Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  This first round of Ashokan edicts – the Minor Rock Edicts – were followed by the Schism Edicts, starting with the Bairat-Calcutta Schism Edict, which is addressed directly to the Sangha and not to the mahamatras or religious officers, who have been placed in charge of the Buddhist Church by the time the Sanchi and Sarnath Schism Edict pillars go up. The next to be set in stone were the Separate or Kalinga Rock Edicts at Dhauli and Jaugada in Orissa and Sannati in South Karnataka, which also anticipate the creation of the special cadre of religious officers. They would have been followed by the remaining Rock Edicts, of which fourteen have been identified to date, ranging from Karnataka to Kandahar in Afghanistan.

  Only five of the Ashokan columns carrying the emperor’s Pillar Edicts can be described as complete or nearly so. The remains of another eleven or possibly twelve survive as fragments. These were erected twenty-six years after Ashoka’s anointing as bold public statements, no longer tucked away on hillsides or among monastic communities but placed at or near population centres or major thoroughfares, and in many cases beside well-constructed wells where people would gather. PE 7 is the last to go up, dated to the twenty-seventh year after his coronation, and found only on Firoz Shah’s Lat.

  The largest of these magnificent columns stands 46 feet high and weighs more than 50 tons, with its capital, bell and abacus adding another 6 feet and 3 more tons – major achievements in themselves, requiring not only a school of skilled monumental masons but also equally skilled engineers capable of transporting them across land and water, to say nothing of their erection. Their size must have presented a logistical headache to those charged with transporting them, so it is easy to see why they were confined to the Mauryan heartland, with the Ganges and its tributaries providing the means of transportation. No Ashokan pillars have been found south of Sanchi, although it has been argued that the Amaravati stupa had such a pillar that was destroyed soon after its erection, parts of which were then recycled.11 They would have been obvious targets for those who considered Buddhism to be heretical or who saw them as manifestations of idolatry, so we can only speculate as to how many such monuments were actually cut from the quarry at Chunar, upstream of Benares, and possibly also from the quarry at Pabhosa, across from Kausambi on the River Jumna.12

  What is equally remarkable is that Emperor Ashoka’s edicts appear out of nowhere, fully formed. The probability is that the first Kharosthi and Brahmi scripts were tried out on palm leaves, perhaps even bits of cloth as Alexander’s admiral, the Greek Nearchos, seemed to suggest – probably beginning at Taxila.13 Taking his cue from the Persian Achaemenids and the Greeks, Ashoka initiated the practice of writing monumental inscriptions on stone, using lettering inspired from outside but locally determined to better convey his own local spoken Magadhan Prakrit, so that these inscriptions should be read throughout his empire and for posterity.

  Despite the best efforts of bigots, iconoclasts and the elements, Ashoka’s song has survived the vicissitudes of some 2270 years. And yet, for all his brave words and despite all the Buddhist tales about Dharmashoka, the Wheel-turning Monarch, the man himself still remains intangible, more myth than real personage, little known and little valued, a subject seemingly fit only for academics and not the wider world.

  This is particularly – especially – the case in India itself. The nation that adores Rama – the mythical warrior-hero of the epic Ramayana, who fought the demon king Ravanna before returning to be crowned king of Ayodhya and rule over India for eleven thousand years as the perfect monarch – has little time for the real thing: the man who first forged India into a single nation state, and thus has a real claim to be its founding father; the first Indian ruler with a distinctive, identifiable voice; the pre-Gandhian pioneer of non-violence, the first proponent of conquest by moral force alone, whose words remain absolutely, unequivocally, unique among rulers as a statement of governing principles.

  Those stirring sentiments reached and helped shape the culture in the furthest corners of Asia. Yet today in India itself they are shown scant respect – and the monuments upon which they are inscribed receive only cursory protection from the ASI.

  Why this indifference? It cannot be put down to ignorance. In 1927, writing from his prison cell to his fourteen-year-old daughter Indira – whom he had also named Priyadarshini in direct homage to the emperor who liked to call himself Priyadasi, or ‘Beloved-of-the-Gods’ – the Harrow-educated secularist Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru put Ashoka on a par with Jesus Christ as a source of inspiration in his non-violent struggle against the British rulers of India. Two decades later, when Nehru became a more modern father of the nation as independent India’s first Prime Minister, he selected as the symbols of the new India two images directly linked to Emperor Ashoka: the twenty-four-spoked wheel known as the chakra, or ‘Wheel of Law’, which was set at the centre of the Indian tricolour; and, for its national emblem, the Ashokan capital excavated at Sarnath in 1904–5 showing four lions standing guard over four chakras, representing the ‘lion’s roar of the Buddha’ spreading to the cardinal directions.

  These symbols were expressly chosen to represent the new, secular India, free of any specific religious affiliation, as the author and journalist Gita Mehta remembers: ‘As children, we were often told by our parents that these 2300-year-old symbols were not mere deference to antiquity; they were to inspire us to create a country governed by righteousness.’14 There was also the romance associated with the name of Ashoka, a great conqueror who had become a great teacher, as Mehta goes on to explain:

  At the very pinnacle of his glory as a conqueror Emperor Ashoka embraced the philosophy of ahimsa, ‘nonviolence’, declaring, ‘Instead of the sound of the war drum, the sound of Dharma will be heard.’

  Two-and-a-half millennia later, the sound of Dharma would once again be heard when Mahatma Gandhi used nonviolence to expel the British from India. In the newly liberated nation, Ashoka’s Dharma Chakra, the Wheel of Law, would be given pride of place in the centre of free India’s flag. Ashoka’s pillar crowned with four lions facing the four points of the compass and denoting the peaceful coexistence of Dharma would become free India’s national symbol – a constant reminder to India of what government should be.

  Nehru’s choice of two Ashokan symbols was also a very deliberate riposte to the thinking of his great co-liberator, M. K. Gandhi. The Mahatma’s vision of a free India was very different from his own, being based on the ideal of Ram Raj, of a return to the mythical Hindu golden age of Rama wherein life would revolve around the spinning wheel, the bullock cart and the village well, with local councils of elders and a benevolent but distant government – rooted in tradition but somehow free of caste and gender oppression. To Nehru this was a fantasy. He wanted an India free of the ‘communal malaise’ that had prevented it from keeping pace with the modern world, which only a strong, secular and centralised government could deliver. In Ashoka’s India he found his model.

  In the event, Nehru’s dilemma and Gandhi’s dream ended with the latter’s assassination at the hands of a Hindu fundamentalist in the grounds of Birla House, New Delhi, on 30 January 1948. So it came about that in the first, idealistic decades of the secular Indian Republic, ‘Ashok’ and ‘Ashoka’ were the buzz words, symbolised by the building in the 1960s of the mammoth four-star hotel in New Delhi known as the Ashok, which became the flagship of a group of government-run hotels scattered across India. A cast was made of the great granite boulder at the foot of the Girnar hill inscribed with Ashoka’s fourteen Rock Edicts and a bronze replica placed in the grounds of Jai Singh’s Observatory in New Delhi. Ashoka – or, more usually, Ashok – also became a popular boy’s name, not because it had Buddhist associations but because it seemed in accordance with the spirit of the times, an India ‘without sorrow’. More importantly, India’s new constitution, drafted by the Dalit (untouchable caste) Minister of Justice Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and made law on 26 November 1949, provided constitutional guarantees for a wide range of civ
il liberties that included freedom of religion and the outlawing of all forms of caste discrimination.

  Sadly for India, this spirit of idealism failed to move the reactionaries – in particular, that noisy minority of sectarians and chauvinists whose rallying-cry was Hindutva or ‘Hinduness’. To them a good Indian was a Hindu Indian, which was an underhand way of getting at members of India’s large Muslim population and, to a lesser degree, its Christians, Parsis – and its increasingly politicised Dalit underclass. Six weeks before his death in December 1956, a disillusioned Dr Ambedkar had organised a mass conversion of himself and many thousands of his followers to Buddhism, arguing that caste discrimination was still entrenched in Indian society and that large numbers of India’s Dalits were in fact the descendants of Buddhists who had been driven out of society. These Dalits today constitute a quarter of India’s population, and in the last two decades Dalit power has become a political reality, challenging but also threatening the traditional conjoined authority of India’s Brahmin and Kshatriya ruling classes.

  One of the pillars of the Hindutva movement is its rejection of what its theorists term the ‘Aryan Invasion theory’ in favour of ‘Out of India’: the belief that Indian civilisation was rooted in the subcontinent and owed nothing to external influences. That rejection somehow extends to include Buddhism and Emperor Ashoka, portrayed in some circles as un-Indian by virtue of his rejection of Brahmanist religion in favour of Buddhism – this despite the fact that the Dharma he set out on his Rock and Pillar Edicts took as much from Hindu and Jain ethics as it did from Buddhism.

  A prominent target of the Hindutvas in the late 1990s was Professor Romila Thapar, whose reading of the early history of India as set down in the national school syllabus was altered in what she saw as an attempt to replace mainstream history with a ‘Hindutva version of history’.15 Thapar’s protests led to her being accused of being anti-Hindu and, after she took up an appointment at the US Library of Congress in 2003, of betraying India. There was a double irony here of which Thapar’s accusers were probably unaware, in that the emperor she wrote about was himself a victim of Hindutvaism in one of its earliest historical manifestations. Fortunately, it now appears that the tide has turned and that the voices of unreason are no longer finding an audience.

  Meanwhile the search for Ashoka continues. Almost every year some new piece of the jigsaw comes to light. In 1982 it was the discovery by Dr P. K. Mishra, superintending archaeologist of the Nagpur Circle of the ASI, of a monastic complex at Deorkothar, close to the highway linking Allahabad to Rewa, that pre-dates the Bharhut and Sanchi stupas. Dr Mishra’s later excavations in 1999 and 2000 revealed that two of the stupas had been enclosed by a rudimentary stone railing with the simplest of ornamental designs, perhaps marking the transition from working in wood to stone. In Mishra’s view, the outstanding discovery of the dig was the recovery of a colossal polished pillar ‘which alludes to the times of Asoka in the 3rd century B.C. having Chakra on the abacus’.16 This pillar lay in more than fifty pieces alongside the railings, which themselves had been broken into smithereens. Everywhere there was evidence of ‘systematic annihilation’, which Mishra ascribed to the first quarter of the second century BCE.

  When pieced together, the pillar fragments were found to carry a six-line inscription in Brahmi of what appears to be a dedication of the pillar to Lord Buddha, placed there not by Ashoka Maurya but by the Buddhist elder Upagupta of Mathura and his followers. If this reading is confirmed – and doubts have been raised as to whether it really is Upagupta’s name on the inscription – it would give credence to the Ashokavadand’s and Xuanzang’s claims that it was Upagupta, patriarch of the Sarvastivada school of Buddhism at the time of Ashoka, who converted the emperor to Buddhism and guided his progress thereafter.

  The violent destruction at Deorkothar also gives credence to the claim that it was the Brahman general Pushyamitra Shunga who brought the Mauryan dynasty to a violent end and then set about destroying Buddhist sites – although it has always to be borne in mind that defaced sculptures and smashed columns may equally be the victims of earthquakes and accidental fires – just as Ashokan pillars serving as lingams, Buddhist icons worshipped as Hindu deities, and Buddhist shrines converted into or built over by Hindu temples may in many cases be nothing more than examples of the human propensity to put what is found to best use.

  Currently the most exciting work in the field of Ashokan archaeology is coming from northern Orissa and the Langudi Hills, where the ruins of the Great Monastery of Pushpagiri, where Xuanzang spent a year studying and teaching, have been identified. They extend over three adjoining hills. On one there stands a simple brick stupa dated to the third century BCE, encircled by twenty-six railing pillars, plain and simple for the most part. Nearby is a rock-cut elephant very similar in style and dating to that found by Markham Kittoe guarding the Dhauli Rock Edict.

  The Langudi rock-cut elephant, similar in design and dating to the Ashokan elephant guarding the Dhauli Rock Edict. This was uncovered during excavations that in 2011 are still ongoing at the site of the Great Monastery of Pushpagiri in ancient Kalinga, visited by the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang in the seventh century. (Courtesy of the American Committee of South Asian Arts)

  In the Cold Weather of 2000–1 a team led by Dr D. R. Pradhan, curator of Orissa State Archaeology, uncovered at Langudi two small stone sculptures. What has so excited students of Indian history is that both of these sculptures carry inscriptions in Brahmi lettering that appear to refer to Ashoka by that name. The smaller of the two is the head and shoulders of a man with long piled-up hair and large earrings. According to Professor B. N. Mukherjee of Calcutta University, the accompanying inscription reads: ‘Chhi [shri, honoured] karena ranja ashokhena’. The word karena can be read as ‘bestowal’, which suggests that the statue is a portrait of a donor named ‘King Ashoka’.

  The second sculpture is slightly larger, some twenty inches across, and shows a man seated on a throne flanked by two standing queens or female attendants. He sits with his legs crossed and his hands on his knees, and wears a turban and pendulous earrings, with numerous bangles from his wrists up to his elbows. Here the inscription is a little longer:

  ama upaska ashokasa samchiamana agra eka stupa.

  This Professor Mukherjee has provisionally translated as:

  A lay worshipper Ashoka with religious longing is associated in the construction of a prominent stupa.17

  The reference to Ashoka as a lay Buddhist would appear to date this image to about 265–263 BCE – about the time of the conquest of Kalinga.

  So the story of the Lost Emperor continues to unfold.

  16

  The Rise and Fall of Ashokadharma

  An overlooked detail from the front of the pillar beside the East Gateway at Bharhut. It shows a king bearing a Buddhist relic casket on an elephant. The accompanying donor inscription declares this to be the gift of ‘Chapa Devi, wife of Revati Devi of Vidisha’, the town close to Sanchi where Ashoka’s first wife lived. (Courtesy Benoy K. Behl)

  The story of Ashoka begins with his grandfather – and the man who placed him on the throne of Magadha: the Brahman Chanakya, nicknamed Kautilya, the ‘crow-like’. Chanakya was a product of Taxila,1 absorbed into the Achaemenid empire at the time of Cyrus the Great and by the fourth century BCE a centre of learning that drew high-caste youths from all over India – Brahmans to study law, medicine and military science, Kshatriyas the art of warfare. But Taxila was also a crossroads of cultures where men came together to exchange ideas and goods – a crucial factor when considering the influences that shaped the thinking of Chanakya and the early Mauryan rulers.

  One of Chanakya’s teachers at Taxila may have been the grammarian Panini,2 who laid down the rules of classical Sanskrit. Yet the sole medium available to Panini and his colleagues in which to set down their thoughts was Aramaic, a poor vehicle for the Prakrit spoken languages of northern India. It forced them to think long and hard as to why they
had nothing comparable – or better – but it also required the authority of a ruler strong enough to challenge tradition and willing to listen to good advice.

  Chanakya’s period of study at Taxila preceded Alexander the Great’s arrival by a couple of decades. He then followed the example of Panini in travelling east to Pataliputra and presenting himself to King Dhana Nanda, a bid that failed so disastrously that he had to flee for his life, helped first by Ajivikas and later by Jains who supported him with funds. He then began a search for a candidate ‘entitled by birth to be raised to sovereign power’, a quest that led him to the boy Chandragupta.

  But who was Chandragupta? Was he Dhana Nanda’s son by his equally low-caste queen Mura, grandson of a keeper of peacocks? Or was he a Kshatriya descended from surviving Sakyas who had settled in Champaran in eastern Magadha, famous for its peacocks? Or could he have been the son of the chieftain of a hill-town named Moriyanaga, ‘peacock mountain’? The last is the most credible. The Mauryas may well have had a link with peacocks as a tribal totem, but the family most probably had its origins in the mountain region of Mer or Meru on India’s north-western border, dominated by the Mer-Koh or Mahabun massif, Alexander’s Mount Aornos. It explains why Ashoka’s two major Rock Edicts at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra are sited where they are, as gateways to the Mahabun region. It also means that Chandragupta was one of the Greeks’ Assakenoi, the Ashvakan horse-people of the Chandravanshi lunar dynasty who offered their services to Alexander as mercenary cavalrymen.