Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (21 page)

With Turnour’s revelations the stage was now set for what would be the last act of the mystery of the golden pillar of Firoz Shah: a dramatic denouement that would come in the form of a double revelation.

James Prinsep’s page of engravings of the Sanchi stupa donations, which when brought together gave him the first clues to the deciphering of the Brahmi script.
(JRAS
, Vol. VIII, July 1837)

In Britain the year 1837 is best remembered for the start of the Victorian era. To political historians of India, 1837 represents the black year in which the Orientalist movement, led by Professor H. H. Wilson in Oxford and James Prinsep’s elder brother Henry Thoby Prinsep in Calcutta, was finally defeated by the Anglicists and the evangelicals under Thomas Macaulay and Lord Bentinck; a defeat that led to the imposition of English as the chief medium of instruction and the ending of government funding for the printing of works in the vernacular.
¹

But for students of Indian studies the year 1837 will always be remembered as the
annus mirabilis
of Indian historiography and philology; the year in which astonishing revelations came so thick and fast that there was no time to absorb the implications of one before the next had been announced.

The year began with James Prinsep’s announcement that he had identified two inscribed stone slabs in the collection of the Asiatic Society of Bengal as stolen property. Some months earlier he had asked a correspondent in Orissa to re-examine the rock inscription at Khandagiri near Bhubaneshwar, first identified by Andrew Stirling twenty years earlier. However, this correspondent had been prevented from carrying out that examination by the local Brahmins, who had complained that some years earlier an English colonel had stolen a number of stone effigies and inscriptions from their temples. That disturbing news provoked Prinsep into searching through the records of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, leading to the unmasking of the culprit as the late General Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart, who a generation earlier had scandalised Calcutta society by adopting Hindu manners and urging English memsahibs for the sake of their health to throw off their tight dresses and wear saris instead.
²
Prinsep arranged for two stone slabs taken by
Stuart from Bhubaneshwar to be sent down the coast to Cuttack, the provincial capital of Orissa, where his contact restored them to their proper owners.
³

The correspondent concerned was Lieutenant Markham Kittoe of the 6th Native Infantry and he was at this time in disgrace. Kittoe was one of John Company’s misfits, a keen young antiquarian who had come out to India in 1825 as a seventeen-year-old military cadet but failed to get along with his brother officers. He had found love in the arms of a colonel’s daughter, Emily, whom he had married in 1835 and who had already borne him the first two of their nine children. But he had made the mistake of accusing his commanding officer of oppression, and was at this time awaiting a court martial at which he would be found guilty of ‘insubordinate, disrespectful, and litigious conduct, unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman’, and discharged from the service. It was James Prinsep who had come to his rescue by finding him temporary employment as secretary of the Coal Committee, a post which allowed him to tour Orissa ostensibly in search of coalfields.

The goodwill engendered by the return of the two stolen slabs now worked to Kittoe’s advantage, for he was allowed to make a copy of the Khandagiri rock inscription, but as he did so he heard talk of a second rock inscription, said to be on a hill on the other side of Bhubaneshwar town and on the far side of the River Daya – a name that in Sanskrit means ‘compassion’, the significance of which would only later become apparent. However, when Kittoe tried to track down this new inscription he was again frustrated, this time by the local inhabitants, the Oriyas. Only the intervention of a passing Hindu religious mendicant from Benares enabled Kittoe to find what he was looking for. ‘Such is the aversion the Ooriyahs have of our going near
their places of worship’, Kittoe afterwards wrote, ‘that I was actually decoyed away from the spot, when within a few yards of it, being assured that there was no such place, and had returned for a mile or more, when I met with a man who led me back to the spot by torchlight. I set fire to the
jangal
[jungle] and perceived the inscription, which was completely hidden by it.’
⁴

Lieutenant Markham Kittoe, with the Ashokan elephant rock at Dhauli shown behind him and the temple spires of Bhubaneshwar in the distance. (A drawing by Colesworthy Grant published in his
Lithographic Sketches
, 1850)

The hostility experienced by Kittoe remains one of the hazards of Indian archaeology to this day, sometimes inspired by religious prejudice but more often than not arising from the
belief that anyone who comes to dig into old ruins is seeking buried treasure, and anything inscribed on rocks or pillars must be the key to those treasures.
⁵

When Kittoe returned to the rock the following morning to begin copying the inscription, he was confronted by a she-bear and her two cubs who had made their home at the base of the rock. To evade them, Kittoe scrambled up the rock face, where he found himself confronted by a small elephant – or, rather, ‘the fore half of an elephant, four feet high, of superior workmanship … hewn out of solid rock’. The bear cubs had fled – but not the mother, so Kittoe shot her. Only then was he able to examine the inscription on the rock face below.

The Dhauli Rock Edict inscription, with the head of the Dhauli elephant just visible on the terrace above. This photograph was taken by Alexander Caddy in 1895. (APAC, British Library)

What Kittoe termed the Aswastama
⁶
rock inscription is better known today as the Dhauli Rock Edict, taking its name from the nearby village of Dhauli. These edicts had been chiselled across the face of a rock just below the summit of one of three low hills overlooking the River Daya: ‘The rock has been hewn and polished for a space of fifteen feet long by ten in height, and the inscription cut thereon being divided into four tablets, the first of which appears to have been executed at a different period from the rest; the letters are much larger and not so well cut. The fourth tablet is encircled by a deep line, and is cut with more care than the others.’

The arrival in Calcutta of Kittoe’s copy of the Dhauli inscription was opportune, for it coincided with the receipt of two other sets of facsimiles of inscriptions. The first had been copied from the great elephant rock at Girnar discovered by Colonel James Tod back in 1823. This had been taken at Prinsep’s request by a Mr Wathen from an earlier set of facsimiles made by the Reverend Dr John Wilson, a Scots surgeon and missionary who, besides founding the first school for Indian girls in Bombay and giving his name to what became Wilson College, was a keen antiquarian. The other set of inscriptions had come from the Great Tope at Sanchi, taken by Captain Edward Smith of the Royal Engineers in answer to Prinsep’s call for copies of its inscriptions and drawings of its sculptures.

Smith’s Sanchi inscriptions were accompanied by some lively drawings showing a number of the sculptures that adorned the four gateways of the Great Tope, but Prinsep had eyes only for the former, for in addition to the several pillar inscriptions from the Gangetic plains, he now had three more different inscriptions from three widely separated locations in Western, Central and Eastern India – all of them written in the same ‘No. 1’ script.

One of the readers who responded to Prinsep’s appeal for illustrations of the Sanchi sculptures was Captain William Murray, assistant to the commander of the Saugor and Narbada Territories. He sent in two drawings, both taken from the cross-beams of the fallen South Gateway of the Great Tope. Prinsep selected for reproduction in the
JASB
the more striking of the two scenes, showing a city under attack and what appeared to be a monarch on a huge elephant directing the assault. Unknown to Murray and Prinsep, both scenes were part of the Ashokan story that would not be understood until eighty years later (for an earlier drawing of the upper scene see
p. 108
, and for a later photograph see
p. 240
). (Royal Asiatic Society)

‘This inscription will be seen to have arrived at a most fortunate moment,’ declared Prinsep when he rose to speak at the monthly meeting of the ASB held on 7 June 1837. The minutes of that momentous meeting state quite simply: ‘The Secretary read a note on the inscriptions, which had proved of high interest from their enabling him to discover the long-sought alphabet of the ancient Lat character (or No. 1 of Allahabad) – and to read
therewith the inscriptions of Delhi, Allahabad, Bettiah, Girnar, and Cuttack [the Dhauli inscription] – all intimately connected, as it turns out, in their origin, and in their purport.’

Prinsep’s note was subsequently published in the
JRAS
, providing posterity with a step-by-step explanation of how he came to break the code of No. 1.
⁷

The inscriptions from Sanchi were of two sorts. The first two recorded grants of land from the early Gupta dynasty of the fourth century CE. The remaining twenty-three (see illustration,
p. 153
) consisted of a number of much shorter inscriptions in No. 1 script found on the crosspieces of the pillars that formed the colonnade surrounding the stupa, most of them cut in a rough and ready way that was in marked contrast to the finely wrought sculptures that decorated the four gateways. ‘These apparently trivial fragments of rude writing’, declared Prinsep, ‘have instructed us in the alphabet and the language of those ancient pillars and rock inscriptions which have been the wonder of the learned since the days of Sir William Jones.’

Prinsep went on to explain how, as he set about arranging the inscriptions to appear together as one lithographed plate for publication in the Society’s
Journal
, he had been struck by the fact that virtually every one ended in the same two letters: a snake-like squiggle formed by six straight lines, followed by an inverted capital T with a dot on one side: