India: A History. Revised and Updated (20 page)

THE GREATEST OF KINGS

In 1837, following years of conjecture and study by numerous other ‘Orientalists’, James Prinsep, the assay-master at the British mint in Calcutta, made what remains the single most important discovery in the unravelling of India’s ancient history. From inscriptions in an unknown script found on the stone railings of the great Buddhist stupa at Sanchi, he managed to identify two letters of the alphabet. One was ‘d’, the other ‘n’; when added to other letters already tentatively identified, they suggested words which convinced him that the language being used in these inscriptions was Pali. Pali was a Prakrit, one of several derivatives of Sanskrit, that was popular in Magadha in the Buddha’s time and was subsequently appropriated as the sacred language of much Buddhist scripture. Armed with his insight into the likely language, plus much of the alphabet, Prinsep proceeded to make the first ever translations from the neat ‘pin-man’ script now known as Ashoka Brahmi. He translated the short Sanchi inscriptions – they recorded the donation of the stupa’s individual stones and the names of
their donors – and he began to tackle a series of much longer inscriptions.

Copies of these longer inscriptions had come from puzzled antiquarians as far afield as Orissa, Gujarat, Allahabad and Delhi. ‘The memorial in question,’ wrote James Tod in 1822 of the Girnar (Gujarat) inscription, ‘is a huge hemispherical mass of dark granite which, like a wart upon the body, has protruded through the crust of mother earth, without fissure or inequality, and which, by the aid of the iron pen, has been converted into a book’.
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Some of the inscriptions were engraved on cliff faces, others on colossal cylindrical pillars; and an odd thing about all of them was that, though found dotted over the length and breadth of the subcontinent, they seemed to contain similar phrasing and even the same message. It was as if, in Europe, chapter-length runes were to be found identically etched, squiggle for squiggle, in the marble of Carrara, the granite of the Grampians, a pillar in the Rhineland and the rock of Gibraltar. Given the obvious antiquity of both script and find-sites, curiosity about their significance was intense. The Harappan civilisation was not as yet even suspected. These looked to be India’s earliest monuments and, whatever their message, they must be of enormous historical importance. Some saw parallels with the Egyptian hieroglyphics; others were reminded of the Ten Commandments as found by Moses on Mount Sinai.

Announcing his translation in 1837, an exhausted and dying Prinsep also saw parallels with Moses: ‘we might easily cite a more ancient and venerable example of thus fixing the law on tablets of stone.’
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For, contrary to expectations, these were not obscure Vedic invocations of unfathomable import but hard statements of policy, and so historical documentation of an immediacy as yet unknown in India. Henceforth called Edicts, rather than Commandments, the inscriptions clearly announced themselves as the directives of a single sovereign. ‘Thus speaks Devanampiya Piyadassi’ was how most began. The formula, echoing that of Persian inscriptions (and later popularised by the Nietzschean ‘Thus spake Zarathrustra’), may indeed have been influenced by Achaemenid practice. Some of the pillars carrying the inscriptions still retained fluted, bell-shaped capitals crowned with an animal image, both of which features are anticipated in the monumental sculpture found at Persepolis.

Yet the confident modelling of these animal figures, the incorporation of subsidiary motifs like the Buddhist wheel, and the lustrous finish imparted to the sandstone have no foreign counterparts. Moreover, the restrained use of honorific titles in the Edicts themselves and, when fully comprehended, the extraordinarily humane sentiments expressed in them, could scarcely have been more Indian. ‘Devanampiya Piyadassi’ unmistakably
belonged to the land of the Buddha and Mahavira. A Gandhian ring would be detected in his emphasis on human values, non-violence and moral regeneration; and to Nehru it would be self-evident that the exquisite capital of one of these inscribed pillars should serve as the national emblem of the republic of India. As usual it mattered not that, featuring a four-faced lion rather than a tiger, it bespoke the Mauryas’ associations with regions of the subcontinent now largely in Pakistan.

But who was this ‘Devanampiya Piyadassi’? Unfortunately for Prinsep no king called anything like that was to be found in the king-lists in the
Puranas.
But from Sri Lanka one of Prinsep’s contemporaries, who was working on the Buddhist chronicles preserved in that still Buddhist island, reported that there had been a Sri Lankan king called Piyadassi, and then that the same name had also been that of a famous Indian sovereign. Indeed this Indian king was a figure of gigantic standing and copious legend in Buddhist sources. He had championed Buddhism in India, had sent his own son to convert Sri Lanka, and was otherwise gloriously known as Ashoka.

‘Devanampiya’, meaning ‘The Beloved of the Gods’, is now thought to have been an honorific title, like ‘His Majesty’. ‘Piyadassi’ means something like ‘gracious of mien’ and may have been the name assumed when Ashoka was enthroned in c268
BC
. That this man was indeed the third Maurya, the grandson of Chandragupta, who would rule for nearly forty years, became self-evident from his listing as
Asoka
in the
Purana
king-lists.

Information on Ashoka’s early life is available neither from the
Puranas
nor from his inscriptions, and must therefore be sought mainly in those Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicles. Of Bindusara, his father (and Chandragupta’s son), little is known. Greek sources call him Amitrochates and testify to further exchanges of ambassadors and gifts between Pataliputra and Alexander’s successors in Egypt and Syria. The name ‘Amitrochates’ has been identified with a Sanskrit title meaning ‘slayer of enemies’. This could imply that he extended his father’s conquests. Additionally he is thought to have patronised the heterodox Ajivika sect in much the same way as his father did the Jains and his son the Buddhists. Clearly considerations of policy, as well as of conscience, may have dictated Mauryan alignment with the new sects; their lay followers were mainly drawn from the rising mercantile and industrial classes and, statecraft being principally about taxation (
Arthasastra
literally means ‘the science of wealth’ or ‘economics’), their support was to be cultivated.

Bindusara ruled for twenty-five years and was probably at least into his late fifties when he died. Ashoka, evidently one of several sons, therefore
had the opportunity to become closely involved in imperial affairs during his father’s reign. His first appointment seems to have been to Taxila, where he successfully dealt with a revolt against the local Mauryan administration. Perhaps on the strength of this, he was sent to Ujjain as governor. He stayed there until his father’s death. Ujjain nestled beside the Sipra river, a tributary of the Chambal, in the heart of the rolling and well wooded uplands of west central India. Now a major city of pilgrimage, it was then the capital of one of the five main divisions of the Mauryan empire. As the principal power centre in Avanti, or Malwa, it was also well sited to control traffic and trade moving between Broach, the principal west coast port, and either Pataliputra (by way of the Narmada valley) or the upper Gangetic regions (by way of the Chambal and the old
Daksinapatha
).

However, of Ashoka’s sojourn there what was thought most worthy of note by Buddhist chroniclers was his love affair with the daughter of a local merchant. The lady in question was Devi or Vidisha-mahadevi, the lovely ‘goddess of Vidisha’. She was not apparently married to Ashoka nor destined to accompany him to Pataliputra and become one of his queens. Yet she bore him a son and a daughter. The son, Mahinda, would head the Buddhist mission to Sri Lanka; and it may be that his mother was already a Buddhist, thus raising the possibility that Ashoka was drawn to the Buddha’s teachings while still in Avanti. In that Vidisa, about 120 kilometres east of Ujjain and near the modern Bhopal, is where stand the glorious monuments of Sanchi (including the great stupa whose inscriptions so enlightened Prinsep), it was clearly home to an important Buddhist community in Mauryan times. But its earliest
viharas
(monastic halls) and stupas probably date from after 275
BC
. It therefore seems just as probable that, instead of Vidisa converting Ashoka, it was Ashoka who converted Vidisa. Mindful of its romantic associations in his youth, he may, in later life as emperor and a lay Buddhist, have retained a soft spot for this peaceful mound in its then sylvan setting near the headwaters of the Betwa river, and by lavish endowment have ensured its religious celebrity.

As with earlier subscribers to the Buddha’s teachings like Ajatashatru of Magadha, Buddhist sources tend to represent Ashoka’s pre-Buddhist lifestyle as one of indulgence steeped in cruelty. Conversion then became all the more remarkable in that by ‘right thinking’ even a monster of wickedness could be transformed into a model of compassion. The formula, if such it was, precluded any admission of Ashoka’s early fascination with Buddhism and may explain the ruthless conduct attributed to him when Bindusara died. Not only is he said to have killed all rival claimants to the throne, notably ninety-nine of his brothers, but also to have paid a visit
to hell so that he could construct on earth something similar, equipped with the very latest in instruments of exquisite torture, for all who incurred his displeasure. This ‘Hell-on-Earth’ evidently became quite a curiosity: nine hundred years later a Chinese visitor, while touring the locations associated with early Buddhism, records the site, which was then marked with a pillar.

That Ashoka was not his father’s chosen successor and that there was indeed a succession struggle is certain. It helps to account for the four-year gap between Bindusara’s death and Ashoka’s enthronement as also for the fact that only one brother of many (though surely not a hundred) receives further mention; according to one source, the name of this brother was Vitashoka and he became a Buddhist monk, a career move no doubt dictated as much by self-preservation as self-abnegation. If not a monster, Ashoka undoubtedly evinced the Kautilyan ruthlessness essential to gaining the throne and the Kautilyan cunning essential to retaining it.

Eight years after his enthronement, so in c260
BC
, there occurred the only campaign that can certainly be attributed to the Mauryas, one which was nevertheless the outstanding event of the reign and the turning point in the life of the emperor. Ashoka conquered, or reconquered, Kalinga (roughly Orissa). The conquest is recorded in the most important of his Edicts, the thirteenth of the fourteen Major Rock Edicts (as opposed to the eight Minor Rock Edicts and Inscriptions, and the seven Major Pillar Edicts). And though the Edict says nothing of the military arrangements, it tells in detail of the human suffering involved – 100,000 slain, ‘many times that number perished’ (presumably afterwards from wounds and famine) and 150,000 deported. More famously, it also records the emperor’s reaction.

On conquering Kalinga the Beloved of the Gods felt remorse, for, when an independent country is conquered, the slaughter, death and deportation of the people is extremely grievous to the Beloved of the Gods and weighs heavily on his mind … Even those who are fortunate to have escaped, and whose love is undiminished, suffer from the misfortunes of their friends, acquaintances, colleagues and relatives … Today if a hundredth or a thousandth part of those people who were killed or died or were deported when Kalinga was annexed were to suffer similarly, it would weigh heavily on the mind of the Beloved of the Gods…

This inscription of
dhamma
has been engraved so that any sons or great-grandsons that I may have should not think of gaining
new conquests, and in whatever victories they may gain should be satisfied with patience and light punishment. They should only consider conquest by
dhamma
to be a true conquest, and delight in
dhamma
should be their whole delight, for this is of value in both this world and the next.
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‘Herein lies the greatness of Ashoka,’ writes R.K. Mookerji. ‘Even as a mere pious sentiment this is hard to beat; at least no victorious monarch in the history of the world is known to have ever given expression to anything like it.’
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In just such a ‘History of the World’ H.G. Wells made the same point: ‘He would have no more of it [the cruelty and horror of war]. He adopted the peaceful doctrines of Buddhism and declared that henceforth his conquests would be conquests of religion … Such was Ashoka, greatest of kings.’
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Renouncing violence, abjuring war, and advocating the elusive but admirable concept of
dhamma
, Ashoka turned statecraft on its head. Not the least of those confounded was Kautilya, whose
Arthasastra
makes the conquest of neighbouring territories one of the sacred duties of a king. It lists several kinds of war, goes into immense logistical detail on armies and battle plans, and includes four handy hints on conquering the world. To a society accustomed to such cynical sentiments, Ashoka’s change of heart must indeed have appeared revolutionary.

Whether it was quite as benign as it seems may, though, be questioned. One wonders why, for instance, if the emperor was so overcome with remorse, he did not arrange for the repatriation of all those deportees? Or why the Edict in question is pointedly omitted from the only rock inscriptions in Kalinga itself, inscriptions which otherwise conform with those in the rest of the country. In its stead are two separate Edicts ordering imperial representatives to conciliate the natives with lenient policies and exceptional diligence so that such wayward people may come to think of Ashoka as their father. Policy as much as conscience dictated this approach. Whatever lessons he chose to draw, in reality Ashoka’s treatment of the subjugated Kalingans was exactly as prescribed by the
Arthasastra
: ‘having acquired new territory the conqueror shall substitute his virtues for the enemy’s vices and where the enemy was good, he shall be twice as good. He shall follow policies that are pleasing and beneficial by acting according to his
dharma
and by granting favours and exemptions, giving gifts and bestowing honours.’
¹³