Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (5 page)

The clue misunderstood by Tavernier lies in the word Bhutan, which contains the Sanskrit root word
budh
, meaning ‘awaken’, as in
Buddha
, the ‘Awaked One’.

Emperor Aurangzeb died in 1707 unlamented by the bulk of his subjects, and with his death the authority of the Mughals began to crumble, a process assisted by the power struggles between his sons, grandsons and great-grandsons. At some point in the next two decades the explosion of a powder magazine blew the pillar at Firoz Shah’s hunting lodge north of Delhi into fragments (painstakingly reassembled two and a half centuries later, with one neat slice missing – now in the British Museum in London). As the Mughals declined, other powers
moved in to fill the political vacuum: most notably, the Sikhs from the Punjab, the Marathas from the Deccan and the EICo from Bengal.

Under the patronage of the Maratha warlords and the saintly widow of one of their number, Rani Ahilya Bai Holkar of Indore, the city of Muhammadabad very soon reverted to Varanasi and underwent a spectacular rebirth. The colourful waterfront of temples and bathing ghats that tourists admire today owes its existence almost entirely to the plunder secured by the Maratha chiefs of the eighteenth century – and to their religiosity.

It was at this time, as Varanasi’s Hindu majority set out to reclaim their city’s Shaivite identity, that the stone pillar seen by Jean Baptiste Tavernier in the courtyard of the Mosque of the Staff became the focus of an increasingly popular fertility cult and the scene of an annual festival known as the ‘marriage of Shiva’s lat’. It led, almost inevitably, to growing friction between the city’s Hindu and Muslim communities, which came to a head in the autumn of 1805 during the Muslim celebration of the Moharam festival. ‘It was under such a state of excited zeal’, wrote a local historian, ‘that a congregation at the
Lat’h Imambareh
, in 1805, was urged by some fanatic preacher to overthrow and defile the pillar and images of Hindu worship at the place.’
¹²
The mob pulled the Staff of Shiva to the ground and broke it into several pieces.

The enraged Hindus responded by setting fire to the great mosque erected by Aurangzeb beside the river, after which rioting engulfed much of the city. Varanasi’s young acting magistrate, William Bird, employed his police and two companies of sepoys as best he could but was unable to prevent mobs of Hindus from attacking the Muslim quarters of the town. In the
words of the
Benares Gazetteer
, ‘The whole of Benares was in the most terrible confusion, as several bazaars were in flames and all of the Julaha quarter was a scene of plunder and violence. Order was not restored by the troops until some fifty mosques had been destroyed and several hundred persons had lost their lives.’
¹³

When the Reverend Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta, visited Varanasi in 1823 he found the Staff of Shiva ‘defaced and prostrate’,
¹⁴
and guarded by Brahmin sepoys. At some time during the following three decades what was probably the largest surviving section of the broken column (or possibly its stump still
in situ)
, measuring some seven or eight feet in height, was encased in a copper sheath and placed under armed guard. So it remains to this day, still unexamined by scholars, for tensions between the two communities in Varanasi remain as bad as ever.

In the year of Aurangzeb’s death, 1707, a Capuchin mission reached Lhasa on the Tibetan Plateau, despatched from Portuguese Goa in the belief that deviant Christians were to be found north of the Himalayas. Eight years later the disappointed Capuchins were ejected from Tibet and settled in Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, where they maintained a mission for over half a century until again expelled. This second expulsion came by order of the new ruler of Nepal, the Hindu Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha, who was not one for religious tolerance and initiated a programme of caste discrimination that saw his country’s non-Hindu communities reduced to the status of outcastes or slaves.

The Capuchins and their few converts found refuge near the town of Bettiah in the plains of Bihar, about 150 miles north-east
of Varanasi. This now became the centre of the Tibet-Hindustan Mission of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith in Rome under the leadership of the scholarly Italian Father Marco della Tomba.

In about 1769 Father della Tomba reported the existence of two stone columns in the vicinity, both carrying inscriptions and both topped by carved stone lions (one being the Tirhut ‘tyger’ seen by Marshall a century earlier):

They stand 27 cubits high up to the capital, on the top of which there is a lion, which looks very natural. The circumference of the column is 7 cubits, as I myself measured. The column seems to consist of a single stone. I struck it several times with a hatchet, and fired some bullets without being able to make out that it was otherwise. These two columns are as if covered with a certain writing, which I traced on paper and then sent to the Hindu Academy of Benares and to some Tibetan scholars; but not one of them could read or understand a word of them … These characters appear to be some ancient Greek.
¹⁵

This same period saw the doughty Jesuit priest Joseph Tiefenthaler criss-crossing the Gangetic plains, nominally as a propagator of the Gospel but with scholarship as his prime motivation. After the Pope’s suppression of the Jesuit order in the mid-1750s, Tiefenthaler had stayed on in India to devote himself to the study of India’s languages, religions and natural sciences. He was most probably the first European to learn Sanskrit, the hermetic language in which all the sacred texts of the Hindus were written – hermetic in that it was considered the language of the gods and thus accessible only to Brahmins
by virtue of their god-ordained status as intermediaries between the gods and men.

In 1756 Tiefenthaler made the first known copy of what he believed to be the oldest inscription on Firoz Shah’s golden pillar, afterwards despatched with other papers to his fellow pioneer Indologist the Frenchman Abraham Anquetil du Perron. However, du Perron was then in the process of being expelled from India along with all his countrymen following the EICo’s capture of Pondicherry. As a result it was not until long after Tiefenthaler’s death that his scholarship became known through the publication of du Perron’s three-volume
Recherches historiques et géographie sur l’Inde
, published in 1786.
¹⁶

Tiefenthaler and du Perron together brought the first seeds of the European Enlightenment to the shores of India. But with France’s imperial ambitions baulked by growing British naval superiority on the high seas, it fell to the latter power to continue that process – in the person of a Welsh polymath. It was William ‘Oriental’ Jones, jurist, scholar and philologist extraordinaire who now laid the ground for those same seeds to germinate.

The son of a well-known mathematician, William Jones was a child prodigy gifted with a quite breathtaking capacity for learning languages. By the time he graduated from Oxford in 1768, Jones was fluent in thirteen languages and familiar with another twenty-eight. Like his father before him, he turned to the aristocracy for patronage, becoming tutor to the young son and heir of Lord Spencer. Having taught himself Arabic and Persian, he embarked on a number of translations that earned him the sobriquet of ‘Persian’ or ‘Oriental’ Jones and led him to declare that the works of Persian poets such as Firdusi were as worthy of admiration as the works of Homer.

A constant shortage of funds led Jones to enrol at the Middle
Temple but failed to stifle his ambition. By the time he was called to the Bar in 1774, ‘Harmonious’ Jones – to give him his third popular title – had become one of the leading lights of the Royal Society and of Samuel Johnson’s club at the Turk’s Head in Soho, to say nothing of his entanglement in Whig politics. His ambition suffered a severe setback when he failed to secure the professorship of Arabic at Oxford, which he believed to be rightly his. It forced him to look further afield, leading to his acceptance of a seat on the bench of the newly established Supreme Court in Bengal.

From the European perspective India was considered at this time to be little more than a charnel house, a fatal shore from which few returned. Furthermore, Jones shared the Whig view that the EICo was a corrupt and despotic institution best dismantled. What helped William Jones overcome his scruples was the salary. The newly created post of supreme court judge in Bengal paid £6000 a year (worth some £200,000 today), which by Jones’s calculation meant that even if he lived very comfortably in India he could return home in ten years’ time ‘still a young man with thirty thousand pounds in my pocket’.
¹⁷
The post also made it possible for Jones to marry the clergyman’s daughter he had been courting since his days as an undergraduate – and it came with a knighthood.

But what also attracted Jones was that India presented possibilities all but undreamed of in England. Captain Cook’s three voyages to the Pacific had shown what could be accomplished and the companion of Cook’s first voyage, Joseph Banks, had demonstrated how a system of scientific endeavour on the grand scale might be set up – provided there was patronage, sufficient men of like mind and someone capable of directing that enquiry at the centre.

Sir William Jones shortly before his untimely death in 1794. An engraving from a drawing by the Calcutta artist Arthur Devis.

So it came about that in September 1783 Sir William Jones stepped ashore at Calcutta as the very embodiment of the European Enlightenment. He was aged thirty-six, newly married, newly knighted and carried two lists in his coat pocket. The first set out sixteen ‘Objects of Enquiry during my Residence in India’, while the second concentrated on how those objectives might be achieved: by the setting up in India of a learned body modelled on the Royal Society, its brief to enquire into man and nature in general and Asia in particular, including the investigation of ‘the annals, and even traditions, of those nations, who from time to time have peopled or desolated it’, so as to ‘bring to light their various forms of government, with their institutions, civil and religious’.
¹⁸

A new chapter in India’s history had begun. The light of reason would now be brought to bear on each of Jones’s sixteen objects of enquiry, leading to a new understanding of Mother India as ‘the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human genius’. And included in that new understanding would be the recovery of India’s pre-Muslim history, its long-forgotten past.

A Brahmin pandit expounding the
Puranas
in a Hindu temple in Varanasi. A lithograph by James Prinsep from his drawing made in the 1820s and published by him in his
Benares Illustrated
.

In 1888 the up-and-coming young journalist Rudyard Kipling visited Calcutta as part of a series of articles on Bengal he was writing for the Allahabad newspaper
The Pioneer
. His preoccupation with death and disease led him to the city’s largest Christian cemetery, located at the wrong end of Park Street. ‘The tombs are small houses,’ he afterwards wrote. ‘It is as though we walked down the streets of a town, so tall are they and so closely do they stand – a town shrivelled by fire, and scarred by frost and siege. Men must have been afraid of their friends rising up before the due time that they weighted them with such cruel mounds of masonry.’
¹

Under one of the most monumental of Kipling’s ‘cruel mounds’, in the form of a towering sixty-foot high obelisk (today cleaned and whitewashed thanks to the combined efforts of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA)), lie the mortal remains of Sir William Jones, ‘who feared God, but not death … who thought none below him but the base and unjust, none above him but the wise and virtuous’. The words were self-penned and give no hint of the extraordinary part their author had played in initiating the recovery of India’s history and culture, a work that had been cruelly cut short by his death on 27 April 1794 at the age of forty-seven.