Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (42 page)

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 the 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.

The obvious answer is that this was the scene of Ashoka’s Third Buddhist Council, a convention regarded by him as so important that he chose to build India’s first monumental building of stone, very probably importing architects and stonemasons from Persia to do the job. Dr Spooner certainly thought so but then rather spoiled his case by going on to argue that the Mauryan rulers may themselves have been Persian in origin.
¹¹
John Marshall was quick to downplay Spooner’s Persian claims, which had not gone down well in Patna, a centre of Indian nationalist feeling. Yet outside influence there undoubtedly was, as displayed in the capital found by Waddell, which is incontestably Graeco-Persian in inspiration if not in manufacture.

The last important Ashokan discovery of the nineteenth century took place in North Bihar in 1898, in the wake of Dr Führer’s announcement that he had discovered the birthplace of the Buddha at Lumbini and his home city of Kapilavastu. In January 1898 – just as Dr Führer was desperately trying to save his reputation at an excavation just a few miles away – a local landowner named William Claxton Peppé opened the largest of a number of stupa mounds on his estate at Piprahwa. Its location was significant: just half a mile south of the Nepal border, 10 miles south-west of Lumbini and its Ashokan pillar,
17 miles south of the Nigliva Sagar Ashokan pillar, 12 miles south-east of the Gotihawa Ashokan pillar, and 15 miles southeast of Tilaurakot, the site of ancient Kapilavastu.

At a depth of twenty-four feet, at the very centre and base of the stupa, Peppé found a large sandstone coffer, weighing some three-quarters of a ton, within which were five soapstone reliquaries, a crystal bowl and a mass of small jewels shaped like flowers, semi-precious stones and other offerings. Overlooked in the initial excitement were some ashes and bone fragments, afterwards presented to the King of Siam, and a short inscription in Brahmi lettering crudely inscribed round the top of one of the soapstone vases.

The Piprahwa reliquary vase (centre) showing part of the Brahmi inscription carved round its lid. (Photo courtesy of Neil Peppé)

That inscription was first read by Vincent Smith and then by Dr Führer, who sent a hand-drawn copy to Professor Georg Bühler in Vienna. Like so many epigraphists since, Bühler was
baffled by three letters that spelled out
su ki ti,
but the general import of the rest of the inscription seemed quite clear:

This relic shrine of the divine Buddha (is the donation) of the Sakya Sukiti brothers, associated with their sisters, sons and wives.

It was Professor Bühler’s belief that what William Peppé had found was the Sakya clan’s share of the relics of Sakyamuni Buddha, making it the oldest inscription yet found in India.
¹⁴
So it was initially assumed that what Peppé had opened was a brick stupa raised by Ashoka over the original mud stupa that had covered the Buddha’s ashes, as recounted in the
Legend of King Ashoka
and by Xuanzang. Moreover, a second excavation of the same site conducted in 1972–3 by K. M. Srivastiva showed that the stupa was of the Kushan era, built over an earlier mud stupa. But what also came to light was an earlier deposition of relics two feet below the place where the stone coffer had stood, with evidence that this had been disturbed at the time the stone coffer with its reliquaries and reliquary offerings were added.