Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  After planting the Bodhi-tree cutting in his pleasure garden at Anuradhapura the king of Lanka follows his neighbour’s example by establishing stupas and monasteries throughout his island. ‘Thus this ruler of Lanka, Dewanamapiyatissa [sic],’ declares the Great Dynastic Chronicle, ‘for the spiritual benefit of the people of Lanka, executed these undertakings in the first year of his reign; and delighting in the exercise of his benevolence, during the whole of his life, realised for himself manifold blessings.’ He reigns for forty years, his death being followed eight years later by that of Dharmashoka’s son Mahinda, ‘the light of Lanka’.

  From this point onwards the Great Dynastic Chronicle has little more to say about events on the Indian mainland – except for one ambiguous paragraph at the start of its twentieth chapter, which tells how in the thirtieth year of King Ashoka’s reign his Buddhist queen Asandhimitra dies, and how four years later he remarries:

  Dharmashoka, under the influence of carnal passions, raised to the dignity of queen consort, an attendant of his former wife. In the third year from that date, this malicious and vain creature, who thought but of the charms of her own person, saying ‘this king, neglecting me, lavishes his devotion exclusively on the bo-tree’ – in her rage attempted to destroy the great bo with the poisoned fang of a toad. In the fourth year from that occurrence [i.e. after the death of Queen Asandhimitra, thus thirty-seven years after Ashoka’s anointing], this highly gifted monarch Dharmashoka fulfilled the lot of mortality.

  This summary hints that all was not well in King Ashoka’s royal household in the last years of his life. Thirty years after his anointing his beloved Buddhist queen dies. Four years later he takes one of his late wife’s attendants as his new queen, who becomes so jealous of her husband’s devotion to Buddhism that in the thirty-seventh year after his consecration she seeks to destroy the Bodhi tree. Ashoka dies soon afterwards, but he is accorded none of the laudatory remarks that the Great Dynastic Chronicle gives his son or his daughter at their deaths. The disappointment is almost palpable. King Devanama-piyatissa’s great ally and model sets Buddhism in motion in Lanka, but then at the very end of his life lets himself and the Buddhist cause down.

  With Dharmashoka’s death the Great Dynastic Chronicle loses all interest in the affairs of the mainland. In fact, India as Jambudwipa features only once more, when a later Lankan monarch builds a new relic stupa at Anuradhapura and invites Buddhist monks from all over India and beyond to attend its inauguration. According to the Great Dynastic Chronicle, many thousands of monks attend from Rajgir, Isipatana, the Jetavana monastery at Sravasti, the Mahavana monastery at Vaishali, Kosambi, the Ashokarama at Pataliputra, Kashmir, Pallavabhogga, ‘Alasanda [Alexandria] the city of the Yonas [probably modern Kandahar]’, the ‘Vinjha forest mountains’, the Bodhimanda monastery, the ‘Vanavasa country’, and the ‘great Kelasa vihara’.36 It seems that a century after the death of King Dharmashoka Buddhism was flourishing mightily both in Lanka and on the Indian mainland.

  George Turnour’s Epitome of the History of Ceylon, Compiled from Native Annals: and the First Twenty Chapters of the Mahawanso showed beyond all reasonable doubt that King Ashoka was not merely the instrument for the establishment of Buddhism in Lanka but a major figure in Indian history in his own right, whose sovereign authority extended throughout the subcontinent and whose influence as a propagator of Buddhism extended beyond its borders. And for those who cared to look, it provided an important clue as to why the complex of stupas at Sanchi might have some special significance in the Ashoka story. The Great Dynastic Chronicle had described how the Prince Ashoka’s first wife Devi, whom he had first met at Vidisha, afterwards lived in Chetiyagiri, ‘the Hill of the Stupa’, so named because of ‘the superb Chetiya wiharo [monastic complex] which had been erected by herself’. It was from here that their eldest son Mahinda had set out with his fellow missionaries to take the Buddhist teachings to Lanka. There are several hills in close proximity to the town of Vidisha but the nearest is the hill today known as Sanchi. Here, it seems, lay the explanation as to why that particular Buddhist site might have become the object of special attention both during and after Ashoka’s lifetime.

  With Turnour’s revelations the stage was now set for what would be the last act of the mystery of the golden pillar of Firoz Shah: a dramatic denouement that would come in the form of a double revelation.

  8

  Thus Spake King Piyadasi

  James Prinsep’s page of engravings of the Sanchi stupa donations, which when brought together gave him the first clues to the deciphering of the Brahmi script. (JRAS, Vol. VIII, July 1837)

  In Britain the year 1837 is best remembered for the start of the Victorian era. To political historians of India, 1837 represents the black year in which the Orientalist movement, led by Professor H. H. Wilson in Oxford and James Prinsep’s elder brother Henry Thoby Prinsep in Calcutta, was finally defeated by the Anglicists and the evangelicals under Thomas Macaulay and Lord Bentinck; a defeat that led to the imposition of English as the chief medium of instruction and the ending of government funding for the printing of works in the vernacular.1

  But for students of Indian studies the year 1837 will always be remembered as the annus mirabilis of Indian historiography and philology; the year in which astonishing revelations came so thick and fast that there was no time to absorb the implications of one before the next had been announced.

  The year began with James Prinsep’s announcement that he had identified two inscribed stone slabs in the collection of the Asiatic Society of Bengal as stolen property. Some months earlier he had asked a correspondent in Orissa to re-examine the rock inscription at Khandagiri near Bhubaneshwar, first identified by Andrew Stirling twenty years earlier. However, this correspondent had been prevented from carrying out that examination by the local Brahmins, who had complained that some years earlier an English colonel had stolen a number of stone effigies and inscriptions from their temples. That disturbing news provoked Prinsep into searching through the records of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, leading to the unmasking of the culprit as the late General Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart, who a generation earlier had scandalised Calcutta society by adopting Hindu manners and urging English memsahibs for the sake of their health to throw off their tight dresses and wear saris instead.2 Prinsep arranged for two stone slabs taken by Stuart from Bhubaneshwar to be sent down the coast to Cuttack, the provincial capital of Orissa, where his contact restored them to their proper owners.3

  The correspondent concerned was Lieutenant Markham Kittoe of the 6th Native Infantry and he was at this time in disgrace. Kittoe was one of John Company’s misfits, a keen young antiquarian who had come out to India in 1825 as a seventeen-year-old military cadet but failed to get along with his brother officers. He had found love in the arms of a colonel’s daughter, Emily, whom he had married in 1835 and who had already borne him the first two of their nine children. But he had made the mistake of accusing his commanding officer of oppression, and was at this time awaiting a court martial at which he would be found guilty of ‘insubordinate, disrespectful, and litigious conduct, unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman’, and discharged from the service. It was James Prinsep who had come to his rescue by finding him temporary employment as secretary of the Coal Committee, a post which allowed him to tour Orissa ostensibly in search of coalfields.

  The goodwill engendered by the return of the two stolen slabs now worked to Kittoe’s advantage, for he was allowed to make a copy of the Khandagiri rock inscription, but as he did so he heard talk of a second rock inscription, said to be on a hill on the other side of Bhubaneshwar town and on the far side of the River Daya – a name that in Sanskrit means ‘compassion’, the significance of which would only later become apparent. However, when Kittoe tried to track down this new inscription he was again frustrated, this time by the local inhabitants, the Oriyas. Only the intervention of a passing Hindu religious mendicant from Benares enabled Kittoe to find what he was looking
for. ‘Such is the aversion the Ooriyahs have of our going near their places of worship’, Kittoe afterwards wrote, ‘that I was actually decoyed away from the spot, when within a few yards of it, being assured that there was no such place, and had returned for a mile or more, when I met with a man who led me back to the spot by torchlight. I set fire to the jangal [jungle] and perceived the inscription, which was completely hidden by it.’4

  Lieutenant Markham Kittoe, with the Ashokan elephant rock at Dhauli shown behind him and the temple spires of Bhubaneshwar in the distance. (A drawing by Colesworthy Grant published in his Lithographic Sketches, 1850)

  The hostility experienced by Kittoe remains one of the hazards of Indian archaeology to this day, sometimes inspired by religious prejudice but more often than not arising from the belief that anyone who comes to dig into old ruins is seeking buried treasure, and anything inscribed on rocks or pillars must be the key to those treasures.5

  When Kittoe returned to the rock the following morning to begin copying the inscription, he was confronted by a she-bear and her two cubs who had made their home at the base of the rock. To evade them, Kittoe scrambled up the rock face, where he found himself confronted by a small elephant – or, rather, ‘the fore half of an elephant, four feet high, of superior workmanship … hewn out of solid rock’. The bear cubs had fled – but not the mother, so Kittoe shot her. Only then was he able to examine the inscription on the rock face below.

  The Dhauli Rock Edict inscription, with the head of the Dhauli elephant just visible on the terrace above. This photograph was taken by Alexander Caddy in 1895. (APAC, British Library)

  What Kittoe termed the Aswastama6 rock inscription is better known today as the Dhauli Rock Edict, taking its name from the nearby village of Dhauli. These edicts had been chiselled across the face of a rock just below the summit of one of three low hills overlooking the River Daya: ‘The rock has been hewn and polished for a space of fifteen feet long by ten in height, and the inscription cut thereon being divided into four tablets, the first of which appears to have been executed at a different period from the rest; the letters are much larger and not so well cut. The fourth tablet is encircled by a deep line, and is cut with more care than the others.’

  The arrival in Calcutta of Kittoe’s copy of the Dhauli inscription was opportune, for it coincided with the receipt of two other sets of facsimiles of inscriptions. The first had been copied from the great elephant rock at Girnar discovered by Colonel James Tod back in 1823. This had been taken at Prinsep’s request by a Mr Wathen from an earlier set of facsimiles made by the Reverend Dr John Wilson, a Scots surgeon and missionary who, besides founding the first school for Indian girls in Bombay and giving his name to what became Wilson College, was a keen antiquarian. The other set of inscriptions had come from the Great Tope at Sanchi, taken by Captain Edward Smith of the Royal Engineers in answer to Prinsep’s call for copies of its inscriptions and drawings of its sculptures.

  Smith’s Sanchi inscriptions were accompanied by some lively drawings showing a number of the sculptures that adorned the four gateways of the Great Tope, but Prinsep had eyes only for the former, for in addition to the several pillar inscriptions from the Gangetic plains, he now had three more different inscriptions from three widely separated locations in Western, Central and Eastern India – all of them written in the same ‘No. 1’ script.

  One of the readers who responded to Prinsep’s appeal for illustrations of the Sanchi sculptures was Captain William Murray, assistant to the commander of the Saugor and Narbada Territories. He sent in two drawings, both taken from the cross-beams of the fallen South Gateway of the Great Tope. Prinsep selected for reproduction in the JASB the more striking of the two scenes, showing a city under attack and what appeared to be a monarch on a huge elephant directing the assault. Unknown to Murray and Prinsep, both scenes were part of the Ashokan story that would not be understood until eighty years later (for an earlier drawing of the upper scene see p. 108, and for a later photograph see p. 240). (Royal Asiatic Society)

  ‘This inscription will be seen to have arrived at a most fortunate moment,’ declared Prinsep when he rose to speak at the monthly meeting of the ASB held on 7 June 1837. The minutes of that momentous meeting state quite simply: ‘The Secretary read a note on the inscriptions, which had proved of high interest from their enabling him to discover the long-sought alphabet of the ancient Lat character (or No. 1 of Allahabad) – and to read therewith the inscriptions of Delhi, Allahabad, Bettiah, Girnar, and Cuttack [the Dhauli inscription] – all intimately connected, as it turns out, in their origin, and in their purport.’

  Prinsep’s note was subsequently published in the JRAS, providing posterity with a step-by-step explanation of how he came to break the code of No. 1.7

  The inscriptions from Sanchi were of two sorts. The first two recorded grants of land from the early Gupta dynasty of the fourth century CE. The remaining twenty-three (see illustration, p. 153) consisted of a number of much shorter inscriptions in No. 1 script found on the crosspieces of the pillars that formed the colonnade surrounding the stupa, most of them cut in a rough and ready way that was in marked contrast to the finely wrought sculptures that decorated the four gateways. ‘These apparently trivial fragments of rude writing’, declared Prinsep, ‘have instructed us in the alphabet and the language of those ancient pillars and rock inscriptions which have been the wonder of the learned since the days of Sir William Jones.’

  Prinsep went on to explain how, as he set about arranging the inscriptions to appear together as one lithographed plate for publication in the Society’s Journal, he had been struck by the fact that virtually every one ended in the same two letters: a snake-like squiggle formed by six straight lines, followed by an inverted capital T with a dot on one side:

  ‘Coupling this circumstance,’ he continued, ‘with their extreme brevity … it immediately occurred to me that they must record either obituary notices, or more probably, the offerings and presents of votaries.’ These two characters were in many cases preceded by a third symbol resembling a double-barbed hook or anchor in which one of the hooks had been distorted to curve downwards rather than up:

  By yet another of those happy conjunctions of timing that surrounded this great breakthrough, Prinsep had only days earlier been working on the coins of Saurashtra in western India.8 ‘Now this [character] I had learned from the Saurashtra coins, deciphered only a day or two before, to be one sign of the genitive case singular, being the ssa of the Pali, or sya of the Sanskrit.’ If that character represented the genitive ‘of’ (just as the apostrophe ‘s’ in English represents ‘of’) it was logical to suppose that the rest of each short phrase concerned a donation and the name of the donor: ‘“Of so-and-so the gift,” must then be the form of each brief sentence.’

  Both in Sanskrit and Pali the verb ‘to give’ was dana and the noun ‘gift’ or ‘donation’ danam, sharing the same Indo-European root as the Latin donare (to give) and donus (gift). This led Prinsep to ‘the speedy recognition of the word danam (gift), teaching me the very two letters d and n.’ The snake-like squiggle represented the sound ‘da’, the inverted ‘T’ the sound ‘na’ and the single dot the muted ‘m’, together forming the word danam.

  With these two letters and the genitive singular understood, all the concentrated study that Prinsep had put in over the previous four years suddenly and dramatically fell into place. It was the eureka moment of Indian philology: ‘My acquaintance with ancient alphabets had become so familiar that most of the remaining letters in the present examples could be named at once on re-inspection. In the course of a few minutes I thus became possessed of the whole alphabet, which I tested by applying it to the inscription on the Delhi column.’

  Having announced the single most important advance in the study of Indian history, Prinsep then backed off, explaining that before he could give the Society his complete translation of the Firoz Shah Lat inscription he needed to prepare a fount of type for his alphabe
t of No. 1, which he was himself in the process of making. He then sought to mollify those present at that historic meeting by offering them a few titbits. These included the statement that the language of the No. 1 inscriptions was ‘Magadhi … the original type whereon the more complicated structure of the Sanskrit has been founded. If carefully analyzed, each member of the alphabet will be found to contain the element of the corresponding number, not only of the Deva-Nagari, but of the Canouj, the Pali, the Tibetan, the Hala Canara, and of all the derivates from the Sanskrit stock.’

  In other words, No. 1, the written language of the Magadhans, was the ancestor of most of India’s modern languages and alphabets. Written from left to right, its alphabet consisted of thirty-three basic letters, each representing a consonant followed by the ‘a’ vowel, the other vowels being formed by the addition of ancilliary glyphs to the base consonant, with only initial vowel sounds having their own specific characters. It had all the simplicity of an original, developed to give written expression to a popular spoken language, Prakrit, which had preceded Sanskrit. Initially, Prinsep called this alphabet ‘Indian Pali’, but it was later recognised that the early Brahmans had termed it Brahmi lipi, the ‘language of Brahma’. Today it is best known as Brahmi, with the earliest form often being referred to as Ashokan Brahmi.