Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (11 page)

A carved slab from Amaravati, showing a highly decorated stupa and its surrounding colonnade and four gateways. This was one of a number of drawings made by Colin Mackenzie’s draftsmen following his partial excavation of the site in 1816. (APAC, British Library)

The dramatic progress in Indian studies that had been achieved since the arrival of Sir William Jones in Calcutta came to a sudden halt on 27 April 1795.

Jones had agreed to serve a term of ten years and no more, and that ten years was completed in November 1794 – by which time both William and Anna Maria Jones were seriously unwell. However, Jones was determined to complete his
Digest of Hindu and Muslim Law
on which he had been working intermittently for some years and which he considered to be his most important legacy. The idea of helping the ‘twenty-four millions of black British subjects in these provinces … by giving them their own laws’, was, he wrote, ‘more flattering to me than the thanks of the King’.
¹
Anna Maria was too ill to stay on and she sailed with the autumn fleet, but her husband remained in Calcutta, despite suffering severe pain from an inflammation of the liver. On 20 April 1795 he called on Lord Hastings’s successor as Governor General, his old friend Sir John Shore, but felt too unwell to stay long. A week later Shore was sent for and reached Jones’s mansion on Garden Reach in time to see Jones breathe his last.

No one was better placed to appreciate what Jones’s death meant than his friend and disciple Henry Colebrooke: ‘His premature death leaves the result of his researches unarranged, and must lose to the world much that was committed to memory … None of those who are now engaged in Oriental researches are so fully informed … and I fear that in the progress of their enquiries none will be found to have such comprehensive views.’
²

These fears proved to be well founded. The death of Sir William Jones left the Asiatic Society like a ship at sea without a navigator. Presidents, secretaries and editors came and went
while the Society drifted for want of a guiding hand at the helm. Yet its scattered correspondents continued to gather information and
Asiatick Researches
continued to be published, albeit less frequently. These contributors included a Captain James Hoare, who presented the Society with a book of drawings of the Firoz Shah’s Lat in Delhi and the Lat at Allahabad, together with eye-copies of their inscriptions.

This was fortuitous because very soon after Hoare’s visit to Allahabad the stone column was ‘wantonly taken down by that enemy to Hindustani architecture, Colonel Kyd, at which time the capital of it was destroyed’.
³
The EICo had sent troops to garrison the fort at Allahabad following a devious treaty of alliance drawn up with the Nawab of Oude. Then in 1801 the Nawab had formally ceded Allahabad to the EICo, and its military engineers had moved in under the command of Colonel Kyd to strengthen the fort’s defences. In doing so Colonel Kyd and his military engineers had not only uprooted the pillar but had left it broken and in pieces by the roadside.

Captain Hoare was dead of fever before his report could be read to the Asiatic Society but in 1800 his copies were examined by Henry Colebrooke, who was now the only European in Calcutta with a thorough knowledge of Sanskrit. But when presented with Hoare’s eye-copies of the Delhi and Allahabad pillar inscriptions Colebrooke had to confess that he could make no more sense of their pseudo-Greek characters than his distinguished predecessor.
⁴

By 1800 the EICo had rid itself of the worst of the abuses that had made it a byword for corruption, but these reforms had failed to halt the growing power of the EICo’s Indian Army, a power that the ambitious Lord Wellesley, appointed Governor General in 1798, now exploited to the full. It was
said of Lord Wellesley that ‘he was instructed not to engage, if possible, in hostilities with any native power; and yet he waged deadly war with every one of them. He was desired not to add by conquest a single acre to the Company’s territory, and he subdued for them all India from the Himmaleh to Cape Comorin.’
⁵
After using the French Jacobin threat as a pretext to overthrow Tipu Sultan in Mysore, he took on the Marathas of the northern Deccan in what became a hard-fought struggle for power in central India.

In the course of what became known as the Second Maratha War, Lord Wellesley’s equally ambitious younger brother Arthur Wellesley – the future Duke of Wellington – secured a famous victory that helped break the Maratha confederacy. Fought on 23 September 1803, the battle of Assaye was, in the opinion of the victor, the bloodiest and the finest he ever won. Five days later his battered army brought their wounded north to the little village of Ajanta, at the very heartland of India, where a small mud-walled fort was put to use as a field hospital. The army remained in and around Ajanta for a month, and soon rumours were heard in the officers’ messes of wonderful things to be seen in the caves less than a mile to the south, where a small river had worn through the rock to create a narrow, winding gorge. Known locally as ‘Tiger Valley’, this gorge was said to be the haunt of tigers and best avoided, which may be why the caves and their contents had remained undisturbed for centuries. Then the army moved north, a peace treaty was signed and the caves of Ajanta were forgotten.

Unashamed imperialist though he was, Lord Wellesley was also determined that India should have administrators who knew the country they were sent to govern. Behind the backs of the EICo’s Court of Directors in London he set up a college
in a corner of Calcutta’s Fort William where new recruits to the Indian Civil Service (ICS) could study Indian languages and customs. By 1818 no fewer than a hundred Indian linguists were employed at Fort William College, providing, in Wellesley’s words, ‘the best method of acquiring a knowledge of the manners and customs of the natives of India’. The college had also built up the finest oriental library in the world, amounting to almost twelve thousand printed books and manuscripts. But what Wellesley could never have anticipated was the impact his college had on Bengal itself, where it helped initiate what became known as the Bengal Renaissance, inspiring men such as Ram Mohan Roy to work for reforms that would eventually bring about the end of British rule in India.

Among those closely associated with Fort William College in its early days, as Professor of Sanskrit and Hindu Law, was Henry Colebrooke. In 1801 he was elected President of the Asiatic Society and held that position until he retired from India in 1814. It was during his tenure that the natural heir to Sir William Jones arrived in Calcutta: John Leyden, a shepherd’s son from the Scottish borders who had studied for the ministry but had shown more aptitude for languages than for theology. Leyden’s friends had found him a position as an EICo surgeon in Madras, where it soon became clear that his talents lay elsewhere. ‘I had determined at all events to become a furious Orientalist’, he wrote to a friend in Scotland two years after his arrival in India.
⁶
His opportunity came when he was appointed medical assistant to the Mysore survey, with a brief ‘to carry on inquiries concerning the natural history of the country, and the manners and languages, &c., of the natives of Mysore’. In the course of his duties Leyden found time to teach himself thirteen Indian languages in as many months.

Leyden was a curious character. A ‘disposition to egotism’
⁷
was accompanied by uncouth manners, a grating voice and a Scots brogue so broad that only his fellow countrymen could fully understand him. Yet his evident genius won the patronage of Lord Wellesley’s successor, Lord Minto, and he was appointed Professor of Hindustani at Fort William College. A second post as Assay Master of the Calcutta Mint provided him with the means to devote himself to his Indian studies. ‘I may die in the attempt,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘but if I die without surpassing Sir William Jones a hundred fold in oriental learning, let never a tear for me profane the eye of a borderer.’ These were brave words, coming as they did from a man who suffered one bout of sickness after another.

After completing the first translation into English of the Mughal emperor Babur’s autobiographical
Baburnama
, John Leyden was asked by Henry Colebrooke to take on the Secretaryship of the Asiatic Society, since the then incumbent was about to retire. The post was unpaid but it had become the Society’s most important position and it would allow Leyden to step into the shoes of his idol, the late Sir William Jones. However, at this point the fate that Leyden had so boldly challenged intervened: he was invited by Lord Minto to accompany him to Java as his interpreter. Arriving at the Dutch settlement of Batavia on 25 August 1811 Leyden lost no time in visiting a library reputed to contain rare Indian manuscripts. He emerged shivering and declared the atmosphere of the room to be enough to give any mortal a fever. Three days later he was dead.

With the best candidate gone Henry Colebrooke now had to cast about for someone to take his place. Leyden’s place as Assay Master of the Calcutta Mint had been filled by his deputy, a bright twenty-three-year-old assistant surgeon named Horace
Hayman Wilson. Amiable, gentlemanly and well connected, Dr Wilson was the antithesis of Leyden in almost every respect, having come to India with no more than a solid grounding in medicine, chemistry and assaying. He was an inappropriate choice for the Secretaryship of the Asiatic Society, but on accepting the post Wilson set about proving himself worthy of the task.

Wilson’s duties as Secretary led him to Sir William Jones’s Sanskrit translations. Wishing to understand his work a little better he cast around for a Sanskrit–English dictionary and found there was none, which led him to conclude that his only course was to write his own dictionary. It took him the best part of a decade, but it led to his gaining such a mastery of the language that he could eventually lay claim to be the leading Sanskritist of the age.

But that pre-eminence came at a price, which was that Dr Horace Hayman Wilson held the post of Secretary of the Asiatic Society for almost twenty-two years. After Colebrooke retired from India in 1814, other Presidents of the Society came and went but none with real authority, so that Wilson’s position was never challenged, allowing him free rein to order the Asiatic Society’s affairs from its impressive new building at the corner of Chowringhee and Park Street very much as he thought fit. A tireless advocate for Indian rights, Wilson opened the membership of the Asiatic Society to Indians and worked no less zealously to promote his twin interests: Sanskrit and amateur theatricals – this last hobby reinforced by his marriage to the granddaughter of the actress Sarah Siddons.

Among Wilson’s many accomplishments was the setting up of a Sanskrit college in Calcutta, established in 1824, to match that in Benares. However, his main claims to fame rest with his
Sanskrit Grammar
, his translations of a number of ancient verse
dramas and his work on the eighteen
Puranas
. These last were supposed to have been written by Veda Vyasa, the compiler of the
Vedas
, but Wilson’s scholarship showed them to be Brahmanical reinterpretations of early history presented as prophecy, none written earlier than the second century of the Christian era. Drawing on earlier dynastic records, the composers of the
Puranas
had highlighted the deeds of those who had abided by the rules of kingship as laid down in the ancient texts, which decreed that monarchs be drawn from the Kshatriya warrior caste but always under the guidance of Brahman ministers, the Kshatriyas representing the arms of the Hindu body politic, the Brahmans the head. When these caste rules of kingship were broken, divine retribution invariably followed, as in the notorious case of the usurping low-caste Nandas.

Wilson is also remembered for his discovery and translation of a long-forgotten document: the
Rajatarangini
, or ‘River of Kings’, a chronicle of the kings of Kashmir written in the form of a poem in 118 verses by a twelfth-century Brahman poet named Kalhana. Although mostly devoted to events that had occurred during or just before the poet’s lifetime, Kalhana had also drawn on earlier historical sources to write about Kashmir prior to the Muslim invasions. And if these sources were to be believed, the ‘heretical faith of Bauddha’
⁸
had at one time dominated that region.

According to the
River of Kings
, Buddhism had been introduced to Kashmir by a king named Ashoka. This King Ashoka had founded the city of Shrinagar in the Kashmir valley, built numerous temples in the valley and caused Buddhism to be taken to adjoining countries, including Tartary. Yet the author of the
River of Kings
displayed a marked hostility towards Ashoka, in striking contrast to his regard for Ashoka’s son and
successor Jalauka, a ‘prince of great prowess’ who after becoming a devout worshipper of Shiva ‘overcame the assertions of the Bauddha heresies, and quickly expelled the
Mlecchas
[foreigners without caste] from the country’. However, even King Jalauka had turned out to be a less than model ruler, for towards the end of his reign he had begun to look favourably upon the Buddhists, an attitude his son and successor King Damodara had then enlarged on to such a degree that he had incurred the ‘the enmity of the Brahmanical order’.

If this King Ashoka who had brought Buddhism to Kashmir was the same as the Ashoka listed in the dynastic tables of the
Puranas
as the third ruler of the Mauryan dynasty of Magadha, then he was patently a powerful ruler, with enough authority to challenge the established order of Kashmir with his heretical religion. The puzzle, for Wilson, was that neither Jalauka nor Damodara, nor Ashoka’s named father and grandfather, were listed in any of the Puranic tables.

It was now clear that the authors of the
River of Kings
and the
Puranas
had a common Brahmanical aversion to Buddhism and Buddhist rulers. Indeed, something of that prejudice seemed to colour their translator’s thinking, for Horace Hayman Wilson showed little enthusiasm for areas of scholarship that fell outside his own pet subject: Brahmanical Sanskrit. For all his virtues, he lacked the breadth of vision that had made possible the great advances achieved under Sir William Jones. During his long Secretaryship of the Asiatic Society, the network of correspondents that had been such an important factor in the days of Jones and Colebrooke simply fell apart for lack of a directing force at the centre. New discoveries in the field came and went without acknowledgement, with little attempt made to assess their significance or to relate them to what had gone before.