Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  Master and pupil; guru and chela. (Left) Professor Georg Bühler, whose career was cut short by his drowning in 1898. (Right) Sir Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, KCIE, remembered in Maharashtra today as a social reformer rather than a scholar.

  Dr Bhandarkar is best remembered today as someone who fought against the evils of the caste system and Brahminical orthodoxy, and for religious reforms within Hinduism. But he should also be remembered as the man who reconstructed the early political history of the Deccan, showing how the Satavahana dynasty, also known as the Andhras, had dominated central India for more than four centuries following the collapse of the Mauryas and had played an important role as patrons of Buddhism, resulting in a flowering of the greatest of the early Buddhist monuments extending from the Ellora and Ajanta caves in the west to Amaravati in the south-east.

  Two other pioneer Indian Sanskritists who played their part in the unveiling of Ashoka were Dr Bhau Daji and Bhagavan Lal Indraji, the former another early alumnus of Elphinstone College, a medical practitioner who took up Sanskrit in order to familiarise himself with traditional Hindu medicine and went on to become one of the leading lights of the Bombay branch of the RAS and a regular contributor to its journal. Dr Bhau Daji’s contribution to Indian studies was finally recognised in 1975 when Bombay’s Victoria and Albert Museum was renamed the Bhau Daji Laud Museum. However, scant recognition has been accorded to the man who acted as Dr Bhau Daji’s assistant and field-researcher, Bhagavan Lal Indraji, for it was largely thanks to the unassuming Indraji, who in the course of thirteen years travelled far and wide in India and Nepal in search of inscriptions, manuscripts and old coins, that his employer was able to contribute so extensively to the advancement of Indian epigraphy.

  Indraji himself came from the princely state of Junagadh, within whose territory lay Girnar mountain and the Ashokan Rock Edict boulder at its foot. Indeed, it was this great rock that first drew Indraji to palaeography. It had long been known that the Girnar rock carried a second set of inscriptions in Brahmi, but it was the combined scholarship of Bhau Daji and Indraji that produced the first clear reading of what became known as the Rudradaman inscription, published in 1863.7 Much of it was taken up with the glorification of the mighty conqueror Rudradaman, already identified from his coinage as the Scythian or Shaka king Rudradaman I, who had ruled Malwa towards the middle of the second century CE. The new reading showed that the inscription marked the completion of major repairs to a dam and reservoir at the foot of Mount Girnar. The dam had been breached in a storm and the task of repairing the breach had been taken on by King Rudradaman’s minister and local governor Suvishakha, who described himself as ‘able, patient, not wavering, not arrogant, upright, not to be bribed, who by his good government increased the spiritual merit, fame and glory of his master’.8

  But the most striking revelation contained in the Rudradaman inscription was its statement that the original dam and reservoir had been constructed by a man named Pushagupta, a provincial governor of the Mauryan king Chandragupta. It had subsequently been ‘adorned with conduits for Ashoka Maurya by the Yavana king Tushaspha while governing’. In other words, the original dam, built in Chandragupta’s time, had been improved upon by King Ashoka’s local governor, a Graeco-Bactrian named Tushaspha. Other remarks on the rock inscription, such as King Rudradaman’s strong attachment to Dharma, his compassion and his vow to abstain from slaying men, except in battles, made it clear that here at least the name and ethos of Ashoka had survived into the second century CE.

  The death of Dr Bhau Daji in 1874 left Bhagavan Lal Indraji in straitened circumstances. However, it had the effect of allowing his own scholarship to be brought out from under his employer’s shadow, one example being the detective work that led to the discovery of what is known today as the Sopara Rock Edict .9

  In 1882, acting on information received from the Collector of Thana District, Indraji travelled by train up the coast from Bombay to Sopara, situated beside a creek a few miles from the ruins of the Portuguese settlement of Bassein. From the Collector’s account Indraji suspected that what he had described as a fort was actually a Buddhist stupa, which proved to be the case. An artificial pool was identified as a harbour from the days when Sopara had its own port, and here Indraji found a block of polished stone bearing a few lines of Brahmi that he identified on sight as part of RE 7. According to the local townspeople, this had been part of a much larger stone covered in writing that had disappeared only very recently.10

  Indraji felt sure that a search of some of the religious buildings in the area would bring to light more pieces of the edict rock, but for political reasons no such examinations were permitted. However, in 1955 a second piece of polished stone would be discovered at Sopara, this time bearing part of RE 9. It would confirm Indraji’s claim that one of Ashoka’s major Rock Edicts had been placed here. The Greek geographer Ptolemy had spoken of a seaport named Sopara, as had various Arab geographers, and everything Indraji had read indicated that this had once been the capital of Aparanta, the coastal region north of Bombay. ‘It appears as a holy city in Buddhist, Brahmanical and Jain books,’ he wrote. ‘Asoka sent to Aparanta one of his missionaries, Dhammarakhita the Yona or Yavana, that is the Greek or Bactrian … I believe Dhammarakhita made Sopara the centre of his missionary efforts, and that it was from Sopara that Buddhism spread over Western India.’

  Meanwhile, in Bengal local Sanskritists had also found a role model in the multi-talented linguist Rajendra Lala Mitra, a Bengali from the Kayastha sub-caste who in 1846 was appointed Librarian and Assistant Secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Mitra went on to become Secretary of the Society and served as its vice-president for nineteen years before finally becoming its first Indian president, in the meantime contributing no less than 114 learned articles to the JRAS. Mitra is best remembered today as the ‘uncompromising crusader’ who used the press to promote nationalist causes and campaigned to improve working conditions in the indigo plantations of Bihar and Bengal. However, he was an equally outspoken advocate for the preservation of India’s past and in the late 1860s secured the backing of the government of Bengal for a systematic investigation of all the ancient buildings, temples and ‘tumuli’ (burial mounds, but in fact Buddhist stupas) of the province of Orissa, the fruits of which afterwards appeared in two large volumes as The Antiquities of Orissa, one of the first publications in India to use photographs as illustrations. From this time onwards Mitra and General Sir Alexander Cunningham were in frequent correspondence, with the latter frequently seeking Mitra’s opinions on issues ranging from architectural styles to his readings of early inscriptions.

  Much of the fieldwork that the general had previously undertaken in North India was now being carried out by his two assistants, Joseph Beglar and Archie Carllyle. The former identified the remains of at least two early stupa complexes – at Deoria, on the eastern border of the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh), and at Beshnagar, a few miles north of Vidisha and Sanchi hill – both with sculptured railings and gateways similar to those found at Bharhut but so severely damaged as to suggest deliberate iconoclasm.

  Archie Carllyle’s chance to shine had come in the course of the two Cold Weather seasons of 1874–5 and 1875–6, during which he revisited many of the Buddhist sites in North Bihar first noted by Francis Buchanan. This included a re-evaluation of its several Ashokan pillars and it was while Carllyle was engaged in taking a new impression of the Lauriya-Araraj Pillar Edict that he was approached by a group of Tharu forest-dwellers, the original inhabitants of the sub-Himalayan forest belt known as the Tarai.

  The Tharus reported the existence of a very similar pillar some distance to the north – ‘a stone sticking in the ground which they called Bhim’s Lat, and which they said resembled the top of the capital at Laoriya’.11 Guided by the Tharus, Carllyle entered what was still considered to be wild and dangerous country due to its jungle and the fatal miasmas that killed all strangers who ventured into those parts and stayed on a
fter nightfall. Outside the village of Rampurva, close to the border with Nepal, Carllyle came upon the top of a pillar ‘sticking out of the ground in a slanting position, and pointing towards the north’. Nearby were the remains of its capital in the form of a seated lion, with supporting abacus and bell attached, broken in half just above its paws. Round the sides of the abacus were pairs of geese with lowered heads similar in stance and style to those found on the pillars at Sanchi and Lauriya-Nandangarh.

  With the help of the Tharus, Carllyle succeeded in exposing just enough of the column, as it lay buried diagonally in the swampy ground, to reveal the upper half of an inscription incised in Brahmi. It was too waterlogged to go any deeper so Carllyle had to make do with a rough impression, achieved only by his men standing up to their waists in water. This was good enough to identify the inscription as yet another set of the Pillar Edicts, making it the fifth so far discovered.

  Sticking out of the ground some three hundred yards south of the lion pillar was the stump of a second pillar. Since Carllyle and his men were anxious to get back to safer country this had to be left to a later generation of archaeologists, who would find a capital in the form of a hump-backed bull complete with bell and abacus, displaying that characteristic Mauryan sheen and in almost perfect condition. The head and upper torso of Carllyle’s lion capital was also located, its face damaged but otherwise in good order.

  The excavation of Carllyle’s first Rampurva pillar, accomplished in 1907 under the direction of Dr Day Ram Sahni. The lion capital can just be seen on the upper left. (APAC, British Library)

  The Rampurva bull capital now stands on a plinth on the verandah of Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, the official residence of the President of India, where it is almost as impossible to visit and photograph as is the Ashokan pillar in Allahabad Fort.

  Carllyle’s discovery of the two Rampurva pillars close to the border with Nepal and the Himalayan foothills led him to speculate that they had been erected by Emperor Ashoka to mark some sort of royal pilgrimage: ‘Four different pillars of Asoka are now known to be situated along the line of the old north road which led from Magadha to Nipal … I should therefore expect to find another pillar, or else a rock-cut inscription, still further north somewhere in the Nipal Tarai.’ More than two decades were to pass before the accuracy of Carllyle’s prediction was confirmed.

  Carllyle’s single greatest coup was his excavation at Kasia of the colossal Nirvana statue of the Buddha described long ago by Xuanzang, confirming that this was the site of ancient Kushinagara where Sakyamuni Buddha had died. His excavations here, at the great Kesariya stupa nearby, and at other sites in North Bihar, showed how widespread had been the stupa cult in this region, a practice that had transformed the landscape of Bihar and owed its origin to Ashoka, even if it was his successors – the Shungas, Kushans and Guptas – who had taken it to its full fruition.

  Archibald Carllyle continued to perform sterling work for Cunningham and the Archaeological Survey of India for several more years, particularly in the field of Indian prehistory, where his pioneering work on cave-paintings in the central India highlands and microliths in Bundelkhand and Bhagelkhand entitles him to be listed among palaeontology’s founding fathers.12 His reports are fascinating to read but not always for the best reasons, for he never held back from expressing thoughts best left unsaid, not least his views on race, which were that the British, along with the Parsis, were the cream of the Aryans, and Hindus but the ‘coffee dregs’. By 1885 Carllyle’s eccentricity had tipped over into paranoia and Cunningham was forced to pension him off. By then Alexander Cunningham had himself reached the age of seventy but justified his non-retirement on the grounds that he was indispensable, which indeed he was.

  The fieldwork undertaken by Beglar and Carllyle allowed Cunningham to work on the bigger picture of Indian archaeology. This he did in close consultation with the leading epigraphists of the day, authorities such as Georg Bühler and Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar in Bombay, Rajendra Lal Mitra in Calcutta, Max Müller in Oxford and the brilliant young scholar Émile Senart in Paris. It was this collaboration that enabled Cunningham to publish in 1877 his Inscriptions of Aoka, being Volume I of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum – a mammoth project that James Prinsep had dreamed of initiating as early as 1836. Here for the first time in one volume were assembled all the known Ashokan inscriptions, each with its several translations, from the first to the most recent and authoritative.

  The tally of known Ashokan inscriptions now amounted to six Rock Edict sites, seven Minor Rock Edict sites, seven Pillar Edicts and fifteen cave inscriptions. They represented, in Cunningham’s view, but a fraction of the many edicts that must originally have been inscribed on Ashoka’s orders. Even the Pillar Edicts, he reckoned, must at one time have been numerous, although probably confined for obvious logistical reasons to ‘the very heart of Asoka’s dominions, from the Jumna to the Gandak [Gandaki River]’, since they would have had to be transported by a system of barges very much as Sultan Firoz Shah had demonstrated.15

  By combining all the known evidence, extending from the dating of the Mauryas given in the Puranas, the Ceylon chronicles, the Legend of King Ashoka and the Divine Stories, and the travel accounts of Faxian and Xuanzang, to the information given on the Rock and Pillar Edicts, Cunningham now felt able to assemble a chronology for the key events in the life of Ashoka and his Mauryan forebears:

  478 BCE Death of Sakyamuni Buddha.

  316 BCE Anointing of Chandragupta Maurya, reigns for twenty-four years.

  292 BCE Anointing of Bindusara Maurya, reigns for twenty-eight years.

  277 BCE Prince Ashoka appointed governor of Ujjain. 276 BCE Birth of Mahinda.

  264 BCE Death of Bindusara. Ashoka begins four-year struggle with brothers.

  260 BCE Anointing of Ashoka Maurya as Piyadasi.

  257 BCE Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism.

  256 BCE Ashoka’s treaty with Antiochos.

  255 BCE Ashoka’s eldest son Mahinda ordained.

  251 BCE Earliest date of Rock Edicts.

  244 BCE Third Synod under Moggaliputta Tissa.

  243 BCE Mahinda leads mission to Ceylon.

  234 BCE Pillar Edicts issued.

  231 BCE Queen Asandhimitra dies.

  228 BCE Ashoka marries Queen Tishyarakshita.

  226 BCE Queen Tishyarakshita attempts to destroy the Bodhi tree.

  225 BCE Ashoka becomes an ascetic.

  224 BCE Death of Ashoka.14

  But even before Cunningham’s Inscriptions of Aoka had been published these datings had been thrown into doubt by the scholarship of the Dutch Professor Johann Hendrik Kern, who had briefly held the post of Professor of Sanskrit in the 1860s at the Sanskrit and Queen’s Colleges in Benares before moving on to Leiden University.15 Kern argued that Sakyamuni had died not in 478 BCE but in 388 BCE, and that the gap between his Great Final Extinguishing and Ashoka’s inauguration was 118 years, therefore Ashoka’s anointing had taken place in the year 270 BCE. In short, Cunningham was out by ten years in his datings for Ashoka.

  ‘I need hardly say that I dissent from this conclusion altogether,’ Cunningham wrote.16 But Cunningham was (probably) wrong and Kern (probably) right – at least in so far as his dating for Ashoka was concerned. That view is widely shared by later scholars, with the following dates representing the general consensus today:

  322–299 BCE Reign of Chandragupta.

  299–274 BCE Reign of Bindusara.

  302 BCE Birth of Ashoka.

  285 BCE Birth of Ashoka’s eldest son Mahinda.

  282 BCE Birth of Ashoka’s eldest daughter Sanghamitta.

  274–270 BCE Four-year interregnum.

  270 BCE Ashoka’s anointing.

  265 BCE Ashoka converts to become a lay Buddhist.

  Begins Buddhist building programme.

  263 BCE Ashoka conquers Kalinga.

  260 BCE Ashoka issues first Minor Rock Edicts, makes first tour of Buddhist sites, begins his st
upa-building programme, his queen Padmavati gives birth to Kunala.

  259 BCE Ashoka issues Kalinga Rock Edicts.

  258 BCE Ashoka issues the Rock Edicts, grants Barabar caves to the Ajivikas.

  253 BCE Ashoka inaugurates Third Buddhist Council. 252 BCE Mahinda goes to Lanka. Ashoka institutes missionary programme.

  252 BCE Ashoka goes on second pilgrimage tour, including Lumbini.

  243–242 BCE Ashoka issues Pillar Edicts.

  240 BCE Ashoka celebrates the five-year pancavarsika festival.

  239 BCE Death of Ashoka’s queen Asandhimitra.

  235 BCE Ashoka marries Queen Tishyarakshita. Ashoka’s son and heir Kunala sent to Taxila.

  234 BCE Kunala blinded. Queen Tishyarakshita leads anti-Buddhist faction at court and is executed. Ashoka becomes increasingly infirm. Kunala’s infant son Samprati appointed heir-apparent.

  233 BCE Ashoka dies.

  General Sir Alexander Cunningham kept up his Cold Weather tours. In 1882–3 he returned to the holy city of Mathura, much damaged by Muslim iconoclasm, where a number of ancient mounds were in the process of giving up their secrets, revealing a wealth of magnificent Buddhist and Jain sculpture from the Kushan period. But earlier Buddhist sculpture was also recovered, including a colossal male figure more than seven feet in height, much battered but retaining traces of a high polish. It carried a crudely cut inscription on the base written in early Ashokan Brahmi characters, allowing Cunningham to date it to the third century BCE – the earliest statue yet found in India. He speculated in his report that it might be a yaksha demi-god but omitted to mention that the figure was remarkably corpulent, which is not an attribute of yakshas except for those of the dwarf variety, and that he had a very round face, its features all but obliterated.