Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  When Führer read the phrase at the end of the second line – hida budhe jate sakyamuni, or ‘here the Buddha was born, the sage of the Sakyas’ – the significance of these four and a half lines at once became apparent. He knew he had found Lumbini. Xuanzang had described Ashoka’s pillar as split in half by a dragon, and here was that split very much in evidence on what remained of the pillar (see illustration, p. 303). Scholars continue to dispute the exact meaning of the last sentence but there is nothing ambiguous about the rest (Professor Falk’s translation):

  When king Priydarsin, dear to the gods, was consecrated for this 20th regnal year he came in person and paid reverence. Because the Buddha, the Sakyamuni, was born at this place, he had a stone railing made and a stone pillar erected. Because the Lord (of the world) was born at this place, he exempted the village of Lumbini from taxes and granted it the eight shares.7

  The Lumbini and Nigliva Sagar pillars and their inscriptions were patently by-products of the same royal tour made by Emperor Ashoka in about 250 BCE. A third pillar, surviving only as a stump on its original foundations and located by Dr Führer a few miles south-west of the Nigliva pillar, almost certainly dated from the same royal visit. Together they proved beyond doubt that Ashoka had done what Xuanzang and the Legend of King Ashoka had claimed for him, which was to make an extensive pilgrimage to the holy places of Buddhism, beginning with the Lumbini Grove and moving on to Kapilavastu nearby, where he had erected a number of memorial stupas and pillars.8

  Unfortunately for Führer and Indian archaeology, the German archaeologist had made wild claims in his report on his first foray into Nepal. In a desperate bid to locate the ancient city of Kapilavastu, which he had claimed to have seen in all its glory, Führer dug himself almost literally into a hole, which grew all the deeper when it emerged that he had been selling bogus relics to a Buddhist monk from Burma. Führer was sacked but his antics appear to have preyed on the mind of his patron Georg Bühler, who in April 1898 disappeared while out rowing late at night on Lake Constance. That tragedy and the suspicions of fakery overshadowed the last phase of archaeological discoveries made in Bihar in the last decade of the nineteenth century, of which three are of particular importance in the Ashoka story.

  The first was a find rather than an excavation, made in 1892 by Dr William Hoey, commissioner of Gorakhpur Division in North Bihar. Hoey was a keen antiquarian and in the course of exploring a series of mounds beside the Rapti River he got talking to an old man from the village of Sohgaura and learned that in his youth the old man had dug up a small copper plate, which he had presented to the local zamindar or ‘land-owner’. Hoey made enquiries and some months later the son of the landowner turned up at his office with the plate and presented it to him.

  The Sohgaura plate turned out to be bronze rather than copper, which was itself remarkable. It was no more than 2½ inches long and 1¾ inches wide and in astonishingly good condition. Even more remarkably, it bore both symbols and letters, moulded in such high relief that they were easy to make out.

  The writing consisted of four lines of early Ashokan Brahmi. Above it was a line of seven distinct symbols: two different species of trees set behind railings, two triple-storey buildings with pillars and thatch roofs, a single spear-like object, a globe topped by a taurine symbol and, at the centre, a ‘stupa’ pyramid of three semi-circular domes topped by a horned moon. Apart from the two buildings, all were symbols found on early Indian punch-marked coins.

  The Mauryan Sohgaura plate, presented by Dr William Hoey to the Asiatic Society of Bengal and subsequently lost or stolen. (JASB, 1894)

  Quite by chance, one of the ICS officers serving under Hoey was Vincent Smith, a great admirer of Sir Alexander Cunningham and who a decade later would retire to Oxford to write the first biography of Ashoka and the first edition of the Oxford History of India. Hoey and Smith presented a joint paper to the Asiatic Society of Bengal on the Sohgaura plate but were unable to shed much light beyond declaring it to be of the Mauryan period. Fortunately, they took photographs and sent a copy to Professor Bühler, who showed that the language was Prakrit and that it was an order from the religious officers at Sravasti declaring that two storehouses at Vamsagrama were in urgent need of supplies of grain, pulses and other foods, and that these supplies were not to be withheld. The symbols were as much of a mystery to Dr Bühler then as they are to epigraphers today.

  Claims have been made that the Sohgaura plate represents a key moment of transition from pictographs to a proper written language, rather in the manner of a miniature Rosetta Stone. This has given rise to much wild speculation about India’s lost Saraswati writing, best left to the internet. What is more relevant is that in 1931, while archaeologists were starting preliminary excavations at the great walled city of Mahasthan in East Bengal, first noted by Buchanan back in 1808 and very briefly explored by Cunningham in 1879, a local villager uncovered a small stone slab very like the Sohgaura plate. Its seven lines of Brahmi carried a message similar in general form, in that it was an order from an unnamed ruler of Magadha – maddeningly, the first part of the top line is too damaged to be readable – to the religious officer of a town named Pundranagara telling him to take measures to relieve the distress of the Samvamgiya people caused by superhuman agency and – curiously – parrots, and to replenish the granary and the treasury.9

  These two finds are almost certainly contemporaneous and Mauryan. They point to the existence of a highly sophisticated administrative system that employed an equally sophisticated message system. Because of the references to famine relief, it has been suggested that they may date from Chandragupta’s time when a twelve-year famine raged. But the Greeks who reported on Chandragupta’s kingdom would surely have mentioned such a sophisticated communications system had it existed. All the evidence points to these two messages being Ashokan in their dating. Indeed, it has been argued that the central symbol on the Sohgaura plate of the stupa overlooked by chandra, the moon, may have been the personal seal of Ashoka himself. The brass plate was itself the product of a manufacturing system requiring great skill in casting, using a wax technique not seen again in India until the eighth century CE.

  Dr Hoey presented the Sohgaura plate to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. So chaotic was the curating at this low period in the fortunes of the ASB that some years passed before it was officially admitted that the Sohgaura plate had been lost. It may turn up one day, perhaps lodged behind one of the many cupboards lining the walls at No. 1 Park Street, Calcutta, where the ASB had its headquarters. In the meantime, its loss can only be described as incalculable. It is the oldest bronze plate found in India and nothing like it has been found since.

  The second Ashokan discovery took place in Patna, which had so far proved a graveyard of archaeological hopes. Cunningham had explored the town and surrounds and had come away disappointed, convinced that the great capital city of Pataliputra as seen and reported on by the Greeks in the days of Chandragupta had long since been washed away. It fell to Dr L. A. Waddell of the Indian Medical Service to prove him wrong. Waddell was an unlikeable character, quick to take offence and unscrupulous in the pursuit of his own goals.10 He considered himself to be the true discoverer of Lumbini and Kapilavastu, and he did his best to destroy the career of a fellow archaeologist, Babu Purna Chandra Mukherji, who found the city of Kapilavastu in the jungle at Tilaurakot just west of Nigliva Sagar.11

  Like so many of his contemporaries, Waddell pored over the writings of the Chinese pilgrim travellers. In 1892 he came to Patna from his medical post in Darjeeling on two days’ leave, armed with a sketch map based on the information supplied by Faxian and Xuanzang. This suggested to him that some of the monuments visited by the Chinese travellers lay within what was now the oldest quarter of Patna city, and that Ashoka’s palace and the great Ashokarama monastery built by Ashoka would be found south of the railway line, which at that time marked the southern limits of the city. ‘I was surprised to find’, he afterwards wrote, ‘that m
ost of the leading landmarks of Asoka’s palaces, monasteries, and other monuments remained so very obvious that I was able in the short space of one day to identify many of them beyond all doubt, by taking the itineraries of the Chinese pilgrims as my guide.’12

  Waddell’s findings involved a lot of wishful thinking but he was on the right track. The first site he examined was in the city about half a mile south of Patna College: an artificial mound made of brick about twenty feet high and about a quarter of a mile in circuit (long since covered over). In Waddell’s time it was known by the suggestive title of Bhikna pahari, or ‘Monk hill’, and, according to Waddell, it matched Xuanzang’s description and location of the hermitage built by Ashoka for his younger brother Tissa.

  Equally speculative was Waddell’s identification of Ashoka’s notorious ‘Hell’, the prison in which captives were said to have been tortured to death in his pre-Buddhist years as Fierce Ashoka. This Waddell located in an ancient well, known as the Agam kuan or ‘bottomless well’, sited just outside the boundary of the city formed by the railway line (just southwest of today’s Gulzarbagh railway station). The well had been restored and covered by a roof in Emperor Akbar’s time but Waddell found – or claimed to have found – that it was associated with evil, so much so that no one ever drank from it.

  More importantly, the well was adjacent to the Hindu temple of Shitala Devi, goddess of smallpox. Alexander Cunningham had come here in 1879 in search of Mauryan yakshi fertility goddesses, having read that three such sculptures had been found in the area back in the 1820s. Two had been transported downriver to the Asiatic Society of Bengal’s museum but the third figure had been left behind – to be rediscovered by Cunningham at the shrine of Shitala Devi, but now an object of worship too sacred to be moved.

  Waddell found Cunningham’s goddess (in fact, two goddesses back to back) half-buried in the temple courtyard and was struck immediately by how similar they were to the yakshi figures excavated by Cunningham at Bharhut. He made enquiries and learned that the pillar had originally come from another site entirely, half a mile to the west. He would afterwards claim that it was Xuanzang’s trail that he was following, but it was the yakshi pillar that led him to the village of Kumrahar.

  A Buddhist railing pillar in the form of a pair of yakshis at the shrine of Shitala Devi beside Patna’s ‘bottomless well’, photographed by Alexander Caddy in 1895. (APAC, British Library)

  This entire village belonged to a local landowner named Shaikh Akram-ul-Haq, and what Waddell learned from the Shaikh and saw for himself convinced him that he had found the site of King Ashoka’s palace.

  The Shaikh’s story was that a number of pagan statues had been found here in the past, the most recent having been dug up in the courtyard of his own house in his father’s time and taken away by the Hindus. Indeed, Shaikh Akram-ul-Haq was happy to hand over to Waddell parts of a Buddhist railing and a few other sculptured stones that he or his ancestors had unearthed in digging wells or house foundations. Waddell’s own searches produced more fragments of stone pillars and railings, showing that an early Ashokan-style Buddhist stupa had once stood in the vicinity. He also learned that whenever wells were dug in or near Kumrahar village the diggers struck a barrier at a depth of fifteen or twenty feet, usually in the form of massive wooden beams or palisades. This put Waddell in mind of ‘the old wooden walls of the city as described by Megasthenes’.

  Greatly encouraged by this brief reconnaissance, Waddell petitioned the government of Bengal for funds and in 1896 returned to Patna to supervise the digging of trenches at Kumrahar and at three other sites. At a depth of about fifteen feet, close to the railway line, he found a section of wooden palisade, as well as a magnificent capital of a ‘distinctly Greek type … manifestly of Asoka’s period or soon after it’. At Kumrahar village itself Waddell uncovered broken fragments of ‘a gigantic pillar of Ashoka … one of those polished colossal monoliths which that emperor set up and inscribed with his edicts’.

  A ‘magnificent capital of a distinctly Greek type’, combining Ashokan and Graeco-Persian motifs. (From Waddell’s Report on the Excavations at Pataliputra (Patna), 1903)

  Waddell’s further ground survey of the area south of Kumrahar identified low-lying areas that were dried-out river beds, showing that at some time in the past the Sone River had divided into two channels just before it joined the Ganges. The main channel had run through what was now the British Civil Lines district, known as Bankipur, upstream of Patna town, while the lesser channel had joined the Ganges just south of Patna, so creating the island upon which the city of Pataliputra had been built. When Waddell discovered the wooden piers of what he surmised was some kind of landing stage at the southern edge of Kumrahar village it seemed to confirm that this was indeed the case.

  Waddell returned to the Kumrahar site in 1897 to continue his excavations but to his dismay found a professional archaeologist already at work. This was Babu P. C. Mukherji, from the Indian Museum in Calcutta. To make matters worse, Mukherji had already found parts of six separate Ashokan pillars at Kumrahar, all buried among a thick layer of ashes and embers – pointing to what he believed had been a deliberate attempt to split the pillars by heat.

  Waddell was furious at this intrusion and mounted an unsuccessful campaign to have Mukherji dismissed. Two years later when Mukherji was appointed to continue the archaeological survey of the Nepal Tarai begun by the disgraced Dr Führer, Dr Waddell again intervened in a bid to have the Bengali archaeologist removed. It is a pleasure to report that it was Mukherji who had the last laugh – by discovering the true site of ancient Kapilavastu at Tilaurakot while Waddell was pursuing a false lead elesewhere.

  Yet Dr Waddell’s pioneering work at Patna deserves to be remembered, as does his discovery of two more fertility goddesses courtesy of information supplied by Shaikh Akram-ul-Haq. He tracked these wonderful, lustrous creatures down to a temple at Naya Tola, half a mile to the west of Kumrahar (today Rajendra Nagar railway station). As at the Shitala Devi shrine, the yakshis stood back to back supporting a pillar, but were infinitely superior in execution. Just short of life-size and naked but for waist-belts, each raises a polished hand above a polished breast to grasp the branch of a tree.

  Magnificent as this sculpture is, it has to give pride of place to another goddess in Patna Museum’s magnificent collection of Mauryan and Shungan sculptures: the so-called Didarganj Yakshi, unquestionably one of the finest artworks of the Mauryan era yet discovered. Made of the same light sandstone in which the Ashokan pillars had been carved, and probably from the same quarry, she has the characteristic polish of the pillars and the best Ashokan sculptures. Like Waddell’s tree-goddesses, she has prominent, globular breasts, a trim waist and curvaceous hips, with two soft rolls of flesh on her tummy – all glowing with a magnificent sheen. As well as the traditional shringar patti jewellery on her head (just as worn by Indian brides today) she wears earrings, a necklace, bangles down to her elbow and heavy, ornate anklets. She carries a chowrie or fly-whisk over her right shoulder, showing that she was one of a pair of attendants flanking what must have been a colossal and quite magnificent central Buddha figure. She has been called the Venus de Milo of Indian art, which does her no favours, for she has far more allure, even if she shares her Greek sister’s modesty in wearing a drape, which hangs from her waist in delicate folds, just about held up by an intricately carved chain-belt. She was carved at least a century and a half before the Greek Venus – and by an artist every bit as good as Praxitiles.

  (Above left) One of Dr Waddell’s lustrous Naya Tola tree-goddesses, superbly sculpted but outclassed by the Didarganj Yakshi (above right) more correctly a chowri dharani, or ‘fly-whisk holder’. (Both photos courtesy of Namit Arora of Shunya)

  The Didarganj Yakshi owes nothing to Dr Waddell. She was found in 1917 by a villager of Didarganj, sticking up out of the mud beside the Ganges just west of Bankipur, very probably washed downstream when the River Sone burst its banks at some time in th
e distant past when its course was nearer to Pataliputra.

  The work begun by Waddell and Mukherji at Kumrahar was completed by an American archaeologist, Dr David Spooner, who had cut his teeth excavating Kushan Buddhist sites in and around the Vale of Peshawar. In 1913 Spooner came to Kumrahar and conducted the first large-scale and systematic excavation on the site, thanks to funding from the Parsi industrialist Sir Ratan Tata. Under a Gupta level of brick buildings he came upon the same thick layer of burned wood and ashes that Mukherji had first noted, among which were the fragments of at least seventy-two sandstone pillars set fifteen feet apart in eight rows of ten pillars. These were the remains of a pillared hall built on a truly grand scale, covering an area of more than 18,000 square feet. The pillars had originally stood on supporting wooden rafts which, Dr Spooner conjectured, must have gradually sunk into the soft subsoil under the combined weight of the pillars and the hall’s roof. Nothing like it had ever been found in India, the only comparable structure being the great pillared hall at Persepolis built by the Achaeminid kings and partially destroyed by Alexander’s fire.

  Part of David Spooner’s excavation at Kumrahar, showing (above) an Ashokan pillar and the fragments of many more lying in individual heaps, and (below) workmen clearing some of the wooden rafts supporting the pillars of Ashoka’s Great Assembly Hall at Pataliputra. (APAC, British Library)

  Also uncovered at an even greater depth than the supporting rafts was a wooden stairway leading directly from the Great Assembly Hall down to the riverside. Everything found here by Spooner was from the Mauryan era or after, showing that the Great Hall had been constructed on open ground just outside the city of Pataliputra. It could only have been the work of a very powerful ruler, and had clearly been built not to serve as a palace but as a meeting hall.