Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (37 page)

Not surprisingly, the vandal remained silent, so that it was not until 1872 that the Jaugada Rock Edict was officially reported on, by a district officer named W. F. Grahame. By the time Grahame’s report appeared in the first issue of the
Indian Antiquary,
Sir Walter Elliot, KCIE, had retired from India and had become a leading member of the Royal Asiatic Society. The question of the identity of the Jaugada ‘civilian’ was not pursued.

The Jaugada inscription proved to be another of Emperor Ashoka’s major Rock Edict sites, the fifth so far discovered after Girnar, Dhauli, Shahbazgarhi and Kalsi. In common with the other edict rocks, it had been inscribed with REs 1–10 and 14. However, REs 11–13 had been replaced by two other edicts: the so-called Separate Rock Edicts (SREs 1 and 2). These had been set apart from the main edicts in two boxes and were relatively undamaged.

This was precisely what James Prinsep had found on the Dhauli Rock Edict outside Bhubaneshwar, and its discovery helped to explain why it was that REs 11–13 had been omitted both here and at the Dhauli rock, for both these sites lay within the boundaries of ancient Kalinga, one in the north, the other in the south. The three missing Rock Edicts were those in
which Emperor Ashoka had described his conquest of Kalinga and his subsequent remorse at the suffering he had caused. In Kalinga itself those remarks had been deliberately omitted, presumably to spare the feelings of the already traumatised people of Kalinga.

The two SREs that had replaced REs 11–13 at Jaugada and Dhauli are addressed to Ashoka’s
mahamatras
or special religious officers at Tosali (Dhauli) and Samapa (Jaugada). They are directed to carry out the emperor’s instructions regarding the spiritual welfare of the people under their care and to do so justly and impartially, so that the people of Kalinga might live at peace with one another. It was in this context that Emperor Ashoka had set out what is perhaps his most famous doctrine, in which he declares that he rules for the happiness of all his subjects (modern translation): ‘All men are my children. What I desire for my own children, and I desire their welfare and happiness both in this world and the next, that I desire for all men. You do not understand to what extent I desire this, and if some of you do understand, you do not understand the full extent of my desire.’
³

SRE 2 continues in the same vein but it, too, carries a quite remarkable message, intended for ‘the people of the unconquered territories’. If they are wondering what the king’s intentions are towards them, Ashoka’s answer is this (modern translation):

My only intention is that they live without fear of me, that they may trust me and that I may give them happiness, not sorrow. Furthermore, they should understand that the king will forgive those who can be forgiven, and that he wishes them to practise Dharma so that they can attain happiness in
this world and the next. I am telling you this so that I may discharge the debts I owe, and that in instructing you, you may know that my vow and my promise will not be broken … Assure them [the people of the unconquered territories] that: ‘The king is like a father. He feels towards us as he feels towards himself. We are to him like his own children.’

This message was for the peoples who lived south and west of Kalinga, whose territories had yet to be conquered by Ashoka. They had seen the terrible fate that had befallen Kalinga when it had resisted Ashoka’s armies. Now the emperor wanted them to understand that he was a changed man who wished to conquer by force of Dharma alone.

In the event, Ashoka never did conquer the southern tip of India, any more than he conquered the island of Lanka beyond. He had no need to for, as the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
tells us, he achieved his aims by peaceful means with the spread of the Dharma.

With the discovery of the fifth edict rock a distinct pattern began to emerge. All five had been cut into the outer flank of a prominent – and elephantine – boulder set on a hillside overlooking a human settlement. Both at Jaugada and at Dhauli the edict rocks look down upon the remains of walled cities. At Dhauli the ancient city of Tosali is on the far side of the nearby River Daya, the ‘River of Compassion’, but its monumental mud and brick walls and outer moat are still strikingly visible. At Jaugada the hill actually merges into a corner of the walls of Samapa so as to form a sort of acropolis, as in a Greek city. Here the earthworks are less impressive but what is still visible to the naked eye is that the original town of Samapa had been laid out
in a square on a north–south grid, with two gates on each side – again, very much on the Greek model. From its size and location, it must at one time have been an important administrative centre for the southern half of ancient Kalinga, with its close proximity to the river and the sea coast making it well placed to engage in trade inland and up and down the coast.

Walter Elliot carried out a cursory dig here at Jaugada in 1858 and unearthed a collection of Kushan coins dating from the first century CE. A more thorough excavation would be carried out in 1956–7 by Mrs Debala Mitra of the Archaeological Survey of India. She would show that Samapa had been founded during the reign of Ashoka in the third century CE. Punch-marked coins of the Mauryan era and a range of working and decorative materials pointed to a flourishing and prosperous community.
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That same pattern is found at Tosali, so that both appear to have been new towns founded immediately after the conquest of Kalinga as new administrative centres of Ashoka’s empire.

The Sanskritist who first examined and wrote about the Jaugada Rock Edict was an Indian: the scholar and social reformer Dr Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar,
⁵
at this time assistant lecturer in Sanskrit at Bombay University, which by now had become the centre of Indian studies in India.

West-coast Bombay had eclipsed Calcutta – and if General Sir Alexander Cunningham was to be believed, this was because the Asiatic Society of Bengal had been taken over by what he called ‘the Naturalists, who then monopolised the direction of the Museum’, so much so that when he visited its museum to re-examine a Buddhist statue excavated by him at Sravasti he found it tucked away ‘in the midst of a herd of stuffed deer and antelopes, [which] completely hid its inscribed
pedestal from view’.
⁶
However, the real factor in Bombay’s rise to prominence was that it was less hidebound by race and caste on both sides and it had profited from a succession of enlightened governors – among them the Orientalist Jonathan Duncan, who had died in office in Bombay in 1811 – who recognised the need to bring Indians on board.

The enterprise that had characterised Calcutta in its early days had now become Bombay’s hallmark, which in the academic field found expression in the rise to prominence of Elphinstone College. It became the nucleus of Bombay University in 1860 and within a decade its Department of Oriental Studies had become a beacon of scholarship, largely thanks to the presence of Professor Georg Bühler, under whose aegis Indian epigraphy was transformed from a hobby into a discipline. Sanskrit – and in due course Pali – became a respectable subject to study at university and a new breed of college-educated Sanskritists began to appear who were no longer content to serve merely as pandits to Europeans.

A third golden age of Indology now began in which Indian scholars were able to participate on an equal footing not only with foreign-born epigraphists working in India, such as Dr Bühler and Dr John Fleet of the ICS, but with their counterparts in Europe. In Bombay the first local graduate to make his mark was Professor Bühler’s protégé, the Maharashtran Brahmin Ramakrishna Bhandarkar, born in the
annus mirabilis
of 1837. When Bühler took on a more senior post in 1868 it was Dr Bhandarkar who took over his chair as Professor of Sanskrit – only to be passed over four years later when the position was given to a twenty-five-year-old Oxford scholar, Dr Peter Peterson. Despite the protests of Bühler and others, the authorities refused to back down, so Bhandarkar had no option but
to serve as Peterson’s assistant – a humiliation compounded by Peterson’s insistence on sharing the credit for what Bhandarkar saw as his greatest achievement: his collection and editing of scores of previously unknown Sanskrit and Pali manuscripts. When it became clear that Peterson was staying put, a special post was created for Bhandarkar as Professor of Sanskrit at the Deccan College in Poona, which Dr Bhandarkar lived to see develop into the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, formally opened by the Viceroy in 1917, by which time Dr Bhandarkar had himself been awarded a knighthood.

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.
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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.
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