Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (55 page)

3
Max Deeg, ‘From the Iron-Wheel to Bodhisattvahood: A
oka in Buddhist Culture and Memory’,
A
oka in History and Historical Memory
, Ed. P. Olivelle, 2009.

Chapter 1. The Breaking of Idols

1
Sadr-ud-din Muhammad Hasan Nizami,
Taj-ul-Masr
, in Sir Henry Elliot and John Dowson,
History of India as Told By its Own Historians
, 1867–77, Vol. II.

2
Minkaj-ud-din,
Tabakat-i-Nasiri: a General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, including Hindustan; from A.H.194 (810 A.D.) to A.H.658 (1260 A.D.) and the irruption of the infidel Mughals into Islam
, Vol. I, trans. H. G. Raverty, 1880.

3
Sir Henry Elliot and John Dowson,
History of India as Told By its Own Historians
, Vol. II, 1867–77.

4
The last known eyewitness of the fate of Nalanda was a Tibetan monk named Dharmaswamin. Arriving at Nalanda in the year 1235, he found just
one survivor, a ninety-year-old monk named Rahul Sribhandra who was teaching a small class of acolytes from a Sanskrit grammar – the only manuscript to have survived the great fire. Dharmaswamin stayed on to study, only for the class to break up in panic when it was reported that Turk raiders were heading their way. Dharmaswamin carried his elderly teacher into hiding, and when the two returned to Nalanda they found the rest of the class had fled. Having taught Dharmaswamin all he knew, the aged monk handed him his copy of the Sanskrit grammar and told him to return to Tibet.

5
The first fire was Julius Caesar’s accidental burning of the city in the Alexandrian War of 48
BCE
. There were then two episodes of anti-pagan pogroms, initiated by the Christian patriarchs Theophilus and his nephew Cyril in about 390 and 410 CE. Finally there was the Arab sack of the city in 642 CE, when the last of the great library’s books were used for fuel by the general Amr ibn al-As – supposedly, by order of Caliph Omar on the grounds that if they agreed with the word of God they were superfluous and if they did not they were heretical. The fairest account of the destruction of the Ptolemaic Royal Library at Alexandria is to be found in James Hannan’s
Bede’s Library
. The Arab sack of the library has been questioned ever since Edward Gibbon, in his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, heaped all the blame on the thirteenth-century anti-Muslim Christian Bishop Gregory Bar Hebraeus. However, this does not explain how the earlier Arab traveller Abd-ul-Latif al-Baghdadi, writing before Hebraeus in 1231, was able to refer in passing to Caliph Omar’s ordering of the destruction of the library in his
Account of Egypt
. See also Professor Bernard Lewis’s letter ‘The Vanished Library’ in the
New York Review of Books
, 27 September 1990, where he suggests that this may have been an anti-Shia canard started by Saladin.

Chapter 2. The Golden Column of Firoz Shah

1
The pillar probably came from Kangra in the Western Himalayas. It carries a six-line inscription in Gupta Brahmi stating that it was erected on a mountain named Vishnupada by a king named Chandra who conquered Bengal and the Upper Punjab, probably Chandragupta II. It has to be said that this version of events contradicts the popular version in all the guidebooks, which is that Qutb built his mosque over a Hindu temple (quite possible) and around a standing Vishnu pillar (highly unlikely, given his religious orthodoxy). The late John Irwin of the V&A has written extensively and controversially on this subject in such essays as ‘Islam and the Cosmic Pillar’.

2
Shams-i Siraj ‘Afif,
Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi
, in Sir Henry Elliot and John Dowson,
History of India as Told By Its Own Historians
, 1867–77, Vol. III.

3
Sirat-i Firoz Shahi
, quoted in Harry Falk,
A
okan Sites and Artefacts: a Source-Book with Bibliography
, 2006.

4
Quoted by Samuel Purchas,
Hakluytus Posthumus; or, Purchas his pilgrimes
, 1625, ed. W. Foster, 1905–7.

5
As translated by the late Dr S. M. Askari, whose translation of the
Sirat-i-Firoz Shahi
, edited by Dr Ahmad, is to be published shortly.

6
The most complete account of these and other Ashokan columns is given in Harry Falk,
A
okan Sites and Artefacts
, 2006.

7
Timur,
Malfuzat-I Timuri
, in Sir Henry Elliot and John Dowson,
History of India as Told By Its Own Historians
, 1867–77, Vol. II.

8
William Finch in Samuel Purchas,
Purchas His Pilgrimes
, 1613.

9
Shafaat Ahmad Khan, ed.,
John Marshall in India: Notes and Observations in India 1668–1672
, 1927.

10
Sultan Qutb-ud-din Aybak’s hammer Muhammad Bakhtiyar in the fourteenth century, the Sharqi rulers of Jaunpur and Sikander Lodi in the fifteenth century, and Emperor Shah Jehan early in the seventeenth century.

11
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier,
Travels in India, translated from the original French of 1676 with a biographical sketch of the author, Notes, Appendices, etc
., by V. Ball, ed. William Crooke, 2001.

12
The local historian was none other than James Prinsep, writing in his books of sketches
Benares Illustrated
, published in 1833. He was quite unaware that the lat was an Ashokan pillar.

13
H. R. Nevill,
Banaras Gazeteer
, 1909. The
Varanasi Gazeteer
of 1965 gives a very different and wholly unwarranted version of these events, playing down the religious differences between the two communities.

14
Bishop Reginald Heber,
Journey though India, from Calcutta to Bombay with Notes upon Ceylon
, 1828.

15
Padre Marco della Tomba, de Gubernatis, 1878, trans. Hosten 1812, quoted in Harry Falk,
A
okan Sites and Artefacts
, 2006.

16
M. Noti,
Joseph Tiefenthaler, S.J., A Forgotten Geographer of India
, 1906.

17
For more detail on William Jones’s Indian career see Charles Allen,
The Buddha and the Sahibs: the Men who Discovered India’s Lost Religion
, 2003; Dr Michael J. Franklin,
Sir William Jones: a Critical Biography
, 1997, and as editor,
The European Discovery of India
, 2007.

18
Sir William Jones, co-founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,
Letters
, 1970. See also O. P. Kejariwal,
The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past
, 1988.

Chapter 3. Objects of Enquiry

1
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places’, 1892.

2
James Forbes,
Oriental Memoirs
, 1834.

3
Author unknown,
Calcutta Review
, Vol. VI, 1849.

4
Lord Teignmouth,
Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones
, 1804.

5
Sir William Jones to Charles Wilkins, 22 June 1784,
The Letters of Sir William Jones
, Vol. II, ed. G. Cannon, 1970. My thanks to Dr Michael Franklin for drawing my attention to this and to other aspects of Jones contained in his unpublished paper ‘And the Celt Knew the Indian: Sir William Jones 1746–94’, read at conference at Cardiff University on 25 May 2010.

6
Sir William Jones, ‘Asiatick Orthography’,
AR
, Vol. I, 1788; see also Kejariwal.

7 Sir William Jones, ‘On the Chronology of the Hindus’,
AR
, Vol. II, 1790.

8
Ill-health forced Law to quit India and he eventually settled down to farm near Washington in the United States of America.

9
Law’s paper was never published, but is referred to in James Prinsep, ‘Further particulars of the Sarun and Tirhut Laths, and account of two Bauddha Inscriptions found, the one at Bakhra, in Tirhut, the other at Sarnath, near Benares’,
JASB
, Vol. IV, 1835.

10
John Harington, ‘A Description of a Cave near
Gaya’, AR
, Vol. I, 1788.

11
John Harrington had a stronger constitution than Law and he stayed on in Bengal, eventually retiring from India in 1822 to become President of the Board of Trade.

12
Robert Montgomery Martin,
The British Colonies: British Possessions in Asia
, Vol. XI, 1854.

13
The unfortunate Polier ran straight into the French Revolution and was stabbed to death by a mob. However, just before he left India in 1788 he sold half of his collection of five hundred Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit MSS to Edward Pote, Resident at Patna, who promptly donated most of them to his alma mater, Eton College.

14
Sir William Jones in a letter to Lieutenant William Steuart, Krishna-nagar, 13 September 1789,
The Letters of Sir William Jones
, Vol. II, ed. G. Cannon, 1970.

15
Sir Charles Ware Mallet, ‘Account of Some Ancient Inscriptions at Ellora’,
AR
, Vol.V, 1897.

16
Sir William Jones, ‘Fourth Anniversary Discourse’, delivered 15 February 1787 by the President,
AR
, Vol. II, 1790.