Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (39 page)

‘I need hardly say that I dissent from this conclusion altogether,’ Cunningham wrote.
¹⁶
But Cunningham was (probably) wrong and Kern (probably) right – at least in so far as his dating for Ashoka was concerned. That view is widely shared by later scholars, with the following dates representing the general consensus today:

322–299
BCE
Reign of Chandragupta.

299–274
BCE
Reign of Bindusara.

302
BCE
Birth of Ashoka.

285
BCE
Birth of Ashoka’s eldest son Mahinda.

282
BCE
Birth of Ashoka’s eldest daughter Sanghamitta.

274–270
BCE
Four-year interregnum.

270
BCE
Ashoka’s anointing.

265
BCE
Ashoka converts to become a lay Buddhist.

Begins Buddhist building programme.

263
BCE
Ashoka conquers Kalinga.

260
BCE
Ashoka issues first Minor Rock Edicts, makes first tour of Buddhist sites, begins his stupa-building programme, his queen Padmavati gives birth to Kunala.

259
BCE
Ashoka issues Kalinga Rock Edicts.

258
BCE
Ashoka issues the Rock Edicts, grants Barabar caves to the Ajivikas.

253
BCE
Ashoka inaugurates Third Buddhist Council. 252
BCE
Mahinda goes to Lanka. Ashoka institutes missionary programme.

252
BCE
Ashoka goes on second pilgrimage tour, including Lumbini.

243–242
BCE
Ashoka issues Pillar Edicts.

240
BCE
Ashoka celebrates the five-year
pancavarsika
festival.

239
BCE
Death of Ashoka’s queen Asandhimitra.

235
BCE
Ashoka marries Queen Tishyarakshita. Ashoka’s son and heir Kunala sent to Taxila.

234
BCE
Kunala blinded. Queen Tishyarakshita leads anti-Buddhist faction at court and is executed. Ashoka becomes increasingly infirm. Kunala’s infant son Samprati appointed heir-apparent.

233
BCE
Ashoka dies.

General Sir Alexander Cunningham kept up his Cold Weather tours. In 1882–3 he returned to the holy city of Mathura, much damaged by Muslim iconoclasm, where a number of ancient mounds were in the process of giving up their secrets, revealing a wealth of magnificent Buddhist and Jain sculpture from the Kushan period. But earlier Buddhist
sculpture was also recovered, including a colossal male figure more than seven feet in height, much battered but retaining traces of a high polish. It carried a crudely cut inscription on the base written in early Ashokan Brahmi characters, allowing Cunningham to date it to the third century
BCE
– the earliest statue yet found in India. He speculated in his report that it might be a yaksha demi-god but omitted to mention that the figure was remarkably corpulent, which is not an attribute of yakshas except for those of the dwarf variety, and that he had a very round face, its features all but obliterated.

The mysterious Parkham giant, identified by the inscription on its base as Mauryan. (APAC, British Library)

Cunningham’s last contribution to Ashokan studies was his work on what is now known as the Mahabodhi temple at Bodhgaya and its restoration. This began in 1877 in the wake of a botched attempt at restoration carried out by Burmese workmen under the orders of the king of Burma. Rajendra Lal Mitra was asked by the government of Bengal to report on the situation and was appalled by what he found: ‘The mischief they have done by their misdirected zeal has been serious,’ he wrote in a damning report. ‘The demolitions and excavations already completed by them have swept away most of the old land-marks and nothing of ancient times can now be traced on the area they have worked on.’
¹⁷
The Burmese were ordered off the premises and the task was handed over to the ASI, Joseph Beglar assuming onsite control, with Mitra as his adviser. The complex history of the Mahabodhi temple and its surrounds was painstakingly revealed, suggesting that the original Mauryan shrine and protective railings enclosing the Bodhi tree had been replaced by a grander structure and surround at the time of the Kushan king Huvishka in the second century CE. More sections of the original Ashokan railing were recovered, including parts of the four pillars that had supported the original Ashokan shrine and – most dramatic of all – the slab of the Diamond Throne placed by Ashoka at the base of the Bodhi tree. All these features corresponded to the first depictions of Bodhgaya as shown on a number of bas-reliefs at Bharhut.

Today the decorated upper surface of Ashoka’s Diamond Throne is usually concealed under ornate coverings, while the plinth’s lower sections are completely buried under earth as a result of the Bodhi tree’s growth. However, it is usually possible to catch glimpses of the repeated pattern of acanthus leaves that decorates the sides of the plinth, echoing the motifs found on several of Ashoka’s pillar capitals.

(Above) Emperor Ashoka’s Diamond Throne at the base of the Bodhi tree, enclosed within a protective pavilion raised on four pillars, one surmounted with an elephant capital. Detail of a panel from the Bharhut stupa. (Cunningham,
The Stupa of Bharhut,
1879) (Overleaf) Emperor Ashoka’s Diamond Throne after the restoration of the Mahabodhi temple in the 1880s, showing the Bodhi tree some years after its replanting by Alexander Cunningham. The seated figure is Angarika Dharmapala, a pivotal figure in the Buddhist reform movement that began following his visit to Bodhgaya in 1891. (Theosophical Society of India)

With the help of an early stone model of the Mahabodhi temple recovered from the ruins, Cunningham, Mitra and Beglar made the best of a bad job. By the time Sir Alexander Cunningham was finally persuaded to step down he was aged seventy-one. He sailed from Bombay in September 1885 on board the steamship
Indus,
which soon afterwards struck a rock off Ceylon and foundered, taking with it much of Cunningham’s collection of coins. Cunningham himself got to shore unscathed and was able to congratulate himself on having previously sent on ahead his best gold and silver pieces, now in the British Museum. He died in South Kensington eight years later, by which time almost all the missing pieces in the Buddhist jigsaw he had tried to fill with the help of Faxian and Xuanzang had been found – almost but not quite.

The Lumbini pillar with its inscription barely visible below ground level, soon after its excavation by General Sumsher Khadga Rana in 1896. Photograph by Dr Anton Führer. (APAC, British Library)

Sir Alexander Cunningham’s brief never extended to the Madras and Bombay Presidencies. In 1873 Dr James Burgess, editor of the
Indian Antiquary
and chief disciple of James Fergusson, had been appointed Archaeological Surveyor for Western India. Two years later, following intense lobbying from James Fergusson, Sir Walter Elliot and other grandees in England, Burgess was given the additional charge of archaeology in south India. Following Cunningham’s retirement he was appointed Surveyor General for the whole of India and his triumph over his former rival appeared to be absolute, even if Cunningham’s senior assistant Joseph Beglar continued to challenge his authority as Archaeological Surveyor for Bengal.

Burgess’s interests were very different from those of Cunningham, focusing on architecture rather than archaeology and, in particular, the Buddhist cave temples of western India and their inscriptions. This may account for his failure to take due notice of what Cunningham had always considered to be a prime archaeological site but which he himself had never been allowed to examine: Amaravati.

The result was that Amaravati continued to suffer the assaults of amateur archaeologists and locals in search of building material, culminating in an order from the governor of Madras to clear the site. It meant that when Burgess finally got around to excavating there himself in 1882 he found little more than what he himself described as ‘a large pit’.
¹

Burgess’s only achievement at Amaravati was to note that a number of the remaining stone slabs had been carved on both sides and that the stupa had apparently suffered some violent destruction at an early stage, probably in the second century
BCE
when the Satavahana dynasty was in the process of moving in to fill the vacuum left by the Mauryas. It had then been restored
and greatly enlarged when the nearby city of Dhanyakataka had become the capital of the Satavahana rulers of Andra. However, Burgess has to be given some credit for his subsequent survey of the archaeological sites upstream of Amaravati and his discovery of the Jaggayyapeta bas-relief (see illustration
p. 93
).

The Jaggayyapeta slab excited little interest then and it has been largely overlooked since. Yet taken together with the surviving Wheel-turning Monarch scenes from Amaravati, it demonstrates that the cult of the Chakravartin was now well established within India, from where it would spread to China and beyond.

Burgess’s authority never extended to the two largest princely states in South India: Hyderabad and Mysore. Here it was left to local enthusiasts to advance the cause of Ashokan studies, most notably Benjamin Lewis Rice, who had been born in Bangalore (also in the
annus mirabilis
of 1837) and had returned there in the early 1860s to be the headmaster of a high school. Bangalore was then the British administrative centre for the princely state of Mysore and in due course Rice was made Inspector of Schools and Director of Public Instruction for Mysore State. In the course of his duties he toured the state on horseback and became increasingly interested in the many inscribed stones he came across in the course of his travels. With the help of Sanskrit and Kannada pandits he began to collect and decipher these ancient scripts, eventually amassing over nine thousand inscriptions. On his retirement he was appointed Mysore State’s director of archaeology, a position he held until he finally left India in 1906 at the age of seventy.