyasagar Sethu but usually referred to as the ‘second Hooghly bridge’, it is named after Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a key figure in the Bengali Renaissance. At the bridge’s southern (Kolkata) end its overpass skirts the western bastions and the water gate of Fort William, the old EICo citadel that today serves as the headquarters of the Indian Army’s Eastern Command. This was where Lord Wellesley’s Fort William College was sited and where in 1841 Vidyasagar became the head Sanskrit pandit, being then but twenty-one years of age and already renowned for his learning. While Vidyasagar went on to greater things the college went into decline, although it survives as a centre of education in the form of the Kendriya Vidyalaya Government School.
Also overshadowed by bridge and overpass is another memorial to the past: a curious Palladian-style structure made up of a number of classical columns supporting a flat roof. It stands on what was once the landing place where young Britons coming out to seek their fortunes in Bengal were ferried ashore from the ships moored in the river. Once erected, it came to be used as a sort of unofficial gateway of India, welcoming incoming viceroys and other dignitaries, being especially conspicuous during the royal visits of 1875, 1905 and 1910. But that was never the structure’s intended purpose. This is set out in large letters of bronze laid out across one face of the building. They declare: ‘Erected in the honour of JAMES PRINSEP by his fellow citizen’ – the final ‘s’ fell off some years ago and was never replaced. No date is given but the memorial is known to have been erected in 1843.
A postcard from the 1860s, showing James Prinsep’s memorial at the ghat or landing place beside the River Hoogly.
The intervening years were not particularly kind either to the man or his memorial. The area originally known as Prinsep’s Ghat became known as Princep Ghat and even Princes Ghat. Indeed, the little railway station beside the river is today called Princep Ghat. If the site was known at all it was as a romantic ruin that frequently served as a backdrop for advertising or movie shoots.
That has changed in the last decade thanks to the efforts of INTACH, a national body charged with the preservation and conservation of India’s national heritage. Despite a shortage of funds INTACH has helped alter the perception in India that monuments associated with the departed British are unworthy of preservation. In the case of the Prinsep memorial INTACH proposed that this would make a marvellous venue for cultural events – as an arena whereon India’s own native traditions could work in harmony with its colonial past. In January 2008 that vision was realised with the launch of the first Prinsep Ghat dance festival, made possible with the support of an international bank and the goodwill of the Indian Army.
It was here that twenty-year-old James Prinsep was brought ashore in September 1819 and almost exactly twenty years later carried down to the river in a litter to begin his journey home, but as ‘an entire wreck … His overstrained mind … covered in desolation … his body sunk into debility.’2
Prinsep never recovered his mind or his health and died in England in April 1840. But tragic as his death was, Prinsep’s twenty crowded years in India were well spent, and he was particularly fortunate in being in good company as the youngest of three remarkable Englishmen, born within months of each other at the turn of the century, who between them changed the course of Indian studies. Despite their shared interests and exchanged correspondence and the influence they exerted on each other, the three never actually met face to face.
George Turnour was the eldest of the three by a matter of months. The next in seniority was Brian Houghton Hodgson, who came out to join the EICo’s civil service in Calcutta in 1818. Hodgson’s superiors soon discovered that his fragile state of health was no match for the Indian Hot Weather and found a post for him as Political Assistant and Secretary to the British Resident in Kathmandu in Nepal. Here he would remain almost without a break for the next twenty-six years, initially as a subordinate but from 1829 onwards as the Resident.
The youngest of the three and the last to arrive in the East was James Prinsep, born in Bristol of a father who had made a fortune in Bengal only to lose it in England, as a result of which he was raised in such straitened circumstances that for a time he and a younger brother had to share one pair of breeches. With his blue eyes, pale complexion, blond hair, slight frame and what his sister Emily described as his ‘constitutional shyness … and a timidity of speech’,3 the teenage James appeared to be an unlikely genius. Forced by poor eyesight to give up studying architecture he turned down the offer of a civil service cadetship in India and was eventually offered a post at the EICo’s Bengal Mint. Here Prinsep learned all the necessary skills of a metallurgist under the eyes of the Calcutta Mint’s Assay Master, Horace Hayman Wilson, the great Sanskritist and grand panjandrum of the Asiatic Society.
The twenty-year-old James Prinsep lectures in Calcutta on the latest scientific advances with ‘a set of the most showy experiments’. (Lithograph from a portrait by George Chinnery, 1820)
Eighteen months later Prinsep was posted upriver to manage the EICo’s second Mint at Benares, where he turned his scientific expertise to good use in making a census of the city’s inhabitants and drawing the first detailed map of the city. He also honed his architectural skills in a series of ambitious civil engineering works, which included building a three-arched bridge, restoring the foundations of the great mosque built by Aurangzeb beside the Ganges and constructing a deep underground tunnel that drained a large swamp in the centre of Benares and became the centrepiece of the city’s new drainage system. Prinsep was also a talented artist, and the skills he developed in Benares in etching and lithography were to stand him in very good stead in later years.
The enthusiasm with which Prinsep threw himself into every sort of project for the improvement of the city won him friends in all sections of the community, so that when in 1830 the two main sects within the Jain community were locked in dispute they turned to him for help. Their argument was over whose remains were buried within the great dome-like monument that stood just outside the city boundaries at Sarnath. This might be resolved if he were to use his engineering skills to open the structure, ‘that it might be ascertained to which party (Digambari or Swetambari) the enclosed image might belong. My departure from Benares alone prevented my satisfying their curiosity in 1830.’4 The Jains’ request had come too late – but it was not forgotten.
Meanwhile in Kathmandu Brian Hodgson had been using his leisure hours to pursue a quite breathtaking range of intellectual pursuits. The hostility of the rulers of Nepal towards their old enemies, and what Hodgson saw as ‘the jealousy of the people in regard to any profanation of their sacred things by a European’5 meant that throughout his time in Nepal Hod
gson was a virtual prisoner within the grounds of the British Residency on the outskirts of Kathmandu. He overcame this restriction as far as he could by recruiting a number of local Nepalis and training them to act as his researchers and artists, all paid for out of his own pocket.
One of Hodgson’s earliest objects of enquiry was the Buddhism practised in Kathmandu Valley. It led him to Amrita Nanda Bandya, ‘the most learned Buddhist, then or now, living in this country’,6 who soon came into conflict with Hodgson’s own pandit, a Brahmin from Benares, after he brought Hodgson a Buddhist text attacking ‘the Brahmanical doctrine of caste’.7 One outcome of their long and fruitful relationship was a growing collection of ancient Buddhist scriptures written in Sanskrit gathered by Amrita Nanda in response to Hodgson’s request for information on the Buddhism practised in Nepal.
Through Amrita Nanda Hodgson learned that the original inhabitants of Kathmandu Valley, the Newars, had been among the earliest converts to Buddhism and that many of what appeared to be Hindu temples in Kathmandu and the surrounding towns were in fact Buddhist monasteries, nearly all of them dilapidated structures built around a courtyard dominated by a central dome-like structure known as a chaitya, the local equivalent of the stupa, adorned with both Buddha images and Hindu deities. Hodgson’s local artists were put to work drawing these structures, leading him to conclude that the simplest of these chaityas were the earliest, particularly those in and around the town of Patan, which were ascribed to Sri nama Miora, ‘the honoured one named Maurya’, or to Dharmarajya, ‘the Dharma king’.
Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor Page 11