Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor Read online

  Also by Charles Allen

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  Tales from the Dark Continent

  Tales from the South China Seas

  Raj Scrapbook

  The Savage Wars of Peace

  Thunder and Lightning

  Lives of the Indian Princes

  A Soldier of the Company

  A Glimpse of the Burning Plain

  Kipling’s Kingdom

  A Mountain in Tibet

  The Search for Shangri-La

  The Buddha and the Sahibs

  Soldier Sahibs

  Duel in the Snows

  God’s Terrorists

  Kipling Sahib

  The Buddha and Dr Führer

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-1-408-70388-5

  Copyright © Charles Allen 2012

  Map copyright © John Gilkes

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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  The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men. They are honoured not only by columns and inscriptions in their own land, but in foreign nations on memorials graven not on stone but in the hearts and minds of men.

  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 404 BCE

  Contents

  Also by Charles Allen

  Copyright

  Preface: The King Without Sorrow

  1 The Breaking of Idols

  2 The Golden Column of Firoz Shah

  3 Objects of Enquiry

  4 Enter Alexander

  5 Furious Orientalists

  6 The Long Shadow of Horace Hayman Wilson

  7 Prinsep’s Ghat

  8 Thus Spake King Piyadasi

  9 Brian Hodgson’s Gift

  10 Records of the Western Regions

  11 Alexander Cunningham the Great

  12 Sir Alexander in Excelsis

  13 Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum

  14 India after Cunningham

  15 Ashoka in the Twentieth Century

  16 The Rise and Fall of Ashokadharma

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix:The Rock and Pillar Edicts

  Notes

  Index

  Preface

  The King Without Sorrow

  The emperor listed in the ancient Brahmanical Puranas as Ashoka raja, ‘The King Without Sorrow’, ruled over a united India some 2250 years ago. In the course of some forty years Ashoka unified the subcontinent under one government, transformed a minor religious sect into a world religion and introduced moral concepts whose impact on Asia can be felt to this day. Ashoka may be said to be India’s founding father, being the first ruler to forge India into a single nation state. As if that were not enough, long before Mahatma Gandhi, Emperor Ashoka espoused non-violence and the utterly novel concept of conquest by moral force alone – and he was very probably the first ruler in history to establish a welfare state. Ashoka is also the first in India’s ancient dynasties of kings with a distinctive, identifiable voice – and no ordinary voice at that, for what he had to say was and remains absolutely, unequivocally unique as a statement of governing principles.

  The words of what might justifiably be called Ashoka’s Song – more prosaically referred to as the Ashokan Rock or Pillar Edicts – were inscribed in India’s first written script, Ashoka Brahmi. They were chiselled on hundreds of rock surfaces and on scores of polished pillars of stone throughout the Indian subcontinent, so that his song could be heard loud and clear from Kandahar to the mouths of the Irrawady and from Cape Cormorin at the tip of southern India to the Himalayas. From this heartland that same message spread out in ripples on all sides until it was heard in the furthest corners of Asia.

  Only a precious few of these edicts have survived the vicissitudes of time and human violence in readable form: some seven edict rocks, eleven edict pillars, another nineteen more modest sites bearing what are usually referred to as the Minor Rock Edicts and perhaps a dozen more inscriptions in various forms that can be attributed to Ashoka. Together they constitute the earliest surviving written records of India’s ancient history. Yet it is a remarkable and little-known fact that they and the emperor who composed them were all but lost to history for the better part of two thousand years.

  The religious tolerance that Emperor Ashoka called for in his seventh Rock Edict (RE 7), where he spoke of his desire ‘that all religions should reside everywhere’, lay at the heart of the new thinking that Ashoka’s religious ministers promoted within the borders of his empire and his missionaries beyond. But even in his own time this message was perceived as a threat by those who believed that they and they alone had the authority to dictate what religious codes people should follow.

  British historians and archaeologists working in India in the nineteenth century were quick to blame the eclipse of Buddhism there on the Muslim conquests. For seven centuries zealots did indeed inflict horrendous human and cultural damage on India in the name of Islam, yet the fact is that Buddhism in India was in terminal decline long before Mahmud of Ghazni first crossed the Indus in the year 1008 CE.* Already by the ninth century Buddhism as practised by its adherents in India had become so esoteric, so isolated from the wider community as to be unable to compete with revitalised, devotional Hinduism as promoted by the ninth-century reformer Adi Shankaracharya and his followers. However, there is another equally important reason for the failure of Buddhism in India – one that few followers of the Hindutva nationalist movement (which believes that the only good Indian is a Hindu Indian) are prepared to accept: Brahmanical intolerance, which at times was as unbending in its hatred of heresy and heretics as later Muslim hardliners were in their jihads against unbelief and unbelievers.

  Much of the evidence for this Brahmanical oppression comes from India’s Buddhist neighbours in Tibet, Nepal, Burma and Ceylon. However, there are also Brahmanical texts that demonstrate an implacable hostility towards Buddhists and record their persecution at the hands of orthodox Hindu rulers. And there is the evidence of archaeology.

  The politicians who in 1991 egged on the mob that destroyed Babur’s mosque at Ayodhya on the grounds that it was built over the Hindu warrior-god Rama’s fort may be surprised to know that some of the most famous Hindu temples in India almost certainly began as Buddhist structures, often incorporating Buddhist icons, either in the form of images of deities or as lingams. Four likely examples – selected simply because they come from the four corners of the subcontinent – are the Badrinath shrine in the far north Garhwal Himal, the Jagannath temple at Puri on the east coast, the Ayyappa shrine at Sabarimala in Kerala and the Vithalla shrine at Pandharpur in Western Maharashtra.

  The triumph of Brahmanism (the lion) over Buddhism (the elephant), as photographed in 1890. The giant lion is one of a pair that guard the entrance to the great temple of the sun god Surya, a sublime example of Hindu architecture in India.1 (APAC, British Library)

  However, the most striking evidence of Brahmanical hostility towards Buddhism comes in the form of silence: the way in which India’s Buddhist history, extending over large parts of the country and lasting for many centuries, was excised from the historical record. It was by this simple act of omission – the historical revisionism of generations of pious Brahman pundits and genealogists – that Ashoka’s Song was silenced, and Emperor Ashoka himse
lf all but erased from India’s history. In its call for religious tolerance, its wish that all living beings should live together in harmony and without violence, Ashoka’s Song spoke to all. But by promoting the Buddhist heresy throughout the land, Ashoka directly challenged the caste-based authority of the Brahman order. He and his beliefs could not be tolerated.

  Religious intolerance knows no frontiers. When the Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan was pulling down Hindu temples in Benares, Puritans in England were busying themselves smashing medieval stained glass and destroying idols in churches up and down the country. Historians who deny or conceal such uncomfortable truths do us no favours. Herein lies part of the reason for writing this book about a long-forgotten emperor whose song was silenced.

  But there are other and happier reasons, too – one being the means by which India’s lost pre-Muslim history was rediscovered in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. It is an astonishing tale of painstaking detective work begun by European Orientalists – a species vilified by the late Professor Edward Said and his followers.2 Yet anyone who values the advancement of learning has cause to be grateful for these pioneer Orientalists-cum-antiquarians-cum-Indologists – call them what you will. In recounting how the rediscovery of Ashoka and his world came about I hope that even the most ardent Indian nationalist will accept that these foreign enthusiasts and scholars played a progressive role in the advancement of modern India, for all that some were part of the colonial exploitation of India.

  That process of rediscovery was first sketched out by the historian John Keay in 1981 in his undervalued book India Discovered. I myself explored some aspects in greater detail in The Buddha and the Sahibs and The Buddha and Dr Führer. Here I have taken it further in charting step by step the rediscovery of India’s lost Ashokan history by a combination of archaeology and sheer dogged scholarship.

  However, this rediscovery makes no sense without examining how it was that ancient India – and Ashoka with it – came to be lost to the outside world; a process exemplifed by the destruction of the great Buddhist university of Nalanda in 1193–4. A brief account of that dreadful visitation provides this book’s opening chapter. Plenty of Muslim historians were present to chronicle these and subsequent events but they were, with two notable exceptions, blinded to any history that did not form part of the advance of Islam. Brahmanical omission was now compounded by Muslim single-mindedness. The links with India’s past were broken, its pre-Islamic history all but forgotten. Only in the last quarter of the eighteenth century could the process of recovery begin, thanks to a new spirit of enquiry originating in Europe, which manifested itself in India in the Orientalist movement.

  It will by now have dawned on the reader that this is no straightforward biography. The first generation of Orientalists in India – the ‘dead white men in periwigs’ so despised by Edward Said – were very few in number, had no idea what they were looking for and had few tools other than their enthusiasm – and the driving force of reason. But there were clues, scattered like pieces of jigsaw far and wide across the Indian landscape, and it was by finding these clues, recognising them as such and then painstakingly piecing them together, with many false starts and blind alleys, that these enthusiasts reconstructed India’s pre-Islamic history. This process of reassembly extended over more than two centuries, and it ended with the identity of Emperor Ashoka far from complete, but with enough of him for us to understand who he was, what he was like and how enormously important a figure he had been in the shaping of Asia.

  The process may have been initiated by Europeans but it was far from one-sided. Very recently I had the pleasure of sitting quite literally at the feet of the Venerable Waskaduwe Mahindawansa Maha Nayako, elder and abbot of the Buddhist monastery of Rajaguru Sri Subuthi Maha Vihara, situated beside the sea on the road between Colombo and Galle in Sri Lanka. There I was shown some of the extensive correspondence that had taken place between Venerable Waskaduwe’s predecessor the distinguished Pali scholar Venerable Subuthi and three generations of British Orientalists, beginning with letters written by the newly appointed Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, General Sir Alexander Cunningham, from the Bharhut excavation site in 1861, continuing with letters from the Ceylon Civil Servant turned Pali scholar Robert Childers from the 1870s into the 1890s, and ending with letters from the Indian Civil Servant and future historian Vincent Smith, sent from Bihar in 1898.

  To replicate this process of reassembly, I have tried to stay in context, so that at each stage the reader knows little more than did the savants at the time. In the same way I have tried to make my illustrations as contemporaneous as possible and I make no apologies for the quality of some of the early photographs. This withholding of information may baffle and even at times frustrate you, the reader, but I hope it will better allow you to share in the process of the discovery of Ashoka, clue by clue.

  With that recovery completed I have devoted the final chapter to an account of the man and his dynasty: a potted biography based on what little hard evidence we have together with a reasonable degree of conjecture.

  I have avoided academic usage in my spelling: for example, Ashoka rather than Aoka, raja rather than rja, chakra and not cakra and so on. I have also given precedence in my own (as opposed to quoted) text to Sanskrit over Pali, thus Dharma rather than Dhamma. To this day blurring persists in Indian speech between the soft and hard ‘s’ (think of Simla and Shimla), ‘b’ and ‘v’ (Baranasi and Varanasi), and to a lesser extent between ‘l’ and ‘r’, ‘d’ and ‘th’; an unconscious hangover from soft Sanskrit and harder Pali. Philologists may quibble but these differences really don’t matter.

  The ancient texts consulted and quoted come in three interrelated languages – Prakrit, Sanskrit and Pali – and two main alphabets – Brahmi lipi and Kharosthi. An explanatory note on these languages and alphabets is given at the start of the Notes (p. 427).

  Finally, a note about my usage of two words: Brahman and Dharma. A Brahmin – the Anglicised form of the Sanskrit Brahmana – is a member of the priestly caste, the highest of the four varnas that make up Hindu society. The religion over which this sacerdotal caste presided at the time of Ashoka was very different from the popular Hinduism we know today, as was the authority of that same caste. I have differentiated between Brahmanism then and Hinduism today by referring to the priestly caste then as Brahmans and their descendants today as Brahmins.

  The word Dharma is closely associated with the name of Ashoka and Buddhism but has its roots in the Proto-Indo-European verb dhr, ‘to hold’, used to describe the cosmic law underpinning the universe. Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs alike use the word to describe, at one level, the proper practice of one’s religion and, on a higher plane, ultimate reality. In Hindu usage the meaning of the word has been extended to embrace a wide spectrum of ideas ranging from the correct performance of religious rituals and application of caste rules to ethical conduct and the application of civil and criminal law.

  However, in the fifth century BCE the Buddhists gave the word a new and more specific meaning. In the spoken Prakrit of the time the form used was Dhammo, which became Dhamma in Pali, Dharma in Sanskrit. In the Buddhist context it came to mean the ultimate truth as contained in the body of teachings expounded by Sakyamuni Buddha. The Emperor Ashoka, who afterwards became known throughout the Buddhist world as Ashokadharma (Sanskrit) or Asokodhamma (Pali) used the word repeatedly in his Pillar and Rock Edicts. On the bilingual Ashokan edict found in Kandahar in 1958 the word appears in Greek as (eusebeia), usually translated as ‘piety’. Arguments continue among academics over what precise meaning was intended but the details contained in his Rock and Pillar Edicts suggest that Ashoka intended his Dharma to be inclusive, that it represented ‘a religiously founded civil ethics for all state citizens of the Maurya empire as well as a specific religion usually identified as the Buddhist dharma’.3

  The Orientalists whose activities make up such a large part of this
story could never quite get their heads round the concept of Dharma. They began by translating the word as ‘Religion’ and afterwards tended to stick with ‘the Law’. That still falls short but for ease of reading I am calling it the Moral Law.

  Charles Allen, Somerset, August 2011

  1

  The Breaking of Idols

  Part of the ruins of the Mahavihara, or ‘Great Monastery’, of Nalanda, for centuries a beacon of learning in South Asia. A photograph of the partially uncovered remains of the Baladitya Temple soon after the first excavations had begun, photographed by the archaeologist Joseph Beglar in 1872. (APAC, British Library)

  At the start of the winter campaigning season of 1193–4 two hundred armed horsemen crossed the Ganges at Varanasi in search of booty. They were mostly Khilji slaves, including the war lord who led them and who shared their bread and their loot. His name was Muhammad Bakhtiyar, ‘impetuous, enterprising, bold, sagacious and expert’, the most daring of the military commanders serving Qutb-ud-din Aybak – who was himself a slave, his master being Sultan Muhammad of Ghor, celebrated by his compatriots as Jahanzos, the ‘World-Burner’.

  Twelve years earlier the World-Burning Sultan had captured the city of Lahore, which had become the springboard for his further advance into India. The subsequent progress of his armies under the generalship of Qutb-ud-din Aybak had been recorded in detail by the sultan’s chroniclers, among them the Persian Sadruddin Muhammad Hasan Nizami:

  He purged by his sword the land of Hind from the filth of infidelity … and the impurity of idol-worship, and left not one temple standing … When he arrived at Mirat [Meerut] all the idol temples were converted into mosques. He then marched and encamped under the fort of Delhi. The city and its vicinity were freed from idols and idol-worship, and in the sanctuaries, mosques were raised by the worshippers of one God. The royal army proceeded towards Benares, which is the centre of the country of Hind, and here they destroyed nearly one thousand temples. The temples were converted into mosques and abodes of goodness, and the ejaculations of bead-counters and voices of summoners to prayer ascended to high heaven, and the very name of idolatry was annihilated.1