One of the five ancient stupas said to have been built by King Ashoka in the city of Patan in Kathmandu Valley. Drawn by one of William Hodgson’s Nepali artists, its caption in Hodgson’s handwriting reads: ‘The Ipi Thuda Vihar and Chaitya [monastery and stupa] at Patan in the Valley of Nepal. Built in the 1000th year of the Kali era by Sri Nama Miora [the honoured one named Maurya].’ (Royal Asiatic Society)
Between 1820 and 1823 Brian Hodgson sent no less than 218 Sanskrit manuscripts down to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, where they were acknowledged by Dr Wilson and then ignored. Undeterred, Hodgson continued to supply further collections of Buddhists texts, including two complete sets of the Tibetan canon of Buddhist literature known as the Kanjur. Again, he received a lukewarm response. He then set about making what he could of the material still available to him, the first fruits of which appeared in Asiatick Researches in 1828 under the title of ‘Notices on the Languages, Literature, and Religion of the Bauddhas of Nepal and Bhot [Tibet]’.8
This was to be the first of fourteen essays published by Hodgson on the subject of Buddhism, and to his great gratification it elicited an enthusiastic response from the illustrious French Orientalist Eugène Burnouf, at that time Europe’s leading authority on the Pali language. A friendship developed by correspondence and many more Sanskrit texts followed. This unprompted generosity went down badly with some of Hodgson’s compatriots but it led to Burnouf taking up Sanskrit, culminating in the publication in 1844 of his seminal Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme Indien – probably the most influential work on Buddhism to be published in the nineteenth century.
Horace Hayman Wilson’s narrow-mindedness – for it was Wilson whose inaction had so frustrated Hodgson – also blighted the career of that most eccentric of scholars the Hungarian Csoma de Koros, who had spent years travelling through Central Asia in search of the language roots of Hungarian before settling in a Buddhist monastery in Ladakh to learn Tibetan. In 1824 de Koros offered to make the fruits of his researches into Tibetan language and literature freely available to the Asiatic Society, an offer he repeated in 1827. Wilson spurned both offers. After three further years of isolated study in Zanskar, during which he compiled the first Tibetan dictionary and grammar, de Koros applied to the EICo for permission to enter India. Fortunately, this application reached the desk of Governor General Lord Bentinck, who recognised the value of de Koros’s work as an aid to trade and saw to it that he and his manuscripts were made welcome at the Asiatic Society. Here he was given a small government salary and put to work by Wilson cataloguing Brian Hodgson’s collection of Sanskrit and Tibetan works. This had the advantage of enabling de Koros and Hodgson to continue a correspondence begun while the former was still in Zanskar. Nevertheless, Wilson’s hostility towards the Hungarian continued and he refused to sanction the publication of de Koros’s Tibetan Grammar and Tibetan–English Dictionary on the grounds of cost.
However, in 1832 the logjam created by Wilson’s long tenure as Secretary of the Asiatic Society at last began to break up when he secured the newly established Boden Chair of Sanskrit at Oxford. Two years earlier James Prinsep had joined him in Calcutta as deputy Assay Master, and had been proposed by him for membership of the Asiatic Society. The two had then collaborated on an article for Asiatick Researches on the coins in the Asiatic Society’s museum, centred on the lettering on a number of gold and silver coins, ‘some of them resembling the characters of the staff of Feroz Shah at Delhi, and on other columns’.9 The article was illustrated by four plates of engravings of coins, some of which had been acquired by the Italian mercenary General Ventura from his excavation of the Manikyala Tope, a famous landmark beside the Sadak-e-Azam or ‘Great Highway’ (afterwards known as the Grand Trunk Road) running from Peshawar to Calcutta.
These engravings were the work of James Prinsep, whose involvement had the happy effect of leading him to make his own study of Indian coins. Two published articles on Roman and Greek coins found in India were soon followed by others on Indian coinage, each progressively demonstrating Prinsep’s growing authority in an area of numismatics about which virtually nothing was known. Unlike Wilson and his predecessors, Prinsep had neither classical learning nor language skills but he made up for these shortcomings by the application of scientific method, a rigour that underpinned all his work.
Prinsep’s collaboration with his senior drew him into the heart of the Asiatic Society. Within months he had accepted Wilson’s proposal that he succeed him as the Society’s Secretary. A double transfer of power then took place as Prinsep took over both as Assay Master at the Calcutta Mint and as Secretary of the Asiatic Society. And no sooner had Prinsep been voted in as the latter than he set about making the position his own with the energy that had characterised his years in Benares. One of his first actions was to propose Csoma de Koros as an honorary member, after which he found quarters for the Hungarian at the Society, doubled his salary and secured funds for the publication of his two books. Prinsep also brought in a native clerk from Fort William College, Babu Ramkomal Sen, to act as his personal secretary – the first Indian to hold a recognised post within the Society. Although opposed to the modernisers led by the Bengali reformer Ram Mohun Roy, Sen was an able Sanskritist and later became principal of Calcutta’s Sanskrit College.
Prinsep’s main concern was to revitalise the Asiatic Society. It now became the Asiatic Society of Bengal (ASB), while the bulky folio tomes of Asiatick Researches were replaced by the more accessible octavo-sized pages of the Journal of ‘the Asiatic Society of Bengal (JASB), henceforward published in regular monthly issues. Prinsep appointed himself the JASB’s editor and in the first issue sent out a rallying cry that was a deliberate echo of the appeals made by Sir William Jones and Henry Colebrooke, calling all ‘naturalists, chemists, antiquaries, philologers and men of science, in different parts of Asia’ to unite in their efforts and to ‘commit their observations in writing and send them to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta’.10
It was a calculated attempt to jolt the Orientalist movement out of the defeatism into which its members had retreated over the preceding decade, and it worked, initiating a second round of advances in Indian studies even more dramatic than the first – made possible by the happy combination of a second Jones at the centre and some outstanding scholars on the periphery, extending from Brian Hodgson at one end of the subcontinent to George Turnour at the other. But it was James Prinsep upon whom every advance depended, no longer the creature of ‘constitutional shyness’ he had been a decade earlier but an inspirational leader. ‘Himself the soul of enthusiasm,’ wrote one of his admirers, the botanist Dr Hugh Falconer, ‘he transferred a portion of his spirit into every enquirer in India; he seduced men to observe and to write; they felt as if he observed and watched over them; and the mere pleasure of participating in his sympathies and communicating with him, was in itself a sufficient reward for the task of a laborious and painful investigation.’11
The timing was perfect. That first joint article on the coins in the Asiatic Society’s collection had provoked a flood of correspondence, much of it coming from the Punjab and Afghanistan: from foreign mercenaries such as the Italian and French generals Ventura and Court; travellers such as Lieutenant Alexander ‘Bokhara’ Burnes, Dr James Gerard and Dr Martin Honingberger, and adventurers such as the supposed American from Kentucky who called himself Charles Masson but whose true identity was James Lewis, a deserter from the EICo’s army, inspired to visit Afghanistan by reports of gigantic statues at Bamiyan.
This correspondence was supported by tangible evidence in the form of gold, silver and copper coinage, confirming James Tod’s view that Macedonian rule in Bactria and ancient Gandhara had given way to an equally dynamic ‘Indo-Scythian’ civilisation that had reached deep into northern India and had embraced Buddhism. Indeed, Buddhism itself had patently flourished throughout that region for centuries prior to the Islamic invasions. Writing to James Prinsep from beyond the Khyber Pass at Jelalabad
in December 1833, Dr Gerard reported the existence of scores of ‘topes’ similar to those found in the Punjab. These stupas were to be found ‘along the skirts of the mountain ridges’ between Kabul and Jalalabad and ‘very thickly planted on both banks of the Kabul river’. Known locally as ‘spirit houses’, they produced coins, jewels and reliquaries when opened but gave few clues as to who had built them. ‘Whether we view them as contemporary with the Grecian dynasty’, speculated Gerard, ‘or of those subsequent satrapies which emanated from the remains of that kingdom, the same thoughts recur, the same suggestions arise: Who were these kings?’12
Meanwhile, in the Punjab, the French soldier of fortune General Claude Auguste Court, engaged to remodel the artillery of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s army along French lines, was spending his leisure hours excavating stupas for their coins and relics and taking note of other ancient monuments – among them a large boulder close to the village of Shahbazgarhi on the edge of the Vale of Peshawar abutting the mountains of Swat – ‘a rock on which there are inscriptions almost effaced by time’.13 Falling into the old trap of associating the inscription with Alexander and his Macedonian successors, Court tried and failed to decipher its ‘Greek’ inscription.
To every field report published in the JASB Prinsep appended his own notes, based on a better understanding of the early Indian ruling dynasties made possible by the evergrowing numbers of Indian coins now coming his away. The finest of these coins had been inspired by the Mediterranean models first introduced by Alexander’s Macedonian satraps and continued by their successors in Bactria and the Gandharan region: coins bearing a regal portrait on the obverse, a variety of human or animal figures on the reverse, and with Greek lettering on one or both faces. Prinsep’s studies showed that the later Bactrian coins continued to bear proper Greek characters on the obverse but a different script on the reverse, superficially similar but clearly relating to some other language. This same writing also shared some but not all of the characters of the writing found on Firoz Shah’s Lat and on the rock inscriptions found by Major Tod at Girnar and by Andrew Stirling at Khandagiri in Orissa.
Only later did Prinsep realise that what he termed ‘Gandharan’ writing was in fact a quite separate language altogether – today known as Kharosthi – with its own script and often written from right to left. Indeed, in what was to be one of his last articles he announced that he had identified almost half of the consonants of this unknown language and three of its vowels.14 Another half-century would pass before philologists realised that Kharosthi was based primarily on Aramaic, the official written and spoken language of the Persian empire. It would take another full century before it was understood that the Brahmi alphabet of the Mauryas was itself a development from Kharosthi, improved to better express Indian language sounds.15
Another type of coinage proved even harder to understand: small coins of a type already shown by Colonel Colin Mackenzie to have been used all over India: ‘They are of irregular form,’ wrote Prinsep, ‘being square, angular, round, oval, etc. They bear no inscription, are not infrequently quite plain, and in any case have only a few indistinct and unintelligible symbols.’
These symbols included lions and elephants but most appeared to be more basic, such as radiating suns or crosses. One symbol, in particular, caught Prinsep’s eye: ‘a pyramidal building, with three tiers of rounded suras, spires or domes … It may be intended to portray some holy hill,’ he proposed, in what was a remarkably astute conjecture.16 Further study led him to conclude – correctly – that what are today known as punch-marked coins must have constituted India’s earliest coinage.17 Prinsep further assumed that these crude and relatively easy to produce punch-marked coins must have given way to the Greek model, as used by the Graeco-Bactrian rulers and their successors, the Scythians and Kushans. In fact, they continued to be minted throughout that period.
Helping Prinsep to sort out his coins was an enthusiastic subaltern engineer Alexander Cunningham, who had arrived in Calcutta in 1833 as a nineteen-year-old military cadet and had found himself at a loose end while he waited for his first posting. When despatched up-country to Benares two years later, Cunningham kept in touch with Prinsep through a correspondence that continued until the latter’s death. ‘Even at this distance of time,’ Cunningham was to write four decades later, ‘I feel that his letters still possess the same power of winning my warmest sympathy in all his discoveries, and that his joyous and generous disposition still communicates the same contagious enthusiasm.’18
Much of this correspondence concerned their shared interest in Indian coins but there was also Prinsep’s unfinished business relating to the great stupa at Sarnath. At Prinsep’s request and expense Cunningham hired a team of labourers and, having checked that no religious group would be offended, erected a wooden ramp that gave him access to the top of the 143-foot-high structure, today called the Dharmekh Stupa (see illustration, p. 86). Beginning in January 1835, he and his workmen sank a shaft down through the centre of the monument, a process that took far longer than anticipated as the structure turned out to have been built of blocks of stone secured to each other with iron clamps. Only when they had dug down to a depth of 110 feet did the work become easier, for here the stonework gave way to large flat bricks. The digging then went on until they reached the soil at the base of the structure without producing any result. ‘Thus ended my opening of the great tower,’ wrote Cunningham, ‘after 14 months labour and at a cost of more than five hundred rupees’,19 all he had to show for it was an inscribed slab from the Gupta era (330–550 CE) uncovered at an early stage of the excavation.
James Prinsep’s engravings of various coins recovered from two ancient sites, Behat and Kanouj, in the Gangetic plains, including a number of what are today known as punch-marked coins (e.g. bottom right, number 22). The ‘stupa’ symbol can be seen on the reverse of several coins (numbers. 1, 5, 8 and 22). (JASB, Vol. III, May 1834).
However, in the course of the dig Cunningham became friendly with an old man who had been involved in the quarrying of the site reported on by Jonathan Duncan back in 1795. What Cunningham learned was that this quarrying had completely destroyed a second stupa as large as the remaining structure. But it had also uncovered an underground chamber full of stone statues, which had been hastily covered over for fear of disturbing evil spirits. He was able to lead Cunningham to the spot, where his workmen unearthed a cache of ‘about 60 statues and bas-reliefs in an upright position, all packed closely together within a small space of less than ten feet square’. All were Buddhist and had been deliberately hidden. From the copious layer of ash overlaying his find Cunningham concluded that some catastrophic fire had brought an end to the Buddhist occupation of the site.
Then duty called and Cunningham was ordered away to join the staff of the Governor General as an aide-de-camp. He just had time to arrange for some twenty of those statues bearing inscriptions to be transported downriver to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. It was four years before he was able to return to Benares, only to learn that by order of the city magistrate, Mr Davidson, the remaining forty statues together with fifty cartloads of carved stonework had been thrown into the River Barna to serve as a breakwater for the city’s first iron bridge. This vandalism made a deep impression on Cunningham, who in later years became almost obsessive in his calls for the protection of ancient sites.
James Prinsep always acknowledged the help he received from his young correspondent. However, it was his own formidable intelligence that counted. Over the course of six years he wrote a series of increasingly erudite articles on Indian coinage, each illustrated with his own engravings, which together laid the foundations of Indian numismatics up to the post-Gupta period, an achievement eclipsed by his later work on proto-Sanskrit languages. But it was the one that led to the other, for it was his work on the lettering on Indian coins that directed Prinsep towards the inscriptions on Firoz Shah’s Lat and the other inscribed columns and rocks.
Prinsep was i
nitially unaware of the efforts made by Sir William Jones, Henry Colebrooke and others, all faithfully recorded in the early volumes of Asiatick Researches – and since forgotten. However, during his time in Benares he had visited the fort at Allahabad and had been dismayed to see how the sun and rain were eroding the lettering on the broken pillar lying just inside the fort gates. ‘I could not see the highly curious column lying at Allahabad, falling into decay, without wishing to preserve a complete copy of its several inscriptions,’ he wrote. ‘The Moghul emperor Jehangir was content to engrave his name and proud descent in a belt through the middle of the most ancient inscription – the English would rightly deprecate such profanation, but their own passive neglect has proved in a few short years even more destructive than the barbarous act of the Muhammadan despot.’20
The more he looked into the subject the more intrigued Prinsep became by the mystery of the undeciphered script on that fallen column, a script he now termed ‘No. 1’. He wrote to one of his correspondents in Allahabad, Lieutenant Thomas Burt of the Bengal Engineers, and within weeks was rewarded with a set of drawings, which he engraved and published in the March issue of the JASB in 1834.21 That article provoked an immediate response from Brian Hodgson in Kathmandu, whose letter Prinsep read to a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in May.
Hodgson began with a complaint, which was that some years earlier he had sent Horace Wilson drawings of what he called the Mattiah Lat pillar (today better known as the Lauriya-Nandangarh pillar), seen by him on his travels to and from Nepal, together with an eye-copy of the ancient inscription it bore. Dr Wilson had failed to respond. Now he attached drawings of two more pillars he had encountered. These were the three pillars seen and recorded in earlier times by John Marshall, Father Marco della Tomba and others.
Brian Hodgson and Csoma de Koros had each independently established that the Tibetan alphabet was based on written Sanskrit. Hodgson now proposed to Prinsep that his ‘No. 1’ was probably an early written form of the same language: ‘When we consider the wide diffusion over all parts of India of these alphabetical signs, we can scarcely doubt their derivation from Deva Nagari, and the inference is equally worthy of attention that the language is Sanscrit.’22
Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor Page 12