Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (19 page)

James Prinsep’s engravings of various coins recovered from two ancient sites, Behat and Kanouj, in the Gangetic plains, including a number of what are today known as punch-marked coins (e.g. bottom right, number 22). The ‘stupa’ symbol can be seen on the reverse of several coins (numbers. 1, 5, 8 and 22).
(JASB
, Vol. III, May 1834).

However, in the course of the dig Cunningham became friendly with an old man who had been involved in the quarrying of the site reported on by Jonathan Duncan back in 1795. What Cunningham learned was that this quarrying had completely destroyed a second stupa as large as the remaining structure. But it had also uncovered an underground chamber full of stone statues, which had been hastily covered over for fear of disturbing evil spirits. He was able to lead Cunningham to the spot, where his workmen unearthed a cache of ‘about 60 statues and bas-reliefs in an upright position, all packed closely together within a small space of less than ten feet square’. All were Buddhist and had been deliberately hidden. From the
copious layer of ash overlaying his find Cunningham concluded that some catastrophic fire had brought an end to the Buddhist occupation of the site.

Then duty called and Cunningham was ordered away to join the staff of the Governor General as an aide-de-camp. He just had time to arrange for some twenty of those statues bearing inscriptions to be transported downriver to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. It was four years before he was able to return to Benares, only to learn that by order of the city magistrate, Mr Davidson, the remaining forty statues together with fifty cartloads of carved stonework had been thrown into the River Barna to serve as a breakwater for the city’s first iron bridge. This vandalism made a deep impression on Cunningham, who in later years became almost obsessive in his calls for the protection of ancient sites.

James Prinsep always acknowledged the help he received from his young correspondent. However, it was his own formidable intelligence that counted. Over the course of six years he wrote a series of increasingly erudite articles on Indian coinage, each illustrated with his own engravings, which together laid the foundations of Indian numismatics up to the post-Gupta period, an achievement eclipsed by his later work on proto-Sanskrit languages. But it was the one that led to the other, for it was his work on the lettering on Indian coins that directed Prinsep towards the inscriptions on Firoz Shah’s Lat and the other inscribed columns and rocks.

Prinsep was initially unaware of the efforts made by Sir William Jones, Henry Colebrooke and others, all faithfully recorded in the early volumes of
Asiatick Researches –
and since forgotten. However, during his time in Benares he had visited the fort at Allahabad and had been dismayed to see how the
sun and rain were eroding the lettering on the broken pillar lying just inside the fort gates. ‘I could not see the highly curious column lying at Allahabad, falling into decay, without wishing to preserve a complete copy of its several inscriptions,’ he wrote. ‘The Moghul emperor Jehangir was content to engrave his name and proud descent in a belt through the middle of the most ancient inscription – the English would rightly deprecate such profanation, but their own passive neglect has proved in a few short years even more destructive than the barbarous act of the Muhammadan despot.’
²⁰

The more he looked into the subject the more intrigued Prinsep became by the mystery of the undeciphered script on that fallen column, a script he now termed ‘No. 1’. He wrote to one of his correspondents in Allahabad, Lieutenant Thomas Burt of the Bengal Engineers, and within weeks was rewarded with a set of drawings, which he engraved and published in the March issue of the
JASB
in 1834.
²¹
That article provoked an immediate response from Brian Hodgson in Kathmandu, whose letter Prinsep read to a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in May.

Hodgson began with a complaint, which was that some years earlier he had sent Horace Wilson drawings of what he called the Mattiah Lat pillar (today better known as the Lauriya-Nandangarh pillar), seen by him on his travels to and from Nepal, together with an eye-copy of the ancient inscription it bore. Dr Wilson had failed to respond. Now he attached drawings of two more pillars he had encountered. These were the three pillars seen and recorded in earlier times by John Marshall, Father Marco della Tomba and others.

Brian Hodgson and Csoma de Koros had each independently established that the Tibetan alphabet was based on
written Sanskrit. Hodgson now proposed to Prinsep that his ‘No. 1’ was probably an early written form of the same language: ‘When we consider the wide diffusion over all parts of India of these alphabetical signs, we can scarcely doubt their derivation from Deva Nagari, and the inference is equally worthy of attention that the language is Sanscrit.’
²²

Armed with Lieutenant Burt’s copies of ‘No. 1’ from Allahabad and the Asiatic Society’s set of copies of ‘No. 1’ from Firoz Shah’s Lat copied four decades earlier by Captain Hoare, James Prinsep now set out to determine if this was indeed the case. He began by making a painstaking analysis of the alphabet: ‘I soon perceived that each radical letter was subject to five principal inflections, the same in all, corresponding in their nature with the five vowel marks of the ancient Sanscrit No. 2. This circumstance alone would be sufficient to prove that the alphabet is of the Sanscrit family, whatever the language may be.’

The five inflections Prinsep presumed – correctly – to correspond with the five basic vowel sounds ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’ found in Sanskrit and other Indo-European root languages. After drawing up a chart showing all the radical letters with their inflections he found that twenty-nine radical characters were employed – less than in modern languages based on Sanskrit, but what might be expected if this was an early form. He went on to highlight one particular group of fifteen characters, which he observed recurring in identical form at the beginning of almost every section or paragraph of text.

Prinsep’s conviction that this group of fifteen characters would prove to be the keystone of ‘No. 1’ grew all the stronger when he retrieved Brian Hodgson’s eye-copy of the Mattiah Lat inscription, where each section also began with that same group of fifteen letters. But then as he examined the three sets
of facsimiles from Allahabad, Delhi and Bihar side by side he made an even more astounding discovery – ‘namely, that
all three inscriptions are identically the same
. Thus the
whole
of the Bettiah inscription is contained verbatim in that of Feroz’s Lath, published in four consecutive plates in the seventh volume of the
Asiatick Researches
[Captain Hoare’s eye-copies]; and all that remains of the Allahabad inscription can with equal facility be traced in the same plates.’
²³
The italics are Prinsep’s.

Prinsep went on to speculate on the implications of this discovery: ‘Whether they mark the conquests of some victorious raja; whether they are as it were the boundary pillars of his dominions; or whether they are of a religious nature, bearing some important text from the sacred volumes of the Bauddhists or Brahmins, can only be satisfactorily solved by the discovery of the language.’

The publication of Hodgson’s letter and Prinsep’s response in the October 1834 issue of
the JASB
caused a flurry of excitement among its readers, an excitement intensified when an eye-copy made by Hodgson of the inscription on another of the North Bihar columns (today known as the Lauriya-Araraj pillar)
²⁴
was shown by Prinsep also to be identical to the other three sets: ‘So we are now in the possession of four copies of the same inscription, three of them perfect, viz. the Delhi, the Matthiah, and the present one, and that of Allahabad mutilated.’
²⁵

These revelations led Prinsep to cast around for more examples of No. 1 text. He reprinted in the
JRAS
Captain Edward Fell’s account of a visit to the Great Tope at Sanchi, originally published in the
Calcutta Journal
back in 1819, together with an appeal for more drawings from Sanchi and, more importantly, copies of its inscriptions.
²⁶

It was precisely at this point that George Turnour joined the debate from his distant outpost in Ceylon. What prompted him to resume his work on the island’s
Great Dynastic Chronicle
is not known, but after some months of reflection he submitted to James Prinsep in Calcutta a short article on the importance of the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
as an accurate account of early Buddhism. It meant so little to James Prinsep that he unwittingly forwarded it to his former mentor Professor H. H. Wilson in Oxford for comments. Prinsep then added these comments as highly critical footnotes to Turnour’s article when it appeared in the
JASB
in September 1836.
²⁷

Wilson had been one of the sponsors of the two volumes of
The Mahavansi, the Raja-Ratnacari and the Raja-vali, forming the Sacred and Historical Books of Ceylon
, as translated by the Reverend William Fox. He had no time for Turnour’s central argument, which was that the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
demonstrated the major role played by the Mauryan king Ashoka in the development of Buddhism, both in India and beyond India’s borders, after himself converting to Buddhism. This was nonsense, declared Wilson. It was well known that Ashoka was a worshipper of Shiva, and besides, ‘the faith of Asoka is a matter of very little moment, as the prince himself is possibly an ideal personage’. Furthermore, the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
was a thoroughly unreliable document when compared to Brahmanical texts such as the
Puranas
and the poet Kalhana’s chronicle of the kings of Kashmir, the
River of Kings
.

This very public rebuke did not go down well with Turnour. He appealed to the Asiatic Society of Bengal for its support in the publication of his translation of the first twenty chapters of the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
. Probably because of his own close ties with Wilson, Prinsep passed this appeal on to the
Reverend William Mill, the Asiatic Society’s Vice-President – a wise move as it turned out, for despite being a Unitarian and principal of Calcutta’s newly established Bishop’s College, Mill was a Sanskritist and a genuine scholar in his own right.

Mill’s reading of Turnour’s manuscript left him astonished and in no doubt that the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
was, as Turnour claimed, a work of great antiquity and of huge importance as a source document. Not only did it pre-date the
Puranas
by some centuries but it showed every sign of being a far more authentic chronicle of events. Despite the
Great Dynastic Chronicle’s
focus on Ceylon, Mill declared it to be the most valuable historical source yet known relating to the history of India prior to the Muslim invasions. Furthermore, it highlighted ‘the peculiarly interesting connection between the history of Ceylon before the Christian era, with that of Magadha’ – a connection that extended to the language in which the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
had been written.
²⁸

That language was Pali, which Turnour had shown to be ‘no other than the Magadha Prakrit – the classical form in ancient Bihar’. It appeared that Pali and Sanskrit were both derived from the same source: Magadhan Prakrit.

The Reverend Mill’s unequivocal support for Turnour led to a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal held in Calcutta on 4 January 1836, at which those present disregarded the advice of Professor Wilson and voted ‘to advocate the patronage by the Government of India of Mr Turnour’s intended publication’. That funding enabled George Turnour’s
Epitome of the History of Ceylon, Compiled from Native Annals: and the First Twenty Chapters of the Mahawanso
to be published by the Cotta Church Mission Press in Ceylon later in that same year, complete with an introduction in which its author comprehensively
demolished many of the claims made by Wilson and others in their studies of early Indian history.
²⁹

Turnour was able to show that the
Great Dynastic Chronicle’s
early source, the
Dipavamsa
or ‘Island Chronicle’, contained the oldest account yet known of the life of Gautama Sakyamuni Buddha and the subsequent development of the Buddhist community in India and Ceylon over some seven centuries. Here was a very different slant on historical events hitherto seen only from the perspective of Brahman writers – and one that directly challenged their version of Indian history.

The
Great Dynastic Chronicle
was, first and foremost, a history of the Buddhist Church on the island of Lanka but it included events on the mainland from the time of the Buddha, helpfully backed up with a twin dating system: one based on years since the death of Sakyamuni Buddha, the other on years since the accession of the ruling monarch. Thus, the Sakyamuni’s death – year zero in the Buddhist calendar – had taken place in the eighth year of the reign of King Ajatasatru of Magadha. Exactly a century after the Buddha’s death the Second Buddhist Council had taken place, that being the tenth year of the reign of King Kalasoko, whose ten sons had ruled for twenty-two years before giving way to the nine Nanda brothers, the last of which was Dhana Nanda, overthrown by the Brahman minister Chanakya.