Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  Cunningham’s jibe about the Puranas was aimed directly at the scholar most closely associated with their translation, Professor Horace Hayman Wilson, and it hit its mark. The EICo’s Court of Directors in London decided that an archaeological enquirer was indeed required and turned to Professor Wilson for advice on who was best qualified to fill such a post. The position went to another protégé of the late James Prinsep, Captain Markham Kittoe, thanks in part to his translation of the Bhabra rock inscription, better known today as the Bairat-Calcutta Minor Rock Edict. This energetic Captain Thomas Burt of the Royal Engineers had found on a chunk of grey granite lodged at the back of a rock shelter on a hill known as the bijak ki pahari, or ‘hill of the writing’, overlooking the old Jaipur–Delhi road close to the Rajasthan border. One surface of the rock had been smoothed flat and polished, and bore a short eight-line inscription very neatly chiselled in Brahmi characters.

  It was this unimpressive-looking rock that initiated a gentlemanly rivalry between Alexander Cunningham and Markham Kittoe. Cunningham was then aged twenty-six, ambitious, well connected and highly thought of within military and political circles, even if he sometimes trod a fine line between his military duties and his Indological pursuits. Kittoe was the older of the two by six years, and by his own admission ‘a self-educated man, and no Classic or Sanskrit scholar’, his language skills ‘woefully deficient’. His court-martial verdict had been quashed by order of the Governor General but he was still viewed with suspicion by the military authorities. Yet it was Markham Kittoe whose star first appeared to be in the ascendant, following the publication of his reading of the Bairat-Calcutta inscription in the JRAS.

  Kittoe’s translation had been made ‘with the aid of the learned Pandit Kamala Kanta’,12 and it was subsequently shown to be wildly fanciful, for, learned or not, the pandit had misinterpreted the inscription as a Vedic tract. Kittoe’s confusion was understandable, for the Ashokan edicts so far discovered had all been monumental, whether on pillars or boulders, and this eight-line inscription appeared rudimentary by comparison. Furthermore, all the other inscriptions had opened with the declamatory phrase ‘Thus spake Piyadasi, Beloved-of-the-Gods’, whereas this inscription began Piyadasi laja magadhe sangham abhivademanam or ‘Piyadasi king of Magadha salutes the Sangha’.

  When more accurately translated by the French scholar Eugène Burnouf,13 it proved to be an order rather than edict, directed specifically at the Buddhist Church, with Ashoka speaking as ruler of Magadha rather than emperor of the Indian subcontinent. After first declaring his reverence for the ‘three jewels’, of Buddhism, in the shape of the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, the king went on to advise the Sangha to take note of certain Dharma texts as spoken by Bhagavata Budhena or ‘Lord Buddha’. It then cited seven specific texts by their titles and ordered that these should be constantly listened to and memorised, both by monks and nuns and by members of the Buddhist laity.

  Buddhist scholars continue to argue over what specific texts Ashoka was here referring to, but they seem to be relatively minor Buddhist scriptures. That immediately raises the question of why the king of Magadha should have gone to the trouble of publishing such an order, for the implications are unmistakable: this was a royal command directing the Buddhist community to toe the Buddhist line according to Ashoka, king of Magadha.

  The Bairat-Calcutta inscription provided the clearest confirmation yet of what scholars like Burnouf already suspected: that Ashoka was not only deeply committed to the Buddhist cause but directly involved in shaping its course, even to the extent of making it known what teachings he thought monks and nuns should be committing to memory (bearing in mind that at this time all religious teachings were passed down from teacher to disciple by oral transmission only). It also referred specifically to Lord Buddha, a fact that even Professor Horace Wilson – when finally confronted by an accurate translation – had to admit did rather suggest that King Piyadasi might be a Buddhist ruler, even though he continued to maintain that, whoever else he was, King Piyadasi was not King Ashoka. What no one could then have known was that this was to be the only location where Ashoka had been found to refer specifically to the Buddha in his edicts, that this was almost certainly one of his earliest rock inscriptions to be put up, and that he hereafter appears to have gone to some pains to present his Dharma as inclusive and not specifically Buddhist.

  Although Kittoe’s translation of the Bairat-Calcutta rock inscription was wayward, it impressed Horace Wilson – which helps to explain why it was that when Markham Kittoe and Alexander Cunningham competed to follow the trails of the Chinese travellers, the better candidate lost.

  So eager was the new archaeological enquirer to steal a march on Cunningham that as soon as he received news of his appointment in May 1846 he set out for Bihar, even though the Hot Weather was well advanced. Kittoe may have been ill-equipped and understaffed but he had what mattered: an English version of Abel-Rémusat’s Foé Koué Ki, ou Relations des Royaumes Bouddhiques, specially translated for him by an obliging friend at the Asiatic Society of Bengal, J. W. Laidley.14 The information given by Faxian proved to be astonishingly accurate, allowing Kittoe to locate and identify many of the sites associated with the life of Sakyamuni Buddha in southern Bihar. The big disappointment was Patna, where Kittoe could find no signs of its distinguished past as Pataliputra, capital of Magadha. He fared much better at Rajgir, site of the first Magadhan capital of Rajagriha, where he had no difficulty in identifying many important Buddhist sites associated with the life of Buddha as seen by Faxian.

  In the Cold Weather months of 1847–8 Captain Kittoe resumed what he termed his ‘rambles through Bihar’. At Bodhgaya he cleared away some of the sand that had buried much of the base of the Buddhist temple there – today known as the Mahabodhi Temple – and in doing so uncovered the remains of a stone railing, the posts of which had been decorated with carved medallions. Without realising the significance of what he had found, Kittoe made drawings of more than forty of these medallions, some of which were purely decorative, depicting a variety of animals and mythical beasts, while others showed human worshippers praying before a range of objects that included stupas, Bodhi trees and Dharma wheels. He went on to make a more careful survey of the rock-cut caves in the Barabar and Nagarjuni Hills, where he identified four new inscriptions in Brahmi script. He sent his eye-copies directly to Eugène Burnouf in Paris, who established that three of the inscriptions had been set there by order of Ashoka, here calling himself simply ‘King Piyadasi’ without any reference to ‘Beloved-of-the-Gods’. Two of the caves had been donated by Ashoka twelve years after his consecration and the third in his nineteenth year. But Burnouf also showed that all three caves had been donated not to the Buddhists but to an order of ascetics known as Ajivikas, who were neither Jain, Buddhist nor Hindu, but a sect of atheists who followed the precepts of their founder Maskarin Gosala, a contemporary of Sakyamuni Buddha and the Jain philosopher Mahavira. Indeed, it now turned out that the two Barabar caves donated by Ashoka’s descendant Dasharatha were also donations to the Ajivikas – not to the Buddhists, as Prinsep had thought. So here was Ashoka and his descendant bestowing royal patronage on others besides the Buddhists – very much in line with the sentiments contained in Ashoka’s RE 7.

  Kittoe continued his survey of Bihar over a second year but his efforts failed to satisfy the authorities and he was ordered to Benares to design and build the city’s new Queen’s College, which was being built to replace Jonathan Duncan’s Sanskrit College. Kittoe hated his new job, confiding to Cunningham that it gave him no time to pursue his archaeological enquires. What was particularly frustrating for Kittoe was that he now knew from his reading of Faxian and Xuanzang what Cunningham had not known back in 1835 when he had dug into the great Darmekh stupa outside Benares at Sarnath – that this was the site of one of the four most sacred places in Buddhism: the Deer Park where Buddha Sakyamuni had preached the discourse known to all Buddhists as the Turning of the Wheel of t
he Moral Law. Xuanzang, in particular, had left a detailed account of the two great Ashokan stupas he had seen there, and the Ashokan pillar ‘smooth as jade and as reflective as a mirror’.

  When, in the Cold Weather season of 1851–2, Kittoe at last got his chance to excavate at Sarnath, he botched it, probably for reasons connected with his failing health. He came away with little more than further evidence of catastrophic destruction: ‘All has been sacked and burned – priests, temples, idols, all together; for in some places, bones, iron, wood, and stone, are found in huge masses, and this has happened more than once.’15

  That was Kittoe’s last throw. He began to develop virtually identical symptoms to those experienced by his hero James Prinsep and, like his old patron, he was sent home to die. ‘Alas poor Kittoe,’ wrote Cunningham when he heard the news of his death, even though it meant the archaeological field was now clear of rivals.

  11

  Alexander Cunningham the Great

  Lion capitals, broken architraves and other pieces of sculpture near the Great Tope at Sanchi, photographed by the archaeologist Joseph Beglar in 1870. (APAC, British Library)

  Between 1845 and 1849 the armies of the EICo fought two wars that ended in the annexation of the Punjab and the extension of John Company’s borders as far north-west as the Khyber Pass. Major Alexander Cunningham was engaged in both wars but in the lull between the first and the second he was despatched to Ladakh as head of a boundary commission, with orders to demarcate the frontier between India and Tibet (still disputed to this day). It was onerous work but he still found time to visit Kashmir and explore the region’s distinctive temple architecture, which he thought far superior to anything he had seen in the Indian plains and ascribed, quite unreasonably, to the lingering influence of the Greeks. Cunningham also took the opportunity to climb up to the thousand-foot summit of the Throne of Solomon peak overlooking the town of Srinagar in order to explore the Shaivite temple of Shankaracharya perched on its summit. This ancient temple was said to have been founded by the ninth-century reformer of Hinduism who had given it its name, but Cunningham was pleased to discover that even the local Brahmins ascribed its erection to King Ashoka’s son Jalauka, the Shiva-worshipping ruler so glorified in the River of Kings chronicle for his part in restoring Hinduism to Kashmir after the heretical excesses of his Buddhist father.

  Cunningham was particularly keen to visit one particular archaeological site on the northern borders of the Punjab. This had been the subject of two articles which had recently appeared in the JRAS,1 the first written by the supposed American adventurer Charles Masson, the other by the Assistant Secretary of the RAS, an unassuming, self-taught philologist named Edwin Norris, who in the course of many years spent as a humble clerk at the EICo’s London office in Leadenhall Street had moved on from his private study of the Cornish language to specialise in the cuneiform writing of Assyria and Babylon. Both articles concerned a rock inscription on the Punjab frontier, first discovered by the French mercenary General Court back in the 1830s but reported just too late for James Prinsep in Calcutta to do more than note its existence.

  In 1838 Charles Masson had travelled to the site at considerable personal risk to take the first impression of the inscriptions, which he found set on two faces of a large rock on a hill about a thousand yards from the village of Shahbazgarhi. His eye-copy and impression, made on two strips of ‘fine British calico’,2 after several days spent laboriously cleaning the two sides of the rock, had eventually found its way to England and the RAS. The then director of the RAS – who else but the ubiquitous Professor H. H. Wilson – had found it to be written in an alphabet significantly different from the Brahmi of the known Ashokan Rock and Pillar Edicts, and had passed it on to the Society’s Assistant Secretary, Edwin Norris.

  After some days’ study of the Shahbazgarhi writing, Norris noted ‘a group of letters of frequent occurrence representing, according to the value to such of the characters as correspond with those on the coins of Bactria, the word piyasa … preceded by three letters which I could not identify … A further investigation, and an examination of the list of names in Turnour’s Mahawanso, convinced me that the word was Devanampiya.’3 The all-important difference was that the word as it appeared here was written, not from left to right, as in Pali and Sanskrit, but from right to left, as in Aramaic.

  Realising that this was another Ashokan edict rock Norris turned to another member of the RAS, John Dowson, who had spent some years teaching in India. They together compared the Shahbazgarhi inscription with the RAS’s copies of the Girnar Rock Edict and realised that they were dealing with two versions of the same text written in related but different languages and characters. The Shahbazgarhi Rock Edict was written in James Prinsep’s ‘Bactrian-Pali’ – Kharosthi – and it confirmed Prinsep’s theory that two distinct sets of characters had co-existed side by side in the north-west corner of the subcontinent, both being used for writing what was essentially the same pre-Sanskrit and pre-Pali tongue of Prakrit.

  Norris read his paper on the Shahbazgarhi Rock Edict at a meeting of the RAS only a matter of months before his death. It was subsequently published in the autumn issue of the JASB in 1846, accompanied by a note from Wilson, in which he commended Norris’s work but reiterated his conviction that this and the other edicts had nothing to do with Ashoka.

  Now in January 1847, in an unsanctioned visit about which he remained silent for some years, Cunningham crossed the Indus by way of the bridge of boats at Attock and made his way to the village of Hoti Mardan in the Yusufzai plains north of Nowshera. This was three years before Hoti Mardan became the regimental headquarters of the famous Corps of Guides Cavalry and Infantry raised by Captain Harry Lumsden in 1847,4 and for good strategic reasons, for the village stood at the crossroads of two important routes: one leading north from Peshawar to the Malakand Pass that gave access to Swat; the other being the ancient east–west trade route known as the Sadak-e-Azam, or ‘Great Highway’, which followed the course of the Kabul River as far as Charsadda before skirting round the foothills of the Mahabun massif to reach the crossing-point of the Indus at the edge of the plains.

  The village of Shahbazgarhi straddled the Great Highway a few miles east of Hoti Mardan, at a point where the highway was joined by a road coming down from the mountains of Mahabun by way of the defile known as the Ambeyla Pass. Here, on the side of a hill overlooking the village and the highway, King Ashoka had chosen to display another set of his Rock Edicts in a manner strikingly similar to those at Girnar and Dhauli.

  The elephantine rock at Shahbazgarhi, photographed by James Craddock in 1875. Rock Edicts 1–1 are carved on the eastern face of the boulder, as seen above. (APAC, British Library)

  ‘The great inscription of Asoka’, Cunningham noted, ‘is engraved on a large shapeless mass of trap rock, lying about 80 feet up the slope of the hill, with its western face looking downwards towards the village of Shahbazgarhi. The greater portion of the inscription is on the eastern face of the rock looking up the hill, but all the latter part, which contains the names of the five Greek kings, is on the western face.’ Cunningham was mistaken in describing the Shahbazgarhi rock as a ‘shapeless mass’. It was, in fact, shaped very like a seated elephant, as were the two Rock Edict sites so far discovered. The fact that these three sites – at Girnar, Dhauli and now Shahbazgarhi – together enclosed a triangle of land that extended to three thousand miles was a striking demonstration of how far Ashoka’s authority had extended.

  Cunningham had no time to take an impression or make an eye-copy of the edicts but he observed that Shahbazgarhi village was surrounded by the remains of what, according to the local Yusufzai villagers, had once been the capital of the region. They pointed to several mounds of ruins as having been inside the city, and to two well-known spots, named Khaprai and Khapardarh, as the sites of the northern and eastern gates of the city: ‘The truth of their statements was confirmed by an examination of the ground within the limits specified, w
hich I found everywhere strewn with broken bricks and pieces of pottery.’5 What Cunningham also learned was that the village had acquired its name – literally in Pashto, ‘the home of the king of eagles’ – from a shrine on the top of the Rock Edict hill, supposed by some to be the tomb of a Muslim saint but regarded by others as the grave of an unbeliever. That led Cunningham to John Leyden’s translation of the memoirs of the first Mughal emperor Babur, Baburnama.

  In the course of his journey down the old highway in the year 1519 Babur had camped at Shahbazgarhi and had found the prospect from the top of its little hill very beautiful. But he had taken offence at the hilltop shrine and had ordered its destruction: ‘It struck me as improper that so charming and delightful a spot should be occupied by the tomb of an unbeliever. I therefore gave orders that the tomb should be pulled down and levelled with the ground.’ Babur’s actions at Shahbazgarhi raised all sorts of questions in Cunningham’s mind but twenty-three years were to pass before he was in a position to provide answers.

  On this same journey to the Punjab’s north-west frontier Cunningham became aware that another military officer in the area shared his antiquarian interests. He was Major James Abbott, part of the first wave of British political officers brought in to administer the Punjab frontier, initially in alliance with the Sikh government and then replacing it. ‘Uncle’ Abbott, as he became known, had made his mark as a young cavalry officer with a daring mercy mission to Khiva to rescue some Russian hostages. The bid had cost Abbott two fingers on his sword hand but it led to his selection in 1846 as the right man to impose British authority on Hazara (not the region in Afghanistan known for its much-persecuted Shia inhabitants but the less well-known mountain country east of the Indus River in what is now northern Pakistan). In the course of six years spent among the Hazarawals, Abbott came to identify closely with the mountain tribesmen – too closely for the comfort of his superiors, leading to his removal and transfer. But Abbott got to know the Hazara country better than any European before or since, and being a man of wide interests he explored Hazara’s past, beginning with the incursion of Alexander and his Macedonians.