Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (7 page)

This state of ignorance soon began to change as the Asiatic Society gained more members, many of them stationed up-country: amateur antiquarians such as Thomas Law and John Harrington, who had both joined the EICo as teenage writers in the 1770s and went on to became part of the Company’s first generation of civil servants. Both had been posted to the province of Bihar to learn the ropes. In 1783 Law was made Collector of Gaya District in Bihar, where he endeared himself to the local Hindus by abolishing the pilgrim tax. He also drew up the first fixed settlement scheme upon which landowners were taxed, afterwards introduced as part of the land reforms known as the Cornwallis Permanent Settlement of 1789.
⁸

At one of the first meetings of the Asiatic Society Thomas Law presented a paper entitled ‘A Short Account of Two Pillars to the North of Patna’,
⁹
illustrated with his own drawings. These were the same two pillars described by the Capuchin Father della Tomba, and Law now located one at Nandangarh, some seventeen miles to the north of the town of Bettiah, and the other at Araraj, approximately the same distance south of Bettiah. The first still had its capital, in the form of a seated lion (see illustration,
p. 18
), while the second was now bare. Both columns carried inscriptions written in characters that Law had never seen before. His paper led Jones to call for accurate copies of these Lat or pillar inscriptions to be made.

John Harrington’s contribution concerned caves rather than pillars. He had explored two groups of hills lying about midway between Patna and Gaya in South Bihar. At the first, the Barabar Hills, he had been shown a number of rock-cut caves known locally as the ‘seven houses’, all with arched roofs, their polished surfaces covered in soot, their appearance being ‘very dismal even when lighted’.
¹⁰
The entrance to one of the caves had an ornately carved doorway ‘very curiously wrought with elephants and other ornaments, of which I hope in a short time to present a drawing to the Society’.

What Harrington overlooked at the Barabar Hills were a number of inscriptions cut into the rock beside the cave entrances. He did better when he moved on to the Nagarjuni Hills nearby, where he spotted two such inscriptions, ‘which my Moonshee [
munshi
, language teacher and interpreter] took off in the course of three days, with much trouble and sufficient accuracy’. The first inscription was in medieval Devanagri, which the interpreter had no trouble in reading. The second was ‘unfortunately of a different character, and remains still unintelligible’. Harrington’s report excited little interest.
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It was the monumental inscribed stone columns that had caught the imagination of Jones and his fellow antiquarians – and the curious script carved thereon.

(Above) A party of Europeans on the Gaya–Patna road, with the Barabar and Nagarjuni Hills in the background. A pen and ink drawing by Sir Charles D’Oyly, dated 1825. (APAC, British Library) (Below) The doorway of the rock-cut cave that became known as the Lomas Rishi Cave, or ‘Cave of the Long-haired Saint’. This early photograph was taken by the archaeologist Joseph Beglar in 1872–3. (APAC, British Library)

Jones’s call for rubbings of the pillar inscriptions had been heard by the Swiss mercenary Colonel Antoine Polier, who had taken service with the Mughal Emperor in Delhi only to find his employer, the ill-starred Shah Alam II, so assailed by Marathas, Sikhs and Afghan Rohillas as to leave him ‘tossed about, like a child’s toy, from one usurper to another – a tool during their prosperity, a scapegoat in adversity’.
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Having seen the writing on the wall, Polier had booked a passage to Europe and was in the process of liquidating his assets and bidding farewell to his many local wives. However, before abandoning his begums and his employer to their fate – Shah Alam was blinded at the hands of the insane Afghan chief Ghulam Qadir and his Red Fort sacked – Polier took a rubbing of the inscriptions on Firoz Shah’s Lat and sent it to Sir William Jones in Calcutta.
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Jones’s excitement at having the rubbing in his hands turned to disappointment and frustration when he found himself quite unable to decipher what was clearly the oldest of the three sets of inscriptions cut into Firoz Shah’s Lat. ‘The Nagari inscriptions are easy & modern,’ Jones declared in a letter to a friend, ‘but all the old ones on the staff of Firuz-Shah drive me to despair.’
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This unreadable inscription was written in an alphabet made up of some thirty or so clearly defined characters that at first glance could be mistaken for Greek but patently were not. Jones’s Brahmin pandits who examined the script declared it to
be
Brahmi lipi
, or ‘writing of the god Brahma’ – a suitably romantic appellation that failed to catch on among the Europeans until well into the next century.

What Jones was able to establish was that the alphabet used on Firoz Shah’s Lat was the same as that found by Harrington at the Nagarjuni cave and on another set of rubbings sent to the Asiatic Society by a senior civil servant from western India. These had been taken from the walls of a number of man-made cave temples at Ellora, in the mountains inland from Bombay.
¹⁵

For no good reason, Jones now concluded that all three sets of inscriptions must in some way be associated with a conqueror or law-giver from Ethiopia: ‘I believe them to be Ethiopian, and to have been imported about a thousand years before Christ by the Bauddhas or priests and soldiers of the conqueror Sisac, whom the Hindus call the Lion of Sacya.’ This same Sisac or Sakya had, he supposed, travelled to India from Ethiopia ‘about a thousand years before Christ’, his title of Buddha, indicating an enlightened person, suggesting that he was ‘rather a benefactor than a destroyer of his species’.
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What Jones also discovered was that his Brahmin pandits held strong views about this same Sakya or Buddha, declaring him to be not only a heretical leader of a false sect but also the ninth
avatar
or incarnation of the god Vishnu. This mirrored exactly what the Arab historian Abu al-Fazl had written in his
Ain-i-Akbari
, where he had remarked, ‘The Brahmans called Boodh the ninth Avatar, but assert that the religion which is ascribed to him is false.’

This paradox greatly puzzled Jones: ‘He [Buddha] seems to have been a follower of doctrines contained in the
Vedas;
and though his good nature led him to censure these ancient books,
because they enjoined sacrifices of cattle, yet he is admitted as the ninth Avatar, even by the Brahmens of Casi [Kashi, the ancient sobriquet for Varanasi].’
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His solution was to propose that there had been two Buddhas: the first a revolutionary who ‘attempted to overturn the system of the Brahmans, and was the cause of their persecution of the Baudhas’; the second a Buddha who came later, ‘assuming the name and character of the first’.

Jones’s tentative thoughts on Buddha and Buddhism appeared in the first two issues of the
Asiatick Researches
, many times delayed but finally published in 1789. They provoked a flood of responses from friends and correspondents: among them, John Marsden in Sumatra, Captain Mahony in Ceylon, William Chambers in Madras, Lieutenant Francis Wilford in Varanasi, Henry Colebrooke in Mirzapur, John Harrington in Calcutta, and Francis Buchanan also in Bengal. These diverse correspondents were able to cite ancient Buddhist texts obtained in countries to the north, east and south of India, some written in Sanskrit but others in a language known as Pali, thought to have the same origins as Sanskrit, both apparently derived from a spoken language called Prakrit, ‘consisting of provincial dialects, which are less refined, and have a more imperfect grammar’.
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All these foreign texts agreed that Buddhism had originated in India; specifically, the country of Magadha, ‘for above two thousand years a seat of learning, civilisation and trade’, and ‘the cradle of the religion of one of the most powerful and extensive sects of the world’.
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There was further agreement that the founder of Buddhism was a historical figure named Sakyamuni or Gautama Buddha who had lived and died in that same country of Magadha. And if these sources were correct,
this Buddha’s death had occurred not in the eleventh century
BCE
, as Jones had suggested, but as late as the fifth century
BCE
. This new evidence also suggested that despite being ‘branded as atheists, and persecuted as heretics, by the Brahmans’,
²⁰
and despite persecution by various Hindu rulers, the Buddhists had not only flourished in India for many centuries but had continued to survive in some parts of the subcontinent as late as the twelfth century.
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At this same time supporting evidence for Buddhism’s Indian roots began to emerge from the central Gangetic plain itself, beginning with an inscription found at a ruined temple known locally as Buddha-gaya just south of the town of Gaya in southern Bihar. It recorded a tenth-century donation made to the ‘house of Bood-dha’, honouring the ‘Supreme Being, Bood-dha’ who had ‘appeared here with a portion of his divine nature’.
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In Varanasi, too, startling evidence emerged suggesting that this most orthodox of Hindu cities had at one time contended with a rival religion.

Varanasi in the 1780s was in the process of being Anglicised into Benares under the new authority of the EICo. In 1788 the Company appointed as its Resident and superintendent in that city thirty-two-year-old Jonathan Duncan, part of a select band of administrators known as ‘Warren Hastings’s young men’ and one of that minority whose empathy for Indian culture was combined with intellectual curiosity – the twin attributes of the Orientalist. Duncan shared Hastings’s view that to interfere with India’s ancient laws or its religious views would be an ‘unwanted tyranny’, while at the same time regarding it as his duty to oppose abuses of what would today be called human rights. These included the custom of female infanticide widely practised by the Rajput class, the most powerful landowners in
and around Benares. By demonstrating to the leading landowners that it contravened the Hindu scriptures, Duncan was able to convince them to stop the practice. However, the city’s more conservative Brahmin class had also to be won over, which Duncan achieved by lobbying for a Sanskrit College in Benares, ‘for the preservation and cultivation of the Laws, Literature and Religion of the Nation at the Centre of their Faith’.
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By such diplomacy Duncan won the support of all sections of the city. It meant that when in 1794 a green marble urn was unearthed from some ruins just north of Benares, it was brought to Duncan and his advice sought. The urn had come to light when a complex of ruins known as Sarnath was being excavated for building material.
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It contained cremated bone fragments, which was against Hindu custom, leading Duncan to speculate that the remains must have belonged to ‘one of the worshippers of Buddha, a set of Indian heretics, who having no reverence for the Ganges, used to deposit their remains in the earth, instead of committing them to that river’.

Duncan’s surmise was confirmed when in the same ruins ‘a statue or idol of Buddha’ was uncovered bearing an inscription which, when translated by his friends from the Sanskrit College, proved to be a record of an eleventh-century donation made by Basantapala, King of Gaur, who with his brother had come to worship there and had ‘ordered all those who did not follow the Buddhas, to embrace that sect’. Here was clear evidence that Buddhism had flourished under royal patronage in Upper Bengal well into the eleventh century.

But what was now all too apparent to Sir William Jones and his fellow savants was that the recovery of India’s pre-Muslim past was being held up by the lack of what Jones called ‘the
grand desideratum in oriental literature, Chronology’;
²⁵
specifically, some name or event which could be tied to European history – a methodology known today as synchronology. Perhaps sensing that he was getting nowhere with his biblical correlations, Jones turned to the classics of his childhood. He knew his Herodotus, his Strabo, and his Megasthenes; he had read Arrian’s
Anabapsis
, Ptolemy’s
Geographia
and Quintus Curtius Rufus’s
Historiae Alexandri Magni
in the original Greek and Latin – and much else besides. He now subjected these texts to the closest re-examination for any light they could throw on early Indian history, particularly with regard to the Indian kings encountered by Alexander the Great in the course of his invasion of India and by Alexander’s Macedonian successors in the east. He was convinced that hidden in these accounts was the key that would provide the missing synchronicity: a name or event common to both the Greeks and the Indians that could be identified and by doing so would unlock the past.