Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (33 page)

One of the pillars of the East Gateway of the Bharhut stupa, with adjoining rail and coping, photographed by Joseph Beglar in 1874. (Cunningham,
The Stupa of Bharhut,
1879)

The uprising known to the British as the Indian Mutiny convulsed the subcontinent from the summer of 1857 through almost to the end of 1858. It ended East India Company rule and led to Crown rule, with a Viceroy governing India in the name of the Queen. Four years later Alexander Cunningham retired from military service with a colonel’s pension. A group photograph taken at the time of his departure shows him looking every bit his forty-six years.

Alexander Cunningham (centre) at the time of his retirement from the Indian Army, with other Royal Engineer officers in October 1862. (Royal Engineers Museum, Chatham)

However, before his departure Cunningham had taken care to make his case with Lord Canning, the first viceroy, and within a matter of months he was back – but as a major-general
and archaeological surveyor to the Government of India ‘in Behar and elsewhere’, together with an equally vague brief to ‘make an accurate description of such remains as most deserve notice’. It was the role he had been born to fill.

No financial provision had been made other than Cunningham’s official salary of 450 rupees a month and a field allowance of 350 rupees a month. But it was a start and it allowed Cunningham to devote himself full-time to the recovery of ancient India’s historical geography, criss-crossing northern India in a series of field-trips during the winter months and then writing up the results over the summer. The fruit of these surveys eventually amounted to twenty-three volumes of
Archaeological Survey Reports,
which to this day make breathtaking reading, as much for their scope as their findings.

The first Cold Weather survey was concentrated on Bihar and the province then known as the North-Western Provinces and Oude (subsequently United Provinces and today the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh). Stanislas Julien’s two-volume translation of the travels of Xuanzang,
Memoires sur les Contrées Occidental,
had appeared in 1857–8, which meant that Cunningham was now able to conduct his field surveys with copies of both Faxian’s and Xuanzang’s travels in his knapsack. It enabled him to track down virtually every place visited by the Chinese pilgrims, including such ancient cities as Sravasti, Kosambi and Ayodhya. At Kosambi, west of Allahabad on a bend of the Yamuna River, Cunningham found an Ashokan pillar that Xuanzang had failed to mention, lacking a capital, badly damaged by a recent fire and carrying no Brahmi inscription, but still standing. At Ayodhya, where Xuanzang had seen several ruined monasteries including one ‘with an Asoka tope to mark a place at which the Buddha had preached to the
devas’,
¹
Cunningham could find only the bell of an Ashokan capital, inverted to serve as the base of a lingam in the Shaivite temple of Nageshvarnatha.
²

He did better south of the River Ganges, identifying the extensive ruins first reported on by Francis Buchanan south of the fort of Bihar as the site of the famous monastic university of Nalanda. At Bodhgaya he began clearing the mass of ruins surrounding the great temple and its Bodhi tree to better expose the stone railing that Markham Kittoe had unearthed during his visit to the site back in 1847. He found more of the posts decorated with medallions that Kittoe had drawn, a number of which had been recycled to serve as roof supports for a building beside the main temple now occupied by Hindu devotees.

From the style of the decorations and the accompanying Brahmi inscriptions recording the names of the donors, Cunningham concluded that the railings could not be of much later date than Ashokan.
³
However, he was wrong, as a second round of excavations conducted in 1875 revealed when the remains of a simpler and earlier set of railings was uncovered. Together, they confirmed the essential accuracy of Xuanzang’s account, which was that the original Ashokan railings had been destroyed by the anti-Buddhist regicide Pushyamitra and that the second set of railings that had replaced them had themselves been destroyed by King Sasanka of Bengal.

The Bodhi tree was itself a major cause for concern. In 1812 Francis Buchanan had found the tree in full vigour but when Cunningham saw it half a century later it was ‘very much decayed’, its branches ‘barkless and rotten’.
⁴
By the time of Cunningham’s third visit to Bodhgaya in 1876 the tree had gone completely, having been brought down in a storm and removed. During the course of his fourth visit, in the Cold
Weather of 1880–1, it occurred to him that some of the tree’s roots might have survived. A dig into the sandy soil just west of the Diamond Throne disinterred two large pieces of ‘an Old Pipal Tree’. Conscious that the sacred continuity of the Bodhi tree was now at risk, he took a cutting from the nearest pipal tree and planted it beside the now restored Diamond Throne. It took root and is now venerated by Buddhist pilgrims as the authentic descendant of the original Bodhi tree of Sakyamuni Buddha’s time.

In 1864 Cunningham returned to the scene of his first success: Sankisa, the site of the Buddha’s descent from heaven. He now had Xuanzang’s account and the extra information it provided, including the detail of an Ashokan stone pillar of a ‘lustrous violet colour and very hard, with a crouching lion on the top’.
⁵
The modern village of Samkassa was perched on a large rectangular mound known locally as the
qila
or ‘fort’. About three-quarters of a mile south of the fort was a smaller mound, made up of solid brickwork crowned by a modern Hindu temple dedicated to Bisari Devi, described to Cunningham as a goddess of great power. As he made his way across the open ground towards the temple he almost fell over a large boulder-like object. When cleared of the surrounding undergrowth it revealed itself as a capital of an ancient pillar, bearing the figure of an elephant.
⁶

Carved in lustrous pale sandstone and standing four feet high, the elephant was incomplete, having lost its trunk, tusks, ears and tail. Even so, Cunningham thought the sculpture ‘by far the best representation of that animal that I have seen in any Indian sculpture. The veins of the legs are carefully chiselled, and the toes are well and faithfully represented.’ It stood on a round abacus and bell similar in style to that recovered by Cunningham at Sanchi, although here decorated with stylised leaves rather than ducks.

The Ashokan elephant capital found by Alexander Cunningham in a field outside Samkassa village in 1864, as photographed on site by his assistant Joseph Beglar in the 1870s. The original print is damaged. (APAC, British Library)

The pillar upon which the elephant had originally stood could not be found. However, Cunningham had no hesitation in declaring this to be another of Emperor Ashoka’s works and he speculated that the reason why Xuanzang had reported seeing a lion capital at Sankisa and not an elephant could have
been because the trunk had already broken off when the Chinese pilgrim saw it and ‘the elephant thus disfigured was mistaken for the lion’.

In this same winter season Cunningham returned to Kosambi to look for further remains of the pillar located a year before. He uncovered a short and much mutilated edict almost identical to the Schism Edict found at Sanchi, confirmation that Ashoka had indeed sent out a directive to a number of Buddhist monasteries ordering the Sangha to toe the line.

But not every discovery came from directions supplied by the Chinese pilgrims. Following information provided by a Mr Forrest, Cunningham travelled due north from Delhi as far as the village of Kalsi, just west of the hill-station of Mussoorie at a point where the Jumna River debouched on to the plains. From here Cunningham was directed to a low ridge above the river, upon which rested a large elephantine boulder of distinctive white quartz covered in moss. Three sides had been smoothed and polished and on two of these were neatly set out the fourteen Rock Edicts of Ashoka, all virtually identical in lettering and contents to the Girnar Rock Edict. An added bonus came with the discovery that the northern shoulder of the rock bore the figure of a bull-elephant with large tusks and a curled trunk, neatly cut. Between the elephant’s fore and rear legs were four Brahmi characters spelling out the word
gajatame.

After much puzzling Cunningham had to admit that he had no idea as to what this could mean, other than it might refer to the name of the rock, which like the other three edict rocks so far discovered had clearly been selected because of its elephant-like appearance. The best theory today is that
gajatame
means something like ‘best of elephants’ – possibly Ashoka’s personal memorial to a favourite elephant but more probably a reference to the elephant as a symbol of the Buddha.
⁷
The Kalsi elephant was the third such image to be discovered in close proximity to an Ashokan monument, the first being the elephant carved out of the
solid rock at Dhauli and the second the elephant capital at Sankisa. All have been cut or carved with remarkable realism.

The Kalsi elephant together with RE 13 and part of RE 14, as drawn and published by Alexander Cunningham in his
Inscriptions
of
A
oka,
1877.