Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (22 page)

‘Coupling this circumstance,’ he continued, ‘with their extreme brevity … it immediately occurred to me that they must record either obituary notices, or more probably, the offerings and
presents of votaries.’ These two characters were in many cases preceded by a third symbol resembling a double-barbed hook or anchor in which one of the hooks had been distorted to curve downwards rather than up:

By yet another of those happy conjunctions of timing that surrounded this great breakthrough, Prinsep had only days earlier been working on the coins of Saurashtra in western India.
⁸
‘Now this [character] I had learned from the Saurashtra coins, deciphered only a day or two before, to be one sign of the genitive case singular, being the
ssa
of the Pali, or
sya
of the Sanskrit.’ If that character represented the genitive ‘of’ (just as the apostrophe ‘s’ in English represents ‘of’) it was logical to suppose that the rest of each short phrase concerned a donation and the name of the donor: ‘“Of so-and-so the gift,” must then be the form of each brief sentence.’

Both in Sanskrit and Pali the verb ‘to give’ was
dana
and the noun ‘gift’ or ‘donation’
danam
, sharing the same Indo-European root as the Latin
donare
(to give) and
donus
(gift). This led Prinsep to ‘the speedy recognition of the word
danam
(gift), teaching me the very two letters
d
and
n
.’ The snake-like squiggle represented the sound ‘da’, the inverted ‘T’ the sound ‘na’ and the single dot the muted ‘m’, together forming the word
danam
.

With these two letters and the genitive singular understood, all the concentrated study that Prinsep had put in over the previous four years suddenly and dramatically fell into place. It was the eureka moment of Indian philology: ‘My
acquaintance with ancient alphabets had become so familiar that most of the remaining letters in the present examples could be named at once on re-inspection. In the course of a few minutes I thus became possessed of the whole alphabet, which I tested by applying it to the inscription on the Delhi column.’

Having announced the single most important advance in the study of Indian history, Prinsep then backed off, explaining that before he could give the Society his complete translation of the Firoz Shah Lat inscription he needed to prepare a fount of type for his alphabet of No. 1, which he was himself in the process of making. He then sought to mollify those present at that historic meeting by offering them a few titbits. These included the statement that the language of the No. 1 inscriptions was ‘Magadhi … the original type whereon the more complicated structure of the Sanskrit has been founded. If carefully analyzed, each member of the alphabet will be found to contain the element of the corresponding number, not only of the Deva-Nagari, but of the Canouj, the Pali, the Tibetan, the Hala Canara, and of all the derivates from the Sanskrit stock.’

In other words, No. 1, the written language of the Magadhans, was the ancestor of most of India’s modern languages and alphabets. Written from left to right, its alphabet consisted of thirty-three basic letters, each representing a consonant followed by the ‘a’ vowel, the other vowels being formed by the addition of ancilliary glyphs to the base consonant, with only initial vowel sounds having their own specific characters. It had all the simplicity of an original, developed to give written expression to a popular spoken language, Prakrit, which had preceded Sanskrit. Initially, Prinsep called this alphabet
‘Indian Pali’, but it was later recognised that the early Brahmans had termed it
Brahmi lipi
, the ‘language of Brahma’. Today it is best known as Brahmi, with the earliest form often being referred to as Ashokan Brahmi.

Once he had understood how the Brahmi alphabet worked, Prinsep applied it – speedily and triumphantly – to the translation of the twenty-three records of donations from the Sanchi stupa and the names of their donors. Next came translations of the lettering on a number of bilingual Indo-Bactrian coins bearing Greek lettering on the obverse and No. 1 on the reverse. A number of short inscriptions from Bodhgaya followed. Only then did Prinsep feel ready to take on the Firoz Shah’s Lat inscription, beginning with the fifteen-character phrase that he had earlier found to begin virtually every paragraph at Delhi, Allahabad, Girnar, Dhauli and elsewhere. ‘The most usual reading,’ he declared, ‘and the equivalent according to my alphabet, are as follows:

Devanamapiya piyadasi laja hevam aha

The word
laja
initially threw both Prinsep and his Pali-speaking Sinhalese assistant Ratna Paula, until they realised that this was ‘the licence of a loose vernacular orthography’ and that the intended word was
raja
. That gave them the opening phrase: ‘Beloved-of-the-Gods beloved king’. The last two words –
hevam aha –
translated as ‘spake thus’, which together gave the complete sentence:

Thus spake King Piyadasi, Beloved-of-the-Gods

These words, professed Prinsep, had every appearance of a royal edict: ‘The simplicity of the form reminds us of the common expression in our own Scriptures – “Thus spake the prophet”, or in the proclamation of the Persian monarch – “Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia”.’

Prinsep’s first thoughts were that here were ‘the doctrines of some great reformer, such as Shakya [Sakyamuni Buddha]’. But when he translated the second sentence it immediately became clear that this could only be the work of a monarch, for it began
Saddavisati vasa abhisitename –
‘In the twenty-seventh year of my anointment’
⁹
– a phrase that was repeated in another four places of the inscription. Today that sentence is generally read as ‘When I had been consecrated twenty-six years’
¹⁰
or ‘twenty-six years after my coronation’.
¹¹

Who then, Prinsep asked, could this monarch have been – for he was patently a ruler powerful enough ‘to spread his edicts thus over the continent of India’? So far as Prinsep knew, no Indian ruler before Akbar the Great had ever ruled over such a large area as that covered by the pillar and rock inscriptions. He had gone through all the Hindu genealogical tables and had found no one by the name of Devanamapiya Piyadasi (more accurately, Devanamapriya Priydarsin, the form most often used today in academic circles).

Only one contender seemed to fit the bill – but a monarch from outside India: ‘In Mr Turnour’s
Epitome of Ceylonese History
, then, we are presented once, and once only, with the name of a king, Devenampiatissa
[sic]
, as nearly identical with ours as possible.’ George Turnour’s translation of the
Great Dynastic Chronicle
had described how this King Devanamapiyatissa of
Lanka had been converted to Buddhism through the efforts of the Indian king Dharmashoka, who could only be the Mauryan ruler Ashoka. ‘Was [it] possible, then, that this Lankan king was the author of the rock edicts’, that ‘Devanampiyatissa
[sic]
, the royal convert, caused, in his zeal, the dogmas of his newly adopted faith to be promulgated far and wide?’

James Prinsep presented his complete translation of the Firoz Shah Lat inscription at the next meeting of the ASB, held in early August 1837.
¹²
It was, in his view, ‘a series of edicts connected with the Buddhist faith issued by Divanamapiya Piyadasi
[sic]
, a king of Ceylon’, their purpose being to ‘proclaim his renunciation of his former faith, and his adoption of the Buddhist persuasion’.

Even though the edicts made no reference to Buddha Sakyamuni, they appeared to be directly associated with Buddhist thinking. The word
dharma
ran through the inscription like a thread: ‘The sacred name constantly employed – the true keystone of Shakya’s reform – is
Dhamma
or
Dharma.’
This word Prinsep translated – or, rather, mistranslated – as ‘virtue’ or ‘religion’. The promotion of Dharma lay at the heart of these edicts, even though it was quite clear that the real authority lay with the edicts’ author, whose name appeared no less than sixteen times on the Delhi column: ‘The chief drift of the writing seems to enhance the merits of the author – the continual recurrence of
esa me kate
, “so I have done”, arguing a vaunt of his own acts rather than an inculcation of virtue in others’.

Prinsep established that the first of seven edicts – known today as Pillar Edicts 1–7 (PE 1–7) inscribed on Firoz Shah’s Lat began on the north side of the column. Here three edicts had been set down within one compartment, each beginning
with the solemn fifteen-letter sentence declaration, ‘Thus spake King Piyadasi, Beloved-of-the-Gods’. The fourth edict appeared by itself on the west side of the column, the fifth on the south, the sixth on the east, and the seventh and longest beginning under the east compartment and continuing right round the column.

‘Thus spake king Devanamapiya Piyadasi’, begins Prinsep’s historic translation of Pillar Edict 1 (PE 1, here quoted in its entirety):

In the twenty-seventh year of my anointment, I have caused this religious edict to be published in writing. I acknowledge and confess the faults that have been cherished in my heart. From the love of virtue, by the side of which all other things are but sins – from the strict scrutiny of sin, and from a fervid desire to be told of sin – by the fear of sin and by the very enormity of sin – by these may my eyes be strengthened and confirmed. The sight of religion and the love of religion of their own accord increase and will ever increase: and my people whether of the laity, or of the priesthood – all mortal beings, are knit together thereby, and prescribe to themselves the same path: and above all having obtained the mastery over their passions, they become supremely wise. For this is indeed true wisdom: it is upheld and bound by religion – by religion which cherishes, religion which teaches pious acts, religion which bestows pleasure.

By today’s standards of epigraphy, this first translation was very wide of the mark. Neither Prinsep nor Ratna Paula could fully grasp the meaning of many sentences, as can be seen when the above is set beside a modern translation (see Appendix,
p. 419
):

The second Pillar Edict (PE 2) was easier to translate, although it too was taken up with the meaning of Dharma, here defined by King Piyadasi as the performance of good works that included (in Prinsep’s translation) ‘the non-omission of many acts: mercy and charity, purity and chastity’. To this end, King Piyadasi had himself performed many acts of benevolence ‘towards the poor and afflicted, towards bipeds and quadrupeds, towards the fowls of the air and things that move in the waters’. It closed with an explanation as to why these edicts were being promulgated: ‘Let all pay attention to it, and let it endure for ages to come, and he who acts in conformity thereto, the same shall attain eternal happiness.’

James Prinsep’s translation of the Pillar Edicts cannot be quoted here in full simply for reasons of space. However, an exception has be made for Prinsep’s rendering of the closing sentences of the last of the seven Pillar Edicts (PE 7), where he came closest to catching the essence of its author’s call for his message to be read by future generations: