Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (2 page)

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
A
oka, raja
rather than
r
ja, 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

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

It was at this point, with the upper Gangetic plains secured for Islam, that Muhammad Bakhtiyar was given permission to push on with his small band of mujahideen. Hardened by years of campaigning, inspired by the belief that they were engaged in jihad, he and they gave no thought to their own comfort. We may imagine them whipping their ponies on, intent on covering the 160 miles to their goal as fast as humanly possible. They carried little other than swords, spears and shields, knowing that God would provide.

Their immediate goal was Bihar, which was both the name of the plains country they rode through and the seat of the last of the Pala dynasty of kings. The riders were probably unaware that the very name of Bihar was derived from the numerous Buddhist
viharas
, or monastic centres, scattered across the countryside. They may not even have known that an hour’s ride west of Bihar fort was a second seat of power; one without ramparts or garrison but presenting a direct challenge to their belief in the oneness of God. This was the
Mahavihara
, or ‘Great Monastery’, of Nalanda, known throughout the Buddhist world as the
Dharmaganja
, or ‘Treasury of the Moral Law’.

For centuries Nalanda had been the most important seat of learning in Asia. It contained the most extensive repository of Buddhist knowledge in the world, housed in three multi-storeyed libraries: the
Ratnasagara
, or ‘Sea of Jewels’; the
Ratnadadhi
, or ‘Ocean of Jewels’; and the
Ratnaranjaka
, or ‘Jewels of Delight’. Generation upon generation of the Buddhist world’s most gifted scholars had come here to study and teach the sacred texts of the Buddhist canon.