by John Keay
Thus, to within a decade, one event in India’s ancient history had been given a date. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this discovery. Fortuitously Alexander, Seleucus and Megasthenes had blundered into Indian history at a crucial moment. Chandragupta would soon be revealed as a sort of Indian Julius Caesar, the creator of an empire and the founder of a dynasty unique in Indian history. The date of his ascent to the throne was thus a crucial one. Working backwards from it to the birth of Buddha, and forwards using the Sanskrit king lists, the whole chronology of Indian history could be, and was, based upon it.
Six months after announcing his discovery, Jones wrote to a close friend in England. ‘This day ten years ago & we landed at Calcutta; and if it had not been for the incessant ill-health of my beloved Anna, they would have been the happiest years of a life always happy &’ But now Anna Maria must go home; to stay longer would endanger her life. Jones himself would follow ‘as soon as I can, consistent with my own plans & but having nothing to fear from India, and much to enjoy in it, I shall make a great sacrifice whenever I leave it’.
In fact I shall leave a country where we have no Royal Court, no House of Lords, no clergy with wealth or power, no taxes, no fear of robbers or fire, no snow and hard frosts followed by comfortless thaws, and no ice except what is made by art to supply our deserts; add to this, that I have twice as much money as I want, and am conscious of doing very great and extensive good to many millions of native Indians, who look to me, not as their judge, but as their legislator. Nevertheless a man who has nearly closed the forty-seventh year of his age, and who sees younger men dying around him constantly, has a right to think of retirement in this life, and ought to think chiefly of preparing himself for another &
Already his eyesight was deteriorating, and in November he collapsed with a fever. He recovered, but rheumatism and a tumour continued to give him great pain. Anna Maria sailed for home. Jones immersed himself ever deeper in his studies. Seven volumes of the digest of Hindu law were now complete. A year more of intensive study, and the remaining two volumes should be ready. He officially requested permission to resign his judgeship and return to England in 1795. A month after making the request he collapsed. Doctors linked the tumour to an inflammation of the liver. Again he seemed to recover. On 26 April 1794, the doctors thought him well enough to face an immediate voyage to England. The next day, as if shattered by the thought of such an abrupt departure, ‘the father of oriental studies’ died.
Jones’s discoveries – of the Indo-European family of languages, of the riches of Sanskrit literature, and of the first date in ancient Indian history – were all milestones. But in retrospect, his most important achievement was the founding of the Asiatic Society. Had he left no such institution, his death might well have created an unbridgeable void in the ranks of the orientalists; the reconstruction of India’s ancient history might have been delayed by decades. As it was, there was no hiatus. Henry Thomas Colebrooke, another brilliant scholar, who had read his first paper to the society just before Jones’s death, completed the digest of Hindu laws. He also assumed the mantle of Jones as the champion of Hindu civilization and the exponent of Sanskrit literature; indeed, Professor Max Muller, the great German orientalist, considered Colebrooke the finer scholar.
Many other notable figures assisted in the exploration of Sanskrit and in the study of how India’s vernacular languages had developed from it. Indirectly, they also contributed to the reconstruction of Indian history and the appreciation of Indian art and architecture. But the more sensational discoveries would be made elsewhere. Sanskrit literature proved too unreliable on facts and dates, too hard to authenticate and too diffuse to assimilate; sometimes it was positively misleading.
But if Jones had concentrated on literature, he had also provided for and encouraged the widest possible use of research: ‘Man and Nature – whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other.’ Every branch of Indian studies owed something to his inspiration and, without this, no true picture of India would ever have emerged.
He had also succeeded in making Indian studies respectable. In England, Calcutta was now compared to Florence; there was talk of an Indian-based renaissance; and Jones and his successors were compared to the great Italian humanists. The ‘Exotic East’ had taken on a new meaning. It was no longer possible to view India as an extravagant and titillating circus. For scholars it was a challenge, for administrators a responsibility. Various reforms were making India less attractive to the adventurer and speculator. Jones’s fame ensured that their place would be taken by the soldier-scholars and collector-scientists who became the true glory of the raj.
CHAPTER THREE
Thus Spake Ashoka
The trappings of government set up in Calcutta to cope with the sudden acquisition of Bengal included not only a judiciary but also a mint. It was as Assistant Assay-Master at this mint that James Prinsep arrived in India in 1819. The post was an undistinguished one; Prinsep, far from being a celebrity like Jones, could expect nothing better. He was barely twenty and, according to his obituarist, ‘wanting, perhaps, in the finish of classical scholarship which is conferred at the public schools and universities of England’. As a child, the last in a family of seven sons, his passion had been constructing highly intricate working models; ‘habits of exactness and minute attention to detail’ would remain his outstanding traits. He studied architecture under Pugin, transferred to the Royal Mint when his eyesight became strained, and thence to Calcutta. ‘Well grounded in chemistry, mechanics and the useful sciences’, he was not an obvious candidate for the mantle of Jones and the distinction of being India’s most successful scholar.
In the quarter century between Jones’s death and Prinsep’s arrival the British position in India had changed radically. The defeats of Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, of the Marathas, and of the Gurkhas had left the British undisputed masters of as much of India as they cared to digest. Indeed the British raj had begun. The sovereignty of the East India Company was almost as much a political fiction as that of their nominal but now helpless overlord, the Moghul emperor. Both, though they lingered on for another thirty years, had become anachronisms.
From Calcutta a long arm of British territory now reached up the Ganges and the Jumna to Agra, Delhi and beyond. A thumb prodded the Himalayas between Nepal and Kashmir, while several stubby fingers probed into Punjab, Rajasthan and central India. In the west, Bombay had been expanding into the Maratha homeland; Broach and Baroda were under British control, and Poona, a centre of Hindu orthodoxy and the Maratha capital, was being transformed into the legendary watering place for Anglo-Indian bores. In the south, all that was not British territory was held by friendly feudatories; the French had been obliterated, Mysore settled, and the limits of territorial expansion already reached.
Visitors in search of the real India no longer had to hop around the coastline; they could now march boldly, and safely, across the middle. Bishop Heber of Calcutta (the appointment itself was a sign of the times; in Jones’s day there had not been even a church in Calcutta) toured his diocese in the 1820s. The diocese was a big one – the whole of India – and ‘Reginald Calcutta’, as he signed himself, travelled the length of the Ganges to Dehra Dun in the Himalayas, then down through Delhi and Agra into Rajasthan, still largely independent, and came out at Poona and thence down to Bombay.
The acquisition of all this new territory brought the British into contact with the country’s architectural heritage. Two centuries earlier Elizabethan envoys had marvelled at the cities of Moghul India ‘of which the like is not to be found in all Christendom’. The famous buildings of Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Delhi, ‘either of them much greater than London and more populous’, they had described in detail. When, therefore, the first generation of British administrators arrived in upper India they showed genuine reverence for the architectural relics of Moghul power. Instead of the landscapes of Hodges and the Daniells, their souvenirs of India would be detailed
drawings of the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort. Their curiosity also extended to buildings sacred to the non-Mohammedan population; Khajuraho, Abu and many other sites were discovered between 1810 and 1830. The raw materials for a new investigation of India’s past were accumulating. But it was another class of monuments, predating the Mohammedan invasions and with unmistakable signs of extreme antiquity, which would become Prinsep’s speciality.
The first of these monuments – one could scarcely call them buildings – to attract European attention were the cave temples in the vicinity of Bombay. The island of Elephanta in Bombay harbour had been known to the Portuguese and became the subject of one of the earliest archaeological reports received by Jones’s new Asiatic Society.
The cave is about three-quarters of a mile from the beach; the path leading to it lies through a valley; the hills on either side beautifully clothed and, except when interrupted by the dove calling to her absent mate, a solemn stillness prevails; the mind is fitted for contemplating the approaching scene.
The approaching scene was not of some natural cave with a few prehistoric scratchings, but of a spacious pillared hall, with delicate sculptural details and colossal stone figures – an architectural creation in all but name; for the whole thing was hacked, hewn, carved and sculpted out of solid rock.
North of Bombay, the island of Salsette boasted more groups of such caves. In 1806 Lord Valentia, a young Englishman whose greatest claim to fame must be the sheer weight of his travelogue (four quarto volumes of just on half a hundredweight), set out to explore them. He took with him Henry Salt, his companion and artist, to help clear a path through the jungle that surrounded the caves. Outside the Jogeshwar caves they hesitated before the fresh pug marks of a tiger; according to the villagers, tigers actually lived in the caves for part of the year.
Salt found that the other Salsette caves at Kanheri and Montpezir had also been recently occupied. To the Portuguese, the pillared nave and the transepts had spelt basilica; there was even a hole in the façade for a rose window. They had just smothered the fine, but pagan, carving in stucco and consecrated the place. Salt chipped away at the stucco and observed how well it had preserved the sculpture.
Though these figures are by no means well proportioned, yet their air, size and general management give an expression of grandeur that the best sculptors have often failed in attaining; the laziness of attitude, the simplicity of drapery, the suitableness of their situation and the plainness of style in which they are executed & all contribute towards producing this effect.
He was getting quite a feeling for ancient art treasures. In Lord Valentia’s train he would move on to Egypt, stay on there as British consul, and become so successful at appropriating and selling the art treasures of the Pharaohs that he rivalled the great tomb-robber Belzoni.
Meanwhile in India more rock-cut temples had come to light. The free-standing Kailasa temple at Ellora, cut into the rock from above like a gigantic intaglio, was discovered in the late eighteenth century. It was followed by the famous caves at Ajanta and Bagh. ‘Few remains of antiquity,’ wrote William Erskine in 1813, ‘have excited greater curiosity. History does not record any fact that can guide us in fixing the period of their execution, and many opposite opinions have been formed regarding the religion of the people by whom they were made.’ From the statuary at Elephanta and Ellora, particularly the figures with several heads and many arms, it was clear that these at least were Hindu. But why were they in such remote locations and why had they been so long neglected? What, too, of the plainer caves like Kanheri and the largest of all, Karli in the Western Ghats? Lord Valentia was pretty sure that the sitting figure, surrounded by devotees, at Karli was ‘the Boddh’; he had just come from Ceylon where Buddhism was still a living religion, though it appeared to be almost unknown in India.
Other critics who looked to the west for an explanation of anything they found admirable in Indian art, insisted that the excellence of the sculpture indicated the presence of a Greek, Phoenician or even Jewish colony in western India. Yet others looked to Africa: who but the builders of the pyramids could have achieved such monolithic wonders? These theories were based on the idea that such monuments were exclusive to western India, which had a long history of maritime contacts with the West. They became less credible with the discovery of the so-called Seven Pagodas at Mahabalipuram near Madras. Here, a thousand miles away and on the other side of the Indian peninsula, were a group of temples cut not out of solid rock, but sculpted out of boulders. At first glance they looked like true buildings, a little rounded like old stone cottages, but well proportioned – up to fifty-five feet long and thirty-five feet high – with porches, pillars and statuary. It was only on closer inspection that one realized that each was a single gigantic stone sculpted into architecture. ‘Stupendous,’ declared William Chambers who twice visited the place in the 1770s (though his report had to wait for the Asiatic Society’s first publication in 1789), ‘of a style no longer in use, indeed closer to that of Egypt.’
Five years later, a further account of the boulder temples, or raths, was submitted by a man who had also seen Elephanta. To his mind there was no question that in style and technique the two were closely related. Had he also seen the intaglio temple of Ellora he might have been tempted to postulate some theory of architectural development; first the cave temple, then the free-standing excavation, and finally the boulder style, freed at last from solid rock. It was as if India’s architecture had somehow evolved out of the earth’s crust. Elsewhere, stone buildings have always evolved from wooden ones; but in India it was as if architecture was a development of sculpture. The distinctive characteristic of all truly Indian buildings is their sculptural quality. The great Hindu temples look like mountainous accumulations of figures and friezes; even the Taj Mahal, for all its purity of line, stays in the mind as a masterpiece of sculpture rather than of construction.
There was yet one other type of ancient monument which had intrigued early visitors. Thomas Coryat, an English eccentric who turned up in Delhi in 1616, was probably the first to take notice of it. South of the Moghul city of Delhi (now Old Delhi) lay the abandoned tombs and forts of half a dozen earlier Delhis (now, confusingly, the site of New Delhi). The ruins stretched for ten miles, overgrown, inhabited by bats and monkeys. But in the middle of this jungle of crumbling masonry Coryat saw something that made him stop; it did not belong. A plain circular pillar, forty feet high, stuck up through the remains of some dying palace and, in the evening light so proper to ruins, it shone. At a distance he took it for brass, closer up for marble; it is in fact polished sandstone. Of a weight later estimated at twenty-seven tons, it is a single, finely tapered stone, another example of highly developed monolithic craftsmanship. But what intrigued Coryat was the discovery that it was inscribed. Of the two principal inscriptions one was in a script consisting of simple erect letters, a bit like pin-men, which Coryat was sure were Greek. The pillar must then, he thought, have been erected by Alexander the Great, probably ‘in token of his victorie’ over the Indian king Porus in 326 BC.
Fifty years later another such pillar was discovered by John Marshall, an East India Company factor who has been called ‘the first Englishman who really studied Indian antiquities’. He was certainly less inclined to jump to wild conclusions. His pillar was ‘nine yards nine inches high’ and boasted a remarkable capital: ‘at the top of this pillar & is placed a tyger engraven, the neatliest that I have seene in India’. It was actually a lion. But perhaps the most interesting thing about this pillar was that it was in Bihar, a thousand miles from Delhi and many more from the rock-cut monuments around Bombay and Madras.
Writing similar to that found on the Delhi pillar was also found on some of the cave temples; and at Karli there was actually a small pillar outside the cave. Clearly all these monuments were somehow connected. But it was doubtful whether Alexander had ever reached Delhi, let alone Bihar. The existence of a similar pillar there put paid to Coryat’s idea of
their commemorating Alexander’s victories, although the possibility that the letters were some corrupt form of Greek would linger on for many years.
With the foundation of the Asiatic Society there was at last a forum in which a concerted investigation into all these monuments could take place. Reports of more pillars and caves were soon trickling in. Jones himself was rightly convinced that the mystery of who created them, when and why, could be solved only if the inscriptions could be translated. Some ancient civilization, some foreign conqueror perhaps, or some master craftsman, seemed to be crying out for recognition. Another breakthrough seemed imminent; and with it another chunk of India’s lost history might be restored.
Thanks to Charles Wilkins, the man who preceded Jones as a Sanskritist, progress was at first encouraging. At one of the earliest meetings of the Society he reported on a new pillar, also in Bihar.
Sometime in the month of November in the year 1780 I discovered in the vicinity of the Town of Buddal, near which the Company has a factory, and which at that time was under my charge, a decapitated monumental pillar which at a little distance had very much the appearance of the trunk of a coconut tree broken off in the middle. It stands in a swamp overgrown with weeds near a small temple&. Upon my getting close enough to the monument to examine it, I took its dimensions and made a drawing of it&. At a few feet above the ground is an inscription, engrained in the stone, from which I took two reversed impressions with printer’s ink. I have lately been so fortunate as to decipher the character.