Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (16 page)

Another victim of Wilson’s telescopic vision was Major James Tod, who in the course of eighteen years’ service as Political Agent in the region known at this time as Rajputana (today Rajasthan) amassed a collection second only to Colin Mackenzie’s. Tod’s main focus of interest was the Rajput ruling clans of central India, but in his latter years of service he began collecting ancient coins, even going so far as to employ agents who during the rainy season went to Mathura and other cities located beside the Ganges to ‘collect all that were brought to light by the action of the water, while tearing up old foundations, and levelling mouldering walls. In this manner, I accumulated about 20,000 coins, of all denominations.’
⁹

In 1823 Tod was advised to leave India for the sake of his health. He chose to make his way down to Bombay by a circuitous route that took him to the celebrated Jain temples on the holy mountain of Girnar in the Kathiawar peninsula on the western seaboard. Here on its lower slopes he and his entourage came upon ‘a huge hemispherical mass of dark granite’ shaped rather like a kneeling elephant, almost its entire surface covered in writing.

‘The memorial in question’, Tod noted, ‘is divided into compartments or parallelograms, within which are inscriptions in the usual antique character … Each letter is about two
inches long, most symmetrically formed, and in perfect preservation … I may well call it a book; for the rock is covered with these characters, so uniform in execution, that we may safely pronounce all those of the most ancient class, which I designate the “Pandu character”, to be the work of one man. But who was this man?’
¹⁰

The Girnar edict rock. A lithograph engraved by Captain Markham Kittoe, from a drawing by Lieutenant Postans, and published in the
JASB
in 1837.

Like Stirling and Mackenzie at Bhubaneshwar, Tod was immediately struck by the writing’s affinity to ‘the inscriptions on the triumphal pillars at Delhi’. With the help of his Jain interpreter he copied down two sections of text.

Tod’s notice to the Secretary of the Asiatic Society of his discovery failed to elicit any response. This was particularly unfortunate, since Andrew Stirling had just published at his own expense an illustrated account of his Elephant Cave
inscription discovered at Khandagiri in Orissa on the eastern seaboard. As a result, thirteen years passed before anyone in India became aware of the close affinities between these two rock inscriptions on opposite sides of the Indian subcontinent.

Tod took his entire collection with him when he returned to England, where he wrote a ground-breaking article on India’s Hellenistic coinage. However, he professed himself baffled by the writing on the coins of those who had succeeded the Greeks as rulers in north-west India. ‘The characters have the appearance of a rude provincial Greek,’ Tod wrote. ‘That they belonged to Parthian and Indo-Scythic kings, who had sovereignties within the Indus, there cannot be a doubt.’
¹¹
This article Tod published not in
Asiatic Researches
but in the first transactions of a new learned society set up in England, supposedly to complement the Asiatic Society but to all intents a rival body.

This new body was the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (RAS), founded in 1823 following a meeting held at the London home of Henry Colebrooke, who since his retirement from India had gathered about him a circle of other retired ‘Indians’ who shared his Orientalist interests. At the inaugural meeting of the RAS, held at the Thatched House Tavern in St James’s Street on 7 June 1823, Henry Colebrooke followed the example of his mentor Sir William Jones in delivering his own ‘discourse’ on the new society’s aims, declaring that since the origins of Western civilisation were to be found in Asia and England’s success as a world power owed so much to India, it followed that England had a duty to repay this debt. This included making a study of Asia in all its aspects.

Among the many luminaries present on that occasion were the pioneer Sanskritist Charles Wilkins, the Ceylon jurist Sir
Alexander Johnston and the retired Colonel James Tod, who agreed to serve as the RAS’s first Librarian. Tod’s first concern was to write up his monumental two-volume
Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan
, which took him the best part of five years. Ill-health then prevented him from completing his
Travels in Western India
, which was not published until four years after his death in 1835. It meant that Tod’s remarkable discovery of the Girnar rock inscription would remain unknown until 1839.

There is nothing in the records of either the Asiatic Society or the RAS that suggests a rift between these two learned bodies. Indeed, it can be argued that the founding of the RAS in England in 1823 was in direct response to the establishment of the Société Asiatique in France in 1822, and that having two societies that concerned themselves with Asian affairs was better than having one. But there are hints that suggest a distinct
froideur
between the two societies, one being a brief notice in the journal of the older body that it had rejected a proposal from the younger that it should rename itself the ‘Asiatic Society of Bengal’ and become affiliated to the RAS, another a note in the first issue of the RAS’s journal that copies of its aims had been sent to the EICo’s Madras and Bombay Presidencies – but not to Bengal.

Despite their differences, these two learned bodies were united in their opposition to the creeping Anglicisation that was now taking place in India, under pressure from the evangelical movement and other reformers. Milords Hastings and Wellesley – both founder members of the RAS – and their successors as Governors General had stood firm against the thunderings of the Claphamite Sect and its determination to exchange India’s ‘dark and bloody superstition for the genial influence of Christian light and truth’.
¹²
But with the passing
of the India Act in 1813 the evangelicals got their way. Calcutta became a bishopric and the missionaries began to stream in. ‘The thin edge of the wedge being thus fairly inserted in the stronghold of idolatry, the force of truth drove it home,’ was how a contemporary evangelical historian put it, using words that might equally have come from a Muslim historian writing centuries earlier. ‘The Scriptures were now openly distributed. Toleration was no longer conceded only to Hindooism and other idolatries.’
¹³

Female infanticide, slavery and
sati
(the practice of immolating widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres) were now prohibited by law, but such reforms went hand in hand with a growing contempt for Indian culture in general. In a despatch written by the EICo’s Court of Directors in London in 1821 to Lord Hastings (serving a second term as Governor General), Hastings was warned that ‘in teaching mere Hindoo or Mohammedan learning, you bind yourselves to teach a great deal of what is frivolous, not a little of what is purely mischievous, and a small remainder indeed in which utility is in any way encouraged’. Nine years later the Court of Directors proposed that the ‘Oriental scheme of education’ should be replaced by English: ‘We think it highly advisable to enable and encourage a large number of natives to acquire a thorough knowledge of English, being convinced that the high tone and better spirit of European literature can produce their full effect only on those who become familiar with them in the original language.’
¹⁴

Orientalists and their allies both in England and in India resisted these moves vociferously, but they were few in number and became fewer still with each passing decade.

At this time fresh accounts began to circulate once more in military circles of caves filled with wondrous paintings on the
eastern frontiers of the Bombay Presidency. The rumours were finally confirmed in 1824 when a young cavalry lieutenant, James Alexander of the 16th Lancers, returned to his regiment with news of just such a site: at Ajanta, some sixty miles northeast of Aurangabad. He had taken local leave to go hunting and, ignoring local warnings, had entered the tiger-infested gorge below Ajanta town, accompanied by a local guide. He had soon found himself on the floor of a natural amphitheatre formed by a great bend in the River Waghewa. Above were a series of twenty-six rock-cut caves set into a cliff face of black basalt in two tiers like rows of boxes in a theatre.

Clambering up the face of the cliff, Alexander and his guide reached the lower tier of the caves, occupied only by bats. The branch of a conveniently sited tree gave Alexander access to the upper tier, where the largest and most elaborately decorated caves had been cut. It was clear that they had remained unoccupied for centuries. ‘That these excavations served for the retirement of some monastic society I have no doubt,’ the young cavalryman would afterwards observe. He had seen something quite similar at the well-known Kanheri caves outside Bombay. But what set these caves apart only became apparent when he began to explore their interiors by the light of a brushwood torch. The walls and ceilings of virtually every cave were adorned with paintings of astonishing quality, ‘as exhibiting the dresses, habits of life, pursuits, general appearance and even features of the natives of India perhaps two thousand or two thousand five hundred years ago, well preserved and highly coloured, and exhibiting in glowing tints, of which light red is the most common, the crisp-haired aborigines of the sect of the Buddhists, who were driven from India to Ceylon by the advent of Brahminism’.
¹⁵

(Above) The interior of Cave 10 at Ajanta, dating from the second century
BCE
. Modelled on a wooden roofed prayer hall, this was the first cave to be cut into the rock in the Waghewa gorge. A lithograph by Thomas Dibdin reproduced in James Fergusson,
Illustrations from the Rock Cut Temples of India
, 1845. (Below) A ruler surrounded by his queens and concubines. A drawing by James Burgess of part of a wall painting in the same Cave 10, from his
Original Drawings from the Buddhist Rock Temples of Ajanta
. (APAC, British Library)

With this discovery Lieutenant Alexander threw open a window into the past to reveal a brightly lit world peopled by gods, demi-gods and lesser beings of flesh and blood, every aspect of whose living and dying was depicted, from the king in his palace harem to the solitary hermit in the jungle: scenes of love and war, triumph and adversity, pageantry and poverty – each crowded scene rendered the more authentic by the details of hairstyle, dress, ornament, utensil, weaponry, musical instrument and much else besides. Many of the paintings had an obvious religious content, showing haloed Buddha figures meditating, teaching and reclining, always watched over by floating beings that could be construed as angels, but the most striking images were those of bare-breasted men and women of exceptional grace and beauty: sad-eyed monarchs clasping lily-flowers in one hand and consorts in the other; queens and princesses riding in state on elephants or being pampered by handmaidens who giggled and gossiped as they went about their duties.

News of Lieutenant Alexander’s discovery was initially confined to military circles and for the next five years the site remained undisturbed. Ajanta’s extraordinary secret was finally revealed to the wider world when a lecture given by Alexander to his brother officers at Sandhurst Military Academy in August 1828 was reprinted in 1830 in the second volume of
Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
, the official organ of the RAS – soon afterwards retitled the
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (JRAS)
.