Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (31 page)

Abbott’s theory found support from another British officer, Dr Henry Bellew, the first surgeon of Lumsden’s Corps of Guides.
⁹
Dr Bellew spent almost his entire military career in and around the Vale of Peshawar, his facility with local languages and his knowledge of the Yusufzai Pathans making him much more than just a military doctor. He and his commanding officer, Harry Lumsden, were the first Europeans to explore the large Buddhist monastic complex of Takht-i-bahi, nine miles north of Mardan on the road to Swat. Here and elsewhere in the Peshawar Vale they found coins and other antiquities proving ‘the successive existence in this country … of Greeks, Graeco-Bactrians, Indo-Bactrians, Scythians, and Brahmins’.
¹⁰
One civilisation after another had flourished here, with Brahmanism ultimately triumphing over Buddhism, only for both to be completely annihilated by Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century: ‘Fire appears to have been the chief
means of destruction; for most of the ruins that have been excavated bear marks of its action, and show signs of the hasty flight of their former inhabitants.’

Swat and the Mahabun mountain country lay outside British control but Bellew employed scouts to map the area, from which he determined Alexander’s route through the mountains to Mount Aornos and on down to the Indus crossing. He learned that on the summit plateau of the Mahabun there still stood ‘the ruins of an extensive rock-built fortress, very difficult of access’, and that according to local tradition, ‘Alexander did cross the Indus by a ford at the foot of the hill alluded to [Mahabun], passing from Amb across to Darband in Hazara. The tradition relates how he gained possession of the hitherto impregnable fortress through the miraculous intervention of a native ascetic he met with on the spot.’

However, for Alexander Cunningham it was the travels of the Chinese pilgrims rather than Alexander that counted. He contributed two largely speculative articles on this subject to the
JASB
before rejoining the Bengal Army and putting his engineering skills to good use when the second round of the Anglo-Sikh War began in December 1848. He was present at the hard-fought battles of Chilianwala and Gujrat and at the surrender that followed in March 1849, leading to the final annexation of the Punjab.

Cunningham had too much self-belief for his own good, which made him reluctant to admit that he was wrong. He was determined to see Greek influences in early Indian sculpture and architecture that weren’t there, and his archaeological methods were essentially destructive, but he was also far ahead of his time in grasping the potential of what he termed ‘field archaeology’, in understanding that excavation went hand in
hand with epigraphy and that there was also a need to preserve and conserve. He undertook the first recognisably systematic archaeological excavation in India in 1851, and by the time he had ended his last dig, at Bodhgaya in 1892, he had overseen three decades of archaeological advances as founder and first director of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).

This new age of Indian archaeology dawned at Sanchi, thanks to the appointment of Cunningham’s younger brother Joseph as Political Agent to the native state of Bhopal in central India. Twenty-five miles north-west of the state capital was Sanchi, with its hill-top complex of stupas dominated by its central stupa. The Great Tope, as it was then called, had been much talked about since James Prinsep’s pioneering readings of its inscriptions in 1837, but the geographical isolation that had helped it survive, in Cunningham’s words, ‘the destructive rancour of the fiery Saivas and the bigoted Musalmans’ had long since ended. In 1822 a Captain Johnson, Assistant Political Agent in Bhopal, had torn open the Great Stupa from top to bottom, leaving a vast breach and in the process knocking down part of the surrounding balustrade and the western gateway. He had then compounded his vandalism by hacking his way into the next two largest stupas, afterwards known as Stupa 2 and Stupa 3.

In January 1851 Sanchi became the test bed for a new sort of archaeology, still highly damaging by modern standards but undertaken against a background of widespread destruction of such ancient sites – by local villagers in search of hidden treasure, landowners seeking building material, contractors extracting rubble for the foundations of new roads, railways and bridges, and bored British officers or officials who should have known better. At Sanchi the excavation was mapped, drawn, documented and
analysed. What made this possible was Cunningham’s partnership with a fellow engineer, Lieutenant Fred Maisey, a talented draughtsman and surveyor posted to Bhopal State some two years earlier specifically to make an illustrated report on Sanchi and its sculptures and inscriptions. He now found himself having to defer to Cunningham’s superior rank and expertise.

Cunningham began, as at Sarnath, by sinking a shaft down from the top of the Great Tope and, as before, he found their efforts unrewarded. It contained no human remains and was therefore a memorial rather than an ossuary, with a plain plaster exterior laid over a solid-brick interior. But where the Sanchi stupa differed from Sarnath was in its surround: its stone railing that enclosed a processional pathway encircling the stupa and its four entrance points in the form of elaborate
toranas,
or gateways, set at the four cardinal points. Two of the gateways were still standing, the other two lay in pieces.

‘These four gateways are the most picturesque and valuable objects at Sanchi,’ Cunningham wrote in his subsequent report. ‘They are entirely covered with bas-relief, representing various domestic scenes and religious ceremonies.’
¹¹
The pillars of the four gateways were supported by sets of elephants, lions and dwarfs, the open spaces between the uprights contained figures of elephant riders and horsemen and on the outside were what Cunningham described as ‘female dancers’. The faces of the pillars were divided into compartments, each containing religious or domestic scenes and the crossbeams of the gateways, in the form of three nineteen-foot architraves placed one above the other and projecting at both ends, were similarly decorated with complex panoramic scenes. These Cunningham assumed to be portrayals of events either from the life of Sakyamuni Buddha or the
Jataka Tales
– stories from
the lives of the earlier Buddhas who preceded Sakyamuni – as well as numerous depictions of stupa and Bodhi tree worship.

Cunningham left it to his junior colleague to make painstaking drawings of some of the most striking of these scenes, being much more interested in the accompanying inscriptions. As James Prinsep had discovered back in 1837, these were mostly records of donations. Cunningham recorded almost two hundred, showing that the colonnade and the four gateways had been paid for by individual donors, one third of them women, rather than mighty monarchs or religious institutions. The repeated appearance of the archaic form
bhichhu
for ‘monk’ on the colonnade, as opposed to
bhikku
written on the gateways, showed that the one had come before the other, leading Cunningham to conclude that the colonnade had gone up in Ashoka’s time and the four gateways a century later. This appeared to be confirmed by his reading of a donor inscription carved on a stupa at the centre of the panoramic scene shown in the upper architrave of the South Gateway. It read: ‘Gift of Ananda, son of the neophyte Vasishtha, in the reign of Sri Satakarni’.
¹²

Cunningham took this to refer to King Satakarni I, listed in the
Vishnu Purana
as sixth in the Satavahana dynasty of kings of Andhra. The Satavahanas were well known to Cunningham because they were the first Indian rulers to put their heads on their coinage. They had been feudatories of the Mauryas until the death of Ashoka, after which they had broken away, and under King Satakarni I had defeated the Shungas of North India to extend Satavahani rule over much of central India. Unfortunately for Cunningham, the Satavahana dynasty contained several kings named Satakarni, including a self-declared Buddhist monarch who styled himself Gautamiputra (‘son of Gautama’) Satakarni and who ruled in the first century CE.
Cunningham either got his dates wrong or muddled these two figures, and on this basis dated the four gateways to the first century CE.

Cunningham’s lack of interest in the gateway bas-reliefs meant he failed to note that a number of the scenes shown had been inspired by comparatively recent events, including some which may even have occurred within the living memory of the craftsmen who carved them – particularly in the case of the South Gateway, which now lay scattered on the ground in pieces.

Part of the fallen South Gateway of the Great Tope at Sanchi, with the brick stupa and surrounding railing in the background, and sections of architrave in the foreground. A photograph taken in 1861 by James Waterhouse. (APAC, British Library) (Overleaf) Part of the relief shown on the inner side of the middle architrave, showing a king in his chariot proceeding towards a stupa. A photograph (with cracked glass plate) taken by Raja Deen Dayal in 1881. (APAC, British Library)

Cunningham’s descriptions of the scenes depicted on the scattered pillars and architraves of the South Gateway were no more than cursory. He merely noted that one of the extended panoramas depicted a king riding in a chariot approaching a stupa, and on the other side of the stupa the same king appearing to bow before it while a number of Naga snake kings looked on approvingly. Major Franklin had drawn this scene back in 1820 (see
p. 108
) and Captain Murray in 1837 for James Prinsep to reproduce in the
JASB
(see
p. 159
). Like them, Cunningham missed the significance of what was portrayed here – and on two other scenes shown on the same gateway’s cross-beams, both showing a huge elephant whose mahout, or driver, bears a relic casket on his head.

It was left to Fred Maisey to make drawings of these and other scenes from the South Gateway, the full significance of which would only be understood some seventy years later. One of these scenes would prove to be of crucial importance. It comes
from a side panel of one of the gateway’s supporting pillars and shows the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya and the Diamond Throne at its base set within the pavilion-like structure and surrounding wall built for it by King Ashoka. Immediately below it are six figures facing outwards, a king in the centre, indicated by the royal umbrella, and five women. The king appears to be supported by the two women on either side of him.

The Bodhi tree with its Ashokan pavilion and surrounding wall, and below it a king apparently supported by two women. (Frederick Maisey,
Sanchi and its Remains,
1892)

The other three gateways also showed scenes that Cunningham and his contemporaries failed to fully understand. Of particular interest here are two more sculpted bas-reliefs drawn by Maisey. The first, from a side-panel on one of the pillars of
the West Gateway, shows the Bodhi tree without its pavilion and surrounding wall. On the left a very corpulent king is paying homage to the tree surrounded by his womenfolk. The second scene is from a side panel of one of the pillars on the North Gateway. It shows a stupa surrounded by worshippers with a large number of musicians in attendance, in what looks like an inauguration ceremony of some sort. One of the worshippers carries a relic casket.