AshokA

in Ancient India
AshokA
in Ancient India

nayanjot lahiri

harvard university press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2015
 Copyright © Nayanjot Lahiri, 2015
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

First published in India by Permanent Black, 2015

First Harvard University Press edition, 2015
First Printing
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lahiri, Nayanjot.
Ashoka in ancient India / Nayanjot Lahiri.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-05777-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Asoka, King of Magadha, active 259 b.c. 2. India—Kings and rulers—Biography.
3. India—History—Maurya dynasty, ca. 322 b.c.–ca. 185 b.c.
I. Title.
DS451.5.L35 2015
934¢.045092—dc23
[B]
 for
rukun
As works of the imagination, the historian’s work
and the novelist’s work do not differ.
Where they do differ is that the historian’s picture
is meant to be true.
R.G. Collingwood,
The Historical Imagination (1935)
 Contents

Illustrations xi
Maps xv
Acknowledgements xvii
Prelude 1
1 An Apocryphal Early Life 24
2 Pataliputra and the Prince 43
3 Mauryan Taxila 66
4 Affairs of the Heart and State 87
5 The End and the Beginning 104
6 The Emperor’s Voice 118
7 Extending the Arc of Communication to Afghanistan 161
8 An Expansive Imperial Articulation 176
9 The Message in the Landscape 202
10 Building Beliefs into Edifices 226
11 An Ageing Emperor’s Interventions 260
x contents

12 Of Wifely Woes and the Emperor’s Death 280

Epilogue: The Emperor’s Afterlife 289
Appendix: The Inscriptions of Ashoka 308
Notes 318
Bibliography 354
Index 373
 Illustrations

Items in italics denote colour pictures

P relude
Fig. Prelude 1 Erragudi rocks as they appear from the
surrounding fields 2
Fig. Prelude 2 Part of Ashoka’s message on the rocks of
Erragudi

C hapter 1
Fig. 1.1 Ashoka and his queen on a second century ce
panel of the Kanaganahalli stupa in Karnataka

C hapter 2
Fig. 2.1 The hills of Rajagriha with a stupa in the
foreground 48
Fig. 2.2 The Ganga river near Patna 50

C hapter 3
Fig. 3.1 The city plan of Mauryan Taxila on the
Bhir mound 74
xii i l lu s t r at i o n s

C hapter 4
Fig. 4.1 Ujjayini’s ancient mounds with the Sipra river
in the background 88
Fig. 4.2 The Malwa plateau’s hills and forests as they
appear near Bhimbetka 96
Fig. 4.3 Ujjayini’s Kanipura stupa which is associated
with Devi 100

Chapter 6
Fig. 6.1 The Rajula Mandagiri edict is engraved on the
flat rock in the foreground, in front of the tree
dominating a waterbody, with a temple
behind it 122
Fig. 6.2 Worn-out section of the Rajula Mandagiri edict 123
Fig. 6.3 Palkigundu canopy rock—the edict is on a
ledge beneath the canopy 124
Fig. 6.4 View of the surrounding area from the edict
rock at Palkigundu 125
Fig. 6.5 The Maski edict, relatively legible and easy to
read by people standing near it 130
Fig. 6.6 Siddapura edict, cramped by the ledge above it 131
Fig. 6.7 Brahmagiri enclosure with Siddapura rocks in
the fields and Jatinga Rameshwara hill in the
background 150
Fig. 6.8 Brahmagiri edict 151
Fig. 6.9 Ashoka’s edict in a rock shelter at Panguraria 158
Fig. 6.10 View of the countryside around the Panguraria
rock shelter 159

C hapter 8
Fig. 8.1 Part of the inscribed Kalsi rock in Uttarakhand
as it appeared before a shed was built over it 178
 i l lu s t r at i o n s xiii

Fig. 8.2 Stone slab of the Sannathi edict 179

Fig. 8.3 Rock edicts arranged in columns at Girnar 190

C hapter 9
Fig. 9.1 Part of the historic dam that has survived
(and can be seen in the foreground) at
Junagadh 204
Fig. 9.2 Bhoria stupa in the Girnar forest, the massive
cut created by nineteenth-century excavations
still visible 210
Fig. 9.3 Copies of the copper, silver, and gold relic boxes
found inside the Bhoria stupa (now in the
Junagadh State Museum) 212

C hapter 10
Fig. 10.1 Hills around the Barabar caves, the Phalgu river
in the background 228
Fig. 10.2 Interior of the Sudama cave with a hut-like
structure carved into the rock 230
Fig 10.3 Lomasha Rishi cave architrave, with elephants
moving towards a stupa 234
Fig. 10.4 Ashokan pillar at Lumbini, with the modern
Maya-devi temple by its side 240
Fig. 10.5 Worshipping monks in front of Lumbini’s
Ashokan pillar
Fig. 10.6 Gotihawa pillar remnant, once known as
Phuteshwar Mahadeva 244
Fig. 10.7 Nigali Sagar pillar segments 245
Fig. 10.8 The mud stupa of Vaishali is in the centre,
surrounded by later brick constructions 248
Fig. 10.9 Relic box from the Vaishali stupa (now in the
Patna Museum) 249
Fig. 10.10 Vaishali pillar in the vicinity of a brick stupa 250
xiv i l lu s t r at i o n s

Fig. 10.11 The circular temple at Bairat. The Ashokan

inscription was found below the overhanging
rock at the edge of the hill 252
Fig. 10.12 Chunar monolithic railing at Sarnath 254
Fig. 10.13 The broken Sarnath pillar with the edict
inscribed on it 256

C hapter 11
Fig. 11.1 Ashokan pillar at Hissar fort (the lowest part)
which was made part of a composite pillar 264
Fig. 11.2 A close-up of the Ashokan segment of the
Hissar pillar with some Brahmi letters still intact 264
Fig. 11.3 Fatehabad segment of Ashokan pillar
(the bottom part) 265

C hapter 12
Fig. 12.1 Tissarakshita, Queen of Ashoka
(Abanindranath Tagore)
Fig. 12.2 Sanghamitra with the Bodhi tree (Nandlal Bose)

E pilogue
Fig. Epilogue 1 Depiction of Ashoka supported by his wives
on the upper segment of gateway pillar
at Sanchi
Fig. Epilogue 2 Depiction of wheel-bearing pillar
at Sanchi 298
Fig. Epilogue 3 Sculpture of Ashoka at Kalinga by Meera
Mukherjee
 Maps

Map 1 Distribution of the epigraphs of Ashoka 3

Map 2 Magadha’s political capitals: Rajagriha and
Pataliputra 51
Map 3 Afghanistan in relation to Iran and Pakistan 163
 Acknowledgements

T
his book originated in the strangest of cir-
cumstances. An email arrived from Sharmila Sen of Harvard
University Press, inviting me to consider doing a single-
volume biography of Ashoka which, as she put it, should be ‘geared
for a general, educated audience without sacrificing scholar­ship.’
This was in the summer of 2009, during a phase in my life when
I was steeped in administrative work at the University of Delhi.
I had never met Sharmila, nor corresponded with her, and she is
probably not even aware that her invitation became a lifeline of
sorts, pulling me out of the fatigue of executive duties and endless
files. While it took a couple of years before I could immerse myself
in the fieldwork around the landscapes where this book took shape,
I owe a great deal to Sharmila for writing to me and taking her
chances. Over the years our conversations, and the unending supply
of books on antiquity sent by her, have proved invaluable.
A number of friends and colleagues have supported this work
in various ways. While he was vice chancellor of the University
of Delhi, Deepak Pental gave me a powerful official position in
his administration which provided a ringside view of how author­-
ity is exercised. That experience—notwithstanding the fact that
Pro­fessor Pental had an entirely different end in mind—has play­
ed an important role in shaping my understanding of political
xviii ac k n ow l e d g e m e n t s
authority in ancient India. Ramachandra Guha sent comments and
insights on the initial proposal and has supported it ever since with
great enthusiasm. Ratna Raman’s companionship and formidable
knowledge of all things culinary made fieldwork enormously pleas­
ant in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Uttar Pradesh. I am also
grateful to Devika Ranga­chari, Dilip Chakrabarti, Jairam Ramesh,
Rakesh Tiwari, Vivek Suneja, and Upinder Singh for reading and
critiquing parts of the manuscript. Ella Datta’s advice on acquir­
ing images was tremendously helpful. Kesavan Veluthat and
Shalini Shah in Delhi and Parimal Rupani in Junagadh provided
some important references, and Suryanarayana Nanda guided me
through the inscriptions of Ashoka. I must also acknowledge the
two anonymous reviewers who read the manuscript for Perma-
nent Black and Harvard University Press with great care and in­
sight. Some of their suggestions have improved the narrative in
many ways.
At the various places where I pursued this research, I owe a
profound debt to many institutions and people, especially the
officers of the Archaeological Survey of India: in Junagadh, Rasik
Bhatt, J.P. Bhatt, M. Sutaria, and K.C. Nauriyal; in Nepal, Hari D.
Rai; in Karnataka and Andhra, S.V.P. Hallakati and Srinivas; in
Uttar Pradesh, Subhash Yadav; in Madhya Pradesh, S.B. Ota; in
Delhi, V.N. Prabhakar, the staff of the Archaeological Survey of
India library, especially Satpal Singh, and Dr Narendra Kumar at
the Central Library of the University of Delhi.
Because of the disappearance of high editorial skills in book
publishing nowadays, Rukun Advani is already the subject of folk­
lore among the discerning. The reason, in my experience, has to do
with his breadth of knowledge and the surgical skill with which he
transforms scripts when he relates well to them and their authors.
His imagination and precision have made doing books with him
the most intensely enjoyable experience of my professional life, and
this book has been no different. His interest in the sound and music
of prose as part of the art of writing well has also sustained me in
numerous ways. For adding lightness to the often ponderous pen of
a professional archaeologist, and much else, this book is dedicated
to him.
 ac k n ow l e d g e m e n t s xix
At a purely personal level my greatest debt is to Kishore Lahiri
for a lifetime of encouragement and support. This book is dedi­-
cated to the three children in our lives—our daughter-in-law Vrinda;
our son Karan; and, of course, Soufflé—who are more precious to us
than they can ever imagine. Vrinda and Karan’s enormous affection
and interest have enriched me and my work in myriad wonderful
ways, and the unconditional love of Soufflé, our dog, is a constant
source of joy in my life.

***

The following illustrations are reproduced with thanks by permis­

sion from the following sources: Fig. 3.1 and Fig. 8.1, copyright Archaeo-
logical Survey of India (ASI), is from Marshall (1951), reprinted by
permission of the ASI. The sculptural motifs in chapter opening
pages and section separations are from Poonacha (2013); Fig. 10.9
from Patna Museum (Patna); Fig. 10.5 from Hari D. Rai (Lumbini);
Fig. 12.1 from the Delhi Art Gallery (New Delhi); Fig. 12.2 from the
National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi); Fig. Epilogue 3 from
ITC Limited (New Delhi). Maps 1, 2, and 3 are drawn by Rashid
Lone (University of Delhi).
 Prelude

T
here is nothing specially striking about the
cluster of rocks which crowns the edge of a low hilly ridge
near the village of Erragudi in the Andhra region of India.
From a distance the cluster appears unremarkable, while the ridge
on which it sits is somewhat bare, rising out of a patchwork of culti­
vated fields and sparsely dotted with vegetation. The rocks on it are
not imposing, standing a mere thirty metres or so above the plains.
It is what one sees on the rocks at close quarters that makes them
spectacular.
Cascading down the rocks is a dramatic waterfall of words.
More than a hundred lines in characters of the ancient Brahmi
script are imprinted across several of the boulders (Fig. Pre­­-
lude 2). Large portions of this ancient scrawl are even now exceed­
ingly clear, the characters boldly etched across the rock faces.
Some seg­ments have deteriorated, while a few of the lines have
been de­faced by modern graffiti. Yet not even the English and Telugu
scribbles of contemporary visitors to this hillock can diminish the
overwhelming impression of messages from antiquity created by
the profusion of these ancient words. This copious transcription
on rocks is part of a royal enunciation. The words and phrases that
comprise it were composed by and inscribed at the instructions of
Ashoka (‘the sorrowless one’), the third emperor of the dynasty of
the Mauryas—and the subject of this book.
Fig. Prelude 1: Erragudi rocks as they appear from the surrounding fields
 p r e lu d e 3

Map 1: Distribution of the Epigraphs of Ashoka

Some 2200 years ago this political figure made himself visible
through the words that he caused to be inscribed at Erragudi as well
as at scores of other places across India and beyond.
Ashoka’s inscriptions represent a kind of historical daybreak,
ending a long phase of faceless rulers. In approximately 600 bce,
kings emerged out of the realms of tradition to set up and rule over
several kingdoms stretching from the highlands of the north-west
frontier to the lowlands of the Ganges, and southwards across the
Vindhya mountains till the Godavari river on the Deccan plateau.
There were powerful and not-so-powerful kings, aggrandizing
rulers who were aspirants to the appellation ‘chief king of all kings’,
4 ashoka in ancient india

and powerful confederate clans.1 Over a relatively short period of

time—roughly coinciding with the domination of Athens in the
classical period—a large part of this profusion of political entities
was absorbed into a single imperial realm. Centred in Magadha,
which was based in the middle Gangetic plains of Bihar, a succession
of kings ruled over this empire straddling large parts of India. The
first of these imperial houses was that of the Nandas. They were
followed by the Mauryas. From the fourth century bce till the ad­
vent of Ashoka (c. 269/268 bce), there were said to have been eleven
such imperial monarchs,2 nine in the Nanda dynasty, followed
by the two Maurya kings who preceded Ashoka: Chandragupta,
founder of the dynasty (Ashoka’s grandfather, who overthrew the
Nandas), followed by Bindusara, Ashoka’s father.
But though king succeeded king and one century followed an­
other, the only evidence of those times are versions of them—some
accurate, others fanciful, and practically never contemporary—that
have survived. These remaining records of those times are the
Puranas, certain Buddhist and Jaina texts, and histories of a sort
by people who are referred to as ‘classical authors’—mainly lite­
rate companions in Alexander’s entourage—as also the famous
Megasthenes who visited the court of Chandragupta. These sources
provide us with nearly all the information that we now have of India’s
rulers and states in that antique time. The rulers themselves failed
to speak to their subjects, and therefore to us. Many of their names,
and of their principalities, are known: Janaka of Videha, Pasenadi of
Kosala, the Magadha monarch Bimbisara, and Pradyota of Avanti
are some. But how such kings defined their domains and powers,
how they appeared to their subjects, what they and their queens
donated, and what kind of worship prevailed in their courts—these
remain hidden because no royal epigraphs or labelled sculptures, no
coins carrying royal portraiture or the names of kings and queens,
not even palaces or communications emanating from such places
and people, have endured.
It is this pervasive absence of royal voices that makes Ashoka
stand out as an irresistible historical subject. There are other reasons
as well for the interest in him. In relation to his predecessors, he was
 p r e lu d e 5

the first Indian king to rule over an empire embracing much of India
and its western borderlands, from Afghanistan to Orissa and towards
the south as far as Karnataka. In relation to the rulers who followed
him, it was his example which influenced thought—philosophical,
religious, cultural—in Asia more profoundly than that of any other
political figure of antiquity. The appeal of Ashoka as a model of
rulership, even in his own lifetime, is clear from the way in which
the Lankan king Devanampiya Tissa (c. 247–207 bce) is said to have
established the Buddhist faith in Lanka. This happened after Ashoka
sent him gifts which were used for his second coronation, and a
message encouraging him to take refuge in the Buddha.3 Ashoka’s
influence, much after his time, is unmistakable because he became
an icon among Buddhist rulers, ‘the great precedent and model of
some of the emergent polities of South and Southeast Asia.’4 In
China, for instance, his shaping influence became discernible from
the directions taken by several rulers. Emperor Wu of the Liang
dynasty (502–49 ce) is an example of a ruler who tried to emulate
Ashoka by erecting stupas and forbidding the consumption of
alcohol and meat; the Chinese empress Wu Zetian (623/625–
705 ce), at least initially, followed suit by projecting herself as a
wheel-turning monarch or ‘chakravartin’, an image of Buddhist
kingship closely associated with Ashoka.5 H.G. Wells had this in
mind when, in his massive bestseller of the 1920s, The Outline of
History, he said that amidst

the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns

of history, their majesties and graciousnesses, and serenities and royal
highnesses and the like, the name of Ashoka shines, and shines almost
alone, a star. From the Volga to Japan, his name is still honoured. China,
Tibet, and even India, though it has left his doctrine, preserve the tradi­
tion of his greatness. More living men cherish his memory today than
ever heard the names of Constantine or Charlemagne.6

But, above all, Ashoka stands out because his story is, to a
considerable extent, preserved in his own words. This was nicely
articulated by Jawaharlal Nehru in his The Discovery of India when
he said that in their magnificent language Ashoka’s edicts spoke
6 ashoka in ancient india

to him of a ‘a man who though, an emperor, was greater than any

king or emperor.’7 Nehru, like Ashoka, was for many years the
unquestioned ruler of an Indian territory roughly the same size;
more important, he followed Ashoka in being his own ‘sutradhar’
(narrator).
Ashoka naturally also figures in many ancient chronicles,
even if not in those by his contemporaries. He appears in writings
that were put together several centuries after his reign, ranging
from the Sanskrit text Ashokavadana (c. second century ce) to
the Sri Lankan Pali chronicles like the Dipavamsa (c. fourth cen­-
tury ce) and the Mahavamsa (c. fifth century ce). These will figure at
different points in this story of Ashoka because such writings shape
our understanding of his early years as prince and monarch, even
as we bear in mind that their reliability as sources of biographical
information is uncorroborated by anything written during or even
close to his own time. The reliability of historical detail in such
texts, though, can be assessed by juxtaposing them with what can be
reconstructed about those times through archaeological evidence.
This is perhaps one of the defining differences between monarchs
of very ancient times on the one hand, and those of medieval and
later times on the other. Of Akbar and some of the other major
Mughals, for instance, we arrive at a picture via works by their
contemporaries. And at least three of the close collaborators of
Sultan Saladin (1137/38–1193 ce)—the iconic Muslim ruler whose
name is associated with the Crusades (especially with the recapture
of Jerusalem from European Crusaders in 1187 ce)—penned ac­
counts of his life and reign, each providing direct testimony of the
ruler.8 Not so Ashoka, whose persona can be seen in chronicles
written some four centuries after his death. These show us how a
variety of texts chose to understand Ashoka’s life and times; but the
details within such accounts have to be looked at with a sceptical
eye, in part because they may have been purposive, or shaped by
the ideological predispositions of commissioning patrons; in
part because they are frequently coloured by the individual pre­
conceptions and assumptions of their authors; and in part be­
cause when reading them it often becomes difficult to separate the
 p r e lu d e 7

historical Ashoka from the idealized literary portrait of a Buddhist

monarch. An element of discrimination can be introduced by using
archaeology to assess the reliability of parts of the legends and
literature surrounding the Mauryan emperor. But, on the whole,
given the limitations, it is clearly not possible to write up Ashoka’s
life in a way that meets modern biographical criteria. Fortunate­
ly, Ashoka does not have to be written about only in this way. We
can understand his kingship and his personality, his empire and
its neighbours, because he himself, fairly early in his kingly career,
chose to speak.
The communicator par excellence of ancient India, Ashoka spent
a great deal of time thinking through and having messages about his
conception of morality engraved on stone for public consumption.
Other Asian rulers also communicated through inscriptions,
notably the Achaemenid kings of Iran (550–330 bce). However,
unlike Ashoka’s, their public inscriptions devote much space and
superlatives to how foes were killed off and conquered.9
There is, of course, great communicative diversity in different
societies and time periods, and kingly epigraphs carved on stone
represent one method. Naturally, however, much of the com­
munication in the first millennium bce was really not through
writing but through talk and speech. Rhetoric in ancient Greece,
with its emphasis on logical argument, reasoned debate, and emotive
persuasion was in this mode. Such communication between rulers
and the ruled was far more direct and audience-centred than in
classical China and early India, where the aim was to explicate
what were believed to be self-evident truths.10 The contrast can be
made even clearer in other ways: in literary representations before
c. 450 bce, kings, nobles, and leaders in the Graeco-Roman world
aimed to shape actions through words. So, for instance, in the Iliad,
Nestor’s ‘argument sweeter than honey’ is what convinces Patroclus
to fight Hector, and later histories support this and other similar
images of the power of rhetoric.11 To break the rhetorical spell cast
by a one-way address, most of the Socratic dialogues recorded by
Plato introduce an interruptive dialectical method which makes
speakers stop, repeat themselves, and explain what they mean. For
8 ashoka in ancient india

such thinkers, written material—which by its very nature is a closed

and one-way discourse—was the antithesis of ‘the give-and-take’
that formed the basis of public discourse and dialogue.12
In ancient China speech was the primary medium for the
exchange of ideas, and effective speech was thought a valid and
vital instrument of government.13 In fact, an early work called the
Book of History (which took proper form in the sixth century bce)
was primarily concerned with speech and speech-making. Unlike
Greece, however, the focus in China was not on individual excellence
but on the authority of a venerated past.14 The kind of person who
found favour with the Chinese was not one who spoke to attract
attention to himself by being different but who manifested through
his personality the sagacity to conform to the social norm. Even
in the philosophy of Confucius (c. 530–479 bce), with its focus
on the self-purification of individuals, the aim was to create a
society in which harmony would prevail ‘because propriety and
loyalty would be practised by the rulers and the people.’15
As in China, the oral tradition in India is massive and long,
people in both these old cultures showing much greater faith in
speech than written communication.16 The cultural ethos within
which debate and discussion took place was rarely individual-
centred. Debates were usually communal and group oriented,
and in India regulated and restricted along caste lines. Within the
major religious traditions, as for example among Vedic priests and
Buddhist monks, writing was not used for preserving knowledge
until many centuries after their respective religious texts had
been composed. In the Vedic tradition, the power of the word,
and the dissemination of knowledge to restricted groups through
recita­tion and repetition, depended entirely upon oral transmis­­-
sion.17 Gautama Buddha (c. 540–480 bce), who consciously chose
to speak across caste lines, also did so through conversations and
ser­mons, not via writing.18 Even after the texts associated with him
were written down, the importance of hearing about the Buddha’s
life and teachings remained pre-eminent and shines through in
constant invocations, such as ‘Thus have I heard’ and ‘when he had
thus spoken’.19 Political culture in the time of the Buddha—at least
 p r e lu d e 9

wherever it finds mention in the texts that describe those times—

also emphasized orality. Meetings in assemblies were constantly
highlighted by the Buddha in his description of the clans that made
up the Vajjian confederacy of North India (c. sixth century bce).
Their vigorous debates were oral interactions that never came to
be recorded. Listening rather than reading was also the hallmark of
political training among princes, as we learn from the Arthashastra,
a text whose core was almost certainly composed around the
time of Ashoka’s grandfather, Chandragupta. The prince, the text
prescribes, should engage in ‘listening to Itihasa’, and he should
‘listen repeatedly to things not learnt’.20 The king was meant, too,
to ‘hear’ about all matters connected with the people, the emphasis
being on the ruler engaging with them in the assembly hall of his
royal capital, not in and around the places where the populace
resided. Royal communiqués on matters concerning morality or
welfare schemes or patterns of kingly conduct are absent from
such ruler–ruled interactions. From whichever angle we examine
the character of public communication in India before the time of
Ashoka, we find it was largely through some form of oral discourse.
The emperor’s edicts, thus, were a milestone inasmuch as this type
of public communication in written form began with him.
The style of the new communication was also highly individual­
istic. In his stone messages we encounter Ashoka speaking about
the several watersheds of his royal life, and through his words we
witness how he re-created his own path while trying to remould the
lives of people in his empire (as also of those beyond its borders).
Candour and emotion, death and decimation, honest admissions
and imperious orders are all to be found in the Ashokan edicts. Since
his messages were not inscribed all at once but over many years, it
becomes possible to examine Ashoka’s persona not as that of a static
sovereign but as an evolving emperor of uncommon ambition.
Equally, through these missives on stone Ashoka chose to reach
out to his people in, most unusually, the places where they lived and
worshipped. By doing so, he literally carved out a subcontinental
presence for himself. This is evident to anyone who has followed
his trail. One encounters him on rocks and pillars in all kinds of
10 ashoka in ancient india

places that formed part of his empire, right across India, Nepal,
Pakistan, and Afghanistan. This is because the emperor chose to
disseminate his messages by ensuring that his administration sent
out multiple copies of them. That he wanted to be heard in the same
way in Afghanistan and in Andhra, in Karnataka and in Kalinga,
also means that Ashoka’s version of his life and deeds is the one
that was likely to have been the best known, certainly during his
own lifetime. There is no example, in fact, of an ancient ruler whose
voice, in the course of his own life, resonated in such a unique way
across South Asia and beyond, articulating the shifting contours of
his imperial vision and aspirations. As I said, this is not the only
version of his life available to scholars, nor does it permit a complete
reconstruction of his life. However, it has the great merit of being
what was composed during his rulership, and on his orders.
The past comes down to us preserved in objects and words. The
challenge lies in trying to tease out Ashoka’s story by listening to
the emperor’s own voice even while paying attention to the many
stories that emerge in archaeology about the lives and times of
his more ordinary contemporaries. By Ashoka’s own account, his
wide dominions had a large and diverse population, from city resi­
dents and members of religious sects to ordinary rural folk, forest
dwellers, and fisher people. Archaeology allows us to peep into the
places where such ordinary folk lived, to find out what food they
ate, to imagine their ideas about rulers and religion, to travel with
them as they journeyed forth, and to appreciate the remarkable
paintings that they sometimes made on the very waysides where the
emperor’s voice could be heard.21 Such sights and subjects will be
explored as we try to understand the India of Ashoka’s time, above
all because such archaeological glimpses offer a reality check on
Ashoka’s own prescriptions and proscriptions.
Modern India—as indeed modern Sri Lanka, Tibet, Nepal, and
Myanmar—continues to be interested in Ashoka as the Buddhist
king of later traditions rather than the all-too-human emperor of
his own time. Notwithstanding the great deal that has been written
about him, I will try to show that a ‘biography’ of Ashoka cannot
really be disentangled from the legends and perceptions, Buddhist
 p r e lu d e 11

hagiography, and the many validations and valorizations of later

times surrounding him. This difficulty is not specific to Ashoka;
it is precisely the package of problems that scholars grappling
with other ancient lives have faced. Biographers of Alexander
the Great (c. 356–323 bce) have, for example, drawn attention to
the contradictory and non-contemporary character of narrative
accounts of his life and career, all of which were composed many
hundred years after his death. While such writings relied on a
wide range of earlier works, none of those originals have actually
survived except in highly fragmentary form, which has resulted in
a lack of agreement among modern scholars about their reliability.
Again, for a ruler whose public image was so important to him, it is
ironic that the bulk of the surviving images of Alexander are later
Hellenistic or Roman ‘copies’. Even the two coins on which he is
reliably represented were issued not by him but by his successors
with the idea of deploying his power and charisma to elevate their
own political standing.22 These are among the reasons, as the archa­
eologist John Cherry put it, ‘why there can really be no such thing
as “the historical Alexander”’.23
And so is it with the story of Cleopatra (or Cleopatra VII), the
extraordinary queen who ruled over Egypt (51–30 bce) and who,
like Alexander, has continued to fascinate the contemporary public
imagination.24 Notwithstanding the spate of ‘biographies’ written
of her, no version of the events of her life and reign was penned in
her own time, nor is there a detailed family background available
which might have helped explain many aspects of her life. The name
of Cleopatra’s mother, for instance, is not known, and Cleopatra’s
own birth is unrecorded. That she was probably born in 70/69 bce
was calculated on the basis of her death in 30 bce, and the fact that
she was apparently 39 years old when she died. Even this calculation
is based on the description of her life in Plutarch’s Life of Antony,
the most complete account of her career from the ancient world.
However, Plutarch was writing in the first–second century ce, so
his can hardly be considered a contemporary account.25 As one of
Cleopatra’s most recent biographers puts it, ‘we cannot hope to hear
Cleopatra’s true voice, and are forced to see her through secondary
12 ashoka in ancient india

eyes; eyes already coloured by other people’s propaganda, prejudi­

ces and assumptions.’26
If therefore biographies of the kind that are written about
medieval and modern figures cannot be written of comparable
kings and queens of antiquity, however ‘great’ they may have been, it
makes the case of a Mauryan emperor less peculiar and much more
like those other ancient lives. Recovering Ashoka’s life and times
from what has morphed into legend is an exercise in providing him
with contextual flesh, and teasing out his individual psychology
and personality to the extent possible from what was composed on
his orders as well as from what is archaeologically knowable about
the lifeways of the more ordinary people of his time. By peering
over the palisades of a Mauryan city, by journeying along the roads
that were used by travellers in those times, by studying the art and
artefacts made and used by his people, we can imagine the world
of Ashoka and understand the character and the challenges of the
times in which the life of this emperor unfolded.
This book, thus, is more in the nature of a chronicle around a
royal life. It deals with how Ashoka lived and how he ruled, and,
above all, what he thought and how he disseminated his ideas. I
salvage his persona as much as credibility permits. And my salvage
operation is based as much on what he himself articulated as on
what came to be preserved in the form of archaeological relics that
remain of the environment which shaped his life and times.
Why another Ashoka?27
Partly because Ashoka has fascinated generations of writers
and scholars. The fascination stems in some ways from the fact
that we are drawn to leaders and public figures whose ideas and
actions have influenced the lives of large populations. Ancient
India shows several powerful rulers, but they have not captivated
the minds of modern writers in the way that Ashoka has. A con­
quering king like Samudragupta (c. 350–370 ce), for instance,
combin­ed aggrandizement on a subcontinental scale with a
personal predilection for music and poetry. The formidable queen
of Kashmir, Didda (c. tenth century ce), exercised political power
for close to fifty years, first behind the scenes and then overtly; in
 p r e lu d e 13

the process she overshadowed every male ruler of that region. Yet
neither Samudragupta nor Didda has lured modern historians
with a biographical bent.28 This may well be because the sources
are thought inadequate, a view borne out by a contrasting example,
that of Harshavardhana of Thaneshwar and Kanauj (606–648 ce),
whose biography, the Harshacarita, was composed in his own life­
time. Harshavardhana is known to have authored dramas and
epigraphs, and his court was visited and described in all its richness
by the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang. The sources for writing about
him are therefore, relatively speaking, richer, resulting in a variety
of biographical and regnal studies.29 On balance, though, there is
much truth in Ramachandra Guha’s view that ‘the art of biogra­
phy remains underdeveloped in South Asia.’30 Perhaps the only
scholar of ancient India whose books represent an exception to this
perspective is the historian-politician Radhakumud Mookerji, who
wrote voluminously and valuably on ancient kings, most notably
books on Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka, and Harshavardhana.
Considering the general dearth of biographical interest in an­
cient India’s royal dramatis personae, how may one explain the
popu­larity of Ashoka? In large part this is because of his own
keenness to appear to posterity as neither recondite nor imperious
but instead as a flesh-and-blood emperor guided less by power than
by compassion. Among rulers Ashoka is so exceptional in being
upfront about sharing his grief that it is difficult not to empathize
with him. An ancient sovereign who took responsibility for a poli­
tically reprehensible action, he seems at times less a political figure
than a strikingly self-reflective individual. The contrast with the
archetypically self-serving politician is so stark and rare that Ashoka
arouses in historians a knee-jerk admiration virtually unseen in
South Asia until the appearance of Mahatma Gandhi.31
Gandhi is also relevant for another reason. Indian nationalist
leaders and thinkers who fought the Raj under him and forged
the structure of an independent nation sought to image Ashoka
as their political fountainhead. India’s long lineage of tolerance
and non-violence was seen as stretching back to the Buddha and,
from the perspective of the nationalist imagination, the temptation
14 ashoka in ancient india

to assume the mantle of Ashoka as a model of humane rulership

was strong.32 Tagore made this connection when he noted that
‘countless great kingdoms of countless great monarchs have suf­
fered devastation and have been razed to dust, but the glorious
emergence of the power of benevolence in Asoka has become our
proud asset, and is breathing strength into us.’33 Gandhi’s belief
in non-violence, whether consciously or not, derived in part from
the Ashokan worldview, and consequently breathed new life into a
nearly forgotten political value system that Ashoka had inaugurated.
The affinity that Nehru felt for Ashoka, movingly articulated in
The Discovery of India, bears this out. On the verge of building a
modern state in the shadow of Gandhi, it was natural for Nehru to
identify with Ashoka.34 Later, he invoked Ashoka on crucial public
occasions—most notably when a resolution about India’s flag was
moved in 1947. This made explicit the association of modern Indian
democracy with an Ashokan emblem, the Sarnath pillar capitol.
When moving the resolution in the Constituent Assembly, Nehru
said the presence of the wheel, the Ashoka chakra, made him feel
‘exceedingly happy that in this sense indirectly we have associated
with this flag of ours not only this emblem but in a sense the name
of Asoka, one of the most magnificent names not only in India’s
history but in world history.’35 With such rhetorical appropriations
of antiquity are modern national identities forged and communi­
ties imagined, and it could be argued that Ashoka was the ace in
Nehru’s pack.
Adding to the charm and excitement of Ashoka was the dramatic
way in which he had emerged out of unexpected discoveries and
decipherments. Military men, antiquarians, and archaeologists
had chanced upon epigraphs in an unknown writing on rocks and
pillars in various parts of India in the early decades of the nine­
teenth century, a discovery saga which has been well told in vari­
ous works on the evolution of Indian archaeology, most recently
in Charles Allen’s narrative history of the discovery of Ashoka.36
Facsi­miles of the objects and writings unearthed—from pillars in
North India to rocks in Orissa and Gujarat—found their way to
the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The meetings and publications of the
 p r e lu d e 15

Society provided an unusually fertile environment for innovative

speculation, with scholars constantly exchanging notes on, for
instance, how they had deciphered the Brahmi letters of various
epigraphs from Samudragupta’s Allahabad pillar inscription, to the
Karle cave inscriptions. The Eureka moment came in 1837 when
James Prinsep, a brilliant secretary of the Asiatic Society, building
on earlier pools of epigraphic knowledge, very quickly uncovered
the key to the extinct Mauryan Brahmi script. Prinsep unlocked
Ashoka; his deciphering of the script made it possible to read the
inscriptions. All this and more has been superbly told by Charles
Allen.
Allen’s focus on the British discovery of Ashoka does run a small
danger, namely the possible inference that this ruler of ancient
India was pretty much a forgotten entity until Raj antiquarians
and archaeologists exhumed him. While Allen is right in showing
us the concatenation of chance archaeological discoveries that
gave us the Ashoka we see today, it is worth stressing that there
was a continuous textual tradition, from Kashmir down to Sri
Lanka, in which Ashoka featured.37 Historical memory in relation
to virtually all rulers and dynasties was far more the preserve of
textual traditions than of folk knowledge and popular belief. So,
before his epigraphs were deciphered, Ashoka was known mainly to
a fairly restricted group of traditional scholars and pundits in India
and Buddhist communities across Asia. The fact that Ashoka was
not common knowledge is not to say that he was largely unknown,
unless one qualifies this with the truism that but for Orientalist
endeavours virtually all of ancient India, as we have it today, would
have remained unknown. The extent to which the British and other
explorers and scholars fleshed Ashoka out moved the emperor from
his hiding place in sometimes esoteric Brahmanical knowledge and
hagiographical Buddhist texts, making him a far more generally
familiar figure.
The earliest compilation to historicize Ashoka via his epigraphs
was Alexander Cunningham’s Inscriptions of Asoka.38 Cunningham,
founding father and first Director General of the Archaeological
Survey of India, assembled the available epigraphs into the first
16 ashoka in ancient india

volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum. This epigraphic

series aimed to make accessible all the inscriptions of ancient India.
Cunningham did a great service to historical knowledge in seeing
that a whole volume ought to be devoted to the Ashokan inscrip­-
tions (and a few others) that had, till then, been discovered.
What added strength to Cunningham’s compilation was that the
archaeological dimensions of Ashokan sites—which, in many ins­
tances, he and his assistants had themselves explored—brought alive
the landscapes over which Ashoka had inscribed his words. What
may seem surprising from our perspective today—when we know
that many of the edicts were inscribed on large rocks in Karnataka
and Andhra—is that none of the emperor’s southern epigraphs fea­
tured in that volume: those would be discovered a little later.39
Not all the nineteenth-century discoverers and decipherers, it is
necessary to remember, were Europeans. One figure who was dis­
covering Ashokan edicts in Maharashtra and Rajasthan around the
same time that Cunningham and his assistants were scouring the
countryside was the Indian archaeologist Bhagwanlal Indraji. His
work is much less recognized than Cunningham’s because the bulk
of his early writings was in Gujarati.40 In a letter of 1872 he reported
his discovery of an Ashokan edict at Bairat: ‘On the southern side of
Virat is a hillock with ancient Buddhist ruins. Near the ruins once
stood an engraved stone inscription of Ashoka, which at present
lies in the Asiatic Society Museum in Calcutta. While I was on the
northern side of Virat, I discovered a new inscription at the foothill.
The inscription is broken, yet much of its portion is in a readable
condition.’41 Copies were made of this epigraph, but since his letter
containing the details of his discovery was published in Gujarati in
Saurashtra Darpan, he got no credit for it. Instead, A.C.L. Carlleyle,
an assistant of Cunningham who arrived there soon after, came to
be considered its discoverer. The conditions of power at the time of
such discoveries, the inequality in equations between well-placed
British officers and their subordinates, the superior abilities of Raj
officials to articulate, communicate, and disseminate news—in
short the conditions within which this knowledge was produced
and circulated—are likely to have submerged or rendered invisible
 p r e lu d e 17

many a ‘native informant’ such as Bhagwanlal Indraji. This may

seem a bit like raising the old query much beloved of Indian labour
historians—did British supervising engineers build the Indian
railways or were they built by Indian labour? The consensus pre­
sently being that all such achievement was both unequal and colla­
borative, the only sensible answer to such a question now is that the
necessity of moving beyond it greatly exceeds its worth.
All the Ashokan epigraphs were not discovered in the nineteenth
century. Engravings of the emperor have newly appeared through
the twentieth century, from Afghanistan to Andhra.42 The discover­
ers have been a diverse lot, from a gold prospector who chanced
upon Ashoka’s Maski inscription in Karnataka in 1915 to the guru
of a math in Gavimath (also in Karnataka) who, in 1931, com­
municated the existence of what is today called the Gavimath edict.
The discovery of an Ashokan edict was made at Ratanpurwa in
Bihar as recently as 2009. The road to Ashoka is so paved with good
epigraphs which keep popping out of the earth at irregular intervals
that there is no reason to think of Ratanpurwa as the last step in
this very rocky path.43 Various texts and Buddhist works in which
Mauryan rulers figure became widely available from the middle of
the nineteenth century: the testimony of the Sri Lankan Pali chro­
nicles, the Dipavamsa and the Mahavamsa, were central to the iden­
tification of Devanampiya Piyadassi as Ashoka. But it is perhaps the
sheer volume of sporadically appearing epigraphic messages that
has ensured the continuing scholarly interest in Ashoka.
Certainly, this was the assessment of the colonial scholar-civil
servant Vincent Smith when he wrote Asoka—The Buddhist Emperor
of India.44 As the first modern biography of the emperor, this book
strove to tell a historical story strongly on the basis of the emperor’s
words. Its core was devoted to the history and chronology of Ashoka,
the extent of his empire, the way in which it was administered,
the monuments that Ashoka built, and the epigraphs. Smith also
provided translations of and subheadings to each of the edicts. So,
for instance, the Thirteenth or Kalinga Rock Edict, where the war
and Ashoka’s repentance were described, was given the title ‘True
Conquest’. Textual traditions, those of Sri Lanka and India, too
18 ashoka in ancient india

found a place even in Smith’s book, though the author made his
opinion of them clear at the outset. They were, he said, ‘of no
historical value, and should be treated simply as edifying roman­
ces.’45 He was of the firm conviction that no king East or West could
match Ashoka, the only ruler to combine in himself the duties of a
monk and a monarch. Coming from Vincent Smith, an adminis­-
trator of imperial inclinations and views, such unambiguous ap­
proval was a refreshing surprise: most of Smith’s writings were
known for their sweeping generalization that the stimulus of all
ancient Indian high culture lay in the West.46 Realizing that the
obvious comparison would be with the Roman emperor Cons­
tantine, Smith quickly dismissed it for the reason that Constantine’s
patronage of Christianity was ‘an act of tardy and politic submis­
sion to a force already irresistible, than the willing devotion of an
enthusiastic believer.’ Ashoka, on the other hand, transformed the
creed of a local sect which had ‘captured his heart and intellect’ into
a world religion.47
Smith’s book set the tone for many subsequent works on
Ashoka in the sense that epigraphic sources became the inevitable
and desirable guide when depicting him. The emphasis tended to
depend upon the scholar, the various aspects of his life and times
emerging with variations. The Ashoka of Devadatta Ramakrishna
Bhandarkar, Carmichael Professor of Ancient Indian History and
Culture in Calcutta University, appeared two decades after Smith’s
book and relied on Ashoka’s epigraphs and monuments for a history
of the ruler, who was described as ‘the royal missionary’.48 Much
more space was devoted to the nature of Ashoka’s engagement with
Buddhism and the morality that he advocated over his paternalistic
conception of kingship.49 ‘Ashoka’s place in history’—a phrase
much used by historians in the first half of the twentieth century—
was the subject of a whole chapter, with Bhandarkar believing that
Ashoka was second only to the Buddha in the history of the sect.
The emperor’s exuberance may by its excess have disturbed the
balance between the material and the spiritual in ancient India, but
Bhandarkar’s recognition of this flaw did not allow him to upset the
balance of his overall admiration. Radhakumud Mookerji’s Asoka
 p r e lu d e 19

was in the same mould, with chapters on history, administration,

and monuments.50 The bulk of his volume was devoted to the
texts—to translation and annotation of the inscriptions.
Of the early works on Ashoka there are good reasons for seeing
Beni Madhab Barua’s Asoka and his Inscriptions (1946) as diverging
in many ways from the books by Smith and Barua’s older Bengali
contemporaries. Barua used a wider panorama of sources and
strove to structure a different kind of account around Ashoka. His
use of epigraphs was extensive, though he invariably attempted to
also weave textual references into them. Importantly, and perhaps
for the first time, the Arthashastra now came to be carefully
mined for understanding the Mauryan state. Different facets of
the same phenomenon were juxtaposed in the narrative: imperial
and provincial administration, Ashoka’s personal and public life,
rajadharma and upasaka dharma in relation to its more universal
Ashokan form. Barua’s assessment of Ashoka’s ‘place in history’
could, for all this, have been written by either Smith or Bhandarkar:
‘Asoka did for the religion of Buddha what Darius the Great or
Xerxes had done for that of the Avesta and St Paul did for that of
Christ. He indeed raised Buddhism from the position of a local faith
to the status of a world religion.’51
Fifteen years after Barua, Romila Thapar’s assessment of
Ashoka, based on her PhD thesis, was published as Asoka and the
Decline of the Mauryas.52 This study, which has since enjoyed wide
popularity, was both similar to and different from the many books
that preceded it. Though the sections dealing with Ashoka’s early
life, accession, chronology, internal administration, and socio-
economic activity were written broadly in the spirit of her Indian
predecessors, what gave her work a different flavour was that it
sought to more carefully contextualize Ashoka in his time. So, for
instance, his involvement in Buddhism was seen in the background
of the ‘unusually lively interest’ that his father and grandfather
displayed in eclectic ideas, those that came with the Greeks who
travelled to their courts, as also via the religions anchored around
the Ganga—Jainism and the Ajivika teachings.53 Similarly, while
dhamma was recognized as having been nurtured by Ashoka, it was
20 ashoka in ancient india

simultaneously highlighted as being the king’s novel solution to what

he recognized as the problems of binding a multicultural society:
‘To any intelligent statesman of the period it must have been evident
that some kind of binding factor was necessary in order to keep
the empire intact   .  .  .  The policy of Dhamma with its emphasis on
social responsibility was intended to provide this binding factor.’54
Equally, her work showed his policy of dhamma as evolving over his
long reign which, towards the end, was seen as being marred by an
overconfidence in his own achievement.55 Examined closely, the book
shows Ashoka as anchored in the circumstances and responding to
the challenges of his time, but the persona that emerges from this
conceptualization is all the same exceptional. A king who ‘stressed
the conscious application of humanitarianism in social behaviour,
thus appealing not to the narrower religious instincts, but to a far
wider and immediate feeling of social responsibility’ is certainly
singular and different from every other ruler of ancient India.56 The
argument is that the exception grows out of the norm and takes
shape as exemplary form.
The modern scholarly fascination with Ashoka and the changing
contours of research on him are evident in many other writings
but my intention is not to explore them in all their nuances. An
excellent guide to the range and richness of Ashokan studies can
be found in Harry Falk’s bibliography, Asokan Sites and Artefacts,
which contains nearly 1800 entries.57 All the big names of ancient
Indian studies figure there—James Prinsep, Georg Buhler, Emile
Senart, Radhakumud Mookerji, Romila Thapar, Dines Chandra
Sircar, P.H.L. Eggermont, Kenneth Roy Norman, Awadh Kishore
Narain, Patrick Olivelle, and Dilip Kumar Chakrabarti, to name a
few. The bibliography lists hundreds of books and articles about
Ashoka’s epigraphs, several of which contain their texts and trans­
lations; others are expositions on various elements of the scripts
and languages used, as well as on similarities and variations in the
different versions of the inscriptions.
Writings on other aspects of Ashoka are no less impressive and
include accounts of the art and architectural features of his vari­
ous monuments; the diverse archaeology and historical geography
 p r e lu d e 21

of Ashokan sites; the emperor’s ideas on public ethics, spiritual

victory, the rights of living beings, human and animal; the image
of Ashoka in the literature of Asia; comparisons between the edicts
and texts like the Bhagavadgita and the Indica of Megasthenes; the
personality of Ashoka; the fascinating story of the discovery of the
epigraphs and of the emperor in them; and so much else.
Having read a fair range of these writings, I am inclined to put
myself in the shoes of my readers to ask once again: Why another
book on Ashoka? What makes this one different from the others?
Ashoka in Ancient India is a historical study of the life and times
of the emperor through his epigraphs, through the archaeology
and traditions in and around the places where these were put up,
and through an imaginative construction of how people in ancient
India are likely to have understood these messages. The historical
narrative in this book is not organized around the themes that many
books on Ashoka are: the emperor’s early life and later history, his
empire and administration, the social and economic conditions of
Mauryan India, Ashoka’s policy of dhamma and his proclivity for
constructing monuments, the emperor’s place in the larger scheme
of ancient India. Instead, mine is a narrative account of Ashoka in
which a clear path that follows the trajectory of his life cuts through
the jungle of legends and traditions, the epigraphs and monuments,
and the archaeological facts and detail that surround him. Its nar­
rative form will, I hope, also make it attractive to readers who enjoy
digs into the past.58
As I began writing this book I found myself facing two dilemmas.
First, notwithstanding the many accounts of Ashoka’s life, I realiz­
ed that the crafting of such a history is limited by the restrictions
of sources, for crucial phases in the individual life which forms
the subject of the narrative do not figure in accounts contemporary
with him. The historical life of Ashoka only began when he started
speaking through his epigraphs, a little after c. 260 bce, this being
much after he captured the throne at Pataliputra. This meant that
to reconstruct his early life as a prince a different narrative stra­tegy
was required. What I therefore chose to do was use the archaeo­
logical resonances of ancient life that can be mined out of the
22 ashoka in ancient india

many landscapes in India associated with Ashoka’s princely years.

This is one of the biggest problems with his early life: context and
conjecture have to serve as compensatory mechanisms. To put
it another way, in order to compensate the lack of textual detail
I have used archaeology extensively to evoke the times in which
Ashoka lived.
Second—and this perhaps seems clearer in retrospect than when
I was researching the book—the narrative treatment of Ashoka’s
life needed to be extended to his ideas as they developed over the
long years of his reign. Despite the fact that Ashoka has been an
extraordinarily rich subject of study, his shifting mental horizons, as
expressed in the public arena of his epigraphs, remain insufficiently
studied. The Ashoka of the relatively short First Rock Edict, as I saw
it, was an impatient confessor of his metamorphosis as a Buddhist.
Several years later, as he spoke at greater length in messages engraved
on other rocks and pillars, he appeared an altogether different kind
of speaker. So, seeing his ideas unfold over time is crucial to this
story of Ashoka, especially since much of it concerns his trajectory
as a communicator. His changing ideas as expressed in his edicts,
I might add, make him appear as a real human being changing
over time. I attempt to delineate his intellectual evolution through
a chronological teasing out of his thoughts and emotions from the
texts in which he chooses to speak of his life and calling.
Finally, the Ashoka that I write of is very much a product of the
places in which he engraved his messages. This explains why this
book is called Ashoka in Ancient India. The title points to the fact
that the archaeological and locational dimensions of specific places
are crucial to my understanding of the messages and their author.
My journey of discovery took me to many of Ashoka’s edicts and
monuments: outside India to the terai region of Nepal, within
the country to Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra
Pradesh, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Odisha.
Scram­bling across rocks and up steep inclines, walking through
forests of unforgettable grandeur and beauty, stumbling upon his
epigraphs in the middle of modern colonies and museums, getting
tantalizing glimpses of relict structures and vanished waterbodies
 p r e lu d e 23

in the vicinity of the places where the words of the emperor can still
be seen, all these gave me a first-hand feel of what generations of
archaeologists had found. Such landscapes figure in monographs
on Ashoka, but usually in separate sections or chapters dedicated to
archaeological sites and monuments. Here, I have woven the places
and landscapes into a narrative of the contexts in which Ashoka’s
life was lived. Juxtaposing his royal messages with the contextual
flesh of surrounding landscapes has enabled me to highlight the
ways in which the messages themselves were shaped, influenced,
enhanced, and modified.
All of this—the epigraphs, the archaeology, the life—are part
of the enormous outpouring of writings on an unforgettable
monarch. Yet I think my weave is different. The carpet I will lay out
blends the landmarks of life and landscapes to give another picture
of the life and times of Ashoka in ancient India.
 1

An Apocryphal Early Life

W
e don’t know exactly when ashoka was born.
That he was born sometime in the cusp of the fourth
and third century bce (c. 304 bce) is certain, but the
particular day, month, and year is not known. Very few ancient
writers share our modern obsession with recording such events
with calendrical exactness, and certainly Ashoka’s scribes cannot
be counted in this category. Date precision in relation to an indi­
vidual life came into existence much after Ashoka’s time, usually
when a court chronicler penned the biography of a ruler-patron.
Harshavardhana, who ruled from Kanauj in North India near­
ly 900 years after Ashoka, was one such king whose court poet,
Bana, made him the central character in a historical story woven
out of the actual events of his reign. There, the month of Harsha’s
conception, along with his date of birth, were recorded, as also the
fact that he was born just after ‘the twilight time’.1 Such precision
grows commoner in medieval India, when accounts authorized by
powerful emperors come frequently to be composed during their
own lifetime. Akbar commissioned his court historian, Abu’l Fazl,
to write what became the Akbar Nama, whose eponymous hero is
recorded as having been born in Sindh, complete with all manner of
extraordinary phenomena that heralded his arrival in the sixteenth
 a n a p o c ry p h a l e a r ly l i f e 25

century, including a strange light perceptible on the brows of his

mother when she was pregnant with him.2
Ancient India’s royal biographical tradition begins several cen­
turies after Ashoka, which is why we merely know that his father
Bindusara ruled from roughly 297 till 273 bce, and that his grand­
father Chandragupta’s regnal dates are probably 321–297 bce. The
likely year of Ashoka’s birth is surmised by working backwards
from the time when he was anointed emperor, for which we have a
reasonably accurate date. This accuracy for his ascension is because
his years as emperor have been synchronized with the reigns of
contemporary rulers in Asia and beyond: their dates are fairly cer­
tain, and several of them are mentioned by name in Ashoka’s ins­
crip­tions, including Antiochus II Theos of the Seleucid kingdom,
Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt, Antigonus II Gonatas of Mace­
don, Magas of Cyrene, and Alexander of Epirus (or Corinth).3
These kings and the context in which they are alluded to in Ashoka’s
epigraphs will be elaborated later; for the present it suffices that
arriving at an accurate chronology for Ashoka has involved looking
at overlaps in the chronology of these kings and the inscriptions in
which they figure.
The emperor’s consecration is likely to have taken place around
269/268 bce.4 As with several other kings in ancient India whose
lives were described in regnal years, Ashoka anchored the various
happenings in his reign in relation to the year of his consecration.5
He is, in fact, the earliest known monarch of ancient India to have
recorded events from the time when he was anointed. Many rulers,
for centuries afterwards, such as the Satavahanas of western India,
the Palas in the east, and the Cholas in peninsular India, would
continue with this practice of recording events in relation to the
time elapsed since the consecration of the king in question.6 But
there were other monarchs who, by the first century bce, had begun
to indicate events in terms of a more continuous era, where the
continuity was reckoned in relation to the reign of a given king by
his successors (and which could continue even after that dynasty
had ceased to exist).7 Inscriptions of the time of the Gupta line
of rulers were frequently in this format: the Sarnath epigraph is
26 ashoka in ancient india

dated to the Gupta year 154 (‘a century of years increased by fifty-
four’), this being the time of Kumaragupta II, with the year possibly
suggesting that the era originated with the first ‘Maharajadhiraja’
of the dynasty, Chandragupta I.8 Many rulers in their epigraphs
provide dates wholly in relation to the starting year of their reign,
with the additional provision of a second date which measures time
over a relatively longer duration, often calculated according to a
continuous political era. So, had Ashoka used a system of reckoning
in this form, both regnal and dynastic, the time that elapsed between
the accession of his grandfather Chandragupta and Ashoka’s own
consecration may well have been precisely known.
Ashoka’s ‘dates’ figure in the astonishing number of his imperial
texts that were inscribed on stone, rock faces, and pillars. On them
the emperor offered all kinds of information, ranging from what
was cooked in the royal kitchen to his distaste for inane social
ceremonies. The epigraphs are frequently long, and the insights
that they provide about his later life, his aspirations, and those of
his administration and his subjects, are often communications in
the first person: the emperor is addressing us. This in part is what
has raised expectations among historians of this stoneware yielding
something about Ashoka’s early life. These expectations have been
dashed. There is not even passing mention of any milestones relating
to Ashoka’s princely years; he does not speak of his ancestors, nor
even of his own parents.9 Epigraphs in later centuries are known to
have expansively described the lineages of rulers who had had royal
messages recorded. Even the lineages of previous and present queen-
consorts sometimes appear, alongside details of victories in battle,
which are often attributed by the kings to the gods and goddesses
that they worshipped. Such inscriptions occasionally mention the
life of the royal protagonist before he became king. This is so in the
first century bce Hathigumpha epigraph of Kharavela, the ruler of
Kalinga who led successful campaigns against Magadha, Anga, and
the Tamil region. There, an entire verse is devoted to the prince’s
training and learning: ‘for fifteen years, with a body ruddy and
handsome were played youthsome sports; after that (by him who)
had mastered (royal) correspondence, currency, finance, civil and
 a n a p o c ry p h a l e a r ly l i f e 27

religious laws (and) who had become well-versed in all (branches)

of learning, for nine years (the office of) Yuvaraja (heir apparent)
was administered.’10
Ashoka’s reticence over his personal affairs is stark. This, as we
shall see, may well be on account of events specific to his early life,
as also because by the time the epigraphs were composed he had
possibly developed an aversion for social ceremonies performed
on occasions—he specifies these—such as the birth of a son, or the
marriage of an offspring.11 There is also the fact that at the time he
began the practice of inscribing edicts on stone surfaces, Ashoka had
no traditional template before him. He does not appear to follow
the provisions of the manual of statecraft, the Arthashastra, which
tells the scribe that when the commands of the king are set down
there should be ‘a courteous mention of the country, the sovereignty,
the family and the name’ of the king.12 Or else, perhaps deliberately,
he chose not to follow the prescribed format. Instead of mention­
ing his family and genealogy—of immense interest to us but not
it seems to him—he records only what was of central importance
to him. His official consecration ceremony (or ‘abhisheka’) seems
to have been important to him, suggesting that the wielding of
power and the consequent ability to mould a population were what
mattered. Events in the life of a monarch, and not those prior to his
becoming a ruler, were significant. Where he was taking himself and
his people mattered; where he came from did not.
If Ashoka did not care to create his own version of the events
of his princely life, there is no independent contemporary account
of it either. We hear of his early life only in legends so separat­-
ed from his time—by hundreds of years—that it seems a primary
necessity in any biographical account to discount their historical
value. These are all texts that create stories about Ashoka’s birth and
early years, and in doing so show something of how he came to be
represented after his death. What makes these stories useful despite
the concoction is that they frequently include plausible historical
detail about Ashokan times. Using the threads that make up the
tapestry of such legends, one may at least begin to understand the
contexts and circumstances in which the man was born.
28 ashoka in ancient india

The strongest thread to emerge from the lore is that Ashoka’s

‘coming’ as emperor of India was predicted. It was first predicted
during one of Ashoka’s own earlier lives. The ‘prophet’ who fore­-
told it all was an ascetic. This is unsurprising: ancient India, much
like modern India, was awash in holy men claiming clairvoyance.
But this specific sage was not your average run-of-the-mill sooth­
sayer: he was the greatest of all ancient ascetics, Gautama Buddha
him­self.13 While the Buddha lived much of his life in the sixth cen­-
tury bce whereas Ashoka, as the third emperor of the Maurya
dynasty, belonged to the third, within sacred biographies of the
Buddhist tradition chronological fluidity appears to have been
fair­ly common.14 Within this textual mode biographies, especially
those depicting the Buddha, characteristically recount a past life
before moving into a later rebirth or rebirths, or moving from the
present to the past. In the instance at hand, a Buddhist emperor
is incorporated into this tradition, making Ashoka a prediction
subsequent to the Buddha. His coming, by being foretold by the
Buddha himself, conjoins the two, making them seem inseparable
from each other. Such insertion via legend of an earlier life of the
king allows the introduction of a standard motif used in the an­
cient world—predisposing an audience to feel awed at the arrival
of a regal saviour long awaited. Jesus was foretold, the Buddha was
foretold, Moses was foretold. In those times it almost seems that
if you hadn’t been foretold you were not likely to be a sufficiently
important religious figure or kingly personage. The telling of the
story of the Buddha’s prophecy about Ashoka’s future arrival is an
instance of adroit religious narration.
The story is first told in the Ashokavadana, which is a Sanskrit
version of the life of Ashoka (in the form of a legend) written in
the second century ce.15 ‘Avadana’ means a noteworthy deed that
shows the ways in which the actions of one’s existence are linked
with those of former or future lives.16 In this class of literature, as
is evident from the Ashokavadana, the former and the ‘real’ lives of
the ‘greats’ within Buddhism are frequently connected in order to
milk various morals from the narrative. This is very much in the
tradition of Buddhist sacred biographies, where the same sort of
 a n a p o c ry p h a l e a r ly l i f e 29

incident happens again and again under changed circumstances

and different conditions,17 the repetition serving as the narrative
trope that induces the religious feeling of an approaching marvel—
a variety of The Chronicle of a Birth Foretold.
The person of the Buddha is, in this tradition, instrumental
in every story where glimmerings of future greatness are first re­
vealed.18 Here, the Buddha is shown as having encountered an earl­
ier avatara of Ashoka in the city of Rajagriha. Ashoka was, when
thus encountered, a young boy, Jaya by name, who lived in this
city, Rajagriha, which the sage had entered seeking alms. Walking
along Rajagriha’s main thoroughfare, the Buddha saw two young
boys playing in the dirt. One of them, Jaya, on seeing the Buddha,
decided to place a handful of dirt in his begging bowl. Typically, in
such a story, the act of offering is accompanied by the formulation
of a wish or statement of intent about the merit to be gained by the
act. Jaya’s statement is straightforward enough. By the good merit
he might earn, he said, ‘I would become king and, after placing the
earth under a single umbrella of sovereignty, I would pay homage to
the blessed Buddha.’ Children usually have more modest aspira­tions
but Jaya was no ordinary child. The Buddha certainly believed so,
as also that Jaya had the character and the resolve to achieve what
he wanted. As he predicted, ‘the desired fruit would be obtained
because of his field of merit.’ He therefore received the ‘proffered
dirt’, and thus ‘the seed of merit that was to ripen into Ashoka’s
king­ship was planted.’ Soon thereafter the Buddha predicted to his
disciple Ananda that a hundred years after his death ‘that boy will
become a king named Ashoka in the city of Pataliputra. He will be
a righteous dharmaraja, a chakravartin who rules over one of the
four continents, and he will distribute my relics far and wide and
build the eighty-four thousand dharmarajikas.’19
Legends, in order to sound plausible, create credible contexts for
the stories they recount. This legend certainly got the historical
trajectory of the capitals of Magadha right. In the time of the Buddha,
the centre of Magadhan royal authority was indeed Rajagriha, while
by the third century bce, when Ashoka became emperor, it had long
ceased to be so. By then, Pataliputra had become the capital city.
30 ashoka in ancient india

In the next chapter, what we know of the precincts of Pataliputra

and its visible remains will be elucidated. Here, it is enough to
say that the veracity of such historical details surely endows an
authenticity to the text’s description of those centuries. This cannot
be said about all aspects of the text, as, for instance, its sense of
chronology. The statement that Ashoka lived about a hundred
years after the death of the Buddha is incorrect even in terms of the
text’s own pronouncement that eleven generations of kings separa­-
ted Bimbisara, who was the king of Magadha in the time of the
Buddha, from Ashoka. Apparently, ‘one hundred years’ was only a
way of suggesting that the era of Ashoka was much after the time of
the Buddha.20
But what about the story itself? For those readers who are in­
terested in the telling of a good story, the Avadana account may leave
them feeling shortchanged. This is because the future of Ashoka is
foretold very early in the tale. Generally speaking, in the crafting
of a biography, even while it is assumed that the reader is aware
of the broad contours of the life of the personage who forms its
subject, the story is told in a way that ensures there is anticipation,
suspense, and drama. In this ancient saga around a historical life
it is these elements which are in danger of being compromised—
because of the prophecy. Very early on, this prophecy is made and
an important intention in the narrative that follows is to show how
it will be fulfilled.
But did the ancients see the pronouncing of a prophecy in the
way that we do? Prophecy, as a narrative technique, was employed
by the epic poets in Greece. There, such prophecies, by anticipating
what would befall the protagonist, apparently ensured that those
following the narration did so with heightened interest. The epi­
sodes connected with the return and vengeance of the Greek
hero Odysseus in the Odyssey are an example of this, for through
prophecies readers see in advance ‘the doom that awaits the suitors
at the hands of Penelope’s much tried lord’ much before it comes to
pass.21 Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex follows fundamentally the same
principle: it is the chronicle of a doom not only foretold, but foretold
very early on. The point such narratives seem to drive home is that
 a n a p o c ry p h a l e a r ly l i f e 31

‘plot’ is more important than ‘story’, if by story we mean asking the

question ‘what happens next?’ and if by ‘plot’ we want to know ‘in
what way did this happen?’ So, it may well be that in some ancient
literary cultures, rather than taking away the suspense, prophecy
is considered as having aroused and maintained it. Possibly, this
in part explains the ancient legend around Ashoka where the
prediction by the Buddha gave the story a sense of unity. It ensured
that the attention of readers and listeners was never diverted from
the unfolding of the main plot even as the trials and tribulations of
the hero, and those whose lives he touched, were fleshed out.
Predictions about Ashoka’s ‘coming’ recur on two occasions in
the narrative, though the predictors are different. The text has
travelled some distance by then, into the arena of action involving
the future emperor’s real life (in contradistinction to his previous
life). Now, the prophecy is first repeated when a beautiful young
woman, who in the near future will become his mother, enters the
narrative. We will call the woman simply his ‘mother’ because her
true name eludes us. She is known by various names elsewhere,
sometimes as Subhadrangi, also as Dharma, at times Durdhara.22
Buddhist texts do not think it necessary to give her a stable name.
Where she comes from, her native place, is not usually mentioned
in the ancient texts, though in this respect the Ashokavadana is an
exception because it does specify her birthplace: it describes her
as the beautiful daughter of a Brahman from Champa.23 If so, the
maternal origins of Ashoka lie in an ancient city of some fame, an
urban settlement not at too great a distance from Pataliputra. Like
the Magadhan capital, Champa was in its day an imposingly forti­
fied city surrounded by a moat, not far from the Ganga.24 Its ruins
still grace a high square plateau that can be seen on the outskirts of
modern Bhagalpur in Bihar.25
But coming back to the reiteration of the original prediction: as
the story goes, Champa’s citizen, this daughter of a Brahman, came
to marry a king, the Maurya emperor Bindusara, because such an
event had been foretold to her father. Once more, the coming is
presaged, this time by an anonymous someone or some people
con­nected with the future king’s mother. This too is a narrative
32 ashoka in ancient india

arche­type common in Indian religious and hagiographical texts

as much as in Middle Eastern and European, the classic example
being Mary’s dream in which the Angel Gabriel tells her she will
bear a king, the future Jesus. An instance of a trope where ambitious
kinsmen of a prince’s mother find special mention exists also in the
Arthashastra. Possibly for this reason they are seen as posing a threat
to the king by being in league with the princes.26
Unlike the prophecy by the Buddha, where the persona of the
predictor endows his words with a religious aura, the diviners in
this episode happen to be anonymous. Neither their names nor
their social station are mentioned. They are merely people who
inform the Brahman that his daughter will be betrothed to a king.
Simultaneously, they prophesy the destiny of the sons she will bear,
one of whom, according to the soothsayers, will become the emperor.
As the passage puts it: ‘The fortune tellers predicted she would marry
a king and bear two jewel-like sons: one would become a cakravartin
ruling over one of the four conti­nents, the other would wander forth
and fulfil his religious vows.’27
The story goes that the Brahman, excited by what he had been
told, took his daughter to Pataliputra and offered her in marriage to
the emperor Bindusara. Here again, the political circumstances of
the third century bce are accurately invoked in that the Brahman is
shown as taking his daughter to the pre-eminent city of India, the
political capital from where the Maurya king ruled. Unlike in earlier
ages of multiple kingdoms and republics competing with each other,
in the era in which Ashoka was born, as we have noted, large parts of
the subcontinent had been brought within the political ambit of a
sprawling empire whose monarch resided in Pataliputra. Certainly,
for anyone with ambitions of greatness, it was logical, as in the case
of the Champa Brahman, to be heading to that royal capital.
Meanwhile, the emperor was not ‘waiting’ for this girl from
Champa to arrive in his court. By this time Bindusara had a sub-
s­tantial harem and is also said to have had an heir apparent, a son
by the name of Susima. So, the Brahman’s beautiful daughter was
not Bindusara’s only consort, nor in the usual order of things would
the son that she was eventually to bear be considered the rightful
heir to the throne.
 a n a p o c ry p h a l e a r ly l i f e 33

Producing a son, in her case, seems to have required patience and

guile. Because of her beauty, the concubines in Bindusara’s court
prevented her from getting physically close to the emperor for they
feared that if he made love to her he would no longer pay them
any attention. She was, instead, taught by them to be an excellent
barber. Little did they know that she, being determined to fulfil
her ‘destiny’, would wield her razor in a way that would ensure she
seduced her ruler-husband. Apparently, as she began to groom the
king’s beard and hair, she did it with such skill that he began to relax
completely and fall asleep. Since her grooming gave him so much
pleasure, Bindusara decided to grant her a wish. It was then that she
told him that she wanted him to pleasure her, make love to her. No
ordinary man, Bindusara hesitated over her propositioning because
of caste rules. He belonged to the Kshatriya (warrior) caste and he
imagined that she, from the evidence of her skills, had been born
into a lowly barber’s family. When he learnt that she was the daughter
of a Brahman, and moreover of a Brahman who had given her to
him as his wife, he promptly made her his chief wife and fulfilled her
wish. Bindusara must have had many wives and some of them, this
story suggests, were forgotten as soon as he married them. But in
any case, having discovered that his barber was intended as his wife,
and having installed her in that capacity, Bindusara made up for
lost time. There was much dalliance and mutual enjoyment which
resulted in her becoming pregnant and giving birth to Ashoka.
The same legend which describes how the Brahman girl from
Champa fulfilled what had been prophesied also recounts that,
when her son was born, it was she who named him. Apparently,
when the infant’s birth was being celebrated she was asked what
his name should be, and since she replied that she had no sorrow,
the child was given the name Ashoka (a-shoka: ‘without sorrow’).28
She seems to have continued to remain fascinated with this name
because subsequently, when a second son was born to her, this
younger brother of Ashoka was named Vitashoka. This was because,
as the legend puts it, when he was born, all ‘sorrow ceased’ (‘vigate
shoke’).29
Moving on now to the second occasion where Ashoka’s future,
figuratively speaking, was reconfirmed, this happened some years
34 ashoka in ancient india

later, by which time he was a young prince. Again, it is his mother

who is prominent as a protagonist in this story, now along with a
wandering Ajivika ascetic. The Ajivika link with Ashoka’s mother,
it will be later evident, also appears in a different form in another
legend around his birth. Among the cast of characters who knew
about Ashoka’s ‘coming’, the mother and an Ajivika are common to
both the stories.
Unlike the anonymous soothsayers of Champa, this Ajivika
mendicant was not a faceless entity. He is introduced to us as
Pingala­vatsajiva, a religious man who was requested by none other
than Bindusara to examine his sons. This was because the ascetic
had the gift of scrutiny, in this case the power to recognize who
would rule best after Bindusara’s death. Initially, Ashoka was un­
willing to be examined, for his father is said to have disliked him.
The reason for this, in the text, has to do with Ashoka’s unattractive
appearance—his skin was rough and unpleasant to the touch.
How­­ever, his mother advised Ashoka not to resist being examined.
Eventually, when he, along with various other princes, was subject­-
ed to the sage’s gaze, it became evident to the Ajivika that Ashoka
must succeed Bindusara. Yet although Pingalavatsajiva realized this,
he thought it prudent not to pronounce his choice immediately,
for he knew the ruler-father did not like Ashoka. So, without men­
tioning his name to Bindusara, he made the prediction that the
‘one who had the best mount, seat, drink, vessel and food’ would
become the emperor. Ashoka later told his mother: ‘The back of
an elephant was my mount, the earth was my seat, my vessel was
made of clay, boiled rice with curds was my food, and water was
my drink; therefore, I know I shall be king.’30 In much the same
way that Jaya’s persona had earlier passed the Buddha’s scrutiny and
been recognized as destined for future greatness, the suitability of
the now-adult prince as Bindusara’s heir is linked in the story with
his personal qualities. Pingalavatsajiva is said to have met Ashoka’s
mother and told her that Ashoka would succeed Bindusara. Upon
her advice the Ajivika left the kingdom lest he be forced by the king
to give an answer which might endanger him. When Bindusara
died, Pingalavatsajiva, it is said, returned to Magadha.
 a n a p o c ry p h a l e a r ly l i f e 35

It was normal for a queen who had been made aware of her
son’s destiny, but whose progeny did not include the eldest male
child of her husband, to have kept the knowledge to herself. In
large polygamous royal households there were other queens who
harboured similar ‘kingly’ ambitions for their sons: everyone fami­
liar with the Valmiki Ramayana will recall the several wives of
Dasharatha, king of Ayodhya, one of whom, Kekayi, machinates
for her own sons against those of her co-wives and thereby sets the
whole epic in motion. In terms of the present narrative, the queen
keeping matters secret was also necessary because Bindusara’s eld­-
est son, Susima, who was expected to succeed his father, was very
much around, as perhaps was Susima’s watchful mother. And there
was, above all, the emperor himself who actively disliked Ashoka
and would not have taken kindly to such a prediction.
Let us, though, for a moment, stay with the sage who—following
unknown to himself in the footsteps of the Buddha—reconfirmed
Ashoka’s destiny. Why does a sage of the Ajivika order figure as the
one who makes this prediction? And who were these ascetics?
A ‘vanished Indian religion’ is how the doctrine of the Ajivikas
was described by A.L. Basham, the pre-eminent authority on this
sect, and he says ‘vanished’ because the religion, unlike other faiths
with ancient roots, has no modern adherents.31 This extinct sect’s
founder was a religious leader called Makkhali Goshala who lived
in the sixth century bce. It was a time when unorthodox doc­
trines flourished within a wider climate of religious ferment across
North India. Like his contemporaries, Mahavira and the Buddha,
Makkhali Goshala has been described as a charismatic preacher and
leader. He is known to have created a sect around his beliefs, whose
central tenet was an all-embracing doctrine of predestination, one
in which human effort had no place.32 Such rigid determinism was
rare among Indian thinkers and preachers in the milieu in which
Goshala and his followers flourished. The Ajivikas must certainly
have closely interacted with other religious groups. Their relations
with the followers of the Buddha were ambivalent, marked by both
rivalry and friendship. For one, the Buddha was supposed to have
apparently believed that ‘in the ninety-one kalpas of his previous
36 ashoka in ancient india

births’, apart from one Ajivika no others had been reborn in heaven.33
Buddhist monks are also shown as having greatly disliked being
mistaken for Ajivikas. This happened, for instance, when they were
robbed of their robes and, on entering the city of Sravasti naked,
had the citizens wondering who these ‘handsome naked Ajvikas’
were.34 At the same time, relations between them were frequently
depicted as cordial, as for example when an Ajivika became the
carrier of the news to a group of Buddhist monks that their teacher
had attained ‘parinirvana’ (upon his death) in Kushinara. In this
instance the Ajivika was shown holding a flower, the flower of the
coral tree or ‘mandarava’, which he knew to be one that only grew
in the world of gods or paradise, and which fell to earth only when
a great and auspicious event had taken place.35 As for relations
between Ajivikas and Jainas, there is a similar play of cordiality
and tension. The Jaina tradition alludes to the early friendship and
association of Makkhali Goshala and Vardhamana Mahavira, the
twenty-fourth Jaina ‘tirthankara’ (teacher of the path of liberation).
Matters between the two sects, though, became much less cordial
following a couple of conversions of Ajivikas to the Jaina faith.36
That all these sects were looking to expand their following and
were thus competing for converts and adherents will have been an
important reason for the rivalries among them. Another reason
may well have been the competition for royal patronage. Like the
Buddha and his followers, Makkhali Goshala was a name known
in the royal circles of Magadha. During the Buddha’s lifetime, we
learn that ministers in the court of Ajatashatru, the king of Magadha,
suggested the names of six teachers, one of whom was Goshala,
as having the capacity to resolve the king’s doubts. So, along with
various other sects, the kings of Magadha were patrons of the Ajivi­
kas as far back as the sixth century bce. Later, such ascetics are
shown exercising considerable influence in the court of the Maurya
dynasty. This is obvious from the ease with which they move in and
out of royal company in the varying versions of the story that link
Ashoka’s mother with an Ajivika.
Let us look at the prediction itself. Actually, the prophecy about
Ashoka’s future as told by the Ajivika unfolds varyingly, depending
upon the text. One version—the one which has been recounted—
 a n a p o c ry p h a l e a r ly l i f e 37

takes the prediction back to the time when Ashoka was a young
man. Another version presents the prince’s future as having been
accurately predicted, again before he was born, by a religious per­
sonage who happened to be an Ajivika. When his mother was preg­
nant with him, her cravings for all kinds of unusual and odd things
had apparently become a matter of concern for Bindusara. In this
legend, the king first sought the assistance of the Brahmans in his
court.37 How many Brahmans he sought out is unknown, but they
evidently failed to comprehend the queen’s cravings. Eventually,
it was Janasana, an Ajivika known to frequent the queen’s family,
who understood them and pronounced the political destiny of the
unborn child as the future ruler of Jambudvipa. As a geographical
term, Jambudvipa is sometimes used for an island, and at other
times for the territory extending from the Himalayas in the north
to the sea in the south.38 We shall later see, by the time of Ashoka,
as his own epigraphs underline, Jambudvipa meant the vast land
that the emperor ruled. What is striking is that in this tale too the
figure of an Ajivika ascetic is deployed to drive home the point that
Ashoka was destined to be emperor of India.
Why an Ajivika acted as the augur and not, for instance, a Buddhist
or a Jaina or even a Brahman sage, needs to be unravelled. Actually,
a significant insight into this is offered by something we know about
Ashoka from his own epigraphs: he actively patronized this sect after
he ascended the throne of Pataliputra.39 The caves that he donat­-
ed to the Ajivikas at Barabar near Gaya are marked by his donative
epigraphs. These elaborate caves and the king’s carvings there will
be examined at length later; here, it is worth pointing out that these
were no ordinary caves but were created, through a substantial
outlay of money and men, by hollowing out granitic outcrops.40
Like the pillars that the emperor set up in various parts of his em­
pire, their interiors were mirror polished, giving them uniquely
glittering walls. The reasons for Ashoka making such a generous
donation to the Ajivikas remain unknown but the memory of the
emperor’s patronage of this sect must certainly have survived him.
So, for later composers of legends, endowing an Ajivika figure with
the power of prophecy probably gave credibility to the legends.
The other noticeable element about these tales is that they are
38 ashoka in ancient india

all retrospective predictions made several centuries after Ashoka

occupied the Mauryan throne. The version of his early life in which
the Buddha prophesied his future, and in which the soothsayers in
Champa and the Ajivika Pingalavatsa in Pataliputra figure, is earlier
and forms part—as we saw—of the Ashokavadana. There are several
layers of tradition in the text, some of which possibly go back to the
late centuries bce.41 In its present form, though, the Ashokavadana
was, as noted, composed in or after the second century ce, which
makes its prediction some four centuries after the time of Ashoka.
A variety of related prophecies pop up at its very beginning, when
the Buddha predicts the future birth of a Buddha-like figure. One
hundred years after his death, he says at this point, a son will be
born to a perfumer in Mathura who will carry forward his own
work.42 Prediction, then, whether of the birth of a future Buddha
or a Buddhist king, is a specific narrative device that was culturally
common when speaking of the ‘coming’ of figures important to
the Buddhist tradition.
The second version worth noting is from the Vamshatthapakasini,
a commentary on the Mahavamsa, the Sri Lankan Buddhist chro­n­-
icle which was written 800 years or so after the Ashokavadana
and more than 1200 after the death of Ashoka—i.e. in the ninth or
tenth century ce. In the main text, the Mahavamsa, dated to the fifth
century ce, one encounters soothsayers making predictions about
royal children on various occasions. The ancestor of the first king
of Indian descent, named Vijaya, is shown as the son of a king who
was said to have been born of the union of a woman and a lion. This
woman was a princess whom the soothsayers had prophesied as
soon to be united with the ‘king of beasts’.43 Elsewhere in the text we
are told that when Brahmans skilled in sacred texts saw the only
daughter of a later king, Panduvasudeva, they foretold her son as
slaying his uncles for the sake of the throne.44 The Vamshatthapa­-
kasini, in pre­dicting the destiny of Ashoka, follows the forms
and conventions of the chronicle on which it is a commentary.
In inserting the figure of Ashoka in this cycle of prediction, with
an Ajivika foretelling the future (all of which is missing in the
Mahavamsa), it could represent the incorporation of the Ashoka
legend of the Northern Buddhist tradition.
 a n a p o c ry p h a l e a r ly l i f e 39

Forms and conventions apart, are there any other reasons for
the ‘coming’ of an emperor to have been predicted in this way?
And are there other kinds of events that are prophesied in this way,
or other historical figures whose destinies are similarly prefigured
in ancient India?
By the time Ashoka was born, prophecies and prognostications—
if one goes by allusions to ‘events’ that either would transpire or
transpired as a consequence of particular signs—had long be­
come acceptable practice, an incorporation of superstition into
the dominant belief systems by which everyday life was lived.
Future events, auspicious or otherwise, could be indicated by the
cries of certain kinds of birds—as the oldest Indian text, the Rig
Veda, indicates.45 Birds also figure as omens in another text of the
same genre, the Atharva Veda, in which something fallen from
the mouth of a black bird was considered ominous because that
kind of bird was supposed to be the mouth of Nirrti, goddess of
death and corruption.46 The disturbing or disruptive behaviour of
birds and animals appears in all kinds of early literature, from the
Mahabharata where a category of ascetics depicted are those who
understand the cries of birds and monkeys, to the Parantapa Jataka
in which the Bodhisattva (the future Buddha) learns to understand
the meanings of animal cries while studying at the city of Taxila.47 In
other instances the signs to be ‘read’ depend upon the constellation
of planets. A boy, for instance, believed to have been born on an
inauspicious astrological constellation might himself die or bring
about the death of his father or his mother.48
The power of such planetary conjunctions, as indicators of
future fortune and misfortune, is also central to the great Sanskrit
epics of ancient India. In the Ramayana, when Ravana is getting
the better of Rama in battle, the planets are blamed: ‘Mercury stood
covering the Rohini nakshastra which is presided over by Praja-
pati and which is the favourite of the moon and thereby indicat­-
ed evil fortune to people.’49 The Mahabharata is crowded with
similar prophecies. An instance is the vivid description of future
destruction in the Bhishma-parva, the forthcoming apocalypse
being read from astrological indications: here a white celestial
body stood ‘traversing Citra nakshatra’, indicating the destruction
40 ashoka in ancient india

of the clan of the Kurus, while when ‘a very frightful comet stands
covering Pushya-nakshastra’ it meant that terrible evil would visit
both the armies in conflict.50 Such examples suppose that know­
ledge about the future, even though usually hidden, can be secured
by understanding spe­cific signs. The phenomenon of prediction
and divination, in fact, is part of all kinds of ancient literature and
one only has to think of Joseph in the Old Testament using a cup
for divination, or of the Chinese work I Ching, the Confucian classic
on divination, to realize that this phenomenon was not confined
to India.51 Much later, West Asia’s Qu’ranic stories about Biblical
prophets allude to such practices, as when the Qu’ran recounts that
the signal for the commencement of the Flood, for Noah, was a
boiling furnace.52
The devices used for foretelling events in the world of ancient
societies, one imagines, were those that were culturally acceptable
there. In the ancient world of the Greek epics it was usual for
the poet to leave the role of prophecy to his characters. So, in the
fifteenth book of the Iliad, it was Zeus in conversation with Hera
who prophesied various deaths when ‘Achilles shall send Patroclus
into battle, but that when Patroclus has slain many Trojan youths
and Zeus’ own son, Sarpedon, Hector in turn shall kill him; then
Achilles in anger shall slay Hector and later the Achaeans with
Athene’s aid shall take the city of Ilium.’53 This also underlines the
fact that in epic tales, from Greece to India, prophesying war and
violence was commonplace, and that through these the listeners
and readers knew in advance who was going to be defeated, who
killed. While in the Greek texts such predictions were articulated by
seers, heroes, and other such characters, in the Indian epics it was
more common to spell out what the stars foretold.
Diviners and soothsayers in ancient India were well versed in
this lore and used their knowledge to become powerful. Presum­-
ably for this reason, such specialists were not always liked. In speci­-
fic instan­ces, ascetics were prohibited ‘from desiring to secure
alms by foretelling the results of portents (like earthquakes) or of
bodily move­ments (such as the throbbing of the eye or arm) or by
naksatravidya (astrology) or angavidya (palmistry) or by casuistry.’54
 a n a p o c ry p h a l e a r ly l i f e 41

Such censure did not always apply to them, and evidently they
were considered acceptable in the royal court of the Mauryas.
The Arthashastra seems to suggest that the king should appoint as
his chaplain (or ‘purohita’) not only someone whose family and
character were exalted and who had thoroughly studied the Vedic
texts, but also one who had trained ‘in divine signs, in omens and
in the science of politics and capable of counteracting divine and
human calamities by means of Atharvan remedies.’55
By this time, predictions at the time of their birth about the
bright­ness of their future career also formed part of the popular
lore about great men. The future glory of the Bud­dha had been
pre­dicted in precisely this way. He was born as ‘Siddhartha’ in the
latter part of the sixth century bce and, the story goes, it was a sage
who first declared at his birth that he would attain greatness. This
sage was Asita, a Brahman who was also the teacher of the Buddha’s
father, Suddodhana. He is supposed to have developed psychic
powers and would often spend the day in the world of the gods
(the ‘deva’ world). On one such occasion he encountered the gods
engaged in great rejoicing and learnt that Siddhartha Gautama,
destined to become the Buddha, had been born.56 Immediately, he
went to Suddhodana’s palace and asked to see the child. From the
auspicious marks on the child’s body he knew that the infant was
‘no common clay’ but would attain Bodhi (‘enlightenment’). His
encounter with the infant is described thus:
He took him up; and when his gaze
found marks and signs his lore knew well
he lifted up his voice and cried:
‘He has no peer! He’s mankind’s best!’57

This story occurs in an early collection of discourses called the

Sutta Nipata, a work which is part of the Buddhist tradition com­
piled within a hundred years of the death of the Buddha. Versions
of Asita’s prophecy continued into Buddhist texts for many cen­-
turies. The Lalitavistara, a text of the first–second centuries ce,
recounted two versions of Asita’s prophecy, one in prose and
another in verse, which, in their main details, differ but slightly
42 ashoka in ancient india

from the earlier Pali version.58 In all instances, though, as in the

case of Ashoka’s coming, these are retrospective predictions made
by ascetics.
In the centuries that followed, such stories about rulers came to
be told most specially when recounting the life of a king who was
not the first-born male child of the king or not in the existing system
of primogeniture the heir to the throne. In the seventh century ce
Harshavardhana’s court chronicler Bana, using elaborate poetic de­-
tail, recounts that when his mother Yashovati was pregnant with
Harsha, her behaviour reflected the thoughts of the future sovere­
ign she was carrying. This was evident, we are told, in the fact that
instead of jewelled mirrors she preferred to see her reflection on
the blade of a sword, and instead of the lute she found pleasure in
hearing the bow’s twang (‘ill suited to a woman’, Bana says).59At his
birth, even though he was the second son, it was predicted by an
astrologer, whose advice was sought by the king, that Harsha was
born at a conjunction fit for the birth of a universal emperor.
The similarities in the later legend around Ashoka and the story
of Harsha—neither of whom were the oldest sons of their fathers
and thus not rightful heirs to the throne—is striking. In both in­-
s­tances we have odd signs connected with pregnant queens, as also
a figure who had powerful insights into what such signs meant. This
is, in brief, the characteristic narrative mode of a culture in which
the sacred is regularly smuggled into the picture in the shape of a
prophecy, the function of such prophecy being to bestow legitimacy
on an ascension otherwise dubious.
Now it is time to travel to Pataliputra, the city of Ashoka’s child­
hood and of his later years. Not everything about the period of this
future emperor needs to be extracted from legitimizing lore cons­
tructed hundreds of years after his death. Unlike the emperor himself,
the character and culture of Pataliputra can be reconstructed from
clues that are contemporary with Mauryan times. Through them
one may come closer to an understanding of Ashoka’s early life. As
for whether Ashoka’s future was actually predicted in this court, we
will never know. All we can safely say is that, in this time of the
late centuries bce in North India, such a prophecy would not have
surpris­ed anyone.
 2

Pataliputra and the Prince

In the hundredth year after the Nirvana of Tathagata, there was a

king called Ashoka (O-shu-kia), who was the great-grandson of
Bimbisara-raja. He changed his capital from Rajagriha to Patali
(pura), and built an outside rampart to surround the old city.
Since then many generations have passed and now there only
remain the old foundation walls (of the city).1

T
his is how the history of the creation of the
capital city of Pataliputra was described by Xuanzang, the
famous Chinese pilgrim who came there in the seventh cen-
tury ce, more than 800 years after the reign of Ashoka. Of the many
Chinese Buddhists who came to India, Xuanzang was the traveller
best remembered for the extensiveness of his forays across India,
ranging from Kashmir and Punjab to Bihar, Assam, and the penin­
sula. Wherever he went, he recorded his observations on monas­-
­teries, ruined cities, stupas, the myths surrounding them, and a
great deal else.
Xuanzang’s account of Pataliputra is marked by most of these
features. It is part observation and part amalgam of legends. Upon
leaving Vaishali and crossing the Ganga, this restless and intrepid
pilgrim reached Pataliputra. Located on the holy river’s right bank,
the city he said was one that had, many centuries earlier, been
44 ashoka in ancient india

created there as the new capital of Magadha by Ashoka—no doubt

he had been told this or gleaned it from existing legend. Contrary
to what Xuanzang believed, however, Pataliputra’s establishment
as Magadha’s capital did not have anything to do with Ashoka,
and the Chinese pilgrim may have been confusing Bindusara
with Bimbisara—the latter, at any rate, had no relationship of any
kind with Ashoka.2 By the time of Xuanzang’s visit, his account
suggests, Magadha’s realm included towns which were well peopled,
whereas the old city of Pataliputra was a somewhat unimpressive
and decaying settlement, one that he characterized as ‘having long
been a wilderness’ whose ‘foundation walls had survived’.3 By
this Xuanzang probably meant that the ruins of earlier buildings
were still visible within the city. He had encountered such ruins
in many places across India before, but, exceptionally in the case
of Pataliputra, the visible traces of stupas, pillars, old towers, and
strange stones seemed to him to be closely associated with Ashoka.
The associations appear to match many of the legends that by
then surrounded Ashoka, and Xuanzang is likely to have been
familiar with their Chinese versions.4 So, for instance, the early part
of Ashoka’s reign was recounted in them as being marked by much
violence, since the emperor was known to have been a notoriously
cruel tyrant at that point in his reign. Proof of his tyranny was
an earth-prison or ‘hell’ which he had built, a place where all who
entered ‘were killed without any chance of self defence’. After his
conversion to Buddhism, the 84,000 stupas that Ashoka is supposed
to have raised throughout his empire over the relics of the Buddha
are specially mentioned, the first of these being recorded as created
just south of the prison in Pataliputra. By the time of Xuanzang,
this stupa was in ‘a leaning, ruinous condition’, though its crowning
segment of carved stone, with a balustrade around it, had survived.
Then there was a stone on which the Buddha had apparently
walked, marked by the impression of both his feet, a sacred fea­
ture which the king had surrounded within an enclosure. Modern
archaeologists read the Chinese traveller’s description of these
details with approval, Xuanzang having shown the sorts of precise
measuring skills that are the staple of the discipline of archaeology:
he mentions the dimensions of the sacred footprints (18 inches
 pata l i p u t r a a n d t h e p r i n c e 45

long and 6 inches broad), the circle signs embossed on them, and
the manner in which fish and flowers fringed all ten toes. Not far
from this stone, he noted a massive stone pillar with a mutilated
inscription which, he said, recorded that ‘Ashoka-raja with a firm
principle of faith has thrice bestowed Jambudvipa as a religious
offering on Buddha, the Dharma, and the assembly, and thrice
he has redeemed it with his jewels and treasure; and this is the
record thereof.’5 Since no Ashokan pillar that we know has such an
inscription on it, this was possibly a story circulating around the
epigraph that Xuanzang gathered from local people.6
Legend in fact is more the staple of the narrative than measurable
accuracy: in the way he describes it, Ashoka’s imprint on Patali­
putra’s landscape was practically predetermined since the Buddha
himself had prophesied it as a city of the future. This happened
when the Buddha, on his last journey towards Kushinagara, looked
back in farewell at Magadha, and, impressing his feet upon the
stone on which he stood, said to his companion-disciple Ananda:
‘a hundred years hence there shall be a King Asoka; he shall build
here his capital and establish his court, and he shall protect the three
treasures and command the genii.’ If Ashoka’s destiny as emperor
of India had been predicted by the Buddha in the Ashokavadana,
here the sage is invoked as having prophesied, and thereby obliquely
blessed, the creation by Ashoka of his royal capital.
Why Xuanzang’s account of Pataliputra portrayed it primarily
as Ashoka’s city may have to do with what the pilgrim imbibed
from its local antiquarians and the derelict relics that the populace
had, by then, come to associate with the legends around the
Buddhist emperor. His familiarity with Chinese versions of many
of these, written several centuries before his time, may well have
pre­disposed him to seek confirmation of their in situ authenticity.7
The real Pataliputra, though, was very different from the remem­
bered city.

***
46 ashoka in ancient india

Pataliputra was, in a manner of speaking, the progeny of the

Ganga, having been seeded at the topographical point where people
and goods moved across the river and along its right bank. Like
the river, the trajectory followed by the settlement was linear. Some
time at the beginning of recorded history, around the sixth century
bce, 300 years or so before Ashoka was born, a settlement stood
in the area which the sprawling city of Patna has now overtaken,
a little after the confluence of the Son river with the Ganga. We
know this because surviving traces of that first settlement contain
the archetypal deluxe pottery of that time, the North Black Polished
Ware—so called because a lot of this pottery is usually a shiny
black and has been found in many parts of North India.8 This early
settlement was also the one where the Buddha, on his last journey
from the state of Magadha, is said to have stayed. Pataligrama was
what it was called then, suggesting its origins in a village (‘grama’).
There he apparently addressed his devotees in a council hall be­-
fore crossing the Ganga towards Vaishali.9
While sojourning in its vicinity the Buddha is reported as having
seen thousands of magical creatures haunting Pataligrama. This he
interpreted as a sign that a fortress was being built. The intuition
was confirmed by his disciple, Ananda, who told him that the chief
ministers of Magadha—the capital of which was located further
south, around Rajagriha—were building a fortress to better defend
themselves against the Vajji state.
Unlike monarchical Magadha, the Vajjis were a republican poli­
tical confederacy which dominated a region that stretched beyond
the left bank of the Ganga, in the vicinity of Basarh. Seeing this
construction as the influence of powerful ‘fairies’ who ‘bend the
hearts of the most powerful kings and ministers to build dwelling-
places’, the Buddha is believed to have made a prophecy about the
future of Pataliputra to his disciple: ‘And as far, Ananda, as Aryan
people resort, as far as merchants travel, this will become the chief
city, Patali-putta, a centre of the interchange of all kinds of wares.
But three dangers will hang over Patali-putta, that of fire, that of
water, and that of dissension among friends.’10 The Buddha is,
essen­tially, evoked in the early Buddhist literature for every event
 pata l i p u t r a a n d t h e p r i n c e 47

or occurrence that needs to be justified, as well as to legitimize

him as the great foreseer; it seems thus that much before he began
predicting the future greatness of Ashoka, he prophesied the subse­
quent pre-eminence of Pataliputra. This prophecy to Ananda is a
leitmotif in accounts from the late centuries bce till at least the time
of Xuanzang. In the early texts, however, Ashoka is not credited
with the creation of the capital; the Chinese pilgrim’s account of
the Buddha’s prediction about Pataliputra is in this respect novel.
The Buddha’s sojourn at and pronouncements about what
soon became the pre-eminent city of ancient India point to two
crucial factors in the evolution of Pataliputra. One is the role of
traders and trade routes in sustaining the city as a crucial hub. This
is not surprising, for farmers and fishing folk were familiar with
the rivers in the vicinity of Pataliputra from a time well before the
Buddha. The links and locales of third millennium bc sites like
Maner on the Son river, some thirty-odd km west of Pataliputra,
and Chirand on the northern bank of the Ganga, not far from
where the Ghaghara river joined it, suggest this. Pataliputra’s land
arteries too, from the beginning, linked it to Rajagriha and the
Chhotanagpur plateau on the one hand, and Gaya–Bodh Gaya and
beyond on the other.
The other factor, about improving the defensive strength of
Magadha, relates to a more specific sixth century bce feature. It
concerns the shift that was necessitated from hill-girt Rajagriha,
the first capital of the state of Magadha, to Pataliputra in the Ganga
plains (Figs 2.1 and 2.2). Capitals are known to have been shifted
in many other regions, Delhi for example being a city where seven
capital cities are said to have come up at different points in time.
However, whether Delhi’s cities, like Indraprastha and Shahjahana­
bad, hugged the banks of the Yamuna, or as in the case of Lal Kot
and Tughlaqabad, were located in the rocky Aravalli hills, they were
all within a few kilometres of each other. Pataliputra and Raja­
griha, on the other hand, were not contiguous but separated by a
considerable distance—more than a hundred kilometres—with
the two cities occupying very different kinds of terrain. While the
Ganga in the vicinity of Pataliputra is grand in its breadth and
Fig. 2.1: The hills of Rajagriha with a stupa in the foreground
 pata l i p u t r a a n d t h e p r i n c e 49

beauty, this is perhaps the only natural feature in its favour. The
area is monotonously flat and fairly swampy on its edges, fringed
on one side by marshes created by the Punpun river. Rajagriha, by
contrast, was girdled by magnificent hills that gave it a naturally
defensive character. Additionally, extensive cyclopean fortress-like
walls were built across the hills, as also all kinds of structures rang­ing
from monastic retreats to royal residences.11 And yet, as Magadha
expanded and jostled for territorial supremacy over states that
extended along and beyond the left bank of the Ganga, it became
increasingly clear that it was impractical for the political hub of an
expansionist state to be located there. From the interior hilly ter­-
rain of Rajagriha, it would not have been possible to adequately
protect the state’s exposed long flank along the river.
The transition towards the swampy plains began in the time of
King Ajatashatru (493–462 bce). He is credited with converting the
settlement of Pataligrama into the fortified urban complex which
came to be called Pataliputra. As noted, he did this so that it could
serve as a base against the aggressive Vajji (or Lichchavi) republic.
In later years the Gangetic plains were dominated—as were many
other parts of India—by the Magadha-based Mauryas, but at this
point in time there were several states in North India, the balance
of power fluctuating and shifting between them, creating tensions
in their relationships with each other. The Lichchavi confederacy
was one of these many states. Militarily, it formed a powerful force
defeated by Ajatashatru only after a protracted conflict that lasted
sixteen years or more (c. 484-468 bce). The creation of fortifica­-
tions at Pataligrama was probably an important part of the stra­-
tegy to protect Magadha’s Gangetic flank against the aggressive
Lichcha­­vis. Some fifty years later, in the reign of Ajatashatru’s suc­
cessor Udayin, Pataliputra became Magadha’s capital city.
So, within some decades of his death, Pataliputra, it would ap­
pear, had moved fast towards fulfilling the Buddha’s prophecy. Of
course, considering that the travels of the great sage and the truisms
transmitted by him began to be recorded only after his death—by
which time a walled city at Pataliputra already dominated the brow
of the Ganga plains—it is also possible that the recording of his
50 ashoka in ancient india

Fig. 2.2: The Ganga river near Patna

prophecy was a retrospective insertion into folklore (of the kind

that we encountered around Ashoka in the last chapter).
Whichever way we look at it, what makes this first description
of the city so spot on is that it captures its essence. The lifeblood
of the urban metropolis of Pataliputra, as we shall see, was the web
of connections, political and commercial, that inextricably bound
it to regions and people, near and far, making it a place whose
history extended much beyond the city walls that enclosed it. It
also underlines the fact that whatever became its purported past
by the time it was visited by Buddhist pilgrims from China, the
historical origins of this city and its consolidation as a political capi­-
tal had nothing to do with the family or the line of kings to which
Ashoka belonged.

***

What did Pataliputra, which was an integral part of his early

years, look like around the time Ashoka was born? In the late third
 pata l i p u t r a a n d t h e p r i n c e 51

Map 2: Magadha’s political capitals—Rajagriha and Pataliputra

century bce, when Ashoka’s grandfather Chandragupta was the

reigning king, the famous Greek writer-traveller-diplomat Megas­
thenes spent some time in the city and left behind a vivid and,
as confirmed by modern excavations, fairly accurate description
of the dimensions and character of the city. So we can be reason­
ably certain that the city where Ashoka and his siblings spent
their growing years was as described in the narrative of the Greek
visitor.
What was Megasthenes doing in this part of India? Many Greek
chroniclers and writers had been to India before him, the largest
number having been part of the entourage of the Macedonian
Alexander when he overran large parts of the north-west in the
52 ashoka in ancient india

spring of 326 bce. While the plains of Punjab figure prominently

in their descriptions of Alexander’s army as it sailed down rivers
and marched across the Indus plains, they neither ventured further
downstream nor south-east along the flow of the Ganga. Unlike his
predecessors, Megasthenes did. He travelled much further and saw
more of India, especially Gangetic India, than any foreigner before
him. Starting off from Arachosia, he went across Punjab and the
Gangetic plains to spend time at the court of ‘Sandrakottos, king of
the Indians’, Sandrakottos being Greek for Chandragupta. Arachosia
was located in the Helmand area of what is now south Afghanistan,
and the region known by that name possibly stretched till the upper
reaches of the Indus river. It was controlled by Sibyrtius, a satrap
(governor) originally appointed by Alexander, and Megasthenes
was part of this satrap’s staff. He seems to have spent some time in
Arachosia, but if he had any thoughts about that province he does
not share them with us, nor says anything of note about the places
that he saw or the people he met there. We do not even know for
certain who he represented at the court of Chandragupta, though
it is likely that he travelled at the Macedonian satrap’s behest.12
That he should have arrived from Arachosia is not surprising, for
Chandragupta himself, after he had conquered the Nanda king­
dom and ascended the throne at Pataliputra, is known to have had
territorial designs on the Indus plains and beyond. Whether the
region bordering that river had been annexed by Chandragupta by
the time Megasthenes visited Pataliputra is a matter of some con­
troversy.13 The fact that he visited Chandragupta’s capital city and
left an eyewitness account of it, however, is universally acknow­
ledged,14 despite the original text in which he penned his account
having been swallowed up by the sands of time.
The Indica is what that lost account by Megasthenes is called; the
book has come down to us from fragments and quota­tions in the
works of later classical writers. Doubts about several of these frag­-
ments have been raised time and again, it being sometimes un­
clear whether the writers were paraphrasing Megasthenes di­rect or
using an intermediary.15 The observations recorded are not al­­­­ways
consistent, partly because Megasthenes was prone to speculative
 pata l i p u t r a a n d t h e p r i n c e 53

grandeur and wanted to say something about all of India, both

what he knew to be true and what he didn’t. He pro­nounc­ed, for
ins­tance, that the women of the ‘Pandaian’ land bore children when
they were 6 years of age, and described a race of men ‘among the
nomadic Indians who instead of nostrils have merely orifices’ and
whose legs are contorted like snakes.16 Yet even those justifi­ably
doubtful of absolute veracity in the account of such a fanci­ful ob­
server are certain that he had the unprece­dent­ed advantage of having
seen Pataliputra, and that the fragments in which the description of
that city occurs were definitely penned by Megasthenes himself.
Of Indian cities in general he says, ‘the number is so great that
it cannot be stated with precision’; several, made of brick and
mud, stood on ‘lofty eminences’, while others were built of wood
and hugged the banks of rivers or the sea coast.17 Of these, he only
provides an expansive account of ‘Palimbothra’, the Greek name
for Pataliputra, the greatest city in India, in part because of its
close connection with the ruling Maurya, for ‘the king, in addition
to his family name, must adopt the surname of Palibothros, as
Sandrakottos, for instance, did.’ Whether Chandragupta’s name was
in fact given suffixed grandeur by his capital city is uncertain, but
clearly, even as he built a vast empire, this was the city which formed
the core and base of his imperium and of that of the Mauryan
monarchs who followed him.
‘Sandrakottos’ plays second fiddle to Pataliputra in what survives
of the Megasthenes account. It was a city that occupied a long
strip of land where the Ganga and the Son (called Erranoboas by
Megasthenes) met, ‘a city eighty stadia [c. 14 km] in length and
fifteen [c. 2.5 km] in breadth. It is of the shape of a parallellogram
and is girded by a wooden wall, pierced with loopholes for the
discharge of arrows. It has a ditch in front for defence and for re­
ceiving the sewage of the city.’18 The description makes the city long
and narrow.19 One calculation suggests this would mean a city that
covered some 4500 hectares.20 What archaeology has revealed of
its size does not exactly compare with the calculations above, but
the spread of its ancient ruins does make it clear that the city was a
very large one.
54 ashoka in ancient india

It is not easy to get archaeological precision on the size of the

urban metropolis as it stood during Mauryan times since the
houses and palaces, the streets and markets, the pillars and sculp­
tures, and so much else of Pataliputra lies buried under some
twenty-two centuries of strata below modern Patna. So, how have
archaeologists managed to arrive at a rough calculation of its
size? This has been possible because wooden ramparts of the sort
described by Megasthenes have been detected in various areas
of the city. They have not been unearthed in a continuous line,
but even so, by plotting on a map wherever these were found, a
conjectural sense of size can be obtained.21 One calculation is that
the area enclosed by the timber ramparts would have been around
2200 hectares; another assessment computes the fortified city as
much smaller, between 1200 and 1300 hectares. Either way, as the
archaeologist F.R. Allchin put it, ‘even if the more modest figures
are anywhere near correct, Pataliputra would have been far larger
than any other South Asian city of its day, and on this score alone
would certainly qualify for the title of Metropolis.’22 Ashoka would
later travel to other cities in the course of his duties as a prince, and
when doing so is likely to have noticed that many of these too had
massive ramparts and overlooked rivers. But they will have seem­
ed Lilliputian compared to his ancestral city. Two locations that
figure prominently in Ashoka’s early years are Vidisha and Taxila.
The ramparts of Vidisha enclosed around 240 hectares, while the
Mauryan city at Taxila covered a mere 50 hectares. So, in terms
of sheer scale, the urban landscape of Ashoka’s early years was
singular. The Pataliputra of his childhood was not just any walled
city on the banks of a big river. It was by the standards of the time
an enorm­ous sprawl which, by comparison with other Indian
urban centres and cities, was colossal.
This sprawling metropolis now formed the political core of
a subcontinental empire which, with an emperor residing in it,
possessed enormous authority. The king’s palace in a city of these
dimensions is likely to have been impressive, but Megasthenes does
not describe it. The security arrangements of his residence, however,
are: Shakespeare’s ‘uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’ could
 pata l i p u t r a a n d t h e p r i n c e 55

have been said of Ashoka’s forefathers instead of Henry IV, for

Megasthenes tells us that the king was not meant to sleep in the
daytime and by night had constantly to change his ‘couch’ because
he had to safeguard himself against all the people plotting to kill
him. For this reason his care was entrusted to women, Megas­-
thenes says—the time lag between the Greeks and us leaving room
for doubt about whether he was also being tongue-in-cheek when
making the observation. But safety was a pressing concern; Ashoka’s
own grandfather had usurped the crown only a short few years
earlier, and we know that some fifty years after Ashoka the crown
was again snatched off the Mauryan brow by another usurper. So,
every ruling dynast would have had as his first instinct the cer­-
tainty of being the cynosure within a predatory, treacherous am­
bience, the daggers barely sheathed round every corner. The king,
Megasthenes says, left his palace only on specific occasions: in times
of war, when he judged cases in court, when he offered sacrifice,
and when he went hunting. The rituals surrounding the hunt as the
emperor left the palace are vividly captured in his account, not least
because they are so extraordinary, the emperor being surrounded
by an immediate ring of female security guards:
Crowds of women surround him, and outside of this circle spearmen
are ranged. The road is marked off with ropes, and it is death, for man
and woman alike, to pass within the ropes. Men with drums and gongs
lead the procession. The king hunts in the enclosures and shoots ar-
rows from a platform. At his side stand two or three armed women. If
he hunts in the open grounds he shoots from the back of an elephant.
Of the women, some are in chariots, some on horses, and some even on
elephants, and they are equipped with weapons of every kind, as if they
were going on a campaign.23
In this matter the Arthashastra corroborates the Indica. It tells
us of many women among the king’s trusted helpers, from bow-
bearing female guards when he rose in the morning to ‘female slaves
of proved integrity’ who were supposed to ‘do the work of bath-
attendants, shampooers, bed-preparers, laundresses and garland-
makers.’24 In early sculptural representations too, as for instance at
Bharhut in Central India, we find female attendants accompanying
56 ashoka in ancient india

kings in procession. Ajatashatru is one of these kings and is shown

sitting on his state elephant, with a woman attendant bearing the
parasol behind him; the accompanying elephants are mounted by
women mahouts.25
While all the anecdotes and allusions relating to the Mauryan
royalty in the Indica contain no description of any of their resi­
dential quarters either, this may not have seemed a lack if the ruins
of such establishments had survived. But nothing has remained.
The archaeological evidence for a royal residence, and of the
para­phernalia of streets and lanes and the secular and religious
structures surrounding it, has been rendered insignificant by cen­
turies of dust and over-building. Segments of structures and walls
occasionally emerge in the course of modern construction, in
localities such as Rajendranagar, where Mauryan terracottas were
found when sewage lines were being laid; then in the Patna Dak
bungalow area, which was demolished and replaced by a Kisan
Bhawan, in the process exposing Mauryan pottery and numerous
ring wells; and in the Patna Museum compound where Maur­
yan remains appeared in the course of digging for constructing a
foun­tain.26 But none of these appear to be royal buildings. This is
disappointing to those interested in visualizing the world of royalty
on the ground, especially since several medieval palace com­plexes,
from those of the Vijayanagara rulers at Hampi to the Mughal
palaces of Agra and Delhi, are well known and have survived.
The residences and administrative blocks of ancient Indian city
rulers have generally been more elusive. Even in the Mauryan city
of Taxila, which has been extensively excavated, we see dwelling
houses and structures along the streets and lanes, but the buildings
of the elite tend to go missing; and this is true for other Mauryan
cities as well.
An important reason for the problem in relation to Pataliputra
is that much of what we know about it does not, in fact, come
from the centre of the ancient city, where the palace was likely
to be located, but from what has emerged of the edges and out­-
skirts of the old town, where controlled excavations have been
possible. Since fortifications were usually put up on a settlement’s
 pata l i p u t r a a n d t h e p r i n c e 57

bound­aries, the remains of the wooden palisade which protected

Pataliputra have been revealed. This was an element of the urban
landscape vividly described by Megasthenes. Uprights of strong
timber that have been found in excavations in various parts of
present-day Patna make it clear that his description was, in this
case, based on what he actually saw. These defences were made
of two parallel rows of walls constituted by wooden posts about
4.5 m. high, paved with wooden sleepers, and covered above with
wooden planks. This was likely to have been a tunnel-like passage.
It was one that was covered with earth up to a certain height on
its exterior.27 We also know that the city’s drains, which discharg­
ed waste water outside the city, were made of wood. Such details
about drains and palisades are a consequence of numerous digs in
the area of Bulandibagh in Patna, a locality once dominated by a
fruit garden—thus allowing enough space to excavate.
Wood for defences and drains seems an odd choice of material
for the purposes at hand, but it was a carefully thought out choice.
The wood used, that of the sal tree, is unusually hard and possesses
the high survival capacity required in Pataliputra, which then had, as
Patna does today, a high level of subsoil water. In fact, in the 1926–7
excavations of Manoranjan Ghosh on behalf of the Archaeologi­
cal Survey of India (ASI) at Bulandibagh, deep ponds of water had
to first be baled out before digging could begin.28 The watery sur­
roundings of Patna were known to cause waterlogging, which was
why wood was used for defences and drains. Interestingly, these
walls of wooden planks that have since turned up in numerous loca­
li­ties in Patna were not visible to the first archaeological explorers
of the city. J.D. Beglar’s 1872–3 account categorically stated that in
modern Patna he failed to ‘discover a single relic, or any traces of the
great edifices’ that were supposed to have been built there. This he
explained with his hypothesis that the ancient city had been washed
away by the Ganga.29 Beglar, an assistant to Alexander Cunning­-
ham, Director General of the ASI, did not in this instance display
the archaeological intuition of his superior, whose skill in dis­-
covering archaeological corroboration for literary descriptions
at ancient sites was legendary. A couple of decades later Laurence
58 ashoka in ancient india

Austin Waddell, a lieutenant colonel associated with the Indian

Medical Service, who had a keen interest in the history of Buddhism
and Patna, found substantial ‘portions of the old wooden walls of
the city described by Megasthenes.’30 These regularly came to light
when villagers dug wells: ‘On striking these great beams standing
erect so many feet below the surface the superstitious villag­
ers, unable to account for the presence of the huge posts, usually
abandon their attempted wells.’31 Later, many more features of
these intriguing structures were excavated by officers of the ASI.
But by then the palisades had paled into the background as the
remains of a large pillared hall of Mauryan times emerged out of
the locality of Kumrahar.32
But coming back to Pataliputra’s defences: whoever planned and
built these extensive wooden structures evidently went to a great
deal of trouble, for sal was not likely to have been available in any
forest near the Ganga around Pataliputra. We do not even know
where the forests from which the sal was procured were located. The
popularity of the tree is suggested by evidence of the use of its wood
in several other settlements discovered in this part of India, such
as at Chirand and Senuwar, the contexts here greatly antedating its
occurrence at Pataliputra.33 But the real difference was in the scale
of use: Pataliputra was the first city in the Magadha region to use
this wood for such extensive urban infrastructure. The ancient town
planners and builders seem to have known a thing or two, for the
trouble they took to obtain and cart the wood was worth it: more
than 2300 years later, long sections of their work remain intact.
How did Chandragupta’s grandchildren view this vast wooden-
walled city architecture? Did they climb up the watchtowers and
move across the ramparts, spellbound by the view? Did they strike
up conversations with soldiers patrolling the city? The day-to-
day practicalities and pleasures of a Mauryan prince’s life are not
available from any of the sources, but it is a reasonable assumption
that there must have been occasion for the children of the rulers to
have moved around, to have ventured in and out of the city.
Tantalizing glimpses of a different kind relating to the urban
culture of the city are seen in the antiquities that Mauryan citizens,
 pata l i p u t r a a n d t h e p r i n c e 59

royal and ordinary, will have been familiar with. Large free-
standing dancing terracotta figures, unearthed from the locality
of Bulandibagh, are thought to represent Mauryan court art.34
The confident urbane sophistication of these female figures, with
the edges of their skirts lifted, suggests dancers of the type that
occasionally performed for palace people.35 One of the dancers,
her carefully combed hair in a cropped front fringe, carries a small
drum (‘damaru’) in her raised hand. She also seems to have a heavy
ring around each hand, the one on the right being pliant.
Another archaeological haul yielded a cache of twenty-one
small soapstone discs. They were found packed together in a dried-
up watercourse in the Murtaziganj locality.36 Pieces of exquisite
workmanship, with a great variety of fine detail, these miniature
discs depict lotus flowers, nude female figures that are thought to be
goddesses of fertility, and a profusion of birds and animals arranged
in circles—parrots, peacocks, and geese; lions, stags, elephants, and
horses; even an owl and a rhinoceros.37 Why the discs were made
and the purpose for which they were used are not clear, but they
are carved with such exceptional skill that the supposition is they
were meant to catch the eye of an elite clientele that probably used
them in some sort of ritual. But the localities where such elites lived
within the city have, like the royal palaces, not survived.
Having sufficiently rued the vanished structures of the Maur­
yan empire, let us look instead at an inestimable treasure that
miraculously survived and has been found, namely the Arthashastra
by Kautilya.38 This is a text extensively used by practically everyone
who writes on the Mauryas. Like the ramparts of Pataliputra, it
remained hidden from scholarly gaze for many centuries: despite
numerous allusions to it in later literature, as a material artefact
the text was not in evidence.39 The first manuscript appeared in
1904 when a pandit of Tanjore district handed over a set of 168
palm leaf folios in the Grantha script, along with the fragment of
a Sanskrit commentary, to R. Shamasastry, librarian of the Mysore
Governmental Oriental Library. Shamasastry soon realized that
what he had acquired was the first available manuscript of the
Arthashastra. This he went on to edit and publish, first in successive
60 ashoka in ancient india

volumes of Indian Antiquary and eventually as a book.40 While the

manuscript was no more than a century or two old, Shamasastry
recognized it as a copy of a much older text on ancient statecraft,
one which could be dated to the time of the Mauryas. Several other
manuscripts were later unearthed, some complete, others with
a few folios missing, mainly in libraries in Travancore, Madras,
and Cochin, with one version in North Gujarat.41 These, along
with commentaries on the Arthashastra, were used by R.P. Kangle,
Professor of Sanskrit at Elphinstone College, Bombay, to pre-
pare an excellent critical edition of the text, along with an English
trans­lation. This edition has been used by generations of scholars
to come to grips with the treasure-house of insights and advice that
the author of the Arthashastra offered to ambitious conquerors of
the late centuries bce.
Notwithstanding the fact that it is widely used for reconstruct­
ing Mauryan times, there are sharp differences about the date and
authorship of the Arthashastra.42 As with the Megasthenes Indica,
experts differ over the usefulness of this work as a source in the
con­ventional sense for conclusions about Mauryan material life
and culture: unlike the Indica, the Arthashastra is a theoretical
work which does not refer to specific events. The historian Patrick
Olivelle has pointed out that there is a ‘Kautilya recension’ and a
later ‘Shastric redaction’ in which the text’s structure was imposed
on the original treatise.43 He also provides various arguments to
suggest that the ‘Kautilya recension’ was put together much after
the time of the Mauryas. However, the cultural data on the basis
of which he has suggested this is flawed and some of that data
actually underlines that the original recension was likely to be of
Mauryan vintage.44 On balance, it is reasonable to consider the core
of this formidable manual of statecraft as being anchored in the
late centuries bce. Since it is focussed on the doings of imperial
power, an incidental benefit is that it gives glimpses of palace life.
Among its various subjects are regulations for the royal residence
and its members. In the interstices of its hortatory pronouncements
lies some of the context from the time when Ashoka was young.
The palace is described in the Arthashastra as standing to the
 pata l i p u t r a a n d t h e p r i n c e 61

north of the heart of the residential area of a fortified city.45 The

royal residence itself—if the text’s prescriptions were to be followed,
or conversely if they were based on some idealized form of actual
practice—was made up of many halls. It stood within its own
inner fortifications, comprising ramparts, a surrounding moat, and
gates. The treatise designates specific places for a variety of people
and activities: the royal family would have slept in quarters given
to each member or group. The princes and princesses, for instance,
were supposed to live in quarters outside the apartments for the
royal women, including presumably their mothers. The king’s
cham­ber, on the other hand, was in the centre of the palace, at a
dis­tance from the family’s quarters.
The provisions for making the king’s living quarters impregn­-
able and invulnerable are many and border on the paranoid:
He should cause to be constructed a living chamber in the centre in
accordance with the procedure laid down for the treasury, or a maze-
house with concealed passages in walls and in its centre a living cham-
ber, or an underground room with its opening covered by the wooden
image of a deity in a nearby sanctuary and having many subterranean
passages (and) above it a palace with a stair-case concealed in a wall or
having an entrance and exit through a hollow pillar as a living cham-
ber with the floor fixed to a mechanism (and thus) capable of sinking
below, in order to counteract a calamity or when a calamity is appre-
hended.46
Did Ashoka’s father Bindusara occupy this sort of chamber? Were
his children allowed in, to be with him? If the prescriptions of
Kautilya’s manual were strictly followed, the children may well have
been barred entry, for certainly the queens were strongly frown­
ed upon as entrants to his majesty’s living quarters. Instead, the
recommendation was for the king to visit the inner apartments
(‘antaragriha’) of the queen favoured on a particular day, though
even this was meant to happen only after the host queen was
‘cleared of suspicion by old women.’ If Kautilya had had his way,
all palace inmates would have lived forever segregated, more or
less, each limited to his or her particular quarters, mingling only
when strictly necessary.
62 ashoka in ancient india

So obsessed is Kautilya with security that his injunctions could

have served as the rule book for a medieval nunnery. If he had also
been allowed his way with plants and animal life, the royal home
would have been insulated from many of these as well. Precaution
being required against poison and serpents, only the shoots of
plants such as the Ashvattha, as also ‘Jivanti, Sveta, Muskaka and
Pushpa­vandaka’, were admissible. The fauna deemed worthy were
those that apparently destroyed serpents, so ‘letting loose pea­
cocks, ichneumons and spotted deer’ on the premises was a good
idea. Similarly useful among bird life, ‘the heron becomes frantic
in the proximity of poison, the pheasant becomes faint, the
intoxicated cuckoo dies, the eyes of the Cakora-partridge become
discoloured.’47
In the quarters where Ashoka and his siblings spent their grow­
ing years, there might thus have been a plethora of restrictions.
What of the provisions made by their emperor-father for their
education? The number of Ashoka’s siblings remains unknown,
precision in such matters being difficult given the number of
queens and concubines available to the king, the tendency not to
count girl-children at all, and the possibility of some of the king’s
female entourage being impregnated by male courtiers whose
progeny became indistinguishable from the king’s. The tendency in
many ancient Indian texts is therefore to offer a symbolic number
indicating the virility and fertility of a regime: ‘101 sons’ is often
given as a stereotypical figure, which it is in one account pertaining
to the Ashokan context, where this number of offspring are said
to have been born of Bindusara’s many wives.48 The exaggeration
shows in any case that many children in a polygamous royal estab­
lishment was the norm.
How they were educated remains unclear. The king himself
was unlikely to have had much to do with their education since
he did not see much of his family. His daily schedule as detailed
in the Arthashastra suggests that his days and nights were divided
into eight parts each. Time slots were allotted for looking into
income and expenditure, the affairs of citizens and country people,
military plans and a review of troops, consulting counsellors and
 pata l i p u t r a a n d t h e p r i n c e 63

dispatch­ing secret agents, and even being blessed by a chief cook

and astro­loger, but no time was set aside for family and progeny. One
imagines that the sixth part of the day, when he could ‘engage in
recreation at his pleasure’,49 refers to activities quite far removed
from a devoted enlarging of the minds of children.
Proper arrangements were of course put in place within the
palace for the education of princes. A general sense of their up­
bringing can be had from the section in the Arthashastra which
sets out how princes were to be trained. Unlike Egypt, where we
see Cleopatra employing a distinguished scholar of Damascus to
educate her twins, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, in the
court of the Mauryas the princesses were not thought worthy of
an education.50 No source says anything about Ashoka’s sisters.
Ashoka himself was likely to have been raised, like his male siblings,
to be an effective leader and administrator. A prince’s training
ranged from the martial arts to more cerebral subjects. In his early
childhood, probably at the age of 3, he would have been tonsured,
and then instructed in writing and arithmetic. After his initiation
(‘upanayana’), he is likely to have had several tutors because he was
expected to ‘learn the three Vedas and philosophy from the learned,
economics from the heads of departments (and) the science of
politics from theoretical and practical exponents.’51 The training was
continuous, conducted daily. In the first part of the day the subject
of study was how to use elephants, horses, chariots, and weapons; in
the latter part the prince was expected to listen to what is described
as ‘itihasa’. This denotes ‘history’ in our time, but in Ashoka’s it
covered a range of knowledge about the world. A prince listening
to ‘itihasa’ would have acquired narrative histories of the universe,
economics, and the existing ideas about social functioning.52
One may reasonably assume that the range of able officials in
the court of Bindusara included tutors designated for such work. A
minister-in-charge of the princes was, we know, expected to live in
the palace.53 That Ashoka was well taught is evident from the fact
that his inscriptions reflect a deep interest in and understanding of
statecraft, philosophy, and ethics. His experiences and exploits in
later life will have added to his personal and intellectual depth, but
64 ashoka in ancient india

the propensity towards such expansion will have been nurtured by

the princely instruction that first honed his character.
While this early training was meant to ensure that the ruler’s
sons were not lacking in discipline and mental development,
all princes, disciplined and undisciplined alike, were thought to
pose a danger to the king.54 In one well-known analogy, princes
are like crabs—creatures known to devour their begetters. It would
seem from the existence of sayings such as this that the thought
of regicide diluted the filial gaze in every sovereign of the ancient
world.55 Undisciplined sons, disaffected ones, those in disfavour,
and those of evil intellect are described at length, as are the ways to
neutralize them or otherwise do away with them. The provisions
tended to vary according to the number of sons the king had. If his
only son was disaffected, he was to be put in prison; if there were
many sons, the recommendation was to send the disaffected one to
the frontier or some other suitably distant region where he might in
time be swallowed up forever.56
The palpable distrust that such provisions reveals was perfect­-
ly plausible since there was no shortage of kings who had either
been killed off or dethroned by ungrateful or ambitious sons.
Some three centuries before Ashoka a king of Magadha, Bimbisara,
in about the sixth century bce, was murdered by his son Ajata­
shatru—whom we met earlier as the builder of the fortifications at
Pataligrama. Bimbisara’s contemporary Pasenadi, monarch of the
Kosala king­dom, fared little better. His royal insignia was handed
over to his son Vidudabha by one of his own ministers, the son
being then installed as king while the dispossessed father was
deserted by practically everyone.
In the same breath that cautions kings against their sons, the
manual offers survival techniques to princes out of favour. Disguise
and seeking refuge with a neighbouring prince are very highly
thought of; parricide is reserved as the last option in worst-case
scenarios. The odd thing in this vicious terrain of royal sagas in
which princes are ever ready to stab their fathers in the back is the
tenacity of primogeniture. Blood, it seems, was always thicker than
water. Kings guard themselves to the hilt against their own sons. But
when the time comes, the son inherits.
 pata l i p u t r a a n d t h e p r i n c e 65

Did Bindusara send Ashoka to different parts of his empire

because he sensed a disaffected son? Ashoka apparently went to
Taxila on his father’s orders, but whether the emperor sent him
there because he wanted to keep a contrary son at bay remains
unclear. In any case, for us this seems a good moment to leave Patali­
putra and see what Ashoka is likely to have encountered at Taxila if
he did indeed go there.
Ashoka would have approached that very distant north-western
city somewhat cautiously: it was really very far from Pataliputra,
some 2000 km or so across a land, as we shall see, of large rivers
and luxuriant forests. At that point in time, Taxila was also said
to be a somewhat tense and turbulent place—exactly the sort of
frontier location to which the discontented prince was, in Kautilya’s
opinion, supposed to be transferred.
 3

Mauryan Taxila

T
axila is the name of an ancient city as well
as the sobriquet of an archaeological site. When Taxila
figures in the ambitions of eastern aggrandizers like the
Maurya rulers based in Pataliputra, or in those of invaders from the
West—the Persian Darius I and Alexander of Macedon, mainly—
it is a single city that comes to mind. Its Sanskrit name, Takshashila,
was first pared down to Taxila by the Greeks when they described
it as the foremost city of Punjab, and presumably since the Greek
version trips easier off the tongue than the Sanskrit—unlike the
slightly absurd-sounding anglicization ‘Sandrakottos’ for Chandra­
gupta—the abbreviation took root and was extended to describe
the larger archaeological site of Taxila. The latter is actually an
ensemble of several sites: three city sites, and the ruins of many
Buddhist stupas and monasteries scattered across hills and spurs
in the surrounding countryside, including knolls near the Tamra
nala and the northern slopes of the ridges of Margala. Of these, it is
the settlement of people that came to occupy what is known as
the Bhir mound which is central to this story, since it was at the
Mauryan city there that Ashoka is said to have arrived at the behest
of his father.
No chronicle or record contemporaneous with Ashoka exists
to tell us of his campaign to pacify Taxila. It is once again the
 m au rya n tax i l a 67

second ce Ashokavadana which recounts his arrival there, as also

the circumstances which drove him so far to the north-west front­
iers of the kingdom. Taxila, the text tells us, was in the midst of a
rebellion which Bindusara wanted his son to quell—bizarrely, says
its translator John Strong, without weapons:
Now it happened that the city of Takshashila rebelled against King
Bindusara. He therefore sent Ashoka there, saying: ‘Go, son, lay siege to
the city of Takshashila.’ He sent with him a fourfold army [consisting
of cavalry, elephants, chariots, and infantry], but he denied it any arms.
As Ashoka was about to leave Pataliputra, his servants informed him
of this: ‘Prince, we don’t have any weapons of war; how and with what
shall we do battle?’
Ashoka declared: ‘If my merit is such that I am to become king, may
weapons of war appear before me!’
And as soon as he had spoken these words, the earth opened up
and deities brought forth weapons. Before long, he was on his way to
Takshashila with his fourfold army of troops.1
Several interpretations seem possible. Given the tendency of this
variety of hagiography to exaggerate and valorize its protagonist,
sometimes to the point of deifying him, Bindusara’s decision to send
Ashoka to Taxila without the required means could simply denote
an inadequacy of weapons rather than the absolute lack of them,
the son’s subsequent expeditionary success thereby becoming one
of the many miracles associated with his glorious career. Alternat­-
i­vely, it could mean that Bindusara, who as we saw is supposed to
have disliked this son of his, was engineering Ashoka’s Taxila ex­
pedition to ensure a failure that would forever remove him from
Magadha. It may be stretching it a bit to argue that the emperor
had an accurate premonition about Ashoka not needing to resort
to arms, but even this perspective on the affair is not unwarranted
because, according to the text, though Ashoka arrived in Taxila at
the head of an armed contingent, the swords remained in their
scabbards: the citizenry, instead of offering resistance, came out of
their city and on to its roads to welcome him, saying ‘We did not
want to rebel against the prince  .  .  .  nor even against King Bindu­
sara; but evil ministers came and oppressed us.’2 This image of
68 ashoka in ancient india

the prince in Taxila, armed yet not having to resort to arms, fits
with the later textual representation of Ashoka who, as an ‘iron-
wheeled monarch’ (‘ayashcakravartin’), is supposed to have ruled
Jambudvipa (India) with the threat rather than the actual use of
the sword.3 Whichever way you look at it, benevolence, compassion,
and a benign attitude towards his fellow human beings seem to lie
at the back of the assertion that Ashoka’s Taxila campaign was non-
violent from start to finish.
But did Prince Ashoka ever actually come to Taxila? He himself
never says he did, but that is neither here nor there because we have
seen how famously reticent he was about his early life. Whoever
composed the Ashokavadana, though, may have known that the
city bore many markers associated with Ashoka. For one, the most
impressive Buddhist monument of Taxila was a stupa whose name,
Dharmarajika, alludes to Ashoka. The nomenclature denotes a
religious structure built by the Dharmaraja of the Buddhists, the
emperor Ashoka. So, the Ashokavadana’s account of its protagonist’s
visit to a turbulent Taxila squares with the archaeological evidence.
For another, the title by which Ashoka was known in his edicts
which figure a little later in the book, was used in an Aramaic ins­
cription that was found at Taxila on an octagonal pillar of white
marble. The epigraph mentioned ‘our lord Priyardarshi’.4 That this
‘Priyadarshi’ was Ashoka is evident from the nature of the mes­
sage which speaks of non-injury to creatures and obedience to the
aged.5 In other words, Buddhists and others familiar with Taxila
who may have read or listened to this nugget about Ashoka’s early
life are not likely to have doubted its veracity.
It is not as clear how the scribe who put together this legend
of Ashoka’s life would have visualized the city itself. Travellers fre­
quently went to Taxila, a flourishing urban centre in the early cen­
turies ce, and they may have carried back impressions of its big
buildings and broad streets. But by then it was no longer situated
where Ashoka had been: it stood in a different location, at Sirkap,
towards the northern side of the valley, occupying a small but well-
defined plateau there. The Ashokavadana contains nothing enlight­
ening for those curious about this old city, nor about how it would
 m au rya n tax i l a 69

have appeared to Ashoka, nor why its citizens had rebelled against
his father. But this is because the work is purposive and agenda
driven: it is mostly a hagiographical and not a historical work. It
is written to buttress Buddhism by highlighting the fact of a great
monarch transformed by its tenets.
Modern readers are more fortunate than their ancient counter­
parts in that, because of the extensiveness of its ruins, they can
imagine what ancient Taxila was like. This emerged from the
long and detailed excavations conducted by the ASI under John
Marshall for two decades or so from 1913. The ruins so patiently
unearthed over long years still stand, testimony of the historical
settlement which Ashoka apparently beheld as a young man.6 The
archaeological record of Taxila, it needs to be said, is very different
from the narrative of the Ashokavadana. Dated imperial and official
inscriptions, which can shore up the plausibility of events mentioned
in ancient sources, are rare in India, as they are in large parts of
the ancient world.7 So an episode such as the arrival of an armed
Mauryan prince and his party at Taxila has left no material trace
at all and is basically unconnected with what has been identified
by the excavations, namely the building and rebuilding of houses
and streets, the changing stratigraphic features, and some events
that may have influenced those changes. This makes it possible to
describe the kind of city that Taxila was, and the quality of life of its
citizens in Ashokan times.

***

To reach Taxila the prince of Pataliputra would have traversed an

enormous distance, nearly 2000 km, that being roughly the distance
between present-day Patna and Punjab. The journey will have been
across a vast crescent of alluvium created by the Ganga and its
tributaries in the east and the Indus and smaller rivers that joined
its flow towards the west. In the third century bce, there will have
been some open grassland and stretches cleared for cultivation, but
70 ashoka in ancient india

large parts of the tracts were thickly forested. References in ancient

texts like the Mahabharata, as also pollen records and charred
wood specimens from sites in the upper Gangetic plains, suggest
this.8 These forests did not, however, deter either travel or trade.
A grand arc of communication existed across this northern
axis, humming with people and products, and was called the Uttara­
patha (northern road). Originating in the regions beyond Taxila
and sweeping across the Indus and Gangetic plains, the Uttarapatha
went much beyond Pataliputra, to the port town of Tamralipti on
the eastern coast.9 Traders, pedlars, caravan leaders, religious men,
and princes commonly figure as travellers on this route; and, as we
saw, Megasthenes too had journeyed over this stretch. Much before
him, residents of Magadha are known to have travelled the long way
to Taxila. In a story set in the time of the Buddha, a resident of the
Magadhan capital Rajagriha, Jivaka by name, went to train under a
renowned physician at Taxila,10 returning to his home town after a
studentship that lasted as long as seven years.
While texts make the Uttarapatha visible through such jour-
neys, archaeological sites have yielded raw materials that were
con­­veyed along the same route. Beyond Taxila, from Afghanistan,
lapis lazuli, for instance, appears to have been in demand in the cities
across this axis, from Rairh in Rajasthan to Sravasti and Rajghat in
the middle Gangetic plains.11 Many other exotic stones and metals,
from tin to silver, came into northern India from Afghanistan. For
Bindusara this was an important reason for ensuring peace in Taxila
and friendship with its citizens. The settlement had become vital as
a hub for traders and merchants from Central Asia on their journey
into the heartland of Gangetic India.
Some decades before Ashoka’s putative journey Chandragupta
had pacified the Punjab and incorporated it into his empire, this
being necessary to consolidate Magadhan supremacy further up
towards the Hindukush mountains. If Taxila, the premier city of this
frontier region of the Mauryan empire, was restive, the impact on
overall stability within the geopolitical orbit could be disastrous.12
Quelling turbulence there was additionally crucial because this was
a very prosperous region. It was, in fact, reputed to be part of one
 m au rya n tax i l a 71

of the richest provinces in the ancient East from a time preceding

Alexander’s arrival in 326 bce: the twentieth satrapy of the Achae­
menid empire in the sixth century bce had been described by
Herodotus as the richest in the Persian empire.13 The king of
Taxila capitulated to Alexander, who is said to have sacrificed there
as well as held ‘a competition in athletics and horsemanship’.14
Subsequently, Alexander marched eastward to attack Porus, leaving
behind at Taxila—as he did in various other conquered cities—a
garrison of Macedonians and mercenaries under a commander. The
mercenaries murdered their commander, but they too did not last
long. Towards the end of the fourth century bce Taxila was again
subjugated, this time by Chandragupta.
Martial conquests such as those by Alexander and Chandragupta,
as by other heroic men of the past, have been endowed with celebrity
status because military success and the building of vast empires—
which from a saner perspective might justifiably be thought of as
male megalomania of the most revolting form—have come to be
accepted as ‘wonderful’ and ‘great’. Looked at from a more Ashokan
lens, i.e. a moral common sense based on humanity, compassion,
and fellow feeling, these men of drive and ambition slaughtered
thousands of soldiers, divested Taxila of its independent political
status, and ruined the lives of the city’s residents and their families.
The Ashokavadana’s account of a restive populace, resentful of the
Mauryan ministers who oppressed them, if historically true, makes
eminent sense. And Ashoka is likely to have been a relieved man
if indeed its citizens, contrary to his expectations, welcomed rather
than resisted him.
What did Taxila look like when it welcomed him? Literary ac­
counts are unsatisfactorily silent about this. John Marshall, who
devoted twenty-two years of his working life to excavating Taxila,
writes of the curiosity of the Greeks accompanying Alexander when
they saw the city’s shaven-headed and long-haired ascetics, whom
they encountered practising austerities. The Westerners endea­
voured to understand Indian gymnosophy and related philosophi­
cal directions and were amazed by social habits such as offering the
dead to vultures. But these observers, Marshall laments, had nothing
72 ashoka in ancient india

to say ‘about the appearance of the city, the houses of the people,
or the countless other things that an archaeologist wants to know
concerning material culture.’15 Consequently we know nothing
either about the city’s governance by Mauryan officials which the
Taxilans were supposedly rebelling against.
Luckily there is a welter of ruins—walls and wells, shops and
squares, and much else—from which the lives of the citizenry can
be reconstructed. Leading a contingent of men and animals, Ashoka
will have sighted Taxila from a distance, standing as it did on a plateau
which rose between 18 and 21 metres above the surrounding plains.
The royal party will have seen a crowded congeries of structures
cover­ing virtually the whole of the Bhir plateau, which measures
some 1097 metres north to south and around 668 metres east to
west, as does the city atop it.16 Size-wise Taxila was far smaller than
some of the other great cities of Ashoka’s time, but not many were
locat­ed on a natural promontory visible from a distance. Taxila,
Ashoka may well have thought, was in this respect a little like
Champa—the place from where Ashoka’s mother possibly hailed—
in ancient Bihar, a very old town on a tableland, seen before it is
reached, and not far from Pataliputra.
As the army reached Taxila’s immediate surroundings the variable
elevations that made up the skyline of the city would have become
visible. Its flat-roofed houses were likely to have been of varying
heights, the surface of the plateau being uneven and the rubble of
earlier construction lying buried under them.17 The houses were
plastered with clay, this clay-clad appearance of the city being much
the same as when the first settlement was established there in the
sixth century bce. That earliest settlement was substantially smaller
than the cities that grew over it, but its structures would have look­-
ed the same because the walls of its buildings had across the cen­
turies been evenly and thickly coated with a mixture of mud plaster
and straw.18
Beyond that remarkable homogeneity given by mud plaster, the
character of the house walls and public buildings had changed.
These were now of stone, made from locally available varieties of
a hard limestone found in the neighbouring foothills and the
 m au rya n tax i l a 73

very soft lime kanjur available all over the plains.19 Whereas the
constructions of earlier settlements at Taxila were generally of a
rough and loose rubble masonry, the blocks of buildings that made
up the Mauryan city were neat and compact. The archaeological
strata here span several centuries, going back to the fifth century
bce, if not earlier (this being designated strata IV), and continuing
till the invasion of the Bactrian Greeks in the second century bce
(represented by the first or uppermost stratum). The Mauryan
was the second stratum, and the walls of buildings of this period
showed more careful and clean ways of construction. The stone
walls, though, would not have been visible to the royal visitor be­
cause the practice of cladding them externally and internally with
plaster seems to have persisted despite the improved building
materials. The city’s appearance will have struck Ashoka as starkly
different from that of most of the cities seen on the way to Taxila:
cities like Kaushambi and Hastinapur were brick-built since they
stood on alluvial expanses bereft of stone.
Usually, the impression given by a city depends upon the har­­-
mony between the geometry of its streets and lanes with the
residential and public structures that border them. Entering Taxila,
the main street will have impressed the party from Pataliputra.
Because of its width, averaging some 7 metres and its more or
less straight alignment, ‘First Street’ is what it was fittingly called
by its excavator. 20   Visit­ors in the third century bce who used this
street were travelling over an artery that had been Taxila’s main
thoroughfare since the time of its first settlement. We know this
because there is no debris of collapsed or demolished structures of
earlier strata underneath, of the kind usually encountered under
blocks of houses that line roads. Instead, there is ‘only a deep accu­
mulation of small boulders and river pebbles that had been used to
pave the street or had been dumped there from time to time when
it became necessary to raise the level.’21
How visitors and city residents experienced the main street
would have depended upon the season. This is because Taxila lacked
a drainage system. While there may have been surface drains—
such surviving remains have been found in the Fourth Street and
Fig. 3.1: The city plan of Mauryan Taxila on the Bhir mound
 m au rya n tax i l a 75

in Lane 1—they do not connect with a main drain of the type

which would have carried rain water out of the city.22 So, for all
prac­tical purposes, the impressive main street functioned both
as a communication axis and wet-weather watercourse. Ashoka
would not have enjoyed parading his troops through slushy water
flowing down First Street had his arrival been during the monsoon,
especially as the flow during downpours was more in the nature of
an inundation on account of water from the higher lanes augment­
ing its own.
Taxila’s geometry presents another contrast with the quality of
planning that went into creating the system of drainage at Patali­-
putra, where we have already seen an impressive network of
underground wooden drains. Taxila was also very different from
the first cities of the north-west, such as Harappa and Mohenjo-
daro, that flourished in the third millennium bce. Comparisons
between cities separated by more than two millennia are not
specially useful, but for the historian of archaeology it is difficult
not to think of India’s first cities in connection with Taxila since
Marshall, who presided over the discovery of those first cities, also
excavated Taxila. His report on Mohenjodaro describes streets
that, like Taxila’s First Street, run remarkably straight and most of
them, he showed, had burnt-brick drains associated with them.23
Moving beyond the orderly if somewhat muddy First Street,
the plan shows a city full of oddly aligned winding streets and
lanes. It is unlikely that the royal visitor and his entourage undertook
a tour of these, but since archaeological details about them help re-
create the ambience of movement and habitation, it is worth going
beyond what is likely to have been seen. Much narrower than the
main street, these side streets and lanes are an odd combination of
straight and winding segments.24 The Second Street, for instance,
begins on a somewhat straight alignment that, less than halfway
through the city, moves by several feet towards the west, and again
after intersecting the Third Street lurches in a wide curve towards
the east. As for the lanes, ‘they were narrower still, no more in fact
than passages between the houses in which two persons would
often find it difficult to walk abreast.’25 A few of these narrow alleys
76 ashoka in ancient india

appear to have been meant only for the private use of the houses
that flanked them. This was the case with Lane 2 which, towards its
western end, was cordoned off by a cross-wall.26 This meant that
people who wanted to cut across from First Street to Second Street
could not use Lane 2, which connected them. Instead, they would
either have to follow Lane 1 or move north and turn left, on Third
Street. So, Lane 2 in effect became a kind of private alleyway.
What makes this mishmash surprising is that the elegant main
street had been the city’s thoroughfare from earliest times. Practically
all the other streets and lanes, the awfully asymmetrical ones, were
created later, during the late fourth and early third centuries bce.27
One would have expected the later development to have emulated
the proportionate and urban good sense of the earlier rather than
fallen short of them, so the disfigurations of Taxila’s bylanes have
disappointed many a modern scholar of those times, especially as
images of cities in Mauryan times commonly suggest a reasonable
degree of planning. So, for instance, the ideal urban layout as des­
cribed in the Arthashastra is of a city space demarcated by six
roads, three running from east to west and three from north to
south; this is what anyone familiar with the literature of those
times would broadly expect to hold generally true. The reality of
Mauryan urban spaces, Taxila reveals, was far less regimented.
Whatever the prescriptive vision, circumstances on the ground
in those times, as mostly in contemporary urban India, were
likely to be of greater significance in how the city and its streets
were shaped.
In fact, the question in relation to Taxila that needs to be answer­-
ed is this: if the city administrators had, as seems evident, under­
taken a programme of public works and practically created a new
communication network from scratch, why did they configure the
streets to run in such an irregular way? The answer is unclear, but
my guess, on the basis of what is known from below the streets
and lanes, is that the city administration had to clear structures
in the areas through which the roads were to be laid. Possibly,
their clearance campaign was resisted by citizens whose lives were
affected by the restructuring. It seems reasonable to think of some
house owners, shopkeepers, and commercial proprietors willing
 m au rya n tax i l a 77

to allow their properties to be acquired, and of others unwilling

to allow their land and homes being cut for the sake of straight
streets. The city planners at Taxila may have agreed in theory with
Kautilya but found it prudent in practice to let the topography of
subsidiary streets and lanes be determined by the availability of land
rather than by a drawing board gridiron. The streets that resulted
from this compromise are winding and haphazard, but they do
seem to represent a citizen-friendly solution.
Realizing that the streets were inconveniently aligned for the
pack animals that used them for the transport of goods, the plan­
ners took some care to ensure that the corners of houses in the
streets were protected. This was done by constructing wheel-guards
in the shape of stone pillars set up in corners. The pillars usually
rose only a little less than a metre above the ground, with another
half metre buried below ground. Also, even though the streets and
lanes were usually narrow, there were substantial open squares at
different points, a feature created to relieve the congestion in the
narrow pathways. These squares were scattered all across the city,
providing some breathing space amidst cramped and narrow lanes.
The presence of a stone bench in the south-west corner of one
of these squares, known as Square S, around or before the begin­-
ning of the Mauryan occupation also suggests that these were
meant to be used by the populace. From such street furniture it is
possible to imagine ancient Taxilans shooting the breeze in their
city squares.
Except that the breeze they shot may have been rather smelly.
The squares seem also to have served as public areas where large
garbage bins, built of stone rubble, were located. One of these, on
the east side of Square S, known by the bones and broken pottery
that were excavated out of it, leaves little doubt that it was used
by houses in its neighbourhood for refuse disposal.28 These public
garbage bins will have required a class of sweepers and refuse
collectors, well-to-do citizens in the ancient world not being famous
for personally disposing off their own household garbage, and
certainly never in the subcontinent’s caste-ordered social system.
There would also have had to be a system in place to clean out those
bins and prevent garbage overflows on to streets and squares.
78 ashoka in ancient india

Notwithstanding such a system, solid refuse was sometimes

dump­­ed into soak-wells meant for liquid refuse. This seems to have
been the case with a soak-well situated in a square at the intersec­-
tion of Lane 3 and Lane 4 in the eastern part of the city.29 It was
filled with a large quantity of pottery vessels, as many as 164 of
them, choking the whole shaft of the well.30 The dumped vessels
may have contained household kitchen waste, or else they had
outlived their utility and were just chucked. That they were thrown
in such large numbers into a well meant for liquid waste suggests
that the subcontinent’s famed contemporary incompetence in the
sphere of public hygiene and civic-mindedness goes quite a long
way back. Of course, it is possible that when distant dignitaries and
their emissaries came visiting, the city’s municipality was galvanized
into cleanliness. Ashoka would naturally never have experienced
first-hand the normal state of insanitation in Taxila.
Was royalty expected to pay obeisance at the temple at Taxila,
the most prominent public space in the city? The city brimmed
with deities. Goddesses outnumbered gods. Miniature goddesses of
clay outnumbered gods. Many of these were for domestic worship
in homes, but also seem to have formed part of the paraphernalia
of public worship at least in this most conspicuous area within the
city, where the presence of an early temple is clear.
This place of worship is in the western part of the city and com­
prises two blocks with a narrow lane running between them. In
the larger block, which is to the north, are two open courtyards, a
large pillared hall on the western side of one of the courtyards, and
some thirty rooms.31 The rooms were dwelt in and the inhabitants
are likely to have been the temple priests. The debris in this block
yielded a number of terracotta reliefs, with a male and female deity
standing side by side, so there seems little doubt about this having
been a shrine. Marshall sums it all up:
The position which it occupies alongside the street suggests   .  .  .  that
it served rather as a shrine of some sort, and if this was so the house
attached to it may well have been occupied by the priests and their
attendants or disciples. This seems more likely because in the debris of
this building, as well as among the ruins on the farther side of the lane
to the west, were found a large number of terracotta reliefs representing
 m au rya n tax i l a 79
a male and female deity standing side by side and holding hands. Such
stamped reliefs were made to be sold or presented to worshippers at
a shrine and to be kept by them as mementos or talismans, just as
figurines of devas or devis are made and sold today in shops outside
many an Indian temple. In this case it seems highly probable that the
structure referred to on the opposite side of the lane was just such a
shop, and this would explain why many of these plaques are found in it.
If I am right in drawing this inference, then the Pillared Hall acquires
an added interest as being the earliest Hindu shrine, by several cen­
turies, of which any remains have come down to us.32

The room, designated B4, close to the pillared hall was domi­-
nated by a large square tank-like construction which, Marshall
believed, could either have been an ablution tank or a fire pit. Either
way, it is a facility found within Hindu shrines; neither has been
found in early Buddhist and Jaina places of worship.
What of the deities found here, and do they provide clues to
the religion of their worshippers? The commonest ritual objects
found are votive plaques showing a male and female figure standing
side by side.33 The turbaned male, with necklace and earrings and
wearing a dhoti, holds the side of his shawl with his right hand. The
female, with ear pendants and a necklace as also a long veil on either
side of her head, rests her left hand on her hip. Similar plaques and
the terracotta matrix from which these were moulded were found
together in a shop opposite the pillared hall. Their presence there
indicates a shop-cum-manufactory which possibly supplied all
man­ner of deities—a votive relief shows a standing female deity
holding a bird in her left hand;34 another is a pot-bellied squatting
dwarf (called ‘kumbanda’) with bulging eyes and a wrinkled face.
The establishment could produce grotesque standing figures too,
the mould for such a shape having been found. The wrinkled face
is evident, but the pot belly characteristic of such figures is in this
instance missing.35
Usually, such votive plaques were procured by devotees and
offered up at the temple, possibly part of a promise for the ful­
filment of vows linked with recovery from illness, success in busi­
ness, and so on, this kind of worship being common in Indian
shrines from earliest times till now. Ashoka could conceivably have
80 ashoka in ancient india

been here and made offerings, his conversion to Buddhism being an

event associated with his later years. As with a great deal else here,
while the temple remains clearly etched, the historical characters
who came to it, prominent outsiders or resident citizens, remain
unknown.

***

Where did important visitors, such as visiting royalty, stay when

they came to Taxila? From their proportions and facilities, none
of the blocks excavated appear to be palatial. An affluent resident
of the city may have played host. With their many small rooms
built around large courtyards and their frontages marked by
shops or nearly blank façades, these house blocks will have seemed
prominent to Ashoka the moment he encountered the city. Many
Mauryan settlements have been excavated, but few of them have as
extensive a collection of surviving walls and foundations. Taxila is
much smaller than many of its contemporaries, but its ruins allow
the reconstruction of house patterns missing elsewhere.
Taxilan houses tended to give the city’s streets a distinctive aes­
thetic. Several houses had shops in front, but many were fronted
by uninspiring and largely blank walls relieved only by narrow
window slits on the ground floor. Wide windows, the norm today,
do not show up in the domestic architecture of that period; it was
the courtyard inside the house which was crucial for natural light
and ventilation. Most Taxilan houses are organized around such
courtyards. A good sense of the sizes and plans of residences appears
in Marshall’s description of a house within a well-to-do quarter of
the city:
The average ground area of this class of house runs to about 3,600 ft.,
of which some 700 ft. were taken up by open courts, leaving some 2,900
ft. for rooms. Assuming that there were two storeys (and there were
certainly not less), this would give a room space of 5,800 sq. ft. in all.
On the ground-floor, the rooms, which numbered some fifteen to
twenty, were small—rarely covering more than 150 sq. ft. each, and
 m au rya n tax i l a 81
often not more than half that area. It must be remembered, however,
that among the wealthier classes many of the lower rooms would pro­
bably be occupied by slaves and dependants, and for this reason they
were smaller than the upstairs rooms where the family would live  .  .  .  
As a rule, this type of well-to-do house was provided with two courts,
one of which, it may be assumed, was more private than the other,
but both courts were usually so placed that easy access to them could
be obtained from the street or lane, and through them to the vari­-
ous rooms which gave off from them or from passages connected
with them.36

These were houses whose room floors were either of beaten earth
or ‘bajri’ (a coarse sandy aggregate) rammed with mud. Earth also
covered the roofs of these houses.
Many of these Taxilan abodes of the third century bce had
been built over earlier habitations going back some two hundred
years and more. Instead of removing the remains of collapsed and
destroyed roofs, walls, and floors, the common practice seems to
have been to level them and build new rooms and courtyards over
them. Under Mauryan period houses, facilities that had existed in
houses of a greater antiquity have been found simply buried intact.
One of the affluent homes, called House K, had a drain under two
of its rooms, while in another room two large storage jars lay
beneath the floor.37
Since the old debris, made up of stones, pottery, and other kinds
of rubbish, was unlikely to have been an easy matrix to dig into,
residents usually chose to keep the foundations of the new struc­
tures relatively shallow. This was an easy enough way of rebuilding.
The problem was that it failed to provide the necessary stability to
the new structures. Cracks and crumbling plaster must have been
quite common, alerting the citizenry to structural weaknesses in
their dwellings. To provide additional support, wooden pillars were
then erected inside the rooms. Such pillars have not survived but
their existence has been surmised from the several shafts (filled with
rubble) that have been identified; on these, heavy limestone blocks
were placed to provide a firm base for the pillars. One house which
required such support was House H, where the roofs of rooms
82 ashoka in ancient india

are thus propped up. The remains of a circular pillar stand in the
middle of a room, while another room shows the remnants of a
square pillar.
The use of English letters as designations—‘House K’,
‘House H’, etc.—can seem odd, but it is common practice when
the names and identities of the residents are unknown. Firmer
names tend to be given when a building’s resident or purpose is
clear. In the ancient town of Bhita near Allahabad, south of its High
Street, a Mauryan establishment is described by the excavator as
‘House of the Guild’ because of the presence of a Mauryan seal-die
inscribed with a legend mentioning a guild (‘Sahijitiye nigamasa’).38
Even where no such inscribed objects have been recovered, in­
ferences have been made on the basis of the particular types of
objects and structures found. The ‘priest house’ at Daimabad in
mid-first millennium bce Maharashtra is known to have contained
fire altars of various shapes; in the phase following, houses like those
of the lime maker, the potter, and the bead maker were similarly
identified.39 The occupations of those in Taxilan houses have not
been ascertained with this degree of assurance.
But it is possible to reconstruct the uses to which some of
the rooms in Taxila’s houses were put. There are bathrooms and
kitchens, and in chamber 15 of House K one can imagine clothes
and utensils getting cleaned and hung: a soak-well and the remains
of some rough stone flooring, as also large water jars found close
by, support the inference. Soak-wells are basically vertical pits. In
Taxila these were either stone-lined, or constructed of earthenware
rings, or of large earthenware storage jars set up one above the other
with holes in their bottoms to allow percolation. These were not
for drawing water but were maintained in every house for sewage
and waste household water. Logically, the rooms in which they
were located were either kitchens or bathrooms or privies. In several
such rooms the soak-wells are found in pairs, close to each other,
and the ‘explanation of this may be that when one well was full, it
was closed in and a new one opened alongside. Or it may be that
they were intended to be used alternately, one being left to dry while
the other was in use.’40 Soak-wells were also placed in courtyards,
 m au rya n tax i l a 83

so washing and scouring happened there as well. The usual wells,

though, used for drawing water, are missing from the city. There
was a functional reason for this. The height of the Bhir plateau
made it impractical to dig wells. They would have had to be very
deep to reach the ground water. Instead, people got their water from
the Tamra nala, a rivulet which flowed outside the city.
Where a row of chambers fronted the houses it is assumed they
served as shops, positioned as they were along public pathways.
House H has a row facing the First Street and another adjacent to
Lane 1.41 Living rooms and bedrooms are more difficult to identify.
The rooms to the front are described as living rooms because they
were positioned towards the street. Tiny rooms, Marshall felt, could
not either serve as living or sleeping rooms because they were too
small. His assumptions are not based on anything other than the
positioning and size of the rooms.
Can we identify the people, en masse, who occupied these
blocks? How, for instance, do we recognize the administrators
of the city and their official areas of work? This is not easy since
there are neither names nor dates for those who occupied public
office—neither in inscriptions nor texts. Their presence can in
some instances be inferred in a general way from the paraphernalia
of administration, such as seals and coins. Seals, though, were
used by all kinds of people, for example to authenticate quality by
manufacturers and traders, and as a marker of kingship. Taxilan
seals are of various types but they never bear names or designa­
tions; they are etched with a variety of symbols. Hypothetically, if
the same symbols were found on the coins of the Mauryan era, it
would suggest the seals were used by administrators—a congruence
absent here. It is likely that the seals were primarily commercial in
function.
One would expect at least a few of the public buildings to be
different in appearance from the dwelling units. But none, with
the exception of shops that front streets and lanes, differ from each
other, the unvarying look being that of a series of house blocks.
Some of these may have housed administrative staff: the complex
of rooms centring around Block A, suggested the archaeologist
84 ashoka in ancient india

Ahmad Hasan Dani—he reinterpreted the data that Marshall had

excavated—was not a domestic unit. Located at the crossing of two
streets, Second Street and Third Street, which ‘cross each other just
in front of this building’, the building, Dani believes, ‘served some
special purpose’.42 The frontage on the eastern side, adjacent to the
Second Street, is semi-octagonal, with a ring of rooms on its inner
side. The arrangement of these rooms, as also the square rooms on
the western side, he says, shows an administrative purpose. The
weakness of the inference, as in Marshall’s interpretation of rooms
being used for ‘sleeping’ and ‘living’, lies in the fact that it is entirely
extrapolated from the alignment of the rooms and not based on
paraphernalia associated with city administration.
The paraphernalia of commerce, though, is more visible than
that of administration. We have seen that the seals were likely to
have formed part of the repertoire of merchants and traders.
Made out of copper, glass, clay, and stone, the Taxilan seals are
either pyramidical or scaraboid. The pyramidical shape was very
popular at this time, being used not only for seals but also for deli­
cate carnelian and agate pendants. Such seals are considered typi­
cally Mauryan and were usually very small. Why they were en­graved
with human figures remains unknown. In one instance, the pre­-
sence of a staff, a circle, and the ‘nandipada’ (bull’s hoof) to the left
of a standing man suggests that it could well represent a deity,43
the bull being much worshipped in ancient India. The nandipada
symbol also occurs on a terracotta sealing—the stamp being the im­-
pres­sion made by the seal.44 This sealing has the figure of a humped
bull on both sides with the nandipada symbol above the hump.
Yet another pyramidical seal, made of copper, has engraved on its
base a ‘lotus-tree of life’, a symbol much used on early Buddhist
monuments.45
The scaraboid seals, on the other hand, are thought to be of
Western workmanship. So called because their shapes resemble
the scarabaeid beetle, these were fairly popular in Persia. Their
workmanship in Taxila is sometimes described as Greek—as, for
instance, in the case of a black agate scaraboid with a lion’s back,
and a chalcedony specimen with two winged animals, a horse and
 m au rya n tax i l a 85

a bull, engraved on it side by side.46 At the same time, some of these

engravings appear to be Indian in inspiration. Above the scarab
with the lion’s back is engraved a nandipada. This symbol is unlikely
to be of Greek or Persian inspiration. Similarly, the bull, notwith­
standing its wings, is typically Indian, not Persian. The scaraboid
seals are in fact curiously reminiscent of seals in the Indus civiliz-
ation of the third millennium bce, some of which were shaped in
ways similar to those in the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia, even as
the designs and script characters on them were typically Indian.
Square and rectangular Indus seals in Mohenjodaro were, we
know, emboss­ed with Mesopotamian designs. The interconnections
of trade between Taxila and the West are what the engravings on the
scara­boid seals evoke, the hot money being on their use by mer­-
chants for transactions relating to West Asia and beyond.
Since the seals were not found clustered in one part of Taxila, it
seems unlikely that there was a specific merchant’s quarter in the
city. The same seems true for people practising other crafts. Crafts-
people are occasionally visible here and there: a crucible with a
pointed bottom lined thickly with burnt sandy clay, a precious metal
polisher, and a chalcedony burnisher of the type used for polish­-
ing small gold and silver articles—all these evoke the presence of
metal craftspeople.47   They are not limited to any particular sector
of the city.
How much of Taxila’s character and commerce, its citizens and
the caretakers of the city, was visible to Ashoka is unknown. But
this was a city that impressed him because many years later, as the
Mauryan monarch, he is said to have built a magnificent structure
in Taxila. This was outside the city, on the rocky spurs and knolls
that lay to the east of the Bhir, where he created a new kind of reli­-
gious establishment. The worship in this new structure was quali­
tatively different from that carried out via rituals connected with
the deities of the city and its temple. Known as the Dharmarajika,
this was a Buddhist stupa whose Mauryan fabric has vanished but
whose religious character was in line with Ashoka’s. What kind of
religious devotion this Dharmarajika evoked among the people of
Taxila, who lived within walking distance of it, we cannot know for
86 ashoka in ancient india

sure. My own view is that the various goddesses of the Taxilans, and
the old rituals around them, were likely to have had more religious
power and meaning for the citizens than the grand stupa made at
the instance of their emperor.
The emperor’s connection with Taxila ends at this point—his
stupa there points us in the direction of Buddhism, and towards the
time when he had gone beyond being a prince pushed to a frontier.
 4

Affairs of the Heart and State

I
n ancient narrations of ashoka’s life, romantic
passion appears for the first time when the Pataliputra prince
is sent to Malwa in Central India. Tellings of this intersect with
him falling in love with a young woman who is known in the ancient
Sri Lankan textual tradition as a Buddhist.
Her name was Devi and the romance began in the city of
Vidisha, where her father was a prominent merchant. Soon
enough, Ashoka married Devi and moved on to Ujjayini. Ordinari­
l­y, romantic love is a popular theme in ancient India’s epics as
well as in numerous plays that revolve around the romances of
princes and kings in royal courts and cities, sometimes the same
story being told and retold across many centuries.1 The famous
love story of King Dushyanta and Shakuntala in the Mahabharata
is one of these and became the theme of Kalidasa’s (c. fourth–fifth
centuries ce) play Abhijanashakuntala, which brings love to life in
the way that the best drama does. Unluckily, this variety of interest
cannot be dis­cerned in the Buddhist literary sources. Their pur­-
poses being religious rather than literary, description of the
dynamics of a future Buddhist king’s romantic relationship is fairly
peripheral to the templates of their narratives. Ashoka’s whirlwind
courtship of Devi are fleeting and passionless despite, it seems,
this relationship being life-changing.
Fig. 4.1: Ujjayini's ancient mounds with the Sipra river in the background
 a f fa i r s o f t h e h e a rt a n d s tat e 89

Before getting to that courtship, what seems of interest are the

circumstances which brought the prince to Vidisha. This happened
when Ashoka journeyed to administer Avanti in the heartland of
India, travelling across the black soil of the Malwa region, ‘rough,
and trampled by the feet of cattle’.2
Ashoka was dispatched to Avanti as viceroy by Bindusara. Unlike
his brief Taxila sojourn, he is depicted as having spent some ten
years at Avanti while headquartered at Ujjayini, the political and
administrative centre of the province, a city described as the ‘Green­
wich of India’ since the longitudinal prime meridian was reckoned
by Hindu astronomers from this city.3 If so, he would have arrived
there roughly around 282 bce, some ten years before his father
Bindusara died. By the time Ashoka got there, it was an urban
centre of respectable antiquity, having flourished along the Sipra
river for 300 years or more before it became the Magadhan prince’s
place of functioning. Fortifications of mud were first erected
around Ujjayini in the seventh century bce, and in about the sixth
century bce the state of Avanti, whose capital Ujjayini was, became
a powerful independent kingdom.4
The territorial ambitions of this state extended beyond Central
India into the Gangetic north. Pradyota, the ruler of Avanti, was
a contemporary of Bimbisara, king of Magadha (and father of
Ajata­shatru, fortifier of Pataliputra). The Avanti-based Pradyota
is known to have had designs on Magadha and, in one tradition,
attacked Rajagriha, the Magadha capital during Bimbisara’s life­-
time. Apparently it was out of fear of an aggrandizing Pradyota that,
later, Ajatashatru strengthened Rajagriha’s defences. Subsequently,
one of Pradyota’s successors conquered the North Indian kingdom
of Vatsa, after which a prince of Ujjayini ruled from its capital,
Kaushambi. So, the practice of princes administering distant pro­
vinces of large states seems to have been fairly common much
before Ashoka.
Avanti, though, could not sustain hegemony over Vatsa and,
over time, ceased to be an independent kingdom. When this hap­
pened is not known, but by the time Bindusara took over the reins
of empire the Magadha-based Maurya state assuredly exercised
90 ashoka in ancient india

control over it. The emperor’s decision to dispatch Ashoka as its

viceroy suggests that the Malwa-centred Avanti province, on ac­-
count of its wealth and links with various parts of India, was stra­
tegic for political and commercial reasons.
A trail of sorts can be discerned as Ashoka travelled on his
father’s orders from Pataliputra to Malwa.

***

Ancient India’s royalty travelled in style: that is what sculptural

representations of large royal processions of chariots and elephants
suggest. Some of the earliest such reliefs can be seen at Bharhut in
Central India of the second century bce, where historical kings
figure. Prasenajit of Kosala, for instance, is shown on a chariot
drawn by four richly caparisoned horses with attendants and
riders, while Ajatashatru of Magadha is depicted sitting on a state
elephant with the others accompanying the leader controlled
by female mahouts.5 Like military expeditions, the itineraries of
travelling kings were presumably planned well in advance, with
calculated halts on the way in villages, towns, and forests.6 The
forethought that went into these expeditions was crucial because,
to facilitate the movement of sovereigns and armies, travel tracks
had to be made suitable for such retinues. It is for this reason that
Bharata, younger brother of Rama of the Ramayana, is said to
have first organized technical people and labourers to construct
the road to Chitrakuta on which he would travel when trying to
persuade Rama to return and assume the throne at Ayodhya. The
arrangements in that instance were so elaborate—with topo­
graphers, guides, surveyors, masons, carpenters, diggers, and even
tree planters involved in the expedition—that the trade routes
scholar Moti Chandra was reminded of modern sappers and
miners who level the ground, chop trees, repair roads, and cons­
truct new ones.7
Ashoka as newly appointed viceroy is likely to have undertaken
his march to Malwa in a similar style, even if his accompanying
 a f fa i r s o f t h e h e a rt a n d s tat e 91

entourage, by virtue of his being viceroy and not king, may well
have been smaller than those depicted on ancient sculptural reliefs
and described in epic tales.
If Ashoka began his journey from Pataliputra, the track he
followed was well trodden, forming part of the long traverse of
a network of routes known collectively as Dakshinapatha, or the
southern route. It was along the Dakshinapatha that Jivaka, the
physician of Rajagriha who trained in Taxila, went to the court of
Pradyota, the king of Ujjayini, at the king’s request, to cure him
of jaundice.8 Among the more frequent travellers were traders in
caravans (‘sartha’) carrying goods from the regions south of the
central highlands. Ranging from the Deccan and peninsular India
to the western and eastern coasts, these found large markets for their
wares in the cities of Gangetic India. The Arthashastra describes the
Dakshinapatha as preferable to other routes, singling out conch-
shells, diamonds, rubies, pearls, and gold as plentiful along this
route.9 Along with this trade, mendicants moved from North India
to the Deccan and back, a movement reflected in the story of the
Brahman sage Bavari of Sravasti, who went along the southern route
and settled down on the banks of the Godavari. On learning that
the prince of the Sakyas, the Buddha, had become a mendicant, he
sent sixteen of his disciples to Rajagriha, the old capital of Magadha,
to meet the great sage.10
Regions along this route are also sometimes depicted as being
different from those in the North. Avanti, for instance, is shown in
the literature as different in its practices and customs from places in
the Gangetic plains. It is described as the land where people attach
great importance to bathing, and where ‘sheep-skins, goat-skins,
and deer-skins were used as coverlets.’11 Ashoka will have noted
such differences as he travelled towards Ujjayini.
Considering that Pataliputra and Ujjayini were separated by
nearly a thousand kilometres, a splendid retinue of elephants and
chariots is not likely to have accompanied the armed contingent
and provision-laden carts required for the expedition too far. The
ceremonials were probably only heraldry at the beginning and
conclusion of expeditions, in the manner of ‘triumphs’ allowed by
Romans to their great generals, such as Pompey and Julius Caesar,
92 ashoka in ancient india

a couple of centuries later. Many more centuries later, in the time

of the Mughal emperors, on the best-maintained royal road from
Agra to Lahore, the average daily distance covered by caravans was
a little over 30 km. Thus, in Mauryan times, on a far more difficult
traverse from the Gangetic heartland into Central India, 30 km
would have been a steep distance to aim for as the daily average. If we
allow 25 km per day, Ashoka’s journey to the viceregal region will
have taken him 40 days. The variability and difficulty of tracks and
terrain encountered on the way make this an optimistic estimate.
While within cities like Ujjayini, where Ashoka was headed, all-
weather roads were constructed with a veneer of gravel over a clay
soling, long-distance alignments in this part of the region were
generally levelled tracks whose width is likely to have depended
upon the terrain and on what was considered sufficient to facilitate
movement.12 In the hilly areas—comprising part of the terrain in
Ashoka’s traverse across Central India—were narrow passageways
created by cutting through rocky areas. Ashoka is unlikely to have
begun the trek before the monsoon months because travel over this
time was specially difficult. The Damoh area in Central India, for
instance, which falls along his route, could not have been crossed
with wheeled conveyances between July and October, its soil being
black loam which became soggy to the point of stickiness after the
first rains. Whatever the weather, the pragmatic option would have
been pack animals and carts, not elephants. We also know from
the accounts of later travellers that one of the major problems was
to harmonize different modes of transport. Oxen and elephants
move at a different pace. Jean Deloche, the historian of early trans­-
port and communication in India, provides a seventeenth-century
travel account highlighting the trouble with heterogeneous group­
ings:
Camels, pack oxen and oxen harnessed to the heavy carts of Hindusthan
did not proceed at the same rate. When, in addition, it was necessary
to adapt to the pace of light equipages of some wealthy patron travell­
ing with swift elephants, only deplorable contretemps could result. To
give a vivid example, we relate here the experience of Peter Mundy, who
in 1633 had been charged to conduct the last caravan of the season,
 a f fa i r s o f t h e h e a rt a n d s tat e 93
consisting of 268 camels and 109 carts, from Agra to Surat. Underway
Mundy encountered the new governor of Gujarat, Baqir Khan, who
was journeying to his residency along with his entourage, and asked to
accompany him in the hope that he would thus avoid payment of local
taxes and thereby reduce the transport expenses. The decision proved
to be imprudent and costly. The troubles soon began. It was impossible
for Mundy’s caravan to keep pace with the fast rhythm of the official
escort. At Khamva, a sand-storm broke, followed by profuse rains; the
camels were thus delayed and reached the next stage one day after the
carts. Fortunately, the governor had halted because of the rain, and
together they continued onwards to Bayana. Two miles before arriving
at that destination, one cart wrecked and another became stuck in the
river; it was impossible to extricate it and the men had to carry the
bales of indigo on their shoulders.13

There is every reason to imagine that the travails of terrain and

weather that large convoys, such as the one described by Mundy,
were part of the pattern of travel of the Ujjayini-bound royal party
in the first quarter of the third century bce.
The route that Ashoka and his retinue took, having long ceased
to exist, remains unknown, but we can try and visualize it by ex­
ploring the villages and towns of his time that existed along its
alignments, as also the itineraries of ancient traders and travellers.
The general sweep is clear enough: moving south-west from the
middle Gangetic plains, the Kaimurs, which form the eastern scarp
of the Vindhyan highlands, will have been ascended. By Himalayan
standards these mountains are molehills, the highest point in the
entire 1000 km long Vindhyan range being only about 1100 metres.
But any forty-day journey at the head of a large travelling contingent
more than 2000 years ago will have seemed Himalayan, even to a
cosseted emperor in his tent.
Moving from the middle Gangetic plains, the Kaimurs would
have been ascended, and here Sasaram’s location will have been
crucial for the prince’s travelling procession to move further west
towards the Rewa plateau.14 From Rewa, the Damoh and Sagar areas
would have been traversed to Vidisha, and then onwards towards
Ujjayini. Each of the important nodes in this broad alignment,
94 ashoka in ancient india

incidentally, was linked in multiple ways and could be accessed

through various routes. The research of the archaeologist Dilip
Chakrabarti, who made it his professional vocation to travel along
ancient routes, highlights this. So, for instance, if Ashoka began his
journey from Pataliputra and was headed towards the Kaimur hills
on the eastern edge of the Vindhyas, the most direct route would
have been along the valley of the Son river. The presence of Deo
Markandeya, a site flourishing in Mauryan times and even before,
shows that there would have been relatively little problem for an­
cient travellers who followed this alignment.15 The other alignment
from Pataliputra followed the Bodh-Gaya and Gaya line in order to
gain access to the Kaimur hills, but there again two routes existed
between Rajagriha and Gaya: one via the Barabar caves and another
via Kurkihar.16 Practically all these were ancient places of habita-
tion and repute, and therefore it is impossible to decide which of
these old historic alignments Ashoka will have chosen to follow. We
can only be pretty certain he travelled on one of them.
He will have passed through captivating country. Anyone with
even holidaying knowledge of the Central Indian hilly climes and
the Malwa plateau will vouch for the beauty of the land. Masses
of jungle terrain and incredible cliffs teeming with rock shelters
are interspersed with long vistas of impressive undulating plateau
areas and riverine plains. The Rewa jungles were in the nineteenth
century often dense, full of trees like sal, tendu, saj, and khair, and
were teeming with wildlife—tigers, leopards, bear, antelope, and
chinkara deer.17 Large parts of this territory must have been sparse­
ly inhabited, but even so, some settlements and sites would have
been found along the way. So, from Rewa towards the Jabalpur area
the Magadhan entourage may well have chanced upon Rupnath and
Kakrehta. Considering that at Rupnath there are springs full of water
issuing from the rocks, the entourage may even have camped there
and, if so, it may be one of the reasons why, many years later, Ashoka
had a set of his royal edicts inscribed at this spot. But Kakrehta, only
a kilometre from Rupnath, could also have been a stopover. Situated
near the Suhar rivulet, a tributary of the Hiran river, historic pottery
(North Black Polished Ware, among other types) of the Mauryan era
 a f fa i r s o f t h e h e a rt a n d s tat e 95

was excavated out of its ancient mound, whose remains also show
that the settlement had stood there for hundreds of years before the
time of Ashoka.18 As the prince moved across the central highlands,
he will have noticed how starkly different his native land was from
the mighty Ganga and its near monotonous alluvial plains, and
from the Vindhyan rocks and the villages and towns that nestled so
frequently at the foot of scarps or on isolated hills.
Not all the areas that fall on Ashoka’s hypothetical travel itine­
rary have yielded ancient remains. Damoh and Sagar are among
the areas where the ruins of early settlements have been remarkably
elusive, while later mid-first millennium ce architectural re­-
mains and the coins of the Gupta dynasty are widespread.19 Future
exploration may yield an older or later past, but this sparsely
inhabited stretch will almost certainly have felt Ashoka’s footprints,
or those of the animal on which he was mounted. Within a day or
more after crossing Sagar, the prince’s party will have encountered
the fortified city of Airikina, which falls in the area of the present-
day town of Eran. Located some 75 km from Sagar, Airikina is also
about equidistant from Vidisha. It was built to ensure protection
on three sides by a bend in the Bina river.20 A mud rampart secured
the unprotected side. The rampart was substantial, more than
45 metres wide and with a moat around it.
Ashoka could have halted here and partaken of the city’s hos­
pitality. Airikina possessed the means to provide him and his
entourage the chance to recoup in somewhat more comfortable
surroundings than the jungles of Sagar and Damoh. Shortly after­
wards, he would have moved towards the part of Malwa on which
stood the city of Vidisha. Lying about 250 km east of Ujjayini,
Vidisha will have been Ashoka’s last city stop before the last leg of
his long expedition.
Its accessibility and distance from Pataliputra make Vidisha inter­
esting on a journey’s map. But more interesting are the romantic
associations that it evokes, and these are central to any story of the
life of Ashoka.
This story, of Prince Ashoka and Devi is, like many other roman­
tic liaisons of antiquity, an account of unsatisfactory brevity. She
Fig. 4.2: The Malwa plateau’s hills and forests as they appear near Bhimbetka
 a f fa i r s o f t h e h e a rt a n d s tat e 97

was the daughter of a prominent city merchant in Vidisha, this we

know, but she is otherwise an elusive figure. Nothing is known of
her early life or upbringing or even about her persona before she
encountered Ashoka, except that she was, like most future queens,
extraordinarily pretty before becoming one. As we saw in the story
around Bindusara and the Brahman girl from Champa (later
Ashoka’s mother), royal men have the habit of noticing female
commoners only when they are arrestingly beautiful. Bindusara’s
son seems to have been in his father’s mould. And, naturally, the
texts would have us believe it was love at first sight.
Also in line with the template, it is less the state of the heart than
the reproductive outcome of this affair of the heart which is cen­-
tral to the story. The Dipavamsa puts it blandly: ‘the daughter of a
Setthi (or merchant), known by the name of Devi, having co­habit­
ed with him, gave birth to a most noble son.’21 A later account is
positively loquacious by comparison: Ashoka, it says, ‘made her his
wife; and she was (afterwards) with child by him and bore in Ujjeni
a beautiful boy, Mahinda, and when two years had passed (she bore)
a daughter, Samghamita.’22 Either way, this is the defining incident
recounted in relation to Ashoka’s life in Avanti, an instantaneous
falling in love even before reaching his destination Ujjayini, and the
birth of two children to the couple in the course of his obviously
long sojourn there.
While historians agree with these aspects of the story, there has
been enormous disagreement about other threads. One strange
spat—at least that is how it appears to those who engage with the
ideas of investigators much after they are played out—concerns the
legal status of this relationship, and whether Ashoka did or did not
marry Devi. The historian Romila Thapar, in her book titled Asoka
and the Decline of the Mauryas, is certain that Devi was ‘not legally
married’ to Ashoka since, among other things, there is no reference
to a marriage in the Dipavamsa.23 Given the brevity of the evidence,
this is not surprising. In fact, such sources don’t describe a great
deal else that we know to have transpired in the life of Ashoka.24
The disagreement has also been fuelled by differing interpretations
of the word samvasa in the Sri Lankan chronicles. The word was
98 ashoka in ancient india

initially translated in a way that suggested sexual relations outside

marriage, but is supposed to mean co-residence, presumably within
a conjugal relationship.25 And then there is the odd argument that
the absence of a ‘legal’ marriage could be the reason why, after
Ashoka’s consecration, Devi did not become his chief queen (‘since
she would have been debarred from performing the duties of the
chief queen’).26 Given that this prince showed himself self-willed in
going against the tradition of primogeniture by which most princes
ascended the throne—he snatched the throne of Magadha at his
father’s death—it seems to me more likely that Devi was the wife
of Ashoka, declared or undeclared, and that the children she bore
him, as will become evident, grew into people who were an inte­-
gral part of his public life.
How authentic is the testimony of the texts which give a glimpse
of Ashoka’s love for a Vidisha woman, their marital residence in
Ujjayini for many years, and the birth of two children to them? This
interlude figures in the Sri Lankan tradition and in it the purpose
of the retelling is to provide a synoptic account till the time when
Ashoka’s son and daughter from Devi went to Sri Lanka. The
Sri Lankan scholar Ananda Guruge believes there ‘was a special
reason why the Sri Lankan Pali sources should have taken special
care to preserve the memory of this particular phase in the life
of Ashoka. It was on his way to Ujjain that Ashoka enjoyed the
hospitality of the guild-chief Deva of Vedisa, met his daughter
Vedisadevi and married her. The royal missionary Thera Mahinda
who introduced Buddhism to Sri Lanka, and his sister Theri
Sanghamitta, who brought the sacred Bodhi-tree, were both born
of this relationship.’27 It remains possible to test the veracity of this
retelling by looking at them from the perspective of other allusions.
That Ashoka was sent to Ujjayini seems authentic since his own
edicts as emperor refer to the presence of a prince or ‘kumara’ at
Ujjayini. A royal prince heading the administration there seems to
have been normal practice, so the likelihood is that Ashoka, like
his son later, administered Avanti from the city of Ujjayini.28 A
geographical logic in the textual references is also pertinent: Ashoka
is shown as meeting Devi at Vidisha, and Vidisha falls on the way
 a f fa i r s o f t h e h e a rt a n d s tat e 99

to Ujjayini from Pataliputra. Its description as a town (‘nagaram’)

is a characterization of the settlement that matches what we know it
to have been in Mauryan times, an urban centre of commercial re­-
pute probably integral to the larger Mauryan scheme of adminis­
tration in Malwa. Vidisha’s remains show a strong pre-Mauryan
core going back to the mesolithic period, followed by a long phase
when it was occupied by people who used stone and copper.29 The
first historic phase of occupation there is substantial and goes back
to c. 500 bc, to a time before the Mauryas. Its prosperity continued
into and beyond Ashoka’s time. So, Ashoka’s halt there looks very
plausible, and his interaction with citizens of substantial means
such as Devi’s father, a man of commerce (‘setthi’), even more so
because an important function of the viceroy was to collect reve­
nue. Traders and merchants were important in this scheme of
things since they contributed significantly to the coffers of the
Mauryan state.
A point about Ashoka’s personality also seems worth consider­
ing in this context. By the time he was sent to Ujjayini he was a
young man of some experience, a prince who had possibly tra­
velled to Taxila and other parts of his father’s empire. If later textual
recountings of incidents relating to his life had wanted to conjure
up a story around the sowing of his wild oats rather than a regular
marriage, they did not have to wait till he reached Vidisha. And, in
any case, why Vidisha in particular? If the idea was to show him in
a romance rather than a relationship more sober, the story could
well have been woven around places that figure earlier or later in his
life: Pataliputra, the city of his childhood, or Ujjayini, where he was
headed. The fleeting and somewhat incidental way in which Vidisha
appears renders the accounts of it as the locale for the beginning
of Ashoka’s relationship with Devi all the more believable.
The same circumstantial logic has to be applied in order to
understand whether Devi was a Buddhist. The places associated
with her have strong Buddhist connections. Vidisha is universally
recognized as the pivot of the monuments of Sanchi. Marshall’s
opinion was that ‘from first to last, the story of Sanchi was intimate­
ly bound up with the fortunes of the great city in whose shadow
100 ashoka in ancient india

Fig. 4.3: Ujjayini’s Kanipura stupa which is associated with Devi

its sangharama grew and flourished and on whose wealth it was

mainly dependent for its support.’30Again, local traditions link the
largest stupa at Ujjayini, the city where Devi is said to have resided,
as one that was built for her. The Kanipura stupa, made of large
Mauryan bricks at a height of more than 10 metres, is on the north-
eastern outskirts of present-day Ujjain. It is locally known as the
Vaishya Tekri (‘Vaishya caste’s mound’) since Devi was the daughter
of a merchant, this being a characteristically Vaishya occupation.
Beyond the Buddhist associations, the way in which Devi is
described in the Pali texts suggests she followed this relatively new
faith. Unlike Ashoka, or even her own children, there is no men­
tion at all of her having converted to it. In fact, her portrayal in the
Mahavamsa, where she is shown—much after the time period that
forms the focus of this chapter—as leading her son Mahinda, by
then a monk (‘thera’), ‘up to the lovely vihara Vedisagiri’, suggests
that she was already a Buddhist and strongly associated with
that vihara. Because this was on a hill, the conjecture is that the
monastery where the mother chose to take her monk-son and his
companions was Sanchi. This happened, of course, much after
 a f fa i r s o f t h e h e a rt a n d s tat e 101

Ashoka’s early years, but the incident is worth looking at here in

order to make the point that if she was a Buddhist in her later years
without there being any allusion to her conversion to that reli­gion,
then she is likely to have been a Buddhist when she first met Ashoka.
Her children—the son Mahinda, and daughter Sanghamitra—are
described as having chosen to ‘receive the Pabbaja ordination’, i.e.
a ceremony for what can be translated as ‘leaving the world’. This
was the initial step before ordination into the monastic order.31
That said, the fact that Ashoka had loved and lived with a
woman who is remembered by history as a Buddhist does not
seem immediately to have influenced the trajectory of his life. On
the contrary, his long sojourn at Ujjayini would come to an end in
circumstances which would, almost certainly, have been disapprov­
ed of by devout Buddhists.

***

Some ten years after Ashoka became viceroy in Ujjayini his emperor-
father fell critically ill in Pataliputra. Grave ill health in a monarch
usually has serious political ramifications, and in this case the king
was quite old. The prevailing sense will have been that he would be
dead before long. It is thus not fortuitous that his father’s failing
health became the reason for Ashoka ending his residence in Malwa
and returning to Pataliputra, where his bloody assumption of the
Mauryan throne would happen. As before, we must depend on later
traditions in which this turn of events figures amidst a fascinating
if somewhat unverifiable maze of memories and stories.
There are various versions of how these events came to pass. The
Mahavamsa records the accession of Ashoka with characteristic
brevity, merely mentioning that upon Bindusara’s illness he came
back to Pataliputra: here ‘he made himself master of the city, after
his father’s death, he caused his eldest brother to be slain and
took on himself the sovereignty in the splendid city.’32 There are
other ways in which this right royal fratricide is remembered in
102 ashoka in ancient india

the Sri Lankan texts, where Ashoka is described as having killed

many more brothers in his bid to capture the throne of Magadha.
The Dipavamsa says a hundred brothers were so killed.33 Figures
such as this, as we have seen, are a common stereotype, merely a
way of saying that many brothers were killed, not just one, as the
Mahavamsa would have us believe. Killing off his brothers may
well have allowed Ashoka to rule, but it is possible that protract­-
ed fratricidal battles had first to be waged, for the Dipavamsa
suggests a gap of four years between that bloody assumption and
Ashoka’s formal consecration as emperor.34
A far more gory and viscera-filled tale is told of Ashoka’s acces­
sion in the Ashokavadana, where certain kingmakers, rather than
Ashoka, are ministers and key figures in the court of Bindusara.
The decision to ensure that Bindusara’s eldest son would not
succeed him is traced back in this text to a slight that the king’s
prime minister suffered at the hands of Susima, the heir apparent.
It seems the prince slapped the bald head of the minister in jest.
The minister, however, was not amused and formed a coalition
hostile to the ‘jester’. The turn of events is described:

‘Today he slaps me with his hand,’ the minister reflected, ‘when he

becomes king he’ll let fall his sword! I had better take action now to
ensure that he does not inherit the throne.’
He therefore sought to alienate five hundred ministers from
Susima, saying to them: ‘It has been predicted that Ashoka will become
chakravartin ruler over one of the four continents. When the time
comes, let us place him on the throne.’35

Soon after this, the people of Taxila again rose in rebellion. This
time, instead of Ashoka, Susima was sent by the king to quell it.
Almost immediately thereafter, Bindusara is said to have fallen
seriously ill. He recalled Susima, intending to consecrate him as his
successor, and ordered that Ashoka be sent to Taxila in his place.
But the coalition of ministers pretended that Ashoka was ill. On
his deathbed, in fact, they urged Bindusara to instal Ashoka as his
successor for the moment and replace him with Susima upon the
latter’s return.
 a f fa i r s o f t h e h e a rt a n d s tat e 103
This, however, made the king furious.
Ashoka, therefore, declared: ‘If the throne is rightfully mine, let the
gods crown me with the royal diadem!’ And instantly the gods did so.
When King Bindusara saw this, he vomited blood and passed away.36
Ashoka was finally consecrated in 269/268 bce when apparently
he was ‘alone continuing his race’.37 The Ashokavadana supports
the idea that Ashoka’s ascent to the Mauryan throne followed the
hot and bloody contest: Susima is said to have been roasted alive
when he returned to Pataliputra. It seems ‘he fell into a ditch’ that
happened to have been filled earlier with the live coals of acacia
wood. Famed for his compassion as a Buddhist, Ashoka seems to
have done a fair amount over his years as an aspiring monarch to
require a long life of contrition and contemplation.
But for us to stretch his Buddhist inclinations to cover the sins of
his youth would need Ashoka to have expressed his own thoughts
on the matter, make some sort of admission, or allude to feelings
of guilt about the manner in which he assumed the throne. Is there
anything in his edicts which can make us believe that the later
textual accounts of his accession are based on hard self-confessional
evidence? To make sense of all this, it is necessary to go back to
Ashoka’s reticence over his early life and lineage, to his silence about
being the son and grandson of earlier Mauryan rulers. It is tempting
to speculate that one reason for his silence was because he became
emperor by violating the tradition of primogeniture, specially as
his father had wanted his first-born son to succeed him. In such
circumstances, it would have been logical for Ashoka to draw a
curtain over his early life and say as little as possible about it. In
fact, given what we can glean of his probable misdeeds from texts
that are in fact intent on showing his beatitude, Ashoka’s silence on
these years of his life is deafening. Unless in the future some scin­
tillating new discovery comes along to piece together this puzzle—
of why a man so explicit and articulate about his reigning years
chose to be so taciturn about his early life, it is extremely un­likely
that we will know for sure the scale and details of the carnage
that Ashoka is believed to have wrought to succeed to his father’s
throne.
 5

The End and the Beginning

A
shoka’s `struggle for succession ended in or
around 269 bce when he was consecrated as ruler of the
realm carved out by his grandfather and consolidated by
his father. The usurper prince took over the throne that he was not
meant to inherit, and the large subcontinental empire that came
with it, but beyond this his early years as emperor remain an
enigma. As be­fore, plausible speculation must serve instead of
an empirically strong and convincing narrative because there are
neither eyewit­ness accounts nor any that survive from the years
proximate with his own lifetime. As for Ashoka’s own testimony,
just as he remained silent about his early life and the bloody after­
math of his bid for the Mauryan throne, so he chose not to speak
about the initial years of his reign.
Ashoka’s early years as emperor came to be recalled in literary
texts some centuries later. Those recollections tend to be one-
dimensional, as we shall see, ranging from those that see him as
an intemperate and violent ruler to others where his persona is
that of a searcher for truth. We have no means of telling if these
accounts are based on things that Ashoka actually did or are mere­
ly retrospective projections of their composers’ predilections. My
assumption, though, is that some do contain grains of truth. This is
 the end and the beginning 105

suggested by the circumstantial evidence around which allegorical

tales of physical violence or spiritual passion were created.
One set of narrations, forming part of what is known as the
Northern tradition—the staple for constructing some of the con­
tours of the life of Ashoka as prince—portrayed the early years of
his reign as a kind of continuation of his manner of succession,
where he settled matters to his own satisfaction, as he had settled
the question of succession, with violence.
Ashoka’s assumption of the throne is in the Ashokavadana
imme­diately followed by an orgy of state-sponsored terror. A
chapter title ‘Chandashoka’, which can be translated as ‘Ashoka the
fierce’, graphically spells out the new king’s cruelty and killings.1
The first episode of his reign discussed in some detail concerns
various ministers who were put to death by him. The clique from
Bindusara’s time which had helped Ashoka become king had now
apparently begun treating him with contempt. To test their loyalty
Ashoka ordered that they chop down every flowering and fruit­-
ing tree while preserving those that were thorny. On the face of
it, the order seems absurd (quite apart from the taxonomic stupi­-
dity: trees that have thorns often bear flowers and fruit). But, as
Tennyson might have put it, this was a bad case of ‘Theirs not to
make reply,/ Theirs not to reason why,/ Theirs but to do and die’:
the criterion for establishing loyalty to this monarch rested not on
questioning the king’s command, however absurd it sounded, but
in just blindly obeying it. His ministers were not loyal enough, for,
despite being repeated three times, the order was not carried out.
Consequently, Ashoka is said to have personally cut off the heads of
‘five hundred’ of them.
The story is reminiscent of the secret tests that the Arthashastra
prescribed for kings to test the integrity or lack of it in ministers.
Such officials were to be instigated through secret agents to go
against the king. This was done by the agents suggesting to them
that the king was impious, and that they should ‘set up another
pious (king), either a claimant from his own family or a prince in
disfavour or a member of the (royal) family or a person who is the
one support of the kingdom or a neighbouring prince or a forest
106 ashoka in ancient india

chieftain or a person suddenly risen to power.’2 If the instigation

was repulsed, the minister was said to be loyal. To judge from the
statecraft prescribed for rulers in Mauryan times, this aspect of
the Ashokavadana’s image of Ashoka appears to hark back to the
political tradition of the Arthashastra.
The carnage did not end with the decapitated ministers. Many
more came to be killed, and now the victims were women who
formed part of Ashoka’s harem.3 Again, there was mass slaughter,
revenge for having slighted the emperor. It all began in springtime
as a consequence of a stroll by the emperor in a park on the eastern
side of Pataliputra. While strolling there with his harem and en­
joying trees fruiting or in bloom, the king came across a beautiful
flowering Ashoka tree—‘my namesake’, as he put it. The sighting put
him in a good mood and he is said to have become ‘very affection­-
ate’ towards his concubines, no doubt a euphemism for the pleas-
ures of the royal bed. Here it seems that the young women of his
harem did not sufficiently enjoy caressing his body, which was
rough-skinned. And so, after he fell asleep, ‘they, out of spite, chopp­
ed all the flowers and branches off the Ashoka tree.’ On learning
of this the king is said to have burned alive five hundred of these
women as revenge for their dismembering his beautiful Ashoka
tree. (The number 500 seems a favourite in this text, as 100 and
101 are in others.)
At this point, alarmed by the scale of the killings that Ashoka
was personally carrying out, his prime minister is said to have
made him appoint a royal executioner who could be delegated the
task of future mass extermination, leaving the king unsullied. A
suitable candidate was found in a Magadhan village, a weaver boy
called Girika who, on account of his ferocity and sadistic tenden­
cies, had the suffix ‘fierce’ attached to his name. ‘Girika the Fierce’—
or Chandagirika—is said to have crowed about his prowess to the
king’s men when they asked him if he felt up to the task of being
Ashoka’s executioner: the boy exclaimed that he ‘could execute the
whole of Jambudvipa.’ This seems to have got him the job, for we
next hear that at his request the king built a jail in Pataliputra, one
that people called ‘the beautiful gaol’ because ‘it was lovely from
 the end and the beginning 107

the outside’ while ‘inside it was actually a very frightful place.’

Chandagirika enjoyed full sway in these quarters, revelling in the
infliction of all kinds of torture on prisoners, and, when the king
allowed, ensuring they never emerged alive.4
Sadistic cruelty is virtually a literary trope in Buddhist hagio­
graphy, the objective being to show radical and fundamental trans­
formation in temperament and personality consequent upon
conversion. Because Ashoka would soon be shown as the ideal
Buddhist ruler in the Ashokavadana, episodes of extreme cruelty
were almost required insertions. The moral change in the king
would stand out so much better against an exceptionally brutish
background in which he was shown cold-bloodedly killing off
even his immediate circle of ministers and concubines. This image
of Ashoka is not confined to the Northern tradition; it figures in
the Sri Lankan tradition as well. The Mahavamsa briefly alludes to
it when noting that Chandashoka was so called in ancient times
because of his evil deeds; later, through his pious acts, he came to
be known as Dhammashoka.5
It is possible, of course, that these representations of a merci­
less monarch were a redeployment of elements that formed part
of the accepted remembrance of Ashoka’s earlier years of violence-
filled usurpation. Cruelty could not have been far during the
early period of Ashoka’s rule because it is almost certain that he
got rid of his older half-brother, and possibly several others who
had supported the rightful heir. And this may not have been just a
palace revolution: the resistance to his kingly ambitions was likely
to have extended beyond the royal family. Who resisted him and
how remain unknown. If the records of the Sri Lankan Buddhist
tradition are relied upon, it took some four years after his bid
for the throne for him to be finally consecrated. This was around
269 bce, some four years after the death of Bindusara. The inter­
regnum can only really be explained as the context of sustained
opposition. And if he consolidated his position ruthlessly, there
was bound to have been collateral damage.
Given that Ashoka succeeded to the throne in a manner that
was never planned or anticipated by his father, and in bloody
108 ashoka in ancient india

circumstances, his consecration could not but have left him acutely
aware of the problems that would likely beset his monarchy.
Ensuring the loyalty of administrators would in such circumstances
have been imperative. It is, then, a fair guess that the Ashokavadana
embroidered an elaborate story around the motif of loyalty to
the king, of punishment by death in the face of disobedience or
vindictiveness against him. It resonated completely with what was
known about the early exigencies of his rule.

***

If the Northern Buddhist tradition produced an exaggerated por­

trait of a fiercely cruel Ashoka in the years after his assumption
of kingship, it was an entirely different image, that of a restless­
ly enquiring emperor, which was woven into the tale that the
Sri Lankan texts told about his early reign. The purpose of their
telling was to highlight the notion that Ashoka’s quest for a worthy
spiritual preceptor was what led him to Buddhism, not because
he had any inherent predilection for the faith. He might, after all,
have chosen the other newly risen faith, Jainism, which was so
fiercely opposed to harming all forms of life that its tenets in
favour of non-violence were fanatic. A king in search of a faith
advocating compassion could well, in normal circumstances, have
looked more favourably upon the worldview of Mahavira than on
that of the Buddha. To account for Ashoka’s preference for Buddh­
ism over every other competing form of religious compassion thus
seemed to require the attractions of a wise man, someone sage-like
whose charisma swayed the emperor in the direction he chose. So
we learn that the recently consecrated king ‘unceasingly  .  .  .  searched
after virtuous, clever men’, and for such men he was willing to give up
his kingdom—all that he had inherited and conquered. Consider­
ing that Devi was an important part of his life and happened to be
a Buddhist it is somewhat strange that the Pali chronicles do not
write of her playing a pivotal role in Ashoka’s conversion. Possibly, a
 the end and the beginning 109

male protagonist as the crucial character in making him a Buddhist

was more in line with the thinking of the times. Ashoka’s impor­-
tance in converting the Sri Lankan king Devanampiya Tissa is
matched by that of his son Mahinda who carried, in a manner of
speaking, the Buddhist faith to Sri Lanka. Women in such narrat­
ives, and not just in India, are mostly the ‘helpmeets’ of domi­-
nant males.
Coming back to the emperor’s quest, the most elaborate telling
of the story occurs in the Dipavamsa. The search began shortly
after he became ruler, this being mentioned in a matter of fact way
in relation to his son Mahinda, a crucial figure for the Sri Lankan
tradition because of his mission to establish Buddhism there. The
text notes that Mahinda was 10 years old when ‘his father put his
brothers to death’, and he was ‘anointed king in Mahinda’s four­
teenth year’. For three years Ashoka is said to have honoured people
who are described as ‘Pasandas’. This is likely to be an umbrella term
for a variety of religious orders since many are mentioned in the
narrative—Pasandas who proceeded from the Sassata and Uccheda
doctrines, Niganthas, Acelakas, Brahmans, Titthiyas, other ascetics,
and sectarians.6 They were invited to the palace, and great gifts were
bestowed on them in the hope that they could answer a question the
king posed to them. Disappointingly, none of them could answer
his question. What this question was the text passes over in silence,
but it was apparently ‘an exceedingly difficult question’. In this way
the Pasandas were ‘annihilated’ and the sectarians ‘defeated’.
The search ended when Ashoka came upon a Buddhist Bhikshu
called Nigrodha looking for alms on a Pataliputra road, ‘a hand­
some young man of tranquil appearance, who walks along the
road like an elephant, fearless and endowed with the ornament of
tranquility.’7 This virtuous monk’s disposition and fearlessness, as
much as his preaching, were responsible for Ashoka becoming a lay
disciple of the Buddha. In a wonderful reply to the king’s plea asking
that he teach him the faith that he had learnt, Nigrodha offers a
sermon on earnestness: ‘Earnestness is the way to immortality’, he
tells Ashoka, ‘indifference is the way to death; the earnest do not
die, the indifferent are like the dead.’ Ashoka is said to have made
110 ashoka in ancient india

an offering of four lakhs of silver and eight daily portions of rice to

Nigrodha. Thereafter, according to this tradition, promoting and
propagating Buddhism became the hallmark of his reign. As we
shall see later, it also became the connecting narrative thread which
ensured that the faith reached Lanka, where the text that tells this
story was composed.
As with the fierce Ashoka of the Ashokavadana, we have no direct
evidence that the emperor’s initial years of rule were dominated
by a spiritual quest. Considering that it took him some years to
consolidate his position and be consecrated, such a quest appears
unlikely. But a revealing series of inscriptions—the first that
Ashoka caused to be inscribed—give us the emperor speaking in
the first person about what Nigrodha preached to him. The sermon
concerned the importance of ‘zeal’—which Ashoka is said to have
realized a year or more after he had visited the Buddhist Sangha.
His zealousness, the fruit of it, and the possibility that his example
would be more generally followed are spelt out in those first
epigraphs. It could therefore be that the sermon on earnestness that
the Dipavamsa speaks of was derived from Ashoka’s own render­-
ing of his transformation.
Perhaps such posthumous stories contain elements that are with­
in the realm of possibility, or perhaps they do not. The verifiable
truth is that Ashoka’s transformation had little to do with his quest
for a spiritual preceptor; in fact, it had very little to do with spiri­-
tual matters at all. I say this with some confidence because it is
through the emperor himself, in words that he himself formulated,
that we learn of his metamorphosis being the consequence of
activities which fell squarely within the realm of certain very material
matters of state. It was a common kingly pursuit which became the
starting point for Ashoka’s radically different rule and life.
What matters of state was the ruler expected to oversee? If
the Arthashastra is to be believed, the range was formidable. The
countryside had to be settled (‘by bringing in people from foreign
lands or by shifting the overflow from his own country’) and
irrigation works built.8 On the frontiers, fortresses for frontier
chiefs had to be set up. Work in mines and factories, and trade in
 the end and the beginning 111

ports and via trade routes, had to be supported, revenue from such
areas being central to state requirements. The king had to protect
his subjects by the wielding of danda (coercion), ‘For the Rod, used
after full consideration, endows the subjects with spiritual good,
material well-being and pleasures of the senses.’ And the social order
had to be preserved, presumably in conformity with the system of
varnas and ashramas.9 The key to the king’s success was his power
over the treasury and the army, so he needed time to focus on
these as well.10
Of all these, most relevant at this point is that the king was
meant to be a ‘vijigishu’ or would-be conqueror with, we are told, an
ambition to own the whole world. Conquest and empire-building,
or in other words the extension and exercise of a monarch’s power
within and beyond his realm, are quintessential within the state
ideology outlined by this manual of politics. Naturally, such acti­
vity was bound up with every state’s relations with all other states,
contiguous and outlying. So, the would-be conqueror contemplat­
ing the expansion of his dominion had to overcome an impos­
sible number of states in his quest for suzerainty, a fact of life
discovered by megalomaniac conquerors such as Alexander and
later the Roman Caesars. These other states are frequently denied
an autonomous existence in contemporary narratives and primary
sources by being defined wholly in relation to their territorial
position vis-à-vis the would-be conqueror and his superordi­-
nate state.
Why were war and conquest so important? The bottom line ap­
pears to have been economic and strategic necessity: if you don’t
exercise power, you will find others exercising it over you. So the
king was only properly a king if he had the ambition to conquer
and extend his sway over the universe. There was no escaping the
need to augment the economy of his state to the detriment of other
states and powers: ‘he should follow that policy by resorting to which
he may be able to see, “By resorting to this, I shall be able to pro­-
mote my own undertakings concerning forts, water-works, trade-
routes, settling on waste land, mines, material forests and elephant
forests, and to injure these undertakings of the enemy.”’11
112 ashoka in ancient india

In his early years, it is a virtual certainty that Ashoka was very

much within the mould of the Arthashastra ideal of kingship.
Because of his conquering ambitions he, who till this point in time
seems remote to the point of invisibility, becomes historical and
real. A major military expedition, the first event of his reign that he
chooses to mention, is now led by him and recorded for posterity.
The territory that Ashoka had his eye on was Kalinga, a state on
the eastern seaboard of India in what now forms part of modern
Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. This desire to bring Kalinga within his
fold became manifest in approximately 260 bce, when Ashoka led
a large army marching from the heartland of Gangetic India to­
wards the east.
This is a good place to go beyond our protagonist’s ambitions
and examine war and territorial aggrandizement in a somewhat
larger perspective. Take the specific time of Ashoka’s march around
260 bce: it happened a little after Rome began its extended conflict
against Carthage in the first of the three Punic wars which, all told,
lasted more than a hundred years (264–146 bc). At the juncture
that Ashoka made up his mind to conquer Kalinga, imperial quests
and the enlargement of dominion over territories sometimes far
distant had become common in many parts of the ancient world.
Some three hundred years before Ashoka the army of the Persian
empire, with its centre in what is now modern Iran, had crossed
into Europe and stamped its authority across regions that stretched
from Turkey in the west to north-west India in the east.12 Persia was
the first world superpower of its time. About two centuries later the
Persian model inspired Alexander’s successful emulation. Starting
from his small kingdom of Macedon near Athens he crushed re­
volts in several Greek cities before leading an expeditionary force
that annexed kingdoms in Africa and Asia extending from Egypt
to Persia, and eventually defeating eastern adversaries as far away
as Punjab.13
Alexander died in his thirties and upon his death this vast empire,
which at the best of times was difficult to effectively hold, quickly
broke up into smaller realms. In Egypt the satrap appointed there
by Alexander became the founder of a new dynasty. The fourteen
 the end and the beginning 113

kings of this dynasty, all bearing the name Ptolemy, ruled Egypt
for almost three centuries. By the time of Ashoka’s consecration
the early Ptolemies had ensured that Egypt was the principal naval
power of the eastern Mediterranean. In those parts of Asia which lay
to the east and north-east of India, similar kinds of consolidation
would soon commence. Some fifteen years after Ashoka’s Kalinga
march, King Zheng, later the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, came
to power, and by 221 bc, after conquering rival states, presided
over the unification of China around a centralized bureaucratic
monarchy.14
Given all these conflicts and rivalries, it is hardly surprising that
a considerable part of the history of the ancient world is of battles,
wars, and conquest. Homer in about the eighth century bce relat­ing
incidents around the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans,
and Herodotus in the fifth century bce writing of the expanding
Achaemenid empire, are probably the best-known chroniclers
of ancient conquest, Homer more literary and Herodotus more
gossipily historical. Why wars were thought necessary at all is
a larger question which strikes one immediately and forcefully,
but we dismiss it out of hand as foolish because of many of the
things outlined in treatises such as the Arthashastra—that power
must lie in the hands of powerful and capable men at the apex of
armies, that the sustenance of dominion requires the expansion of
power via these men and their armies because the alternative is loss
of dominion and enslavement. Beyond this arena of competitive
imperialism as necessary to survival lie other causes, such as the
predominantly male desire to acquire goods and land, food and
women. In the ‘Warring States’ period of China in the fifth and
fourth centuries bce we see that controlling territory became
cru­cial to the consolidation of political domination, while in the
1400s the ‘Flower Wars’ of the Aztecs aimed to seize people required
as sacrificial victims for the gods.15 Over much of ancient history,
territorial expansion also ensured enormous economic benefit. The
acquisitions of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (c. ninth cen-
tury bc) are an example. Even among his smaller campaigns,
the booty included 40 chariots with men and horses, 460 horses,
114 ashoka in ancient india

120 pounds of silver, 120 pounds of gold, 6000 pounds of lead,

18,000 pounds of iron, 1000 vessels of copper, 2000 heads of cattle,
5000 sheep, 15,000 slaves, and the defeated ruler’s sister.16
How much of this weltanschauung formed part of the mental
horizons of Ashoka cannot be specifically known, but conquerors
and kings from the West were very much part of political happen­
ings in South Asia at the time his own grandfather captured power.
So the possibility of this emperor having been influenced by the
world beyond South Asia is very far from being remote. Plutarch,
in his biographical history of Alexander, says Chandragupta, when
a mere lad, saw Alexander in person. When he began to rule from
Pataliputra, embassies from the Western powers came to his court;
later, in Bindusara’s years as sovereign, they were there again. A
charming story told about him and Antiochus I of Syria highlights
this: the Indian monarch asked for sweet wine, dried figs, and a
sophist, to which Antiochus’s reply was that while figs and wine
would be sent, it was forbidden by law to sell a sophist!17
The expedition to Kalinga was preceded by massive arrange­
ments, from ascertaining the strength of the enemy’s forces to
under­standing the terrain through which the army would move
to working out the logistics of the whole operation to deciding on
the season best suited to such an operation. In a territory as hot as
Kalinga was for most of the year, winter was considered the best
time to begin. This would also ensure optimal use of animals like
the elephants which were an integral part of the army.18 We do not
have Ashoka’s version of the size and character of the fighting force
that he led. But if our knowledge of his grandfather Chandragupta’s
force is extrapolated to assess the grandson’s, Ashoka’s army had
combat units of archers, foot guards armed with spears, combat
commanders, horses, and large numbers of elephants under the
control of mahouts.19 Weaponry and war paraphernalia—maces,
catapults, spears, swords, bows and arrows, giant stone catapulting
machines—were likely to have been transported in bullock trains,
which would also have carried provisions for the soldiers and
animals. Imperial armies moved slowly, and given the size of the
contingent and terrain the daily distance covered by Ashoka’s
 the end and the beginning 115

army is unlikely to have exceeded an average of around twenty km.

Pataliputra to Kalinga is a distance of some 900 km, so even just
getting the army to the target ground would have taken five or six
weeks.
How the army reached Kalinga has been variously imagined.
Was the battlefield approached along a route that hugged the right
bank of the Ganga through Bengal to Midnapur, from where the
Mahanadi delta of Orissa is easily approached? This had been for
centuries a pilgrim path well trodden by the devout making their
way to the shrine of Jagannatha in the coastal town of Puri. Or
did the army cross Chhattisgarh to reach the Ganjam–Srikakulam
coastal belt on the southern edge of the ancient state, this having
been the line of movement of the later Samudragupta (c. 328–78 ce,
another emperor from Pataliputra) to Kalinga, which he invaded
as he marched to conquer the southern regions? The size and
strength of the defending forces that Ashoka’s army encountered
is very much in the realm of speculation. The description of its
brutal decimation suggests it was considerable in size. If there is
one thing vividly described, it is the scale of slaughter, death, and
deporta­tion resulting from the war. The epigraph which records the
carnage says:
One hundred and fifty thousand in number were the men who were
deported thence, one hundred thousand in number were those who
were slain there, and many times as many those who died.20

Many who perished had fought for the Kalinga ruler; others rather
more ordinary and outside the arena of war were badly affected
too, innocent civilians whose lives, described as principled and
virtu­ous, were violently interrupted by the bloodbath. The epi­-
graph speaks of these hapless victims as well and deplores the
collateral damage:
(To) the Brahmanas or Sramanas, or other sects or householders,
who are living there, (and) among whom the following are practised:
obedience to those who receive high pay, obedience to mother and
father, obedience to elders, proper courtesy to friends, acquaintances,
companions and relatives, to slaves and servants, (and) firm devotion—
116 ashoka in ancient india
to these then happen injury or slaughter or deportation of (their)
beloved ones.
Or, if there are then incurring misfortune the friends, acquain­-
tances, companions and relatives of those whose affection (for the
latter) is undiminished, although they are (themselves) well provid­
ed for, this (misfortune) as well becomes an injury to those (persons
themselves).
This is shared by all men and is considered deplorable  .  .  .
Therefore even the hundredth part or the thousandth part of all
those people who were slain, who died, and who were deported at that
time in Kalinga, (would) now be considered very deplorable  .  .  .21

This is only part of a longer account graphically capturing the pain

and repentance of Ashoka in his hour of victory, and we will return
to it later. For the present, what makes the story unusual is that it
is the only surviving contemporary narrative description of the
catastrophe. Such narratives are scarcely known to have endured
from ancient times down to ours. As we saw, the original works
of those who accompanied and recorded Alexander’s campaign in
India have disappeared. As against this, the narrative of the killing
fields of Kalinga was composed within a few years of the battle
and can still be read in the script and language in which it was
first composed.
Why did Ashoka choose to immortalize the gory details of war?
The victorious king tells a tale of death and decimation entirely
against himself, damning his actions in the very hour of what every
conquering general of that period in history, regardless of coun­-
try, context, and culture, would have proclaimed as a triumph. This
is not just rare, it is astonishing enough to seem bewildering. A
long litany of kings after Ashoka got their military accomplishments
eulogized in dramatic verse and prose. Kharavela of Kalinga (c. first
century bce), even while recording donations to the Jaina com­-
mun­ity, describes at length how various contemporary rulers—the
Rathikas and Bhojakas, the Yavana king Dimi(ta) and the king of
Magadha Bahasatimita—were forced into submission by him.22
In much the same way, Rudradaman’s second century ce account
of the repair of a dam in Junagadh simultaneously sketches in some
 the end and the beginning 117

detail all the various territories, ranging from Sindhu-Sauvira to

Saurashtra and Aparanta, that he valorously gained.23  Ashoka’s
utter uniqueness is that the one and only account that he caused to
be recorded of a successful war is one in which the conventions
of state propaganda are turned on their head. The triumph is
recorded as a disaster. Defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory.
A chronicle of imperial misfortune is concocted in defiance
of the established practice of all preceding time. The emperor
weeps when he ought to swagger. This reversal of the most hoary
narrative tradition of conquest is now so well known that we
hardly see it any longer for what in essence it was, and remains:
a staggering reversal of the very conception of kingship. The
compassionate and caring king is born and proclaims himself,
as H.G. Wells recognized, for the first time in world history.
Ashoka’s amazing contrition also signals the beginning of a differ-
ent phase of his rule, a phase in which the historian enters the
comfort zones of hard evidence.
And hard evidence never got harder. For Ashoka had it all carved
on stone.
 6

The Emperor’s Voice

P
lunging ashoka into an emotional crisis, the
result of the Kalinga war radically re­directed the entire
subsequent life and career of the grieving conqueror. The
personal upheaval was also, inadvertently perhaps, a powerful and
new political idea: by replacing subjugation with compassion as the
most fundamental principle of monarchy, it introduced the earliest
glimmerings of a rule of law in which ordinary folk and the citizenry,
rather than only the powerful elites and royalty, were consequential.
If one were for a moment to visualize the scenario symbolically, as
a single image, it could take the shape of Ashoka calling for a copy
of the Arthashastra and setting it on fire in full public view. A new
perception of kingly calling emerged out of this victory-as-defeat,
one which Ashoka touched upon some years later when describ­
ing how he discharged his royal responsibilities and duties over
this part of his reign. Central in his narrative in the aftermath of
securing territorial supremacy was the contrast between his conduct
and that of earlier kings. Ashoka’s self-understanding and how he
chose to arrange his narrative of kingship are therefore crucial to
any account of his reign.
It was a little after 260 bce when Ashoka sent out a communiqué
to his administrators in various parts of India—from the edge of
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 119

the Yamuna flood plain in North India to the castellated hills of

Karnataka in the South.1 To distinguish it from the more expansive
later edicts on rocks that are known as his ‘major rock edicts’, this
communiqué has been classified among his minor rock edicts.2
Actually, when Ashoka decided to disseminate his words in this
way he did not (or possibly could not) bring himself to publicly
remember the traumatic watershed of his career. Rather, it was a
related personal experience in the slipstream of the Kalinga war
that he shared, one which he hoped would inspire his people. So,
I shall go back a little in time to Ashoka’s first articulation of his
metamorphosis, and through that remembrance explore how he
sought to galvanize others along the same path.
The reception of any message, and most certainly a royal one,
has a great deal to do with circumstances around its articulation.
How was Ashoka’s voice likely to have been understood by those
who heard and read his words? As there are no references or reac­-
tions to Ashoka’s edicts in any class of India’s ancient literature of
the first millennium bce, our reconstruction has to be rooted in
historical conjecture. Much of the Brahmanical literature of the late
cen­turies bce deals with subjects like codes of conduct, parapher­
nalia pertaining to rituals, norms of social behaviour, and the law.
As such, events like the composition of kingly communiqués and
citizens’ reactions to them were never going to find mention. Nor
were the Buddhist texts of the time in any way primarily concerned
with kings who patronized Buddhism. They were preoccupied
with the Buddha’s discourses, his previous births, and the do’s and
dont’s for monks and nuns. No account by any ambassador from a
neighbouring kingdom of that era has turned up. If an Indica had
been written around Ashoka’s reign, containing information of the
kind Megasthenes recorded about Chandragupta, public reactions
to the emperor’s messages may well have featured.
All the same, some glimpses can be arrived at by juxtaposing
the message with the cultural landscape—by looking at the various
places across his empire where the words were inscribed, at the
cultural patterns in those places as captured in the material evidence
that has survived, and at what the emperor’s sudden visibility in
120 ashoka in ancient india

that world may have entailed. Exploring what has appeared in the
archaeological record should at the very least enable one to imagine
the perspective of the subjects of the Mauryan state facing this
novel way of looking at them.

***

Communicating with provincial officials lay at the heart of the poli­-

tical system in ancient India. The provinces were, as we have
seen—when noting Ashoka’s movements to Taxila in the north-
west, Malwa in the south, and Kalinga in the east—spread out over
thousands of kilometres. Ashoka had inherited an empire extend­
ing from Afghanistan to Karnataka and from Gujarat to Bengal.
Administering an entity of this size required regularly touching
base with provinces, these being frequently governed by princes of
the royal family. Having served as viceroy at Ujjayini himself, Ashoka
seems to have maintained the practice of delegating close male
kin to run the provincial bulwarks of his empire. Directions and
orders were frequently given to these local functionaries through
edicts. Their centrality can be gauged from the fact that directives
for both peace and war appear within them. The decrees also in­-
clude commands by the king concerning punishment and favour,
gifts and exemptions, authorizations for issuing orders and carry­
ing out certain required works.3 The Arthashastra considered it
necessary for such communiqués to be written with clarity and
prescribes the employment of literate scribes with a beautiful hand
who ‘should listen with an attentive mind to the command of the
king and set it down in writing.’4
The importance of royal communications as an anchor of im­
perial administration is in inverse proportion to what has remain­
ed of them: no messages of any kind prior to the time of Ashoka
have survived. The usual materials used for writing were palm leaf,
birch-bark (or ‘bhurjapatra’, Betula utilis), cotton cloth, and possibly
wooden boards. These are mentioned in several textual sources
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 121

and, being all highly perishable, specimens have never shown up.5
Except just once. This sole exception relates to the settlement of
Sringaverapura near the banks of the Ganga, where wood charcoal
of bhurjapatra was recovered in an archaeological context of
the early first millennium bce. This suggests a long familiarity with
the tree whose bark, in the form of thin papery layers which were
peeled off in broad horizontal rolls, was used for writing.6 Rem­
nants of bhurjapatra have only survived at this one site, and this
paradoxically only because the wood got burnt.
As with generations of rulers before him, it is likely that some
of Ashoka’s official communications would have been recorded on
the product of such bark and leaf. The major post-Kalinga revo­
lution in communication was that the emperor ordered several
of his promulgations to be inscribed on stone and in public places.
These stone edicts have survived remarkably well: found some
2200 years after they were carved, several appear in much the state
they were when created. The survival of an ancient document in the
shape and place where it was originally inscribed is in itself unusual.
What makes it even more so is that, in Ashoka’s time, it was relat­
ively rare. Alexander of Macedon, as we saw, went to great lengths
to ensure he was remembered, even appointing an official historian
for the purpose. This notwithstanding, the available narrative ac­
counts about Alexander date to more than 300 years after him.7
Glimpses of rescripts that Ashoka first sent out to his provinces
and which were inscribed on his instructions can still be seen at a
large number of their original locations because the messages were
engraved on immovable rocks and boulders. There is much variety
in the kinds of surface upon which they were inscribed. Some are
on flattish horizontal rock faces, as at Rajula Mandagiri in the
Kurnool district in Andhra, and near Srinivaspuri in New Delhi.8
Others, such as those at Maski and Nittur in Karnataka, are en­graved
on vertical surfaces. The rocks are sometimes easily accessible, as
at Bairat in the Jaipur district of Rajasthan, where the boulder is
at the foot of a hillside; and in the case of the rock face on which
the Erragudi edict in the Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh is
engraved. Some are more difficult of access, such as the inscribed
Fig. 6.1: The Rajula Mandagiri edict is engraved on the flat rock in the foreground, in front of the
tree dominating a waterbody, with a temple behind it
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 123

Fig. 6.2: Worn-out section of the Rajula Mandagiri edict

slab at Sasaram, which is located on top of the hill in the Rohtas

district of Bihar; and the one at Palkigundu in the Koppal district
of Karnataka, which crowns a high and fairly inaccessible ridge, can
only be reached after negotiating a very steep elevation. The reasons
for inscribing rocks in places that appear today to be rather remote
from ancient habitations will be explored; for the moment it is the
act of engraving messages on such surfaces that gives us pause.
The medium that came to be used for inscribing royal epigraphs
in early India depended upon the message and the audience ad­
dressed. Two demi-official epigraphs of Mauryan times, one from
Mahasthangarh in Bangladesh and the other from Sohgaura in
Uttar Pradesh, recorded instructions for the distribution of grain
during drought and famine.9 The commands were intended for
‘maha­matras’, a category of administrators associated specifically
with urban centres, and were inscribed on plaques. More com­
mon are donative epigraphs of the type which were engraved
into what was being dedicated. King Kharavela in Orissa in the
first cen­tury bce recorded the dedication of residences to Jaina
monks in the Hathigumpha rocks—the caves themselves consti­
tuting the donation. He also used his dedication to indulge in much
Fig. 6.3: Palkigundu canopy rock—the edict is on a ledge beneath the canopy
Fig. 6.4: View of the surrounding area from the edict rock at Palkigundu
126 ashoka in ancient india

chest-thumping, graphically describing how he defeated and terri­-

fied many contemporary rulers into submission.10 The early edicts
of Ashoka were addressed to his administrators too, but were
not meant only for them, the messages being more democratically
motivated for communication to his subjects in general. For this
reason it seems logical to assume that the Mauryan officials en­
graved the emperor’s words on rocks located in areas that were
frequented or commonly accessed at the time.
The epigraphs were all in the Brahmi script, while the language
itself was an amalgam of the dialects of Prakrit. Brahmi and Prakrit
were what the administrative functionaries would have been fami­
liar with.11 Prakrit, though, was not likely to have been the langu­
age spoken in regions like Karnataka and Andhra, where there is
a profusion of such inscriptions. So, when these messages were
transmitted to the people in such regions, for the meaning of the
message to be intelligible it would have had to be translated into the
local language.
How did the process of disseminating such messages, from the
time when they were dispatched to when they came to be inscrib­
ed, unfold? In trying to answer this it is necessary to remember
a second innovation. Each message that Ashoka sent out to his
administrators in the scattered parts of his empire was in a form
more or less identical. In the modern world, where the print
revolution has made it possible to place the same text in the hands
of large numbers of people within a very short space of time, the
novelty of Ashoka’s innovation may not be immediately obvious.
What has to be kept in mind is that in ancient India, where the
technology for multiple reproduction did not exist, the state could
not reach out and express its desires and directives in the way it does
now. So, the emperor’s decision to get multiple copies of his message
prepared and sent to various provinces was an attempt at text-based
mass communication, a kind of force multiplier which ensured that
the message had a massive reach. Usually, when we think of culture
in ancient India as text-created, formalized religious iconography
comes to mind—images that depict textual narratives. Here, by
contrast, a ruler attempts to create an image of himself via the
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 127

words of his message, his attempt being to convey the same image
of himself in every part of his empire. In this reaching out it was
of special importance to him that his subjects hear the singularity
and sameness of his voice across the land that he ruled.
The messages will have been composed on the orders of the
emperor, at points in time when he was possibly on tour, first
written out on materials which have since perished. They were then
dispatched to various administrative centres. In each instance, it
was likely that the message was sent to a prince who was the viceroy
of the province and who, in turn, readdressed it and conveyed it to
officials in his territory for onward dissemination. We know this
because in one instance, where three versions of an edict are found
within a few kilometres of each other, the subsidiary instructions
and greetings from the provincial head have also been inscribed.
These three form a cluster in the Chitradurga district of Karna­
taka, at Brahmagiri, Siddapura, and Jatinga-Rameshwara.12 All of
them note that the prince, described as ‘aryaputra’—a designation
suggesting that the man addressed was Ashoka’s own son—and
officials, called mahamatras, from Suvarnagiri (the capital of the
southern province of the empire) wished the mahamatras at Isila
good health. After this initial greeting, the message is much the
same as elsewhere. Transcribing the address by the dispatcher to
the recipient was obviously a mistake made when the edicts were
finally engraved from the common exemplar sent to all three
places. However, thanks to this ancient error, we have a rare glimpse
into the mode of transmission of the message: we know that the
emperor sent it to the provincial governor who, in turn, forwarded
it for transcription at different locations within the province he
governed.13
The provincial functionaries and engravers who were most
materially responsible for transmitting Ashoka’s messages are
shadowy figures. One exception is a character who signed off those
three texts in Karnataka. Presumably, he was the ‘lipikara’ or writer-
clerk who prepared the exemplar from which the rock engravings
were made. The scribe’s name was Capada, this being mentioned
in all three edicts—which of course does not necessarily mean he
128 ashoka in ancient india

was the engraver.14 The engraver was more likely to have been
a literate worksmith; even more likely, several worksmiths, for
though the three texts were inscribed within a few kilometres of
each other, the engraving hands are different, indicating more than
one engraver.15 Instead of Brahmi—the script used in the main part
of the edict—Capada chose to use Kharoshthi for his own signa­-
ture. Kharoshthi was frequently used in the area of Gandhara,
around the upper Indus and Swat valleys in contemporary north
Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan. Capada may have used Kharoshthi
for signing off to show his dexterity with scripts, as also perhaps
to signal that he either hailed from or was in some way linked
with north-west India. The local engraver inscribed his signature
along with the emperor’s message and so immortalized his name.
Of the many writer-clerks likely to have been employed in the
administration, he remains the only one we know by name.
While other clerks and engravers are not visible in the same
way, sometimes the style of engraving attracts our attention to the
particularity of their skill. One such scribe was the engraver of the
Erragudi edict in Andhra. When inscribing Ashoka’s message there,
he made part of it bidirectional. This segment is boustrophedonic,
a form of writing often found in the remains of ancient Greece
in which the lines, rather than following one direction, turn right
to left and left to right.16 Was this unnamed scribe using the rock
surface to suggest that he was familiar with other writing systems?
Kharoshthi was the only regional script written from right to left, so
was the engraver indicating his possession of a more cosmopolitan
knowledge of scripts? And why did he give up writing in this way
after a few lines? The rest of the text, in fact, was rather haphazardly
put down on the remaining space, with no concession to readability
at all.17 There is no clear answer to why he engraved the message
in this way. What can certainly be said is that every official who
expected to read or translate this engraving would, instead of
marvelling at the engraver’s skill, have roundly cursed the fellow for
his rotten cursive. Boustrophedon is not exactly easy on the eye at
the best of times.
Apart from such epigraphic quirks, which occasionally bring
alive engravers and writers, some changes were made at the level
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 129

of the locality so that the identity of the emperor sending out the
message was easily apprehended. The emperor himself evidently
imagined that his subjects would recognize him by his titles alone.
‘Devanampiya’ (dear to the gods) or ‘Devanampiya Piyadasi’ (dear
to the gods and one who looks affectionately or amiably) was how
the emperor was alluded to in the bulk of these edicts. In some
provinces, though, the administrators in charge of propagating
his message added the king’s name to it. At places like Maski in
Karnataka and at Gujjara in Central India, this king is mentioned
by name as ‘Ashoka’ and ‘Ashoka raja’, respectively. In all likelihood
the local administrator believed that the people hearing or reading
the words needed clarity on the identity of Devanampiya.
The quality and the quirks of writers and engravers, and what
was inadvertently or consciously added to the epigraphic text
by local officials, represent only one part of the story. How were
the words set down on rock communicated to the people of the
locality? This was done by a specially designated official through
a public reading in which those who had congregated at the place
of inscription were required to listen. So, even if Ashoka’s message
was inscribed, its dissemination was oral.18 That orality was central
to this spectacle is evident from the proclamatory ‘Devanampiya
speaks thus’, a phrase frequently encountered. It draws attention
to the fact that what had been written had first been spoken, and
that the speaker, being the emperor, had to be carefully listened to.
Living in faraway Pataliputra, the monarch was compensating for
his absence in most of his empire by speaking to his subjects via
intermediaries who were standing in for him via reading out his
utterances. The interplay of orality and textuality also raises the
question of whether the message was read as it appeared on the
rock, or from a copy that the reader-communicator fished out of
from the folds of his clothes or his bag. In the case of a site like
Maski, the edict was inscribed in a fairly compact way and could be
read fairly easily. This was not at all so everywhere. At Siddapura,
for instance, it would have been impossible for the official to posi­-
tion himself in the very restricted space that separated the engraved
rock from an overhanging boulder. So, in such places, a written
exem­plar was almost certainly used.
Fig. 6.5: The Maski edict, relatively legible and easy to read by people standing near it
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 131

Fig. 6.6: Siddapura edict, cramped by the ledge above it

132 ashoka in ancient india

Considering how important it was for the emperor to com­

municate with his subjects, did local administrators appoint
officials with rhetorical skills for the readings? Were there many
such officials who could both read well and recite powerfully?
Considering the oral culture of early India, it is very possible that
even if this was a novel experience for Mauryan functionaries
they would have attempted to render a public discourse by the
emperor in a style similar to that deployed by poets addressing
an audience of listeners. The difference between an oral perform­-
ance by a poet-entertainer and a functionary carrying out the ord­
ers of the ruler would have lain mainly in the content—a political
rather than literary agenda—with the manner of the address being
perhaps similar, if more declamatory and officious in tone.

***

What did Ashoka want to convey in his very first rock edict? This
earliest communication has survived in the very form in which
it was put down in the third century bce at Rupnath, and a full
English translation of it gives a good idea of how the emperor set
about the business for which he is best known. Other versions of
this message will figure subsequently, but the Rupnath edict gives
a good sense of what Ashoka thought worthy of recounting and
communicating to his subjects: not matters of state, but the state of
his mind. He has become a Buddhist. His metamorphosis needs to
be understood and emulated. So it is the process and the conse­
quences of his conversion that he highlights.
Devanampiya speaks thus.
Two and a half years and somewhat more (have passed) since I am
openly a Shakya.
But (I had) not been very zealous.
But a year and somewhat more (has passed) since I have visited the
Samgha and have been very zealous.
Those gods who during that time had been unmingled (with men)
in Jambudvipa, have now been made (by me) mingled (with them).
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 133
For this is the fruit of zeal.
And this cannot be reached by (persons) of high rank (alone), (but)
even a lowly (person) is able to attain even the great heaven if he is
zealous.
And for the following purpose has (this) proclamation been issued,
(that) both the lowly and the exalted may be zealous, and (that) even
(my) borderers may know (it), (and) that this same zeal may be of long
duration.
For, this matter will (be made by me to) progress, and will (be made
to) progress considerably; it will (be made to) progress to at least one
and a half.
And cause ye matter to be engraved on rocks where an occasion
presents itself.
And (wherever) there are stone pillars here, it must be caused to be
engraved on stone pillars.
And according to the letter of this (proclamation) (You) must
dispatch (an officer) everywhere, as far as your district (extends).
(This) proclamation was issued by (me) on tour.
256 (nights) (had then been) spent on tour.19
This first edict of Ashoka is also among his shortest. It is not
part of a set of several edicts, as are those inscribed in later years.
The personal glimpse of the emperor’s inner life is linked to a
range of pronouncements about his mission. The message is part­
ly confessional, presenting his self-realization and organizing it
in terms of a chronological pattern of development. The text was
dispatched by a ruler in the midst of a long tour, it having been
surmised that the presence of the number 256 in all versions of this
message indicates the number of days (or nights) that Ashoka had
been away from the royal capital, Pataliputra. The ‘date’ also shows
that all of these were dispatched more or less simultaneously.20
Perhaps because it captures an important moment in the life of
Ashoka from the time he converted to Buddhism, the brevity and
crowding are understandable. They betray an impatience in wanting
to share what the metamorphosis meant for him as a ruler, and
therefore ought to mean for his empire at large. There were good
political reasons as well for sharing the information, inasmuch as
it made it simpler to expect his subjects to try and emulate him
134 ashoka in ancient india

if they understood the context within which his transformation

had happened. Let us try and understand the information and
instructions contained in this imperial message and see how they
are interlinked.
Ashoka made grassroots contact with his people only after he
became a Buddhist, there being no epigraphs showing this kind
of intent for his pre-Buddhist phase. He appeared as a charged-up
Buddhist ruler across a large part of his empire in the North (Bairat,
Delhi, Ahraura, Ratanpurwa, and Sasaram), in the heartland of
Central India (Gujjara and Rupnath), and in the Deccan where, in
fact, the most frequent articulation of his persona as a royal Buddh­
ist convert came to be set down—this message being engraved in
ten separate places there.21 Reading it would have left no one in
doubt that the emperor was now an ardent advocate of Buddhism.
He declared at the outset that he had become a Sakya, meaning a
Buddhist (after the Buddha’s well-known title ‘Sakyamuni’). Else­
where, in some versions of this message, he described himself as a
lay follower (‘upasake’) of the Buddhist faith.
Ashoka had become a lay worshipper, he stated, some two and
a half years earlier, although his initial formal adherence to the new
faith was not enough, in his assessment, to make him sufficiently
zealous. This seems to mean that Ashoka did not at first feel
great interest in the morality and faith of the religion. It may also
mean that, as with other laypersons, a great deal within Buddh-
ist discourses and ‘laws’ had not been communicated to him. From
an oft-recounted story about Anathapindaka, the rich banker
who generously set up the Jetavana monastery at Sravasti for the
Buddha, we learn that this kind of reticence with laypersons was
fairly common. During an illness, Anathapindaka called Sariputra,
the Buddha’s disciple, who, when comforting him, expounded a
sermon on a subject that the ill banker was not aware of—disgust
towards sense-objects, we are told. At the end of it the banker was
in tears and told Sariputra that while he had revered the Buddha
a long time, this was the first time he had heard such a religious
discourse. Sariputra is said to have told him that such expositions
were not explained to the laity but only to the religious order.22
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 135

The same hesitation to expound a powerful doctrine immediately

upon the king’s conversion may have been considered desirable,
the assumption probably being that a graduated process was in the
longer term more effective towards ensuring future zeal by letting
the convert himself arrive at the conviction that he was now truly
set on the path to nirvana.
Instrumental in making Ashoka a zealous Buddhist, he re­veal­-
ed, was his association with the Sangha, the Buddhist mendicant
order, a year and a half after he became a lay follower.23 Such
congregations of monks and nuns were by the third century bc
known to exist in many parts of India. Precisely which branch of
the Sangha enchanted him is not known, but Mahabodhi is a
definite possibility since we learn from a later Ashokan epigraph
that the emperor visited it in the tenth year of his consecration,
a year which can be inferred to coincide with the time when he
became fervent. The other possibility is that his constant interaction
with monasteries in and around Pataliputra caused him to feel
more deeply about his new religion. There is no way for us to know
anything on this matter with certainty, nor what exactly transpired
between Ashoka and the Sangha. That he became closely associat­
ed with it is all that he tells us, and this simply underlines that he
was now seriously imbibing the teachings of the Buddha. What
he learnt of the doctrines is likely to have been what had by then
been established for the instruction of laypeople and fresh converts.
The instructions included discourses of all kinds, especially those
concerned with ‘giving, morality and heaven: the first emphasiz­-
ed the advantages of renunciation, the second revealed the harm,
vanity and defilement of desires; the third mellowed, liberated,
exalted and appeased the mind of the listener.’24 Various texts that
contained the teachings and discourses of the Buddha will also
have been inhaled and digested, since some years later the emperor
confidently offered advice to the Buddhist Sangha as well as to the
laity on the texts that they should listen to and reflect upon.
For the Sangha, the conversion of the region’s most powerful
man to a religion which the state had hitherto largely regarded as a
philosophy of dissent against the Brahmanical faith was a coup of
136 ashoka in ancient india

unimaginable magnitude. The confidence of monks proselytizing

and encouraging the expansion and reach of the relatively new faith
will have acquired an altogether new dimension. The closest parallel
to this in the West is perhaps the Roman emperor Constantine in
the third century ce, whose espousal of the relatively new religion
of Christianity—coincidentally, as with Ashoka, roughly 300 years
after the birth of the religion—has sometimes been described as
a transition of the imperial state into the sacred state. In fact, a
detailed comparative study of Ashoka and Constantine—a subject
too large for present purposes—could yield fascinating insights
into the character and consequences of massively influential
monarchical conversions in the ancient world. At any rate, Cons­
tantine in Christian ecclesiastical history has the same position of
absolute assurance that Ashoka has in the Sangha’s versions of key
moments in the trajectory of their faith.
Whatever the quality and length of Ashoka’s interaction with
the Sangha, his message confirms what resulted from it. His new-
found ardour was now demonstrated in two main ways. First,
he drew attention to the eight months or so that he had spent
touring—leading to the surmise that he issued this first edict while
on tour. Second, whereas in preceding times humans and gods
had not mingled, now in Jambudvipa—Ashoka’s name for his
empire—the king took credit for making their intermingling pos­
sible. This was a way of saying that by creating a shared moral
uni­verse for his people with their gods, their emperor had made
Jambudvipa a land of greater morality.
In asserting this Ashoka used a motif that occurs in Buddhist
literature, one that he must have picked up during his interaction
with the Sangha. John Strong, an important scholar of Buddhism,
maintains that implicit in this first edict was the idea of a ‘double
utopia’ in which gods and humans mingled either on earth or
later in heaven, and that this commingling carried the resonance
of what the Buddha himself is said to have created—as recounted
in certain texts.25 Whether the notion was picked up by Ashoka
from such texts, or whether this was plucked out by the Buddhist
tradition from Ashoka’s words, Strong points out, is not easy
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 137

to answer. What seems likely though is that Ashoka used an idea

well understood by people familiar with the faith of the Buddha.
If they had not understood what the commingling of gods and
humans implied, he would have taken some pains to explain what
he meant, as he did with so much else.
The emperor also communicated the possibility of this moral­-
ity being open and available to all those who followed his example,
from the most humble to those who occupied high rank. In empha­
sizing the possibility of equal access he was quite evidently following
the Buddha himself in positioning a new moral universe funda­
mentally different from the stratified hierarchy of the Brahmanical
order. Within the social and cultural milieu of the first millen­-
nium bc, it was social differentiation that was usually emphasized:
the four varnas—Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras—
were posit­ed as possessing different innate characteristics and dif­
ferential ac­cess to a variety of social goods, from occupation to
justice. This was a relatively absolutist system of reservations. The
reservations were supposedly ordained by a primeval divinity,
and therefore in­violable. The individual acting against, or against
the grain of, his status was thus supposedly disobeying a sacred
ordinance—an ordinance which had of course been created, per­
fected, and impos­ed by the powerful upon the lowly, and large­
ly internalized both by the lowly and by society at large. Such
‘internalization’ within Hindu society, i.e. the willing consent to
their own subjugation by the subjugated, has been widely exposed
by modern interpretation and analysis as among the world’s most
effective hegemonies pre­cisely because of its incredibly effective
deployment of gods and goddesses within great literary stories
that were accorded the status of religious texts. The creation of this
social and cultural universe of supposedly sacred acts, exam­
ples, and orders from heavenly beings who descend into the
world of men—partly in order to reinforce the tenets of the varna
system—has been so powerful that its hold in the subcontinent,
notwithstanding Ashoka and Ambedkar, has never been seriously
undermined from the time when the Vedas were composed down
to the present. The Buddha and his best-known disciple Ashoka
138 ashoka in ancient india

seem to have recognized that in order to combat and counter a

system of brainwashing as powerful as Brahmanical Hinduism
required the use, for different ends, of some of the same story-
telling techniques. This basically meant ensuring that the Buddhist
message, while asserting a socially inclusive view—both the lowly
and the exalted could occupy the same moral plane by following
a zealous path and achieve heaven (‘svaga’) equally—was not
delivered in ways that were out of line with notions of the sacred
that had been internalized by caste Hindus. In other words, the
commingling of gods with ordinary people was a motif that Ashoka
saw the value of for the spread of a dissenting faith within an old
culture: to that extent, it was new wine being made more heady by
being poured out of an old and recognizable bottle.
The same initial message also shows purposive variety: Ashoka
suggests that, his own subjects apart, people on the borders learn
about what has moved him in this new direction. So, from the time
when he began publicly communicating through edicts, he pre­
sents himself as a ruler not merely providing an example to his
own existing subjects, but equally to potential converts beyond the
limits of his empire. The message, in fact, strongly underlines the
em­peror’s self-proclaimed mission to pursue the promotion of
moral zeal amongst all his subjects, whose continuous progress
he will ensure by enlarging his imperial reach. There was nothing
tentative about this mission. Instead, as Ashoka put it, the mission
‘will (be made to) progress considerably’. Thus, instructions were
given on how he wanted it disseminated. These were fairly precise
and required that the proclamation be sent everywhere, to the
ex­tremities of the district boundaries of the administrators to
whom the instructions were addressed; and that in each district
the message be engraved on rocks as also on stone pillars wherever
these had been erected. By ensuring that his voice was cast in stone,
Ashoka made sure that this part of his life was set out as exemplary
in exactly the way that he wanted.
Presenting his life in this way was central to Ashoka’s mission­
ary intent. This was now life-history as model and prototype,
the sole example for the populace to follow. The new hegemonic
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 139

enterprise shines through his first edict as much as in those that

follow. What is less evident but appears in retrospect implicit is that
he was interpreting his own life and behaviour in a way that would
have reminded knowledgeable observers of crucial incidents with­-
in an earlier historical life. As one ponders over the constituent
ele­ments of this edict, one cannot escape the strong feeling that
there is in the emperor’s autobiographical vignette some echo of
Siddhartha Gautama, the man who became the Buddha in the sixth
century bce.26 Siddhartha’s decision to renounce worldly life, his
later biographers underlined, was related to a personal trauma.
Ashoka does not mention the Kalinga war and his post-war crisis
in his first edict, but we cannot escape reading even this pithy
tablet in the light of one of the most famous nuggets of ancient
history, namely the transformative impact of the Kalinga war
on the conqueror. Again, while the Buddha moved from being
the head of his household to a wandering life in search of truth,
the king’s traditional calling as head of his ‘household’, the state,
changes to a moral mission. Like the wandering Buddha, who
taught as he travelled, the converted Buddhist king embarks on his
mission by touring his empire. His inclusive moral path is patently
the Buddha’s. Above all, just as the Buddha never failed to reveal
personal experience as the basis of his teachings, Ashoka’s life and
his new kingly calling are inextricably combined. The Buddha
acquired disciples; Ashoka’s disciples were in a sense his entire ad­
mi­nistrative apparatus. Was Ashoka indeed framing his life and
message to evoke some elements of the Buddha? This possibility,
apparent enough to us, may have been made known, or made more
explicit, to those unfamiliar with the correspondences by those
disseminating Ashoka’s message.
The one thing we know for certain about Ashoka’s first message
is that its wording and meaning was, for the average person, unlike
anything that had in the past formed the day-to-day reality of royal
rule. While kingship had a distinguished antiquity in large parts of
Ashoka’s empire, going back in fact many centuries prior to Maur­-
yan rule, a king was not prone to confiding the life-changing epi­
sodes of his career to his people. As warrior and protector of his
140 ashoka in ancient india

realm and subjects, as also a supreme arbitrator of their disputes,

he was meant to project himself as powerful, not spiritual. The
people may have had to be forgiven if they were confused by a king
who, instead of proclaiming his strength via grandiloquent titles,
alluded to himself humbly as ‘beloved of the gods’. The very thought
of such a man being their ruler will have run contrary to normal
thought processes within the populace, which, on the odd occasion
that it thought of him at all, perhaps only feared him as a kind of
god at the apex of a tax-extracting administration backed up by an
army, the dread lord who might some day rain down on them with
his soldiers for reasons unanticipated. The power and persona of
such rulers was mediated on the ground by various administrative
functionaries. Villagers and townspeople would normally have been
familiar only with local functionaries, not with the monarch. Now,
through this novel intervention, the ruler had brought himself
within the direct ambit of their world. The situation will have
seemed bewildering, the imperial initiative without precedent.

***

The vast bulk of Ashoka’s subjects, not being mobile or itinerant,

are only likely to have been familiar with at most one of his edicts,
the one located closest to them—it being understood, of course,
that very many are likely not to have been familiar with any. Those
who encountered the first minor rock edict will have been left in
no doubt that the message of the emperor was Buddhist-inspired
because of the specificity with which the connection is made at the
outset. In his compilation Asokan Sites and Artefacts the scholar
Harry Falk puts this succinctly: ‘reduced to its essence it seems to
propose that everyone become a Buddhist layman, develop zeal
and thus mingle with the gods.’27 However, in some of his other
edicts the message is less specifically Buddhist and more broad
based. This is so in Minor Rock Edict II which, along with the first
edict, is found in many places in the Karnataka–Andhra region.
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 141

While elucidating in this edict what he wanted his subjects to ob­

serve as part of the morality that he was propagating, the earlier
clarity of connection with Buddhist virtue is missing. Rather, the
listing suggests a sort of universal morality that no religious faith in
India was likely to have any quarrel with. The broad-based nature
of its ethic seems one that would have appealed to all sections of the
populace. The key elements of its Brahmagiri version are:

Obedience must be rendered to mother and father, likewise to elders;

firmness (of compassion) must be shown towards animals; the truth
must be spoken; these same moral virtues must be practised.
In the same way the pupil must show reverence to the master, and
one must behave in a suitable manner towards relatives.
This is an ancient rule, and this conduces to long life.28

These various virtues have a universal rather than specifically

Buddh­ist resonance. In reiterating them Ashoka also invokes
ancient law or tradition (‘porana pakiti’) and does not take credit,
as he did in his first message, for initiating a mission. The other
striking thing about it, says the historian Patrick Olivelle, is that this
enumeration is marked by a ‘silence on social vices or crimes, such
as theft, murder, adultery, and other sexual offenses’ which were
matters of major concern to the state.29 Possibly, Ashoka considered
his mission ‘to be something far more personal and “religious”—
the development of character, virtue, and spiritual growth—than
abiding by civil and criminal law.’30 It must at the same time be
kept in mind that if the emperor was merely reminding people
in a general way about the path of morality as defined by age-old
tradition, it may have been because the generality of the message
was at the time of its transmission supplemented or accompanied
by further instructions pertaining to the specific area where it
had been sent. So, this may well have been the way in which this
message was understood in the Chitradurga area of Karnataka,
where the cluster of three sites mentioned earlier—Jatinga-Rame­
shwara, Siddapura, and Brahmagiri—bears practically this same
message in this very form. But the brevity and consequent generality
seems to have been because the engravers omitted all reference to
142 ashoka in ancient india

Ashoka’s administrative instructions which had originally accom­

panied his message. What makes this second message seem rather
too broad based and humane is those absent instructions. On the
rocks of Erragudi and Rajula-Mandagiri, as also at Nittur, stern
orders accompanied the message. Whether Ashoka’s orders were
meant to be inscribed or propagated orally has been debated, but
once inscribed could be imperious and authoritative;31 in fact they
were very considerably at variance with the softly focused universal
virtues.
The message in the latter places bristles with directions. The
emperor expected that the governor ‘should pass orders in the
words of the Beloved of the Gods’ and that his mahamatras pass
orders about the necessity of obeying the morality expounded by
him to the ‘rajukka’.32 The mahamatras were officials based in cities,
while in the country areas the crucial administrative functionaries
were the rajukkas.33 They, in turn would ‘order’ the people of
the countryside, as well as a class of officials called ‘rashtrikas’—
governors of parts of a district. Additionally, the orders were ex­
pected by the emperor to be passed on to elephant-riders, scribes,
charioteers, and Brahman teachers. Pupils too had to be instructed
in accordance with ancient tradition or ‘porana pakiti’. Ancient
tradition figured on more than one occasion in the instructions,
with Ashoka dwelling constantly on it, even ordering that all pro­
pagation be in line with it (‘this should be propagated in the proper
manner among pupils in accordance with what is ancient usage’).
This implies the emperor’s belief that traditional values and usage,
which comprised ‘porana pakiti’, had been forgotten. From first
to last, the manner in which the decree was drafted would have
explicitly reminded those who read it that they had no choice in
the matter of following ancient tradition, the last line firmly de­
creeing, ‘thus orders the Beloved of the Gods’.
The inclusion of the emperor’s orders, or conversely the act of
editing them out, shows how a more or less identical message can
acquire varied meanings when inscribed in different locations. It
is a reasonable assumption that this second message which, in the
cluster in Chitradurga, would have been viewed as loosely moral
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 143

and rooted in tradition, would in other places, sandwiched between

stern imperial orders, have been seen and possibly resented as
authoritarian. So, while Ashoka may well have seen his mission as
being personal and moral, the end result of his constant invocation
of Buddhism in the form of orders to and by administrative offi­-
cials may have been considered by many as an extension into their
sacred space of the laws of the land.

***

If the emperor’s first message and its resonance across large parts of
India depended on specifically how his words came to be engraved
at each particular location, the encounters of his mission with
the cultures and practices of people in varying terrains will also
have differed considerably. Of the large number of texts that have
survived of this message, none were found located at or near the
large cities of the Mauryan realm. Pataliputra, Vidisha, Ujjayini,
and Taxila are among those that have figured in Ashoka’s life, and
which we know already as being commercially and politically
important. There were many others cities as well, such as Sopara,
Sannathi, Malhar, Kaushambi, and Champa, to name a few that
were fairly prosperous: the material evidence of archaeology and
documentary sources suggest this. However, these urban agglo­
merations were not the spots chosen for inscriptions. Ashoka’s
earliest message was engraved mainly in the hills, in rock shelters,
and on prominent rocks in the vicinity of locally significant places.
Whether he wanted his words to be engraved in such places and
not in the premier cities of his empire, he doesn’t tell us. So, let us
turn to the places he chose, or which happened to be chosen by his
officials, to try and see why such places were picked.
Maski in Karnataka is one of these. Maski is the modern name,
after a village there which either got its name from or gave its
name to the Maski nullah, a tributary of the Tungabhadra river
that flows nearby. In the third century bce, not far from present-day
144 ashoka in ancient india

Maski, was a settlement in the south-east of the hill now known as

Durgada Gudda, that being the most conspicuous hill alignment
to be found here. The settlement today is only recognizable from
large quantities of potsherds that litter the soil where cultivated
fields of cotton and sunflower now stand. But a few thousand years
ago, in the time of Ashoka, a copper- and iron-using culture flour­
ished at the spot.
From finds that emerged out of excavations conducted at Maski
in 1954, we learn how some of the subjects of the Mauryan em­peror
lived in this part of Karnataka. This was a sedentary agricultural
society which reared cattle and goats.34 While the houses have
not survived, we know that timber was used in their building
since post holes—in which originally were wooden poles that
have decayed without a trace—have been seen and these must
have supported the frame for thatched roofs. The habitations
have more or less disappeared, but the burial practices of these
people have survived a little. That the burials and habitation were
contemporaneous is evident from the fact that there is an identity
in the kind of pottery found in both deposits. Several of the burials
were within the habitation area itself. Lots of bright-coloured
black and red pots and jars, iron objects such as arrowheads, lances
and knife-blades, and animal bones were buried with the dead.
Undressed granite menhirs were also found here, and this is one
reason why these people in Maski have been given the appellation
‘megalithic-building people’. The monoliths, though, were not
asso­­ciated with funerary deposits, so what exactly they signified
remains unknown. There is also uncertainty about what the uses
to which some of the objects were put, as for instance certain
mys­terious-looking spheroidal stone balls. In the opinion of the
excavator, these could have been sling-stones, or ‘bolas’, for kill­-
ing fast-moving game. They could also well have been playthings
since two of them were buried with a child, placed near its feet.
Perhaps dear to the child, they ‘were placed along with the dead body
as part of the funeral furnishings.’35 Other favourite toys of the
children of Maski have also been found in such graves. One of
these, placed in a grave pit with a child’s body, is a painted disc that
resembles a hopscotch diagram.
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 145

Maski’s structurally unprepossessing settlement pattern can give

the mistaken impression that this was an isolated interior village.
Scholars who know the area’s history point to the presence of all
kinds of artefacts and inscriptions here which capture its links with
other regions in the subcontinent and beyond. An early hint of this,
in all likelihood before the time of Ashoka, is a terracotta cylinder
seal engraved with a man driving an elephant. While the elephant
is characteristically Indian, the man’s ‘radiating’ headdress and
the contours of his mouth, as also the seal’s cylindrical shape, sug­
gest strong affinities with Mesopotamia.36 Such cylinder seals were
known to occur more frequently in the third millennium cities of
the Indus civilization further north, at places like Mohenjodaro and
Chanhudaro. Did a merchant trading goods between Mesopotamia
and India visit this region? If yes, what was the trader looking for
in the Maski region? Gold may well have been one such resource
which, as we shall see, has been found here.
The region also had a strategic significance. More than a thou­
sand years after Ashoka, among a bunch of inscriptions that either
referred to Maski (called ‘Mosangi’, ‘Musangi’, or ‘Mosage’) as the
chief town of the administrative region or as a political capital, is
an eleventh century ce epigraph which alludes to it as a battlefield.
In the list of conquests of the Tamil king Rajendra Chola I, which
ranged from Sri Lanka and Kerala to Orissa and Bengal, is the
vanquishing of Jayasimha, identified with the Chalukya king Jaya­
simha II, who was described as being put to flight at Musangi.37
Even though Jayasimha’s base was at Kalyani, while Rajendra Chola
came from the deep south, the fact that the invading Chola king
defeated the Karnataka-based Chalukya in the vicinity of Maski is
a pointer to its critical location.
We can glimpse similar subcontinental links in the time of the
iron-using society of the region. The inhabitants used beads that
may have originated from areas very far from ancient Karnataka.
Beads in several kinds of raw materials, ranging from those made
of carnelian and garnet to terracotta and paste, have been found
here. Lapis lazuli, shell, and coral are also in evidence: the lapis was
probably of Afghan origin, while shell and coral in this interior area
would have travelled along routes that linked it with the western
146 ashoka in ancient india

coast. The raw materials would have come in with commercial

people of all kinds: traveller-traders from the north-west carrying
lapis with them, and people from this belt travelling there and
returning with saleable goods. The material yields of trade add
to our image of the intersection between these regions at huge
distances from each other. This intersection, as we saw, was evident
from the presence of scribes in Karnataka–Andhra accomplished
in Kharoshthi and employed by the Mauryan provincial admi­
nistration.
There was one precious resource here that traders and rulers
coming to Maski would have dearly sought: gold. The region was
rich in gold deposits. Known to geologists as the main Maski band
of the Dharwar series, a number of old gold workings here under­
line the fact that these deposits were exploited in premodern times.
Old workings have been found near Maski, and many in areas
not too far beyond. Two gold objects of the first millennium bce
found at the site make it seem most likely that the auriferous veins
here were mined in very ancient times.38 The chance discovery of
the Ashokan edict at Maski was in fact the result of the prospect­-
ing for gold in 1915 by a gold-mining engineer of the nizam’s
domi­nions, C. Beadon, in that area. One may even imagine that
Ashoka’s provincial capital in this region, known as Survar­-
nagiri (‘golden mountain’), may have been so named because of its
control and regulation of gold, with Maski as a base for prospect­-
ing and mining.
The sense that the reference points of this settlement extended
much beyond its immediate environment is reinforced by different
kinds of graffiti marks on some of the pottery, from the habitation
area as well as from burials. There were some nineteen types of
marks, either scratched or incised, including trident-like marks,
bows, carelessly incised crosses, V-like incision marks, and one
resembling an arrowhead. These form part of a marking system
that has left its signature at several places in South India and
Sri Lanka. Those who have carefully studied the contexts in which
these were found believe this graffiti is a kind of precursor of
a writing system, with places like Vallam (near Thanjavur) and
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 147

Mangudi (south-west of Madurai) yielding sequences where the

initial phase reveals only graffiti, followed by one where the graffiti
combines with the Brahmi script, and eventually the Brahmi script
appearing to the exclusion of earlier forms.39 In other places, as
at Kodumanal near Erode, Brahmi inscriptions on pottery show
graffiti marks incised at the end.40 Either way, graffiti seems to have
been used to convey messages in a way that script signs did in more
sophisticated forms.
The meanings encoded in the Maski graffiti marks remain
unknown, and no potsherds with Brahmi inscriptions have been
found here. Yet there is every possibility that by the third century
bce some people in Maski were familiar with the Brahmi script
signs, which they may well have seen on the cultural equipment of
contemporary groups further south and west. So, even if this was
the first time that the king had made his presence felt in this form
in the neighbourhood of their settlement, such inhabitants would
have recognized the script in which his message was engraved.
The area possesses many gneissic hills and outcrops; the pro­
vincial officials responsible for engraving Ashoka’s message chose
the largest and most conspicuous of these hills, in whose shadow
Maski stood. Unlike many other sites in Karnataka where both
the first and second minor edicts were set into rock faces, here
only the first message of the emperor, Minor Rock Edict I, was
found engraved. But instead of a rock face near the settlement,
the message was inscribed some distance away, on its western
face, making it invisible to the local population. Importantly, it
was not even visible to those who passed that part of the Durgada
Gudda ridge. This is because Ashoka’s message was written incons­
picuously, on an interior-facing outcrop of a rock shelter with
a massive ledge above it. It was not as if other rocky outcrops
were not available. Much nearer the settlement area and beyond
it were more accessible rock faces than this one, which is rather
too thoroughly tucked inside a cavern on the slope of Durgada
Gudda.
So why was this particular rock face chosen for the edict? One
possibility is that the local officials entrusted with the task wanted
148 ashoka in ancient india

the emperor’s message to survive for as long as possible, and the

protection offered by the overhanging ledge made them glance
favourably at the location. Simultaneously, this was a location
conducive to community rituals and local festivals. Such conjec­-
ture can only be affirmed or rejected via excavations in and around
the rocks of the large cavern. But certainly it made sense to engrave
a message within a place ritually visited: what appears an idiosyn­-
cratic location may not have been so then. That said, considering that
the area for people to gather in by the edict is limited, the audience
at any point in time was unlikely to have been a large one.
Maski folk who came to the outcrop could hardly have failed to
ask local officials about the emperor. The name ‘Ashoka’, inscribed
at Maski, would through constant use have become familiar.
The declamatory use of a first-person voice revealed that he was
a Buddhist, a religion which would have been perceived to have a
new and powerful backer. People thousands of kilometres away
from their emperor in Pataliputra would at the very least have
been curious about what he was saying to them in this dramatic
and unexpected way, by inserting himself into their landscape.
For a community with connections in the large subcontinental
world, the imperial presence in this form may even have been
considered an honour specially bestowed to the area. The assurance
of an egalitarian moral universe may have struck an emotional
chord: the most humble cultivator at Maski was being told that he
was not inconsequential and could exalt himself merely by follow­
ing in the king’s footsteps.
These are some possibilities. It is also possible that the notion
of a mingling of gods and humans sounded alien to the populace.
The Buddhist faith was not a part of the local sacred landscape,
nor did anything in the king’s message show awareness of Maski’s
ancient religious practices. The message on the rock had been
parachuted into their midst, and his expectation that they move in
a direction simply because he had personally chosen it could have
seemed foreign and unconvincing. During Ashoka’s lifetime and
subsequently, Maski reveals no change in its faith. There are several
bruisings on the rocks here—circles, fish symbols, and much else—
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 149

but nothing remotely resembling Buddhist symbols. No Buddhist

stupas were ever constructed here during or after the third century
bce, such as those which came up in other areas associated with
Ashoka. The greatest likelihood is therefore that, as before, Maski’s
community continued to believe in the deities that had traditionally
protected them in life and death. The emperor’s strange message
was read, heard, and ignored.

***

The great man’s wishes were engraved into only one area of the
Maski locality; in other places there seems a greater anxiety to
ensure dissemination, for the same message is inscribed at more
than one place within the same locality. The Chitradurga cluster
of Ashokan epigraphs at Brahmagiri, Siddapura, and Jatinga-
Rameshwara is a dramatic instance of this anxiety. Many stunning
rocky landscapes can be encountered across large tracts in this part
of Karnataka, so an abundance of locations was available. But these
three epigraphs, instead of being spread out, are within a radius of
five km. Siddapura was a little over a kilometre west of Brahmagiri
while Jatinga-Rameshwara was less than five km north-west of it.
These spots seem interlinked because of intervisibility. Siddapura
looked towards Brahmagiri. From Brahmagiri, Siddapura and
Jatinga-Rameshwara were both visible. From the panoramic
hilltop of Jatinga-Rameshwara, in turn, these rocky locations in the
neighbourhood where the emperor’s message was inscribed could
be seen. It is entirely possible that the combination of locational
visibility and a more or less identical royal epigraph at all three
locations ensured that they came to be seen as interconnected.
Let us look at these landscapes a little more closely. Brahmagiri
is the name of a hill of granitic outcrops where, close to the base
alignment that looks towards the Jatinga-Rameshwara hill, lies
the boulder where a composite message combining the two early
edicts of Ashoka was set down. The message had been sent here
Fig. 6.7: Brahmagiri enclosure with Siddapura rocks in the fields and Jatinga-Rameshwara hill
in the background
Fig. 6.8: Brahmagiri edict
152 ashoka in ancient india

from Suvarnagiri, the provincial capital. Suvarnagiri was the

base of a prince whose name we do not know but who was pos­
sibly Ashoka’s son. It was ‘at the word of the aryaputra’ (prince)
and of the mahamatras of Suvarnagiri that the message was sent
to the mahamatras of Isila (‘they must be wished good health’,
the message said). Brahmagiri was thus where ancient Isila
was situated. And since administrative officials of the rank of maha-
matras were attached to it, it was likely to have been an urban
centre.
Has Isila been identified on the ground? In 1940 the archaeo­
logist M.H. Krishna believed he had searched out ancient Isila a
little ahead of the edict-bearing rock, and the place was so described
by a later excavator of Brahmagiri:
The northern slopes of Brahmagiri, largely covered by a tumbled mass
of granite boulders, bear extensive signs of ancient occupation in the
form of pot-sherds, fragmentary walls and remains of small terraced
platforms roughly revetted with dry-stone walling. It is to be presumed
that two thousand years ago more earth remained amongst the bould­-
ers than at the present day, and that much evidence of this part of
Isila has been washed away. But at all times the main area of occupation
must have lain, as surface-remains and excavation combine to indicate,
along the gentle slope which forms the transition from the hill to the
plain. Here a long strip some 200 yards in width is a mass of occupation-
earth and sherds. Beyond it, the fringe of the plain itself, to a depth of
500 yards or more and a length of about a mile, forms what must have
been an almost continuous belt of megalithic structures, mostly cist-
tombs. Many of these have been removed by agriculturists, but some
hundreds still survive in intermittent patches.41

Reading this description it is apparent that, like Maski, this was

marked by habitational debris packed with plenty of potsherds,
and with a cemetery area of multiple burials alongside megalithic
structures. The royal rescript was meant for this iron-using culture
marked by multiple megaliths.42 As at Maski, the inscribed rock is
not at the habitation site but towards its periphery. This would thus
have been a place that Isila’s inhabitants regularly passed and possib­ly
visited, especially since behind this rock water was available through
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 153

a seasonal watercourse.43 A couple of millennia later, washing this

boulder (then known as ‘akshara gundu’, or letter rock) with water
was believed to endow it with usable medicinal virtues, which leads
logically to the supposition that the superstition may have per­-
sisted down to the later period from a time after the Mauryan.
What has also survived some distance south-east of the Brahmagiri
boulder, up the hill, is a small apsidal structure made of bricks. The
ruins revealed a structure made of large bricks (1’5” x 9” x 3–3½”)
which were thought to be indicative of a fairly early time, although
no evidence which would help provide a secure date was found.44
If this was indeed a Buddhist chaitya or temple, as is surmised, it
would mean that the imprint of Buddhism at Brahmagiri went
beyond the Buddhist-inspired message of the monarch.
Moving ahead of Brahmagiri, the question arises why Isila’s
administration decided to get the very same edict inscribed on
a rocky knoll just a kilometre or so distant. This falls within the
mod­ern limit of Siddapura village and so is known as Ashoka’s
Siddapura edict. But in the third century bce the town community
of Isila would have been the target audience for the message—the
same citizen body that will have imbibed the Brahmagiri message.
The oddness of this near duplication cannot be missed, nor the
mystery of why such proximity seemed desirable in a context where
boulders of a sufficient size for engravings were not remotely in
short supply. Here, in the middle of cultivated land is a horizontal
ledge in the rocky outcrop which was used for the engraving. A large
boulder hangs over the ledge and seems almost to have squeezed the
space between it and the inscribed surface. Interestingly, this part
of the knoll faces the Brahmagiri hill and not Jatinga-Rameshwara.
Was the Siddapura slab’s orientation merely functional, in that it
was perhaps the best surface available for putting down a message
running into twenty-two lines, even if the restricted space above
it made the business of reading it difficult? Alternatively, were the
Brahmagiri and Siddapura rocks places where local festivities or
rituals had been established and which the administration hoped
could be redeployed for the new message? Were the emperor’s edicts
actually seen regularly, as they were in the nineteenth century, only
154 ashoka in ancient india

because local cattle-keepers and goatherds used shady overhang­

ing rocky eaves as protection against the hot summer sun? At the
point in time when Ashoka’s inscription was discovered, Sidda­
pura’s low hilly landscape bore a name that suggested such links.
It was called ‘Yenamana timmayyana gundlu’, or ‘the buffalo-herd
Timmayya’s rocks’.45 Which of these is the best explanation, and
whether other deductions lurk are matters for unending speculation
because, as at Maski, no specific archaeological pointers can guide
enquiry. But there is every reason to imagine that all who came to
Siddapura—devotees, shepherds, local children, lovers in search
of privacy—could not have failed to note a Buddhist emperor’s
presence looming larger than life in their lived landscape.
If at Brahmagiri and Siddapura the edicts were inscribed around
the base areas of the rocky ridge, at Jatinga-Rameshwara, the third
point in this cluster, they happened to be located on a high hill some
distance from the surrounding town and villages. Some similarities
link the Jatinga-Rameshwara edict with the other two locations. As
there, the writing is cut into a slanting horizontal rock face and has
a large boulder overhanging it. It is likely that the same group of
officials located the appropriate rocks here, for at all three places
they considered horizontal faces best suited to their purpose. At
Maski a more vertical face had been used, as also at Udegolam and
Nittur. So, within each province the local officials seem to have
had their own clear preferences when it came to deciding on an
appropriate rock face to write on.
Coming back to Jatinga-Rameshwara: what makes it most dra­
matic is that the engravers, instead of using the base or an easily
acces­sible part of the hill, carved his message on the summit. The
hike to the hilltop, made relatively easy today by some 700 steps,
must in Ashokan days have been steep and strenuous. The character
of the landscape of this hilltop location in the third century bce
remains unknown from the range of religious associations presently
visible there. The highest part of this spectacular rocky eminence, a
little beyond the horizontal surface where the edicts were inscribed,
we know to be a spot soaked in the mythology of the Ramayana
story. It is known as ‘Jatayu sthana’ because it is here that the injured
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 155

bird is believed by many to have fallen, even as Jatayu tried to rescue

Sita. In the part of the rocky eminence that lies above and behind
the edict-bearing rock lies a pond whose surrounding rock surface
is marked by the impressions of human feet. Among these are a
pair described as ‘Sita pada’ (the feet of Sita). There is nothing,
though, that can help track such beliefs back to the time of the
Mauryan emperor. The hilltop became famous over time as a
pilgrimage spot called Balgoti Tirtha, a place of pilgrimage for
devotees of the god Shiva under the name Rameshwara. Like
Ashoka, many of the powerful royal patrons of this ‘tirtha’ inscribed
their messages on rock surfaces and boulders. But that happened
more than a millennium later.
In short, though we do not know what brought people to this
hilltop in Mauryan times, the simple truth remains that no state
functionaries would have taken the trouble to carve an important
royal message at a place no one visited. My hunch is that the sheer
physical grandeur of the Jatinga-Rameshwara hill, dominating
everything in the landscape around it, was likely to have had a
symbolic spiritual dominance in the lived world of ancient com­
munities within this area. Such communities climbed the hill on
specific ceremonial occasions. The pre-existence of sacredness asso­­
ciated with a hilltop explains its reuse. The edicts, in turn, trans­
formed the place. Jatinga-Rameshwara was probably a local or at
best provincial religious spot. Ashoka’s message made it part of
a web of places connected to each other by the imprimatur of an
emperor who ruled from the Himalayas to the hills of Karnataka
and beyond.
How did people who trudged here to pay obeisance to their
own deities respond to the Buddhist message? There will have been
many kinds of responses, from rapt interest to scarcely concealed
indifference. However, by contrast with the Brahmagiri rock—
which even in the modern era was seen as endowed with special
properties—Jatinga-Rameshwara’s ancient spiritual mission was
rendered quotidian over time. At the time that the Ashokan edict
rock was discovered in the late nineteenth century, it had be­-
come the favourite spot of bangle-sellers hawking their wares to
156 ashoka in ancient india

pilgrims. The rock was called ‘balegara-gundu’, or bangle-sellers’

rock; various holes were punched into it for posts that supported
a tent erected by them at the annual fair.46 An ancient sacred space
later marked by an emperor’s new-found spirituality now suppor­
ted a more mundane and entirely material quest.

***

If unprepossessing iron-using communities with remarkable grave-

building traditions dominated the places in Karnataka where
Ashoka’s early edicts were inscribed, an entirely different repertoire
of associations existed around the king’s message at Panguraria in
Central India.
A forested hilly tract with a range of rock shelters is how one
might describe the landscape of Panguraria. It is a place with rock
paintings done very many centuries before Ashoka even as it carries
a strong resonance of his Buddhism. The prehistoric paintings show
animals, including monkeys, and hunters. They are in the same line
of rock shelters, halfway up a hill, in which Ashoka’s message is
engraved. Spread across the hillside are a large number of stupas
made of dressed stones, some with platforms, the diameters ranging
from 2 to 76 metres. Alongside are monastic cells within rubble
enclosures. A stunning architectural remnant from Panguraria is
a stone umbrella and an umbrella shaft that supported it, which
may well be Mauryan. Engraved on the shaft is an inscription
which records that the umbrella is the gift of ‘bhikshuni’ (nun)
Sagharakhita; it was caused to be made by Pusa, Dhamarakhita, and
Araha, the ‘amtevasinis’ of Koramika.47 ‘Amtevasinis’ literally means
those living on the border, although it was usually used to describe
pupils.
This juxtaposition of painted rock shelters and Buddhist remains
is a very widespread feature of large parts of Central India. Not
far from Panguraria is Talpura, where again rock shelters show
prehistoric and historic paintings, while above stand two stone
stupas on a large platform. The famous Buddhist centre of Sanchi,
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 157

whose great stupa built by Ashoka we will discuss later, stands on

a hill where a line of rock shelters can still be seen along an old
road leading to Vidisha. The shelters bear prehistoric and historic
representations—animals, men, an antler mask, horse and elephant
riders. The pre-existing sacredness of these places from prehistoric
time suggests a continuity into historic time of a new variant of
the same basic religious impulse, the shape now being Buddhism.
Monastic groups, adherents of the later faith, sometimes chose to
inhabit these shelters in unconscious or deliberate acknowledge­
ment of some sort of emotional kinship with those who had gone
before.
This would have been true for Panguraria as much as for other
such spots. What makes Panguraria both different and distinctive is
that it is the only place within this region where Ashoka’s rescript
was recorded on the stone walls of a rock shelter.48 Known as the
Saru-Maru cave (or ‘gufa’), the edict-bearing shelter lies in the Rehti
reserved forest, in the midst of jungle foliage and spectacular scenic
views of the surrounding landscape. An uneven back wall within
the shelter shows the writing. Part of the rock seems to have been
found unsuitable by the engraver. So he set down the epigraph in
two parts, three lines of writing in the first part and five lines in
the second.49
There is a further distinction: Ashoka directly addresses the local
governor, a Kumara called Samva.50 Such direct communication is
not evident at Maski, Brahmagiri, or any other Ashokan location at
this point in time. All who read or heard the Panguraria message, as
we do today, would have learnt that the governor was the recipient
of a message from the king himself. The governor’s title, ‘kumara’,
meant he was a scion of the royal family though not a son of the
king—as was the ‘aryaputra’ in Karnataka.
The place from where the king sent his message is also pro­-
vided, for the first time. Ashoka is communicating with Kumara
Samva ‘from his march to the Upunita-vihara in Manema-desha’.
Upunita-vihara was a Buddhist monastery, though it has not been
identified on the ground; nor has the territorial unit referred to
as Manema-desha. Even so, that the emperor was journeying to
Fig. 6.9: Ashoka’s edict in a rock shelter at Panguraria
 t h e e m p e r o r’s vo i c e 159

Fig. 6.10: View of the countryside around the Panguraria rock shelter

reach a vihara offers a precious hint about some of the places that
he was heading for during his long tour of 256 nights (or days). This
then prompts us to wonder about the reactions of resident Buddhist
monks and nuns in such viharas to the royal visitor and his entour­
age. The man appearing on the horizon will have been perceived
as the first monarch to be touring his kingdom not to consolidate
it materially but to extend it spiritually. His extraordinariness will
have seemed to many to border on the peculiar.
On receiving this communiqué from the king, we imagine
Kumara Samva arranging to get it inscribed in a place where Bud­
dhists were already resident. The governor himself will have been
headquartered in one of the cities of the region. If it was in the
vicinity of Panguraria, either Nandner or Ninnore, both commercial
centres, could well have been his capital.51 It is logical to suppose
that he was in touch with the Buddhist monks of his territory; he
may even have encountered many wandering the nearby towns and
settlements, begging for food in the traditional way prescribed by
the Buddha.
160 ashoka in ancient india

One suggestion is that the Panguraria complex may well have

been the very Upunita-vihara mentioned in the rescript, which
‘the king was asking the royal governor to visit’, we are told, ‘in
anticipation of the promulgation’ of his message there.52 Whatever
the ancient name of the present site of Panguraria, it was by then
already a Buddhist sanctuary. This means that the intended audience,
unlike many other audiences, for the emperor’s inscription was a
monastic community already in existence at this location. Ashoka’s
edict here is similar to those at Maski and Rupnath, but the fact
that the intended audience here was Buddhist will have resulted in
a different kind of reception for it.
The resident monks and nuns will, one assumes, have felt
greatly reassured about the rightness of the path they had chosen,
considering their afflictions worth the while now that this same
path was being trodden by the emperor himself. The mendicants
here, as in the other viharas that Ashoka will have visited, may
nonetheless have been surprised by the import of his message.
Kings as conquerors of the lands of other rulers, or as builders of
political capitals, were commonly encountered within stories that
circulated in the third century bce of the time of the Sakyamuni.
Here, however, was a king proclaiming he was one of them. What
next? Might he decide to join them and live among them? The tenor
of these new proclamations might well have made the discerning
feel there was no saying what might happen in the future.
 7

Extending the Arc of

Communication to Afghanistan

W
hile officials and scribes were etching the
emperor’s messages in the various parts of India, a
royal communiqué was pro­mulgated beyond the sub­-
continent around 259 bce. The timing of the proclamation, around
the tenth year after Ashoka’s coronation, makes it broadly con­­
temporaneous with the others that we have just waded through.
Unlike those messages, though, this one was in Afghanistan, in the
vicinity of Kandahar.
Why did Ashoka get an edict engraved in a region as remote
from Pataliputra as Afghanistan, and how may we visualize the
desire for making his presence felt there? Speaking historically,
Ashoka’s imprint in this territory should not surprise us as the
region had become part of the Mauryan realm since the time
of Chandragupta, when large parts of it were seceded to him by
Seleucus. Geographically speaking, however, its remoteness within
a generally harsh terrain and climate make it an odd choice for
an edict. But then strategically speaking the largely mountainous
character of the province had resulted in it being seldom secluded
at key points of exit and entry, the Khyber and Kurram passes being
much used for access from the south and east, and the Caspian
162 ashoka in ancient india

route from Herat towards the north. Mainly for this reason, many
millennia before the appearance of Ashoka, specific points in
Afghanistan had become a zone of cultural interfaces and trading
connections of all kinds.
Ancient artefacts strikingly evocative of links with the West and
the East, from Greece and Iran to the heartland of Gangetic India,
have turned up from sites in the region.1 Agricultural settlements
had for long existed here, in what have been described as the
‘toothpaste squeezes’ of rivers and tributaries.2 These are found
in a fairly large stretch, in the area of the Amu Darya river in the
north, and in the southern mountains and foothills. The fourth
millennium bce saw the appearance of pottery in an extensive series
of mounds at Mundigak near Kandahar, sharing clear parallels with
ceramics from sites in Baluchistan. Those, in turn, occasionally
had motifs that appear to be of Iranian inspiration.3 All this is per­
fectly logical since an important route to Baluchistan from Iran
passed through Kandahar. The ceramic parallels also show that,
to begin with, Afghanistan’s relationship with Baluchistan was far
more crucial while with the more distant regions to the west, the
cultural interaction was limited.4 Later, in the third millennium
bce, the material culture of this area shows parallels with that
seen in Iranian sites of the same timespan. Shahr-i Sokhta in Iran
manufactured alabaster vessels which reached Mundigak.5 As for
northern Afghanistan, in the third millennium bce a Bronze Age
commercial outpost, exclusively marked by antiquities and arte­
facts of Harappan tradition, was flourishing at Shortughai near the
Kokcha river.6 Shortughai perhaps represents the earliest Indian
diaspora community settled far from its land of origin while main­
taining strong links with it. Harappan settlers came here for its
rich resources, ranging from metal ores to the deep blue lapis
lazuli stone of Badakshan. Lapis was fashioned into beads worn in
Harappan settlements stretching from Punjab to Gujarat.
With the advent of the early historical period the political im­-
print of rulers with an appetite for vast tracts of territory swims
into view, these being conquerors who brought Afghanistan with­
in the ambit of their empires. In the sixth century bce, when
the Achaemenids from Iran made central-south Afghanistan a
 e x t e n d i n g t h e a r c o f c o m m u n i c at i o n 163

Map 3: Afghanistan in relation to Iran and Pakistan

pro­vince of their realm, Kandahar became their main bastion.

From that point in time, very likely, the Aramaic language, steeped
in local Iranian terms, came to be used in the administration
here. The province where Kandahar stood came to be known as
Arachosia and was considered an important political prize, having
been fought over by a loyalist of Darius I of Persia against a
rebel pretender to the Achaemenid throne.7 Later it was overrun
by Alexander in 330 bce, a consequence of his defeating Darius III
in 331 bce. The Macedonian conqueror, now the ruler of the satra­
pies of the Achaemenids, placed new administrators in position to
hold his conquests.8 He is known to have appointed a Greek gover­
nor at Arachosia who was provided with a military arm consisting
of some 4000 infantry and 600 horsemen. Kandahar, rechristened
Alexandropolis, remained the capital of the province.
By the late fourth century bce Arachosia was part of the Maur­
yan state. Following Alexander’s death, Seleucus I Nicator emerged
as king of Syria and parts of western Asia but he failed to hold on
164 ashoka in ancient india

to south-east Afghanistan and the Indus area, being forced to make

peace with Chandragupta Maurya. Through a diplomatic detente
the Seleucid king ceded Gandhara, Arachosia, and Paropamisadae
(the ancient Greek name for the south-eastern part of present-day
Afghanistan). In return he received 500 elephants and a female
relative of Seleucus (for a matrimonial alliance). Paul Kosmin,
historian of the Seleucid empire, believes that this was a mutually
beneficial exchange: ‘Geopolitically, Seleucus abandoned territories
he could never securely hold in favour of peace and security in the
east.’9 As for Chandragupta, he ‘gained unchallenged expansion into
India’s northwest corridor. His gift of elephants may have alleviat­
ed the burden of fodder and the return march!’10 What Arachosia
was called in Mauryan times remains unknown, but a people called
Kambojas are mentioned in sources of that era as locally resident.
From the geopolitical perspective these territorial acquisitions
meant that the Mauryan monarch’s powerful pan-Indian empire
now had unfettered access across this part of Asia.
Ashoka’s communications were one element of this larger line­
age of interconnections that left a mark on Afghanistan, a land
whose fortunes had for long been tied to those of political overlords
located thousands of kilometres distant. The great trade and
military routes in this part of Asia passed through its territory, so
the populace was no doubt habituated to the comings and goings of
kings and conquerors.11 All the same, like populaces around other
edict sites, it may well have cogitated and scratched its head for a
long time when first confronting Ashoka’s epigraphic scrawls in the
vicinity. While here we look at the first of Ashoka’s epigraphs in
Afghanistan, some years later several more were put down in that
remote region, a couple of them in Kandahar itself.12 Two others
were in the valley of Laghman in eastern Afghanistan, carved into in
situ stones on ridges known as Sultan Baba and Sam Baba, two km
distant from each other.13 A third, also from the Laghman region,
was on a stone tablet found in Pul-i-Darunta.14 The population
of the localities in which these were inscribed may have become
accustomed to being accosted by their sovereign as an epigraphic
presence in their midst.
 e x t e n d i n g t h e a r c o f c o m m u n i c at i o n 165

It was in south Afghanistan that the emperor first addressed

his north-western subjects, on the outskirts of Kandahar. The city
lies in a region sandwiched between mountains and a sandy area
appropriately called Registan to its south.15 The plain on which it
stands is between the Arghandab and Tarnak rivers and commands
the road going through the Tarnak valley by Ghazni to Kabul.
Towards the south another route skirts Registan to Quetta and the
Bolan pass, from where the Indus plains could be accessed.16 The
ancient city lay west of the modern one, about four km from it.
The ruins of this old Kandahar, while eroded and robbed in most
places, reveal a massive citadel in the midst of an imposing walled
enclosure with a series of superimposed defences.17 Covering seve­
ral thousand square metres and rising some 35 metres above the
ground, the citadel was an entirely man-made elevation, built on
bedrock. Very possibly it was the location of the city’s adminis­
trative centre.18
Sometime after 260 bce, those resident in Kandahar (as also
those who visited it) would have noticed unusual activity around
an easterly facing rocky outcrop which was part of the Kaitul massif,
a natural stronghold. They were sure to have noticed it because it
lay close to the road to Girishk and Herat, a track frequently used
by travellers and traders. They will have spotted the preparation of
a trapezoidal panel which was inset into the rock and smoothened
with great care. The involvement of the local government would
have been apparent from the presence of officials co-ordinating the
preparation of the panel on which, soon enough, a few hundred
words appeared. Ancient bystanders, like us today, may have wond­
ered why the state functionaries had chosen this particular rock for
those words. Was it, like many other places where the emperor’s
epigraphs had been inscribed, part of a sacred vicinity or near
an ancient shrine? Perhaps. The attractions of engraving royal
messages into rock here may have been considerable, given the
availability of carvable rock. Many centuries later the Cehel Zina
of the first Mughal Babur, commemorating his battle against the
city in the early sixteenth century, was cut into the same mountains
that protect old Kandahar.19 Ashoka’s engraving was conceivably
166 ashoka in ancient india

visible and known to later wayfarers on this trail, though it is

likely that Babur’s engravers, encountering it, would not have made
head or tail of what their predecessors were getting at.
In the third century bce, what would have drawn residents and
visitors to this chipping and grinding will have been the fact that
the emperor’s message was in two familiar languages. The other
messages that we waded through, which were sent out around
the same time as this one, were a fairly similar broadcast, being
also in the same language and script. This first Afghan rescript of
Ashoka, on the other hand, used neither the Brahmi script nor
the Prakrit vocabulary of the carvings we saw earlier. Greek
and Aramaic were served instead, the Greek featuring above
the Aramaic, keeping two readerships in mind. An example of
such bilingualism is the medieval stone tablet discovered in the
foundations of a monastery near the Gauri-Kedara temple at
Bhubaneswar in Orissa. The tablet was inscribed in Oriya and
Tamil because it recorded a transaction between a debtor, a man
of Tamil descent associated with the monastery, and a creditor, a
moneyed Oriya.20 Many centuries before this, in large parts of
Asia and beyond, epigraphic records in more than one language
had become a fairly familiar sight. With the Achaemenids,
in fact, multilingual inscriptions became almost the rule, the
earliest and best-known example being the monumental epi­
graph on a limestone cliff on Mount Behistun in the Kerman­-
shah province of western Iran. Here, Darius I (Darius ‘the Great’)
of the sixth century bce had a trilingual epigraph inscribed in old
Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. Later, such inscriptions were
engraved further west, such as for example those of the reign of
Artaxerxes III (425–338 bce), the eleventh emperor of the Achae­
menid empire. These are at Sardis and Xanthos in Turkey. Lite­­-
rary references to such inscriptions also abound, and, if Hero­dotus
is to believed, stelae with inscriptions in cuneiform and Greek were
set up at the site of the Darius bridge around the Bosphorus.21
Clearly, this template enjoyed wide currency in the regions west
of Afghanistan and beyond much before it was deployed for the
Ashokan message at Kandahar.
 e x t e n d i n g t h e a r c o f c o m m u n i c at i o n 167

The use of Greek alongside Aramaic by a Pataliputra-based

em­peror shows us that at least part of his audience was Greek-
speaking. That Kandahar had such speakers is also known from a
Greek inscription found at old Kandahar, recovered a few hund­
red yards from Ashoka’s bilingual rock edict and inscribed on a
statue base. It mentions a Greek-speaking citizen who describes
himself as the ‘son of Aristonax, one of Alexandria’s citizens’.22
Thus, the first citizen of that city known to history was a Greek.
The partially surviving epigraph suggests that he dedicated what
may have been the statue of a ‘beast’ to what is called a ‘temenos’ of
Alexander. A temenos was likely to have been a kind of sanctuary
or area dedicated to a Greek deity, which means that not only did
this city have Greek inhabitants, it also had structures associated
with Greek life.23 There were Greek settlers in other parts of Afgha­n­-
istan as well, as at Ai Khanoum in Bactria, a Hellenic city that flour­
ished from times somewhat later than those of Alexander.
Before the arrival of Greek, Achaemenian Aramaic, the langu­-
age of official communications in the Persian empire, was in use
here. In the second half of the first millennium bce, Aramaic had
be­come the most widely used script across the ancient Near East,
from Assyria to north-west India, as well as in Egypt and Asia
Minor, because this was what officialdom used.24 Presumably, it
was introduced by the Achaemenids into their satrapies in Afghan­
istan and the Indus valley, roughly from Arachosia to Gandhara.
The empire collapsed but Aramaic continued. This explains why the
Mauryan emperor used it for transmitting his message. Incident­
ally, it is from Aramaic that the Kharoshthi form of writing, widely
used in north-west India, evolved: Ashoka later used it for another
set of messages there. Everywhere else, in the subcontinental main­
land, as we have seen, the Mauryan empire’s administrators used
Prakrit via the Brahmi script. While many different languages will
have been spoken across the area, the Mauryan administration had
earlier stuck uniformly to Prakrit, the assumption having been that
there were enough bilingually fluent people around to translate
Prakrit into the locally common tongues. Now, for the first time,
and deviating from the practice followed in the rest of the empire,
168 ashoka in ancient india

an Ashokan message was composed in two ‘foreign’ languages,

one from Persia and the other from Europe.
The Kandahar situation is not, however, as singular as it seems.
Ashoka’s edicts were inscribed in languages used here in gov-
ern­mental memoranda. It was a pragmatic decision. If the admi­
nistrators of large parts of India conducted official business in
Prakrit, in this part of Afghanistan the familiarity was with Greek
and Aramaic. By using these the administration was ensuring
trouble-free dissemination by factoring in the nature of bilingual­
ism here. Greek and Aramaic apart, other languages and dialects
are likely to have been spoken in the region, though what these
might have been we don’t know because they were not used by the
local administration—at least not on surviving rocks or anything
that has come down to us from that period. Such antique speech
forms are likely to have persisted beyond the conquests and in­
flows of the West. The persistence does not necessarily mean the
existence here of separable population clusters—Greeks and Pers­
ians, Magadha migrants and indigenous groups. All it means is
that while two of the main languages and scripts were used by the
administration, people in general continued to speak in earlier auto­­-
chthonous tongues. This regional linguistic situation was being
kept in mind by those who carved the inscriptions.
The form and content were also qualitatively different. Unlike
the royal Buddhist convert of mainland India who took pains to
explain his spiritual evolution, in Kandahar we see a remarkably
self-assured emperor who has already converted others to his path.
This message is not about his metamorphosis, it is a supremely
confident summary of the sovereign’s spiritual success:
Ten years (of reign, or since the consecration) having been completed,
king Piodasses (Piyadassi) made known (the doctrine of) Piety to
men; and from this moment he has made men more pious, and every­
thing thrives throughout the whole world. And the king abstains from
(killing) living beings, and other men and those who (are) huntsmen
and fishermen of the king have desisted from hunting. And if some
(were) intemperate, they have ceased from their intemperance as
was in their power; and obedient to their father and mother and to
 e x t e n d i n g t h e a r c o f c o m m u n i c at i o n 169
the elders, in opposition to the past also in the future, by so acting on
every occasion, they will live better and more happily.25

This rescript was issued around the time of the edicts we have
seen earlier. The differences between it and those are several: in
his Kandahar message he relates no personal experience nor gives
other reasons for propagating his doctrine of piety. He does not
appear as a converted Buddhist. The confessional mode is omit­
ted, as are the earlier moral expectations from administrators and
subjects. The message is closer to being an announcement outlining
the advent of a new era of general spiritual success following the
tenth year of the king’s consecration. In its tone it is similar to
panegyrics extolling the successes of ancient conquerors, except,
again, in the nature of the victory. The conquest proclaimed is
now a promotion of piety which has enabled his subjects to live
‘better and more happily.’
What of the character and quality of the language in this bi­
lingual inscription—does it capture what constituted Ashoka’s
piety? One commentator, Paul Bernard, remarks on the excel-
lence and contemporary nature of the Greek language which,
as he puts it, does not give the appearance of having languish­-
ed ‘in exile, barbarized by misuse’. The vocabulary suggests an
absence of hybridization and dilution with local accents and usa­ges.
It is—
a language full of vitality, aware of contemporary usage, skilled in
the handling of the literary language, familiar with the terms used by
philosophers and sophists, as well as those found in the vocabulary
of politics, able to find the closest equivalents to specifically Indian
concepts such as eusebeia for the notion of dhamma, diatribe which
means ‘school of philosophy’ in Greek for pasamda, the Indian term
for religious sect, and enkrateia, the Greek expression for self-control,
which applies to the restraint which the emperor’s subjects must
practice among themselves.26

Clearly, the scribe’s skills in Greek were fairly advanced. The

Greek edict does not seem like a translation of general statements
unspecific to locality either. On the contrary, care seems to have
170 ashoka in ancient india

been taken to adapt the ruler’s voice to a form locally appropriate

and comprehensible. Mortimer Wheeler had such elements of
Greek culture in mind when remarking that at Kandahar ‘we need
then no longer to hesitate to accept a full-blown “Alexandria” upon
the side of Old Kandahar. This was no mere tired vestige of a pass­-
ing army. It was a balanced Greek city with its writers, its philoso­
ph­ers, its teachers, no less than its executives and its growing
environment of Hellenized “natives”’.27
Setting aside the encomia for a moment and looking at pos­-
sible problems in the wording, it would seem that in the third
century bce the precise terminology required in Greek for Buddh­
ist concepts will have involved something of a wrestle because of
the lack of exact equivalents. The deployment here of the Greek
‘eusebeia’ or piety is an example. The intention is to introduce the
idea of dhamma, but in fact the Greek word is something of a far
cry from the Ashokan notion of dhamma.28 Eusebeia apparently
‘defines a respect or awe by humans towards the gods or other
divine beings; it applies much less to interactions between mortals
themselves.’29 It also involves the idea of sacrifice, which in the
Greek context meant killing animals. This would make it most
contradictory to Ashoka’s dhamma, ceasing to kill animals being
central to the emperor’s concerns. Moreover, rather than anything
that relates to gods, dhamma is a moral order involving humans and
their roles in that order. In the early edicts of Karnataka it occurs in
association with the Buddhist virtues (‘dhamma-guna’) which were
to be practised. So, what the north-western people of the empire
made of eusebeia seems worth thinking about. The interpretive out­
come of using a language to transmit a message culturally ground­-
ed elsewhere will have modified the meaning of the message, at
points perhaps crucially enough to seriously puzzle people.
What of the other epigraph in Aramaic inscribed below the
Greek? This too uses words more at home within a culture rooted
in the West rather than in the subcontinent. The Aramaic is not
an exact translation of the Greek but corresponds in its general
character to that text inasmuch as Ashoka’s spiritual success is the
main thrust of it:
 e x t e n d i n g t h e a r c o f c o m m u n i c at i o n 171
10 years [having] fallen [it] was made which [was that] our Lord Prydrs,
the king, promoted Truth (Qsyt’). Since then evil has diminished for
all men, and he has caused all hostile things to disappear, and joy has
arisen throughout the whole earth. And moreover, there is this (?): for
the feeding of our Lord, the king, little is killed; seeing this (?) all men
have given up [killing animals], and those who caught fishes, those men
have given up [doing it]; similarly, those who are without restraint (?)
have ceased to be without restraint (?). And [there is] good obedience to
one’s mother and father and to the old people, as destiny has laid down
on every one. And there is no judgment for all men [who are] pious.
This has benefited all men and will continue to benefit.30

Line by line, the Aramaic phrases do not correspond with the Greek.
The differences are worth highlighting. The king here ‘promotes
truth’ (‘qshyt’ in Aramaic) while in the Greek he makes known his
doctrine of ‘piety’. Unlike the king who abstained from killing in
the Greek inscription, here ‘for the feeding of Our Lord the king,
little is killed’. Presumably, this meant that hardly any animals were
being slaughtered for the royal kitchen. This reduction apparently
encouraged his subjects to give up the killing of animals—or so the
epigraph says. The declaration’s end—‘And there is no Judgment
for all pious men’—stands out because the Greek message does not
include it. Overall, however, the Aramaic vocabulary seems able to
get Ashoka’s message without the possible interpretive difficulties
of the Greek. The Persian cultural grounding of Aramaic seems
more conducive to a translation of concepts from the heartland of
Buddhism. The overt preoccupation of this edict with giving up the
killing of animals, incidentally, continues to figure prominently in
Ashoka’s later Afghanistan epigraphs. The Aramaic Pul-i-Darunta
stone inscription noted that no living being was to be ‘fattened’ with
other living beings, while two other edicts, also in Aramaic, from
Laghman speak about the king having dispersed and expelled from
‘the prosperous (population) the lovers of  .  .  .  hunting of creatures
and fishes.’31
But coming back to our Kandahar message: who exactly
composed it and what decisions on its content were taken by
the provincial administration rather than the emperor? Did an
172 ashoka in ancient india

exemplar emanating from the king determine the matter or were

the translators left largely free? These questions connect with
how political authority was constituted in the separable parts of
the Mauryan empire, the dominant issue studied by historians
thus far being the extent or lack of an authoritative centralized
administration. Evidence of varying kinds of authority exercised
across different regions led Romila Thapar to describe the Mauryan
administration ‘as a relationship between three categories of con­-
trol: between the metropolitan state, the core areas and the peri­
pheral regions.’32 Her definition is based on the history of the
political formation, the nature of the administration, and the
character of the economy. The metropolitan state was Magadha,
a state with centralized bureaucratic control much before the
Mauryas. The core areas were already states before they were
conquered by the Mauryas, states like Gandhara and Avanti. On the
other hand, the peripheral regions were areas of relative isolation
with no antecedent histories of state formation, but possessing
natural resources much valued by the Mauryas. These categories
were not immutable and core areas could become independent
kingdoms just as peripheral areas changed into core regions.33
That all administrations, ancient and modern, exercise power
differently across large territories is only natural, given varying
political requirements. The problem is that macro analyses using
state power or economic might as their measure of all things tend
to posit somewhat singular ground realities across diverse regions.
From such perspectives, outlying regions come to be seen as passive
providers for the metropolitan state, as also passive recipients of
innovations emanating from a distant central authority. Histor­
ians employed by royalty in dominant centralizing states defined
the distant regions that their masters conquered and controlled
primarily in relation to the needs of the centre. Interpretations of
the pre-Mughal, Mughal, and British colonial periods were also
for long based on these somewhat reductive assumptions in which
aspects of autonomy, subversion, and precolonial continuity in
regions distant from the centre tended to be steamrolled out
of existence. So also the ways in which core and periphery are
described in works on ancient India which tend to overlook the
Fig. Prelude 2: Part of Ashoka’s message on the rocks of Erragudi
Fig. 1.1: Ashoka and his queen on a second century ce panel of the
Kanaganahalli stupa in Karnataka

Fig. 10.5: Worshipping monks in front of Lumbini’s

Ashokan pillar
Fig. 12.1: Tissarakshita, Queen of Ashoka Fig. 12.2: Sanghamitra with
(Abanindranath Tagore) the Bodhi tree (Nandlal Bose)
 Fig. Epilogue 1: Depiction of
Ashoka supported by his wives
on the upper segment of
gateway pillar at Sanchi

Fig. Epilogue 3: Sculpture of

Ashoka at Kalinga
by Meera Mukherjee
 e x t e n d i n g t h e a r c o f c o m m u n i c at i o n 173

peripheries of empire as the homeland of real people with their

own languages, cultural predilections, and continuing everyday
traditions of spirituality as well as resistance to impositions from
the world beyond. The central state’s armed might was, besides,
often exercised only sporadically, and sometimes restrictedly for
revenue extraction, leaving many areas of activity open for local
modification and variation. The fundamental point is that regions
have their own local histories additional to the history of their
subsumption or control by an external state, and in fact the most
interesting or detailed history of a region can be more connected
with aspects that make it autonomous rather than controlled.
Karnataka, which Thapar sees as a periphery, seems not to have been
peripheral in that broader sense; it was not remotely the passive
recipient of cultural innovation from the Mauryan metropolis.
How the king’s message was received there seems to have depended
on a variety of factors at the level of the locality, ranging from the
character of communities to the nature of trade and commerce.
The same processes can be seen at work in Afghanistan. This was
a frontier region at the edge of the Mauryan empire continuously
open to influences from Greece, Iran, Central Asia, and India. Very
possibly, it was through this part of his empire that several of the
emissaries Ashoka would later send to sovereigns of the Hellenistic
world passed.34 Even at this point, the existence of a Greek sanc­-
tuary at Kandahar within a few yards of the emperor’s edict
underlines the presence of citizens who were familiar with and
engaged in cult activities rooted in the classical world of the West.
We have also seen that terminology locally introduced, such
as eusebeia or ‘piety’ and qshyt or ‘truth’ in place of the Prakrit
dhamma, exemplifies how inter-ethnic contacts resulting from
those influences played a part in translating Ashoka, even if the
tone and character could not have been an entirely local concep­
tion.35 In other words, while Afghanistan marked the physical limit
of the empire of Ashoka on the west, the cosmopolitan commun­
ities here were heirs to a multicultural heritage independent of the
Mauryas, and one which, historically speaking, is not evoked in
descriptions that see this region as peripheral.
It has been suggested that the Kandahar edict has less in common
174 ashoka in ancient india

with other minor rock edicts while showing a general concord­-

ance with another edict of Ashoka, Rock Edict IV, in which a
similar sense of prior ethical accomplishment is conveyed. The
concordance can only be general because Rock Edict IV is a far
more elaborate statement within which the obedience that is
exhorted in the Kandahar edict figures in only one of its senten­-
ces. What further complicates the question of such a link is that
Rock Edict IV came into being two years after the one at Kandahar.
So, because of the chronology, not much is gained by trying to
locate the genealogy of the first Afghan edict in other royal res­
cripts.
It is better, perhaps, to seek an explanation for the qualitatively
distinct character of the Kandahar epigraph in a different set of
historical facts. One possibility is that the edict was specially com­-
posed for this part of his empire, which had formed part of the
territory of many earlier conquerors. Local administrators may
have felt that a confident and assured message was more appro­
priate here than one where the emperor’s personal angst and
spiritual metamorphosis were spotlighted. These officials had a
familiarity with the world of Persia, where kings made triumphant
proclamations about their deeds and battles in elaborate detail.
So, composing a message which spelt out what Ashoka had achiev­
ed would be more in line with what monarchs in this part of Asia
generally disseminated. For this reason, there are elements in it
which have been described as similar to the great Behistun inscrip­
tion of Darius in Iran, in which the facts narrated are counted
from the king’s succession to the throne, with the king stating
that everything changed with his reign.36 But Darius is shown as
victorious over his enemies and protected by a god (Ahuramazda).
Ashoka by contrast emphasizes personal humility and the ultimate
triumph of non-violence.

***
 e x t e n d i n g t h e a r c o f c o m m u n i c at i o n 175

Afghani food has traditionally been rich in all kinds of carnivorous

delights. A graphic description of this diet—including hunks of
mutton, the head and feet of sheep, chicken, skewered meat, hot
mutton stock soups, even dried meat—has been provided by a
scholar of Afghan history and culture, Louis Dupree. Hunting
game, particularly gazelle, markhor, ibex, quail, pigeon, and par­
tridge, and eating fish were equally important to the average
Afghan.37 It would be nice to know even more about the range of
food that ancient Afghanis ate, but the list of non-vegetarian de­-
lights is already sufficient to turn the stomachs of vegetarians, the
evidence for the consumption of animal flesh being not exactly
skeletal. In this kind of context, might there have been hoots of
laughter at the efforts on behalf of vegetarianism from distant
Pataliputra?
The bones of domesticated sheep, goats, possibly cattle, red
deer, gazelles, and horses have turned up in neolithic contexts.38
Later, at the major urban centre of Mundigak, some 55 km north
of Kandahar, material from the second millennium bce exposes
spe­cies ranging from domesticated animals like the ass, the horse,
and the dog, to wild fauna. Apart from the ibex, the lynx, and the
gazelle, the bones include those of a raptor.39 It is likely that later
too, in the first millennium bce, this dietary pattern was main­-
tained. So, whatever the claims of administrators on the success
of Ashoka’s policy of non-violence towards living beings, it is
difficult to believe that vegetarianism took off here. Epigraphic
announcements were listened to, not necessarily followed. People
continued to carry on with their lives as before.
In some ways the Ashokan message here is really much larger
than anything that the emperor intended. Looking at it now we
understand that what the king said did not always define or even
considerably influence the tenor of daily life. The populace will have
seen some of these particular exhortations as most peculiar, and
therefore taken them with a large pinch of salt.
 8

An Expansive Imperial
Articulation

A
shoka’s maiden excursions in public communi-
cation were aimed at converting his audiences into
adherents. ‘Rock of ages cleft for me/ Let me hide myself
in thee’ says the singer in the popular eighteenth-century Christian
hymn, seeking refuge in Christ. ‘Rock of ages cleft for me/ Let me
show myself in thee’ would have been Ashoka’s version, seeking
exposure for the Buddha. It is perhaps not generally recognized that
use of the autobiographical and confessional mode to propagate
religious views, familiar to us in the Christian tradition from the
time of the pioneering fourth century ce Confessions of St Augus­
tine, was anticipated by over six centuries through Ashoka’s virtual
invention of the tradition, if not the genre, in the shape of his
edicts. The short earlier versions whetted his appetite for such
discourse. He seems to have grown ever more convinced that
governance involved not just ruling well and prescribing policy but
ensuring direct and affective communication with his subjects. So,
around 256 bce, some three years after his first edicts, he went on
to elaborate and disseminate information on what appear to be
very novel modes of governance, as well as norms of public and
personal conduct. The contrast between this articulation and his
earlier messages lay not merely in the spectrum of ideas and sub­
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 177

jects outlined, nor only in the vivid combining of personal elements

with political practice. It lay also in the length and elaborate nature
of the new edicts, rendering them qualitatively different from the
earlier short ones.
Ashoka’s voice was first heard in edicts that ran from some six
to twenty-two lines. ‘Short’ is a relative term, the relation being to
the size of rescripts that came to be transcribed in the second cam­
paign of epigraphs. As against the first articulation of the ‘minor’
edicts, we now encounter a series of messages, of more than a
hundred lines covering, in several instances, multiple rock sur­-
faces. By common consent these are known as Ashoka’s major
rock edicts, the word ‘major’ denoting the length and possibly the
gravitas of the message. Collectively, the rendition appears like a
finished and coherent anthology comprising fourteen edicts.
On the orders of the emperor, this set of edicts was transcribed
in several places across India. At many of their locations they have
survived well. The most extraordinary of these sites is Erragudi in
Andhra, where we saw the first of Ashoka’s minor epigraphs—which
graces the most easily accessible of the Erragudi rocks, inscribed on
the lowest of the boulders. Five further boulders marked by similar
scrawls are clustered across the hill face, the most imposing of these
forming a precipice some six metres or more above the lowest.
Many of the boulders crowd the eastern slope, their surfaces marked
by a riot of Brahmi characters, some still easily decipherable, others
only faintly visible. The varying conditions of preservation apart,
what strikes the observer is the plethora of words. Their sprawl is
seen best on the topmost rock, generally described as Boulder A,
which has two inscribed faces. In general, the boulders show the
ancient letters unevenly: sometimes, seven lines of writing cover
2.5 x 0.5 metres, while on the same rock five lines also crowd into a
space only 1 metre long. The same message is also known to cover
several rocks—one of the edicts has twenty-nine lines on a single
boulder (Boulder B), while the last seven lines are continued on
another (Boulder C) which lies a few feet to its south.
Versions of the major edicts like the one at Erragudi appear
on rocks at Girnar in Gujarat, at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra in
Fig. 8.1: Part of the inscribed Kalsi rock in Uttarakhand as it appeared before a shed was built over it
a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 179

Fig. 8.2: Stone slab of the Sannathi edict

180 ashoka in ancient india

north-west Pakistan, at Kandahar in Afghanistan, and at Kalsi in

Uttarakhand. In two places within Orissa—Dhauli and Jaugada—
there is a complete set of edicts, though some of what is found on
them differs from that on the axis from Pakistan to Andhra. A few
of the major edicts have not endured well: Sopara in Maharashtra
has yielded fragments of a mere three edicts, while at Sannathi in
Karnataka only four edicts have been found. Similarly at Kandahar,
as we saw, a mere two edicts have survived on a single rectangu­
lar block of limestone. Interestingly, the edicts at all these places—
Kanda­har, Sopara, and Sannathi—are not inscribed into large in
situ rocks but on dressed stone slabs. Unusually, in Sannathi, they
cover both the front and back of the slabs, leading to the inference
that the slab was vertically set up by the inscribers so that their ins­
criptions could be read. Ashoka’s major rock edicts could some­
times be termed his major stone edicts.
What are these enunciations, what do they say about Ashoka,
what can we surmise about their reception and audiences? First,
however, let us look at the important events and career trajectory
of the emperor as he presented them.

***

Around 261/260 bce Ashoka fought the first and possibly only
large-scale war of his reign, at Kalinga. This is the only conquest
he mentions here, and since no other territorial victory figures in
any of his later edicts it can be presumed that this was his only
major military battle.1 The number displaced (‘one hundred and
fifty thousand’), killed (‘one hundred thousand’), and dead as a
consequence of the war (‘many times as many those who died’)
make it clear that this was warfare on a very considerable scale,2
even if one discounts the tendency to top up the headcount by
offer­ing epic figures rounded off to the nearest hundred thousand.
The carnage also seems to have brought suffering indiscrimi­nately
upon all—Brahmans, Shramanas, other sects, households—many
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 181

among them people who had actually practised the dhamma that
Ashoka now espoused.3 The future protocols for human relation­
ship that would come to define the emperor’s idea of dhamma—
from obedience to parents to proper courtesy towards slaves and
servants—were those that the king now saw as having been al­
ready lived by many whom he had slaughtered, dispossessed, and
deported. He describes his victory as deplorable because of the
blind uniformity with which he had inflicted misery, the ironic
democracy of suffering he had created.
What he proceeded to do in the immediate aftermath of Kalinga
is unknown. Certainly, he lost all appetite for conquering new
territory and soon, he became a Buddhist. Within a couple of years,
in the tenth year after his coronation, we see him on a pilgrimage
to Mahabodhi, where the Buddha had attained enlightenment
roughly 300 years earlier. This was the beginning of what Ashoka
describes as the second part of his reign, a watershed in the conduct
of his personal and political life.
He now undertook what were described as ‘dharma yatras’
instead of the usual royal ‘vihara yatras’. Vihara yatras were marked
by pleasures such as the hunt; Ashoka’s yatras were mass contact
programmes involving donations and guidance on dhamma: ‘On
these (tours) the following takes place, (viz.) visiting Shramanas
and Brahmanas and making gifts (to them), visiting the aged and
supporting (them) with gold, visiting the people of the country,
instructing (them) in morality, and questioning (them) about
moral­ity, as suitable for this (occasion).’4 It was this, Ashoka declar­
ed, which gave him supreme pleasure while those in the ‘other part’,
meaning the earlier pleasures, were deemed inferior.
Can these yatras be described as tours? Vihara yatra and dhamma
yatra have been generally understood as pleasure tours and dharma
tours, respectively, travelling and journeying being their central
features. The factor of enjoyment and hedonism in vihara yatras
is also evident in descriptions other than Ashoka’s. The scholar
Manindra Mohan Bose points to the Mahabharata, in which a
yatra, called the ‘Ghosha yatra’, of one of the epic villains, Duryo­
dhana, is vividly described. The passage where permission is sought
182 ashoka in ancient india

by this character of his father for the yatra reads: ‘O monarch,

this also is an excellent season for thy son to go ahunting’; and
further: ‘indeed, we desire very much to go on a hunting expedi­
tion and will avail of that opportunity for supervising the tale of
our cattle.’5 However, ‘yatra’ in ancient India also indicated festivals.
Bose’s view is that a dharma yatra should be understood as a festi­-
val, not a tour. This is academic quibbling over a term with no
likelihood of a resolution: perhaps some of the tours were con­
ducted with an air of festivity. The point in our context is that,
whether festival or tour, it would have seen the king moving around
his realm. This is what the edict suggests when it says he met people
in the country (‘janapada’). Ashoka was making himself accessible
by being often on the move, meeting people of all kinds, donating
money and gold, instructing them about the dhamma.
Within a couple of years after he began touring, around 257/
256 bce, the king vested enhanced spiritual responsibility in
his officers. Specifically, the rajukkas and pradeshikas and other
such local administrative officials were ordered, even while carry­-
ing out their routine duties, to undertake an inspection circuit
every five years to preach the dhamma, the usual Ashokan favour­
ites being enjoined—proper behaviour towards various classes of
people and animal life, respect to be shown to parents and elders,
liberality with friends as well as, importantly, to persons with dif­
fering religious inclinations. The injunction against slaughtering all
living beings—presumably animals, birds, and fish—was naturally
a strong recommendation in this idea of the moral life. Whereas
Minor Rock Edict II had underlined the need for proper behaviour
towards all as something that ‘should’ be done, or as an order of
the emperor, here it was expected to be preached by his officials so
as to earn his subjects personal merit.

Meritorious is obedience to mother and father.

Meritorious is liberality to friends, acquaintances and relatives and to  
   Shramanas and Brahmanas.
Meritorious is abstention from the slaughter of living beings.
Meritorious is to spend little (and) to store little.6
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 183

The importance attached to such public instruction of morality

resonates with the way that Buddhism had always tried to estab­
lish its doctrines, alongside the giving and donating expected of the
laity.7 Yet the conformity with established doctrinal practice does
not explain everything: there is an interesting deviation. Shramanas
were ascetic renunciants that included but were not limited to
Buddhist monks. By alluding to Brahmanas and Shramanas in the
same breath, Ashoka extends Buddhist ideas somewhat beyond
their normal boundaries into a broader humanism. The espousal
of moderation and thrift within the fold of meritorious conduct
extends religious morality into administrative duty and state func­
tion. Crass materialism and conspicuous consumption are cau­
tioned against, possibly as a veiled warning to affluent citizens who
heard his message as also to sections of officialdom. Ashoka does
not seem to censure the acquisition of wealth per se, the donation of
riches to the deserving perhaps justifying the initial acquisition.
These actions on the ground were combined with a sweeping
public assurance of the impact of such measures. In the twelfth
year after his coronation the emperor issued a public rescript in
which he decided to explain with graphic detail how the practice of
dhamma that he had instituted had led to a social transformation
within his kingdom. This was obviously a king not content with
merely elucidating the nature of the social change required, he
was also interested in ensuring they had been made to happen and
would subsequently benefit posterity. The edicts emphasize both
that there has been a break with the past and the intent to ensure a
transformed future for those who will come.
The repeated mention of past times in relation to the present
was intended to highlight this change. Earlier, ‘for many hundreds
of years, slaughter of lives, cruelty to living creatures, disrespect
to relatives and disrespect to the Shramanas and Brahmanas in­
creased.’8 Now, what had increased ‘to a degree as was not possible
to achieve for many hundreds of years in the past’ was ‘abstention
from the slaughter of life, absence of cruelty to living creatures,
seemly behaviour to Shramanas and Brahmanas, obedience to
mother and father (and) obedience to the aged.’9 He intended
184 ashoka in ancient india

to ensure that this continued after his time: ‘the sons, grandsons
and great-grandsons of king Priyadarshin, Beloved of the Gods,
will promote this practice of Dharma till the time of universal
destruction and, (themselves) abiding by Dharma and good con­
duct, will instruct (people) in Dharma.’10
In the epigraphs of later kings, this kind of proclamation would
become formulaic and used to underscore the permanent nature of
what was being enacted, whether the grant of land or the construc­
tion of a memorial pillar. Ashoka’s epigraph is novel in being the
first in a line of inscriptions that made such declarations. It must
nonetheless have appeared formulaic to his listeners because third
century bce audiences, familiar with sons murdering royal fathers
and brothers, may have been sceptical of any king, however well
disposed, being able to ensure the continuity of his predilections as
policy by his successors.
Were his subjects even vaguely convinced that a change of such
magnitude had come to pass merely because their king said so?
Governments in our time equipped with excellent communication
systems and far more effective methods of coercion have not man­-
aged to successfully bring about social transformation simultane­
ously across the regions of India, so Ashoka’s claim that he had does
not seem credible. Their encounter with Mauryan officials charged
with new responsibilities may have prompted the recognition within
the populace of a ruler with exceptional drive and ambition who at
least aimed, even if he did not succeed, at moral change. This may
well have been Ashoka’s intention. His Buddhist emphases and the
outlining of differences from what had existed ‘for many hundreds
of years’ was a statement of intent couched in the language of ach­
ievement. Departing from his minor rock edicts, the emperor now
made no allusions to the value of age-old traditions, or what he had
earlier called ‘porana pakiti’.
In the following year, the thirteenth after his coronation, he
introduced a major innovation in the institutional structure of his
administration. The moral inspection tours aiding the spread of
dhamma were now supplemented by the creation of a new class
of very senior officials called dharma-mahamatras. The exposi­tion
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 185

on their functions is long and detailed and reveals a proactively

interventionist administrative group spread across his dominions.
Dharma-mahamatras were engaged everywhere ‘among the adhe­
rents of Dharma (to determine) whether a person is (only) inclined
towards Dharma or is (fully) established in Dharma or is (merely)
given to charity.’11 And who were the people within the domain
of their work? Practically everyone, it seems: the edict specifies all
religious sects, people dwelling on the empire’s western borders
(including the Yavanas, Kambojas, Gandharas and the Rastrika-
paitryanikas), the servile class, the Aryas, the Brahmans and the
ruling class, the destitute and the aged, even prisoners. The new
officials were to cater to all kinds. With prisoners their work was
very definite: they were to distribute money to those who had
children, help in ‘unfettering of those’ who had committed crimes
because of the instigation of others and help in getting aged
prison­ers released.12 The larger-than-life presence of this class of
officers is underlined by the fact that they were said to be engaged
in Pataliputra and other towns, as also in the households of
Ashoka’s siblings and relatives. The impression is of a consider­able
administrative apparatus having been put in place to oversee the
practice of morality in the public and private domains, including
the king’s own kin.
These were events for which Ashoka provided a series of chro­
nological markers. They spanned from 261–260 bce till 256–
255 bce, from the Kalinga war in his eighth year (261–260 bce)
to the various ways in which, from the tenth (259–258 bce) till
the thirteenth years (256–255 bce), he altered the administrative
focus towards the creation of a moral empire. There is good reason
to believe that other events and innovations in statecraft were
also introduced over these years. No specificities such as ‘dates’
are provided for these, their existence being inferred from their
inclusion alongside the record of changes in officialdom.
Ashoka’s territorial canvas for moral action also now enlarges.
He appears to have added a new dimension to the terms of engage­
ment of the Mauryan realm with the states bordering his empire
and beyond, towards the north-west and across the deep south.
186 ashoka in ancient india

There was a range of such states and people: the Cholas, Pandyas,
Satiyaputra, Tamraparni; there were the territories of the Yavana
king Antiochus and chieftains neighbouring him. The basis for the
existence of relations with foreign powers is in the Arthashastra
a prelude to the monarch’s expansion of his own realm through
conquest. Ashoka’s consideration in the matter overturned this
Machiavellian thumb rule. The king’s circle of influence in other
kingdoms came to be based, or was showcased as being based, on
welfare measures, specifically medical care and the nurture of living
beings in distant realms, both human and animal. Two kinds of
medical facility were established: hospitals, and facilities in which
roots, fruit, and medicinal plants hitherto unavailable were im­
ported and planted. Roads were laid and wells dug for ‘enjoyment’
by animals and humans. The compassionate and moral life now
also becomes Mauryan foreign policy.
The monarch’s immediate personal access to officials at all times
is another policy carefully proclaimed:
Formerly, in the ages gone by, there was no transaction of state-business
and no reporting (of incidents to the king) at all hours.
So I have made the following (arrangement).
The reporters should report to me the affairs of the people at any
time and place, whether I am engaged in eating (or) am in the harem
(or) in the bed-chamber (or) on a promenade (or) in a carriage (or) on
the march.
And I am now attending to the people’s affairs at all places.
And, when I issue an order orally in connection with any donation
or proclamation or when an emergent work presses itself upon the
Mahamatras (and) in case there is, in connection with that matter, a
con­troversy among (the Ministers of) the Council or an argumentation
(in the Council in favour of a particular view), the fact must be reported
to me immediately at any place and at any time.
Thus have I ordered.13

The Arthashastra had stressed the importance of such access­i­-

bil­ity too. The king was expected to be always active, hear urgent
matters and never put them off, look into the affairs of all kinds of
people and places: ‘temple deities, hermitages, heretics, Brahmins
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 187

learned in the Vedas, cattle and holy places, of minors, of the aged,
the sick, the distressed and the helpless and of women, in this
order, or, in accordance with the importance of the matter or its
urgency.’14 The manual prescribes designated areas for the king’s
public interactions. Unrestricted entrance was necessary for those
wanting to see him in connection with their affairs, but it was in
the assembly hall that such audiences were to be held. Like other
areas in the palace where interactions and decisions relating to state
matters were made, this hall was to be separated from the inner
apartments, the fear of violence being a constant threat. Indeed,
‘everyone (in the palace) should live in his own quarters and not
move to the quarters of another.’15
None of these anxieties feature in Ashoka’s account of his
administrative innovations. The informality outlined is so complete
that one is tempted to imagine the king’s eating and love-making
interrupted by people with problems rushing in and out of his
private chambers. The reality is likely to have been far less colour­
ful, the access to the emperor careful and limited. The change would
nonetheless have been seen as a new political culture in which the
common weal required ‘exertion and prompt dispatch of busi­-
ness [.  .  .] Whatever effort I make is made in order that I may dis­
charge the debt which I owe to all living beings, that I may make
them happy in this world, and that they may attain heaven in the
next world.’ The expressions here are uncannily and ironically
similar to the extolling of the energetic king in the Arthashastra:

In the happiness of the subjects lies the happiness of the king and
in what is beneficial to the subjects his own benefit. What is dear to
himself is not beneficial to the king, but what is dear to the subjects is
beneficial (to him).
Therefore, being ever active, the king should carry out the man­
agement of material well-being. The root of material well-being is
activity, of material disaster its reverse.16

Such similarities are the consequence of historical retros­pec­-

tion. How do we make sense of them in the context of the third
century bce? It is entirely possible that Ashoka had imbibed
188 ashoka in ancient india

the Arthashastra, its core having been composed earlier and its
author very possibly living in the time of Ashoka’s grandfather,
and therefore known at least by repute down the decades. A ruler
based in Pataliputra was in fact very unlikely not to have been
familiar with the work, at least as a body of ideas. In tracing the
genealogy of Ashoka’s welfare statism it would be fair to say that
it had, in a variant form and with different ends in mind, been
enunciated before his time.17

***

The fourteen major edicts, all formulated and inscribed in the

third century bce, seem to resemble an anthology now because we
look at them as a group authored by the same king. But the fact
that the edict set’s locations are hugely diverse also makes aspects
of them specific to each, while the thousands of kilometres sepa­
rating them simultaneously suggest an asynchronous history that
could be said to sometimes complement and at other times con­
tradict the general impression of similitude.
Their composition was individual: each decree was composed
and issued before being inscribed. The edicts themselves make this
evident when alluding to the years in which Ashoka chose to issue
specific decrees. As the last date that figures is the thirteenth year
of coronation, the edicts could only have been set down after that
event, though whether they were composed and erected immediate­
ly after or a couple of years later is not clear. Why the emperor
now chose to get earlier promulgations inscribed in other parts of
his empire—to which, at the time of engraving, many more texts
were added—is also unclear. He was probably anxious to show
them as part of an interconnected whole, much like different
chapters of the same story. A symmetry of official accountability
through the realm seems another strong part of the desiderata.
Since he began to dispatch the pronouncements individually
they were not, obviously, a complete compilation at any single
point in time. In several instances the edicts were dispatched in
batches, with the pattern of dispatch showing many variations.
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 189

We know this because of the pattern and placement of the writing,

the Kalsi Rock Edict providing an instance. Kalsi is situated on
the banks of the Yamuna river in Uttarakhand, at the junction of
the plains and the hills, from where Hindu pilgrims are known to
travel towards Yamunotri. Here, one part of a fine-grained rock
was carefully polished. Onto it were carved the first nine edicts
in very small letters. Below this set, however, the letters become
thrice as large as on the upper part (constituting edicts 10 to 14).
And then, realizing that the original surface was too small for
such large letters, the remaining record came to be carved on the
left side of the rock as well. It is unlikely that the same hand ins­
cribed all the edicts, or that they were inscribed simultaneously. It
also seems that while initially the engraving was carefully crafted,
the last four edicts were done sloppily.
A staggered engraving process can be seen at Shahbazgarhi in
the present-day Mardan district of Pakistan. Here, unlike at Kalsi,
more than one rock was used. Unlike both Erragudi and Kalsi, the
Kharoshthi script was preferred. The first eleven edicts are on the
east face of a large mass of trap rock up a hill.18 The next is en­-
graved on a separate boulder towards the foot of the hill, and the
final two edicts (13 and 14) are on the west face of the same big
rock up the hill whose eastern face was first inscribed. This west face
was not suited to chiselling.19 Why the scribe chose it and ignored
the many other available rock surfaces eludes us. But their variant
pattern of engraving, as well as the different sizes of letters in the
three sets, shows a process of accrual, a progression stretched out.
Some 200 km to the east, at Mansehra in Hazara district, the
pattern mimics the Shahbazgarhi form. Kharoshthi, the script
con­si­dered better suited to the area, is used again. On the highest
boulder, a well-polished square was created at the surface and upon
this the first eight edicts were inscribed in very small characters.20
The scribe who wrote on the second rock, located a little below the
first, used large letters to engrave the texts of three edicts (9 to 11)
on the north face and one edict (12) on its south face. The third
rock, now in a fallen state, carried the last two edicts.
Such was not always the case. Occasionally, the edicts were
simultaneously engraved at one place. In the most spectacular of
Fig. 8.3: Rock edicts arranged in columns at Girnar
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 191

these, at Girnar in the Junagadh district of Gujarat, some thirty

metres on the north-eastern face of a large granite boulder shows all
fourteen edicts. The writing is uniform, arranged in neat columns.
Each of the edicts appears to be divided from the other by straight
lines. The various cartouches, carved into clear compartments,
can still be clearly seen. It seems plausible that this was ordered to
be written at a single point in time, when all fourteen texts were
available. Since the composition of the edicts was more usually a
staggered process, instances of inscriptional simultaneity would
seem to suggest they were set down later. All the edict texts will have
had to first be available in finished form to be set down together
in a single engraving campaign.21 So, Girnar is likely to have got
its edicts after those at Shahbazgarhi and Kalsi, to which successive
batches had been sent.

***

Erragudi is a good place to begin looking at this full anthology of

edicts, its uniqueness being that it is the only site where both the
early messages and the new ones are found together. At Kandahar
there are two different Ashokan inscriptions as well, but not on the
same set of rocks.22
When setting down the new message, the first modification
made and one that his subjects at Erragudi would have noticed, was
an addition to Ashoka’s early title, ‘Priyadarshin, Beloved of the
Gods’. Now, for the first time, Ashoka was called a king. This king
did not begin by recounting what he had instituted in the five-odd
years since Kalinga, but with an enunciation of dhamma concerned
primarily with protecting animals from mindless sacrificial cere­
monies:
Here no living being should be slaughtered for sacrifice.
And also no festive gathering should be held.
For the Beloved of the Gods sees manifold evil in festive gatherings.
There is (however) one kind of festive gathering, which is considered
good by king Priyadarshin, Beloved of the Gods.23
192 ashoka in ancient india

Alongside this proscription is the intent to prohibit festive gather­

ings (‘samajas’) involving animal sacrifice. This was a departure
from how Ashoka had enunciated his idea of morality a few years
earlier: the first minor rock edict mentions kindness to living
beings without outlining prohibitions. Now, ‘restraint’ orders were
proclaimed near towns.24 While the location of ancient settle­-
ment in the vicinity of Erragudi where this order would have been
known remains unclear, elsewhere it was inscribed either near or
at urban centres, at Girnar and Sannathi, for instance, which were
provincial capitals. The Orissa edicts are at Dhauli, not far from
a fortified town, and at Jaugada, within the ramparts of a fort.
Although the exact location of the Sopara message is not known
since only fragments of three edicts were found, we know that
Sopara was a thriving port in western India. Towards the north-west,
Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra were, as noted, strategically important
on account of trade routes.25 The populace in all such locations will
have needed a lot of persuading to abstain from eating meat and
organizing sacrificial ritual. From the abundance of bones in early
historic sites spread over both North and South India, there is little
doubt that animal flesh was in great demand,26 with people of means
probably also importing exotic livestock. The earliest of these, the
Harappans of the third millennium bce, relished catfish brought in
from a coastal location several hundred kilometres distant. There
is no reason to believe that the well to do two thousand years later
did not crave similar delicacies.
In the Karnataka–Andhra belt, death rituals as evident from
megaliths included animal parts in the burials alongside the human
dead. Similarly, in ancient Hindu belief and practice, sacrifices
of goats, oxen, rams, and horses commonly figure in offerings to
the gods. The merit so obtained, one commentator points out, is
extolled in the Mahabharata: ‘animals killed in sacrifices to the
accompaniment of Vedic mantras went to heaven and it [the epic]
narrates the story of king Rantideva in whose sacrifices two thousand
animals and cows were killed every day.’27 Some scriptures frowned
on or had misgivings about these. In the Satapatha Brahmana the
eater of meat is said to be eaten in his next birth by the animal
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 193

killed.28 Regardless of these occasional scriptural impediments,

the general picture is one of a populace not just carnivorous but
eagerly so.
Ashoka could scarcely have been unaware that his dictum
would spur resentment. This is possibly why the edict presents
the proscription alongside an outline of altered culinary palace
practice:
Many hundred thousands of living beings were formerly slaughter­-
ed every day in the kitchen of king Priyadarshin, Beloved of the Gods,
for the sake of curry.
But now, when this record relating to Dharma is written, only three
living creatures are killed (daily) for the sake of curry, two birds and
one animal.
Even this animal is not (slaughtered) regularly.
These three living beings too shall not be killed in future.29
That the dhamma being propounded must be regarded as work in
progress was an idea Ashoka sent out via other parts of the mes­
sage. His successors—sons, grandsons, and ‘the generations com­
ing after them till the destruction of the world’—would continue
his acts of merit, for ‘whosoever among them will abandon even a
part of it will do an act of demerit’.30 This warning betrays anxiety
at the spectre of impermanence: guilt over his own usurpation
may have been some part of the anxiety since the expectation that
his successors would respect a tradition he was establishing had
been diluted by his own record. Hammering home the dhamma,
literally as well as metaphorically, by casting it in stone seems in
part at least to have been the consequence of some nervousness
over whether ‘his descendants may conform to it.’31 Stating and re­
stating that he wanted dhamma to continue as state policy beyond
his reign betrays a deep insecurity at the obvious difficulties in
ensuring continuity faced by all monarchs of the time, such con­
tinuity having been violated in other respects by his own actions
as a prince.
Concern over continuity through time is complemented by
the interest in dissemination through space. To provide his admi­
nistration and subjects with a sense of the territorial length and
194 ashoka in ancient india

breadth of the empire to which they belonged, and of the larger

world of rulers that formed part of his sphere of interaction, will
have been an important motive for the massive coverage Ashoka
wanted. This was, in a sense, a message given out via the spread of a
message—the sense being given of a huge empire. A panoramic vista
of states in every direction beyond it is ultimately also a technique
for communicating imperial strength, and obliquely thereby the
power of the message and the requirements being spelt out. At
Erragudi, for instance, people were likely to have known of political
entities beyond their borders in the South, such as the Cholas and
the Cheras. These realms had cultural and commercial contacts
with North India from at least the fifth century bce.32 Kodumanal,
presently in the Erode district of Tamil Nadu, was a flourishing
centre complete with a gemstone industry. Beads in different stages
of manufacture, discarded chips, raw material blocks, and a range
of precious stones—sapphire, beryl, agate, carnelian, amethyst, lapis
lazuli (probably from Badakshan), jasper, garnet, and soapstone—
have been unearthed from habitations there. At Porunthal in the
Amaravathi river valley of Tamil Nadu as well, beads of quartz,
carnelian, and glass have been found in large quantities. The several
hundred glass beads and a glass furnace found suggest production
on a commercial scale.
An aspect of the present and the past juxtaposed in these ins­
criptions is the use of dramatic and effective rhetoric. In a passage
redolent with metaphor, Ashoka suggests that the change could
be charted through a transformation in sound: where war drums
had once sounded the emperor was now ensuring the sounding
of morality (‘bherighoso aho dhammaghoso’).33 While in the past
music had accompanied armed battles—the beating of the ‘bheri’
was a call to arms—there was now only the sound of dhamma
being proclaimed. Rhythm and onomatopoeia were to be deployed
to render the messages sonorous and effective. The enunciation in
this set of edicts is marked by emphases placed at various points
by the repetition of particular phrases. The message returns time
and again to a contrast of past and present so that the effect
of what Ashoka claimed as achievement was highlighted with
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 195

each juxtaposition. The words ‘Formerly, in the ages gone by’, in

particular, recur constantly for oratorical effect.
Among the more striking aspects of the major edicts is the
emperor’s perception of himself as a sovereign spiritual guardian
with social responsibilities. The seventh edict includes an impas­
sioned plea for the practice of religious tolerance. It is the em­
peror’s wish, the edict says, that everywhere in his dominions all
religious sects should live. Proto-secularism is a possible term
for this desire, making the Ashokan link with the modern Indian
state’s cons­titutional commitment to such values entirely logical.
Ashoka also speaks of how he imagined ordinary folk should con­
duct them­selves. People, as he put it, were of ‘diverse inclinations
and diverse passions. They will perform either the whole or only a
part of (their duty).’34 His view was that being liberal was worthless
without self-control, pure thoughts, gratitude, and solid devotion.
It was a reiteration of what he had said in the same message earlier
when distinguishing between a person fully established in dhamma
from one merely charitable.35 Religiosity was frequently expressed
only through conscience-salving donations, and the emperor was
making it known that he did not consider such giving sufficient.
His subjects would not have had a problem imbibing this part
of his message. What is likely to have made them wary was the
authoritarian tone with which he offered his opinion on how they
ought and ought not to conduct their social rituals. An instance
of this appears in the ninth edict, which expounds on the kinds
of rites which Ashoka considered superficial and unsatisfactory:
‘auspicious ceremony on the occasion of illness, the wedding of a
son, the wedding of a daughter, (and) the birth of children  .  .  .  on
such occasions, the women folk (in particular) perform many and
diverse (kinds of) ceremony which is trivial and meaningless.’36
The people were warned that such acts lacked all efficacy whereas
those associated with dhamma produced results. And dhamma,
he repeated, comprised ‘proper courtesy to slaves and servants,
reverence to elders, restraint in (one’s dealings with) living beings,
(and) liberality to the Shramanas and Brahmanas.’37
The recurrence of dhamma and its vital relevance are obsessive.
196 ashoka in ancient india

The core principles running through the edicts, of proper

behaviour with parents, friends, and holy men, and giving up
killing living beings (‘prananam’), are continuously elucidated, the
eleventh edict offering a variation on the same theme. The results
of acting in line with dhamma mean happiness in this world and
endless merit in the next. The king’s subjects will have seen this
frequent reaffirmation as a sermon in which the foundational mes­
sage works as a leitmotif to underscore its significance.
The sermonizing monarch returns to proto-secularism in
his twelfth edict, which has been generally seen as the supreme
proclamation of tolerance for all religious and philosophical
sects.38 Its core feature is the belief that at the root of dhamma
is a public culture in which every sect honours every other (they
‘should learn and respect one another’s Dharma’). And how is this
to be practised?
.  .  .  restraint in regard to speech, (which means) that there should be
no extolment of one’s own sect or disparagement of other sects on
inappropriate occasions and that it should be moderate in every case
even on appropriate occasions.
On the contrary, other sects should be duly honoured in every way
(on all occasions).
If (a person) acted in this way, (he) not only promotes his own sect,
but also benefits other sects.
But if (a person) acts otherwise, (he) not only injures his own sect
but also harms other sects.
Truly, if (a person) extols his own sect and disparages other sects
with a view to glorifying his own sect owing merely to his attachment
(to it, he) injures his own sect very severely by acting in that way.
Therefore concord is commendable.39

The tolerance defined here is not a passive virtue of cordial dis­-

regard of the Other but rather a positive effort at a concord
recognized as mutually beneficial. This being an important prior-
ity, the king said he bestowed ‘men of all religious communities
with gifts and with honours of various kinds, ascetics or house­
holders.’ Such gifting and honouring were not done for themselves
but to ensure the growth of dhamma among them which, as he
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 197

put it, required amiable and respectful forms of public inter­action

among them.
This proclamation of a social philosophy and accompanying
political programme at Erragudi and elsewhere is likely to have
reassured local populations that the emperor’s Buddhism was not
in the end intrusive. His articulation of moral zeal bordering on
authoritarianism in relation to customary practices is undercut or
alleviated by this espousal of tolerance, this idealization of a public
concord as the essence of dhamma. And, as in the other edicts, the
emperor highlights how he intends his administration to realize
this end. Apart from the dharma-mahamatras, mahamatras who
superintended what are described as matters relating to women
(probably of the royal household and harem), and officers in charge
of the king’s cattle and pastures, are said to have been roped in for
such duties.
In the thirteenth edict the emperor is at his most poignant, finally
finding the inner strength to speak about the life-changing episode
at Kalinga. This is where he exposes the destructive consequences of
his military victory and pronounces himself the chief villain of the
carnage. It is here that he draws attention with great detail to the
horror and repentance it aroused in him in order to convince his
listeners about the importance of self-realization. The composer of
the edict says the people of Kalinga (‘Kalingya’) were successfully
conquered by the king in the eighth year following his coronation.
The graphic accompanying details need not be repeated here.
What is significant is how from that painful past Ashoka moves to
the present, appealing to a group of his adversaries to follow his
exam­ple. These were forest dwellers (‘Atavi’) who he hoped would
repent, as he had, so that they would not be killed. Kalinga had been
pacified by force and the Atavikas may well have been the next in
line: ‘(It is hereby) explained (to them) that, in spite of his repent­
ance, the Beloved of the Gods possesses power (enough to punish
them for their crimes), so that they should turn (from evil ways)
and would not be killed (for their crimes).’40 The threat provides
a glimpse, inadvertent perhaps, of the realities of ruling a large
empire in which powerful groups had the capacity to undermine
198 ashoka in ancient india

the ruling monarch’s hegemonic effort. Ashoka was also implicitly

outlining here the limits to his philosophy of tolerance: for all his
pacific Buddhism, the resort to war and pacification was not ruled
out. Groups in large forested tracts were found especially difficult to
deal with by monarchs at this time. The Arthashastra is categorical
that the Atavika, ‘living in their own territory, are many in number
and brave, fight openly, seize and ruin countries, having the same
characteristics as a king.’41 Ashoka’s edict, threatening and cajol­-
ing this group, shows the persistence of powerful enemies within
the ambit of empire. The message speaks of various kings and
people beyond his frontiers and those within his territories:
And such a conquest has been achieved by the Beloved of the Gods not
only here (in his dominions) but also in the territories bordering (on
his dominions), as far away as (at the distance of) six hundred yojanas,
(where) the Yavana king named Antiyoka (is ruling and where), beyond
(the kingdom of) the said Antiyoka, four other kings named Tulamaya,
Antikeni, Maka and Alikasudara (are also ruling), (and) towards the
south, where the Colas and Pandyas (are living), as far as Tamraparni.
Likewise here in the dominions of His Majesty, (the Beloved of
the Gods)—in (the countries of) the Yavanas and Kambojas, of the
Nabhakas and Nabhapanktis, of the Bhoja-paitryanikas (i.e. hereditary
or tribal Bhojas) and of the Andhras and Paulindas, everywhere
(people) are conforming to the instructions in Dharma (imparted) by
the Beloved of the Gods.
Even where the envoys of the Beloved of the Gods have not pene­
trated, there too men have heard of the practices of the Dharma and
the ordinances issued and the instructions in Dharma (imparted) by
the Beloved of the Gods, (and) are conforming to Dharma (and) will
continue to conform to it.42

The recitation of these names has a pattern to it. The kings and
people mentioned either lived beyond the western borders of the
Mauryan empire or across its southern rim as far as Sri Lanka.
These were powerful independent rulers and polities and speaking
about his conquest of them through dhamma was Ashoka’s way of
drawing attention to his sphere of influence.43 We see a victorious
king announcing his authority over other polities and rulers by
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 199

unusually pacific means.44 Some of them may well have been states
over which an expanding Mauryan empire had territorial designs.
Possibly, Mauryan envoys now deputed there would have had to
explain Ashoka’s change of heart. The hope may also have been
expressed that these rulers abandon all thought of aggression,
including against Ashoka’s territory.45
The pattern seen above recurs with regard to people in Ashoka’s
own dominions: specifically mentioned are inhabitants of areas in
the north-west, west, and towards the south. Among these were the
Andhras: the populace at Erragudi may have seen this as a refer­-
ence to them and, if so, one wonders if they agreed with their
emperor’s assessment that they were conforming to the morality
that was now his mission. The Yavanas and other people who
lived in the southern and north-western parts of the kingdom are
similarly mentioned, possibly because Mauryan control over them
was tenuous. That they are described not by an encompassing
expression such as people (‘jana’) but in terms of their ethno-
geographical identities means that Ashoka wanted to specify them
as people who must, above all, conform to his dhamma. People in
other parts of his empire are not mentioned because presumably
they were known to have been or assumed to have been conform­-
ing in the required ways.
Such passages demonstrate an acknowledgement of the actual
state of affairs within the Mauryan realm, the potential sources of
instability. There is a similar acknowledgement now of what could
realistically be expected by Ashoka of his successors. The ‘dhamma-
lipi’ had been written so that his sons and grandsons would not
think of fresh conquests. Yet, pragmatically accepting that conquest
by his successors was very much in the realm of possibility, the
emperor wished that they would be somewhat merciful in the
event of victory in such warfare. ‘In any victory they gained there
should be mildness (“khamti”) and light punishment (“lahudan­
data”)’, which as one scholar puts it, would make such conquest ‘un­
like his own victory, with its terrible consequences, in Kalinga.’46
In the end the king sets forth the range of variations in his re­
cords, and the reasons for the range. Since his dominions were
200 ashoka in ancient india

wide, he says he has ensured that a great deal was written down,
and more would be written in future. A great deal, though was not
written everywhere. If some of his records were expansive, others
were concise, and still others of a medium form. For the long re­
cords, as in this case, one reason for their elaborate form is that
‘there are (some topics which) have been repeated over and over
again owing to their sweetness, so that people may act accord­-
ingly.’47 On the other hand, their abridgement is in many instances
deliberate because a particular place may have seemed unsuitable
for the full record. In some, the king acknowledges, a poor scribe
had put down an incomplete record. In any case, all types of
records, we are told had not been placed in their complete form
in all places.
Looking at this anthology as a whole and in relation to his
first message, Ashoka will now have appeared to his subjects in a
somewhat different way. While in his first message the emperor
showed his conversion to Buddhism as instrumental in his politi­-
cal life, that connection is now no longer overt: the repentance
over Kalinga is now central. In the minor edicts a broad-based
morality rooted in tradition was disseminated. Now the emphasis
changes into the necessity of transparent governance. The writ
of state is not laid down, but the emperor takes trouble to eluci­-
date the spiritual basis of his political interventions.
That this constitutes a unique political intervention is worth
underlining. Empires make their presence felt in the archaeo­-
logical record in various ways. Kings frequently and literally coined
their presence over their dominion—for instance, the Indo-Greek
rulers’ coins bear their names in Greek, and on the obverse in
Prakrit. Other empires sculpted their rulers in stone. The Kushana
kings were particularly partial to this, the iconic image of the
empire being the martial representation of a belted and booted
King Kanishka, his hand on the hilt of his sword. Of yet others, the
regal presence is made apparent through the use of seals inscribed
with the names and administrative designations of a governing
class: those of the Gupta dynasty mention police officers (‘danda­
nayakas’), judges, and even a council of the ‘heir apparent’.
 a n e x pa n s i v e i m p e r i a l a rt i c u l at i o n 201

These are not the methods by which Ashoka makes his political
authority visible. There are no imperial portraits on coins or sculp­
ture. Nor are there courtly structures where one might imagine
the emperor living with his family and in the proximity of core
commanders and ministers. Instead, the artifact indisputably
Ashokan is the epigraph. His political reach is best visualized via
these written objects, which mark out the Mauryan empire of his
time. Many later kings would also appear as rulers through words
they inscribed, but Ashoka is distinguishable from them because
he so conspicuously shuns the standard regal template of boast­-
ing about material possession and territorial grandeur. He does
not set down messages proclaiming battles won and empire aug­
mented. He proclaims himself, instead, as a man of strong intellect
seeking to convert subjects to his point of view instead of demand­ing
their blind obedience. And he wants to convert them by inscribing
his messages near the places where they live, where they worship,
along pathways that travellers use and the hilltops overlooking
them.
The success of these interventions on the ground is, of course,
difficult to judge. But what is beyond dispute is the fact that
Ashoka had through his major edicts advanced the notion of a
funda­mentally new kind of political and social community.
 9

The Message in the Landscape

T
extual analysis of ashoka’s rock edicts needs
supplementing with context. The conclusions arrived at
by examining authorial voice, political-moral agenda,
and intent in using specific concepts and terms have been on
the assumption that the edicts comprise a single long anthology.
Analysing them as texts, however, is not enough for understand­
ing how they were read and understood in the places where they
were purposefully inscribed. The situating of documents within
public spaces and arenas requires to be understood as well since
the message was made a visible aspect of social and sacred land­
scapes. The specific histories of some of these locations till the time
of Ashoka actually help us in going beyond the textual similarities
of the edicts to see their contextual particularities.
The edicts were, as noted, located in the suburbs of towns,
on routes travelled by caravans and used by the itinerant. The
Pataliputra king’s anthology was not floating unnoticed at such
points, it was anchored in places that conditioned perceptions of it
and possibly altered the message. Such landscapes include features
that influenced how political authority was perceived, so the inter­
pretation of this narrative of political and spiritual power was
bound to depend partly on the arena within which the document
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 203

was seen. Ashoka’s imprint remains vivid in many of those places, a

signature combination of words on rocks that acquires a resonance
both from the remarkable ruins of settlements and stupas as
also local traces of Mauryan intervention. In short, historicizing
the regions and towns and their suburbs in which the edicts were
placed is necessary.

***

At Girnar the message was, in its full form, beautifully and com-
pactly laid out on the eastern side of a single large rock. This is
located in the suburbs of Junagadh city in Gujarat. The hand that
inscribed all fourteen edicts was likely to have been the same, the
characters clearly and decisively cut, more or less uniform in size.
The rock itself is spectacular and on ancient visitors its impact may
have been as considerable as it is in our time. While no ancient
description of it has survived, the response of a visitor in 1822
seems strikingly well worded:
Let me describe what to the antiquary will appear the noblest monu­
ment of Saurashtra, a monument speaking in an unknown tongue of
other times  .  .  .  The memorial in question, and evidently of some great
conqueror 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. The measurement of its arc is nearly ninety
feet; its surface is divided into compartments or parallelograms, with­
in which are inscriptions in the usual antique character. Two of these
cartouches I had copied, by my old Guru, with the most scrupulous
fidelity, and a portion of a third, where the characters varied  .  .  .  I
may well call it a book; for the rock is covered with these characters,
so uniform in execution, that we may safely pronounce all those of the
most ancient class, which I designate the ‘Pandu character,’ to be the
work of one man.1

The writer is Lieutenant-Colonel James Tod, famous Rajasthan

annalist and army antiquarian of the East India Company. His
Fig. 9.1: Part of the historic dam that has survived (in the foreground) at Junagadh
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 205

reaction to Girnar was written before the Brahmi script had been
deciphered. His account is arresting for the recognition that the
edict is both monument and inscription, an ancient rock trans­
formed to a monument by the writing on it.2
The way in which the Girnar edicts were inscribed on a single
rock ensured that, at least theoretically, it would have been possible
for an official placed on a specially created platform to be at eye
level with the edicts and read them out to listeners below. The
relatively compact manner of the layout made it possible. This was,
as we saw, impossible at Erragudi, where the edicts were engraved
across multiple boulders at different heights. A more important dif­
ference was that the Girnar rock stood—and was probably chosen
for this reason—in the vicinity of an artificial lake, not far from
the water’s edge. Known as Sudarshana lake, this waterbody was
created as a consequence of the construction of a dam during the
time and on the instructions of Chandragupta Maurya. There is an
archaeological configuration of structures and remnants in Juna­
gadh which makes it possible to see Ashoka as part of a dynastic
con­tinuum to which he was adding.
Unravelling this configuration is possible on account of details
avail­­able from subsequent historical records. The dam built in
Chandra­gupta’s time is mentioned as having been embellished
in the time of Ashoka. The signature of these monarchs on the
dam is not known from Mauryan records but was recorded in the
Junagadh rock inscription of the king Rudradaman, more than 350
years after Chandragupta.3 This tells us that Mauryan monarchs
were part of the historically remembered landscape of Junagadh in
the early centuries ce. Still, that this glimpse is offered some four
centuries after the dam was built highlights the non-contemporary
nature of the evidentiary threads used for re-creating the fabric of
Junagadh’s landscape in the time of Ashoka.
Considering the time lag, can this inscriptional reference be
used for understanding state-building in Mauryan times?
The existence of the Rudradaman record makes it possible to
speak of at least a quasi all-India state authority with a ground-
level administrative presence in Junagadh. The epigraph tells us the
206 ashoka in ancient india

dam was constructed by Vaisya Pushyagupta, a provincial gover­

nor of Chandragupta.4 The same record notes that conduits had
been added to it by the Yavana king Tushaspha, who governed the
province in the reign of Ashoka. Evidently, one of the emperor’s
governors shared ethnic affiliations with the Yavana rulers on the
north-western borders of the kingdom. Perhaps more noteworthy
is that this system of governance, in the longer-term political
history of Saurashtra, is an aberration, for only when an all-India
state possessed enormous strength could it bring Saurashtra into
its administrative orbit.5 So, for instance, though the Marathas col­
lected tribute from this province, they were not powerful enough
to establish an administrative apparatus within it. Only when
Akbar conquered Saurashtra in the sixteenth century was Guja­
rat governed by officers appointed by the Mughal. Akbar was in
this respect the first ruler after Chandragupta to have properly
conquered Saurashtra—in the sense of also establishing his own
provincial administration there. Ashoka was evidently the legatee
of Chandragupta’s spoils and administrative system.
If the political governors of Mauryan kings were based in the
region, what had made them choose Junagadh as their provincial
capital? This is hard to say for certain, but one reason will have been
the naturally defensive neighbourhood of Junagadh. The area was
forested and hill-girt, with the highest mountain in Gujarat, the
Gorakhnath summit, located at Girnar. The hilly areas of Kathia­
war district were relatively secure, causing many towns to come
up over the centuries, including Adityana, Mendarda, Talala, and
Visavadar.6 Junagadh’s access to the coast must have been another
important factor. The ocean is less than 80 km from here and from
Girnar a glimpse is sometimes possible of forests and low hills
that run in a continuous sweep to the sea. Tod, having ascended
the summit of the seven-peaked Girnar, marvelled at having seen
‘the ocean lighted up by the sun’s last rays, while silence ruled over
the remains of fading glory.’7
The provincial governor, in all likelihood, administered the en­
tire territory from the Junagadh hills to the Arabian Sea. There
was a Mauryan settlement at Prabhas Patan, not far from the
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 207

temple site of Somnath, which means the Mauryas ruled a swathe

from Girnar to the south-west coast of Saurashtra. Situated on
the right bank of the Hiran river, Prabhas Patan was a port which
regulated trade and traffic to and from the hinterland. If Juna­-
gadh’s location was naturally secure because of the hills, Prabhas
Patan was made secure by the creation of a fortified core. The time
period contemporary with the Mauryas (Period IV which stretches
from the fourth till the first century bce) saw the creation of a stone
citadel, with the wall marked by bastions at cardinal points.8 The
creation of this kind of town in Saurashtra continued well into
modern times, with eighteenth-century urban centres here being
primarily military fortresses.9
The other aspect of Junagadh which comes alive thanks to ins­
criptional allusions to the construction of a dam by the Mauryan
state in the time of Chandragupta, and which continued to receive
royal attention during the reign of Ashoka, is the availability of
water. Presumably it was required for cultivation, as drinking water,
and for the other usual purposes. So, was there a large town here?
Where was it located? And why did the administration decide to
build an embankment rather than, for instance, dig wells?
Where the Mauryan town was situated is not known. It could
well have been in the area of the Chamunda locality of modern Juna­
gadh, where the accumulation of habitation deposits in a mound-
like formation is visible over the hillside in its vicinity, and on the
outer edge of the fortifications in what is known as Uparkot. The
present residents of Chamunda are known to find sculptural relics,
pottery, stone artefacts, and even skeletons where they stay. This area
is also not far from what must have been one edge of the lake that
came to be formed behind the dam. Why a dam-like embankment
was constructed here has to do with the suitability of a large bowl-
like space that is naturally available in this hill-encircled basin, the
only exit being the Sonarekha (sometimes called Suvarnarekha)
river. Perhaps the creation of an embankment-dependent water
management system may also have had something to do with the
limitations of well technology in Mauryan times. It is unlikely that
this technology was capable of plumbing the depths at which water
208 ashoka in ancient india

was to be found, for in city areas and their environs water is usually
found at a great depth. The elaborate historic ‘vavas’ or wells there,
all constructions of the medieval centuries, go very deep. The Adi-
Chadi Vava in Uparkot has a depth, from top to bottom, of some
41 metres. Such deep wells were unknown in Mauryan times. Taxila
provides an example: the height of the Bhir plateau on which the
city stood made it impractical to dig wells. The residents therefore
got their water from the Tamra nala, a rivulet which flowed out­-
side the city area.10 In Junagadh the Sonarekha river perhaps fulfill­
ed a similar function.
Alongside, a state-sponsored embankment was built across
the river. The likely locale of the lake and the remnants of the
embankment were identified by Khan Bahadur Ardeseer Jamsedjee,
the Naib Diwan of the princely state of Junagadh, in the nineteenth
century.11 He believed two dams had been constructed, one in the
reign of Rudradaman and an earlier one in Chandragupta’s. The
Mauryan dam was older and smaller and he sought to identify it
with the blocks of masonry in the bed of the Sonarekha river near
the Dharagir gate of the city, in whose vicinity there were mounds.
While the dam is no longer visible, the description given by Jam­
sedjee suggests what it looked like in the nineteenth century:

From the top of the mound on the right or north bank it was clear
the blocks of masonry were remains of a dam that once lay across
the river and stretched westward till it joined the easternmost spur of
the Uparkot rocks. Surely this was the original Chandragupta dam of
which we were in search. The length of the gap or breach in the dam is
36 yards. Of the mound that ran from the right bank of the Sonrekha
to the Jogini spurs few traces remain. The height near the river bank
is about thirty feet. The length of the embankment or west side of
the river between the bed and the Citadel was 314 yards. Of this about
140 yards of masonry remain; 174 have been carried away for building.
The breadth of the masonry varies from 43 to 53 yards.12

The lake that was created behind this embankment would have
covered some 140 acres. Jamsedjee also attempted to identify the
conduits or sluices that Rudradaman’s inscription mentions as a
feature of the renovations carried out by Ashoka. In the Dharagir
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 209

garden he found labourers excavating huge blocks of stone which

formed a pavement hollow in the centre, and which passed
northwards from the bank of the lake. This had the appearance of
being the remains of a conduit or canal. Clearly, keeping the bund
in working order had been ensured by Ashoka’s administration.
The dam being in this area, one edge of the lake would have been in
the vicinity of the Girnar rock.13 Such a landscape, created, altered,
and sustained by Ashoka and his predecessors, will have been seen
and experienced as a symbol of the power of the dynasty in improv­-
ing the lives of its citizens, possibly in a far more meaningful way
than the edicts. The basic point is that Ashoka’s voice in Girnar
would have been seen as one element, albeit singular in content,
of a broad constellation of Mauryan interventions, creating in
their totality the groundwork of power within which state pro­
nouncements were received and interpreted.

***

While Girnar had an impressive lineage of connections with the

Maurya monarchs, there was something that the emperor had
spoken about earlier at various places from the outcrops of Andhra
to the rocks beyond the Ganga which was missing in this much more
magnificent setting. At Girnar the full set of major edicts had been
engraved to create one long sermon. The overall impression here
is of an emperor doubling as spiritual preacher, holding forth on
mat­ters at variance with local religious rites and practices. But the
populace here was not privy to what the Erragudi people knew.
There, via his minor rock edicts, Ashoka had specified that his
metamorphosis had a Buddhist basis before he spoke at length about
all kinds of other matters in the major rock edicts engraved there;
at Girnar there is no evidence of his new religion in his edicts.
This lack of specification does not mean the local people would
not have known about Ashoka’s religious conversion. Traces that
remain in the immediate hinterland of ancient Junagadh and Girnar
point to the possibility that this was common knowledge which
Fig. 9.2: The Bhoria stupa in the Girnar forest, the massive cut created by nineteenth-century
excavations still visible
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 211

probably did not need to take up precious rock space. In several

parts of India the epigraphs had been positioned in the vicinity of
early Buddhist monuments. At such spots there were early stupas
and temples (‘chaityas’). These were either known or likely to have
been constructed with Ashoka’s patronage. Knowledge of the king’s
conversion will surely have travelled out from such places.
Structural relics in the landscape of Junagadh which have an
early association with Buddhism reinforce the idea. One such is the
Bhoria stupa, also called the Lakha Medi stupa. Located in a state-
protected forest known as the Girnar Reserve Sanctuary near the
present-day Bhordevi temple complex, this is the most impressive
early Buddhist structural relic of the area. Built on a rocky knoll
some 7 km to the east of Junagadh city, it stands in a delightfully
secluded valley which provides a magnificent view of both the
rugged Girnar and the Datar hill, the highest mountain after
Girnar. Excavated by J.M. Campbell in 1889, with the massive cutt­
ing left behind by him still clearly visible, the entire ground around
it is strewn with bricks and brick fragments, as also many small
mounds. The main stupa is made of solid brick in herringbone
bond.14 Inside, a stone coffer was found with a stone pot. Inside
this pot were relic boxes of copper, silver, and gold, with semi-
precious and precious stones—such as an aquamarine bead, a ruby,
a sapphire, and an emerald—inside the last. There was also coaly
grit and a ‘relic’ which ‘had the appearance of a dried twig, though
perhaps a trifle heavy  .  .  .  the fractured ends or sections, do not,
however, show a woody texture.’15 Various stone pieces including
two heavy railing slabs and the remains of a stone umbrella were
also found ‘in the vertical axis of the mound’, which probably means
they were buried inside the stupa. Why were these buried inside
the stupa, and were they part of a previous stupa that had been
vandalized? Possibly.
Since the excavations did not yield either a coin or an inscrip­-
tion, it is difficult to precisely date the Bhoria stupa. That it may well
have been built in the time of Ashoka, however, can be suggested
on the basis of the fact that, like many Mauryan stupas, it is a solid
brick structure. An example of a Mauryan brick stupa is the one
212 ashoka in ancient india

at Vaishali in Bihar, where the Mauryan enlargement that came to

encase the original mud stupa was done in burnt brick. Similarly,
the Dharmarajika stupa at Sarnath is made of brick, surmounted by
one or more umbrellas set within a square railing.
Was burnt brick used as a construction material in Gujarat in
the late centuries bce? The archaeologist Y.S. Rawat surveyed an
early historic fort on the Taranga hill in north Gujarat and suggests
it was used fairly early there.16 The fortified settlement dated to
the third century/second century bce shows burnt-brick cons­
truction over granite boulders. Like the bricks of the Bhoria stupa,
these were fairly large. The use of brick is, culturally speaking, a
significant aberration in Junagadh since this is an area where,
from the early medieval period till today, stone is primarily used
for construction, good quality stone being locally abundant. The
tradition of brick building in Junagadh might have remained an
enigma but for the fact that bricks were much used for Buddhist
shrines in Ashokan times, and that the emperor had a strong pre­
sence in Junagadh.
Ancient literature credits Ashoka with the construction of as
many as 84,000 stupas over the relics of the Buddha, which he is
supposed to have redistributed after exhuming them from earlier

Fig. 9.3: Copies of the copper, silver, and gold relic boxes found inside
the Bhoria stupa (now in the Junagadh State Museum)
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 213

ones.17 The exaggerated number apart, the Ashokan stamp on

stupas in different parts of India is unmistakable. Within this pro­
gramme of stupa construction and relic redistribution, it is unlikely
that a provincial capital like Junagadh would have been bypassed,
especially as the edicts were so majestically inscribed. If so, the
Bhoria stupa can be the only site where such relics would have
been interred in the Junagadh area. The relics that have been found
inside the stupa also lend credence to this assumption.
In and around the hills of Girnar, structural complexes of which
remnants survive also used large burnt bricks.18 Their Mauryan
ancestry thus seems likely. At Surajkund in the Girnar sanctuary
there was a circular well cut into the natural rock, and another
lined with bricks.19 The bricks are large and of various sizes, some
decorated with figure marks, a chaitya, and a conch. In another part
of the forest, in the Hasnapur dam area and close to a local religious
place called Jina Baba ki Samadhi, is a stupa site. This appears to
have been made of a combination of large bricks and some stone.
Incidentally, in the dam area too, which is now submerged, brick
structural ruins exist and become visible, according to local people,
when the water level in the dam drops. Thirty km from Junagadh,
near the Ramnath forest checkpost, a large concentration of solid
bricks and brickbats lies scattered. In the suburbs of Junagadh are
sites marked by large bricks. One of these, near the Palasini river, is
known as Hajam Chora, named after a hill where it is located. Towards
the top of the hill are big blocks of dressed stones interspersed
with large bricks and a number of earthen lamp (‘diya’) remains.
Finally, there is Intawa, a Buddhist monastic site in the midst of
a thick jungle on a hill above Bhavnath. Intawa was excavated in
1949 and yielded the foundations of monasteries, as also many arte-
facts ranging from water pots and coins to a rounded clay sealing
which bore a legend that mentioned the seal as belonging to the
Bhikshu sangha of the vihara of Maharaja Rudrasena.20 This is
likely to have been Rudrasena I (199–222 ce). Thanks to the clay
sealing, this early historic site with burnt-brick architecture can be
assigned a firm date.
Is there a pattern in this monumentality? The places marked by
early historic bricks are dotted across a large landscape. While at
214 ashoka in ancient india

Hajam Chora the brick complex is within walking distance of the

remnants of the Sudarshana lake, the Ramnath Mahadev mandir
site is far from the Junagadh area. In fact, it cannot be visualized
in any way as forming part of the circuit that sustained the ancient
provincial centre here. The distribution of the other sites in the
Girnar forest area, however, begins to make sense when it is juxta­
posed with the topography of the hill zone. The forested tract
does not have a great deal of flat land. There are four small valleys
between the Girnar range and the surrounding hills which are in
the vicinity of Bhavnath, Hasnapur, Surajkund, and Bhordevi. The
traditional halting places of the famous Girnar pilgrim circuit (or
‘parikrama’), which starts annually from November, are these very
valleys. It is in the vicinity of these places that early historic brick
ruins are found. Intawa is above Bhavnath and was a Buddhist
monastic site. Surajkund, marked by a late centuries bce well and
other undetermined brick remains, may well be part of a Buddhist
ruin. As for Jina Baba ki Samadhi and Bhordevi, both are marked by
the remnants of Buddhist stupas.
Thus, much before its fame as a centre of Jaina and Hindu
worship, Girnar appears to have been sacred to the Buddhists, and
possibly the earliest circuit of worship in and around the Girnar
was Buddhist. It is hard to be sure of Ashoka’s role in the creation of
this circuit. But as the emperor’s provincial capital will have been the
circuit’s support centre and as the emperor himself was a Buddh­
ist, the presence of brick in the early Buddhist monuments of the
Girnar forest does seem to suggest that Ashoka ploughed resour­
ces into developing places of worship and shelter for the Buddhist
monastic community there.

***

My account of Ashoka’s imprint in the environs of Junagadh has

tried to show why the idea of a standard or more or less identical
message inscribed across a wide area of the empire needs to be
rethought. Local interpretation mediates reception and colours
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 215

understanding at every point. The fixity of inscriptions carved on

rock, combined with the roughly similar ideas conveyed regardless
of location, tend to make us arrive at a singular meaning, a sense
of the entire edict range being reducible to a narrow range of
summary statements about a contrite emperor’s endeavour to cre­
ate a new ethos of citizenship within an ethically governed empire.
To note common threads running through the edicts should not
undermine the possibility of interpretive variation and plurality
of meaning. Political authority and cultural hegemony vary across
regions and mediate the reception of every statement and mes­
sage. Comprehension in a particular way is also a consequence of
the landscape and historical structuring in which the speech act
happens. So, for example, it can hardly be denied that perceptions
of Ashoka’s guilt and repentance will have differed in Orissa, where
the Kalinga war was fought, from perceptions of these at Erragudi
and Girnar.
To continue with this theme of local interpretive difference,
we could look at Sannathi in Karnataka, where the message was
inscribed on a free-standing slab (or slabs) which bore edicts on
both sides.21 From what has survived, it is clear that two of the edicts
inscribed here had earlier been found only at Dhauli and Jaugada
in Orissa. So, whereas before the Sannathi discovery it was believed
that this part of Ashoka’s long rescript was meant for Kalinga alone,
it is now evident that they were also intended for other places. The
designations they bear, though, are the same as those in Orissa and
are alluded to as Separate Rock Edicts 1 and 2. As in Orissa, the
Kalinga Edict is omitted here, but unlike in Orissa the emperor’s
magnificent statement on tolerance in Rock Edict 12 is included.
Among the other edicts, what has survived at Sannathi are Rock
Edicts 12 and 14. The absence of the Kalinga Edict, the thirteenth in
this anthology, means that it was deliberately dropped.
What explains the absence of Ashoka’s account of Kalinga in
Karnataka? During the late second and early third century bce a
part of the Bhima river valley, or ‘greater Sannathi’ as its excavat­
ors have called it, was marked by a strong Mauryan presence.22
This was of an entirely different order from the preceding cultures
at Sannathi. Habitation here goes back to the time of specialized
216 ashoka in ancient india

hunter-gatherers who used microliths of all kinds. Their material

equipment will have included other sorts of objects that have not
survived. The site was then abandoned and later occupied by a black
and red ware culture. This was an iron-using society and its pot-
tery was of the kind usually associated with megaliths in Karnataka
and beyond. The Mauryan occupation here overlay this horizon.
With the advent of the Mauryas, a far richer material culture
made its appearance, marked by the use of burnt bricks, North
Black Polished Ware, polished stone pestles, shell bangles, beads of
terracotta and semi-precious stones (jasper, carnelian, crystal, coral,
lapis lazuli), coins and a disc stone bearing a typically Mauryan
relief of standing goddesses flanked by palm trees and various
animals.23 A major moment in the life of any site is when a system
of fortifications is constructed, indicating what is considered worthy
of defence and consolidation, and at Sannathi the first phase of the
fortifications—constructed by cutting a moat and heaping the earth
to create walls—goes back to Mauryan times.
The Maurya advent seems to have coincided with prosperity of
a kind not seen before, but that would not in itself suggest that this
important town was established by Ashoka, or that he established it
after conquering the region. The date of the urban centre cannot be
precisely established, but that it existed in the time of Ashoka seems
fairly certain—the presence of his edicts suggests this. Equally, the
stupa of Kanaganahalli, situated very close to Sannathi, was first
established in Mauryan times. This was in the form of an earthen
mound, some 16 metres in diameter and rising to a height of a
little over 7 metres. The Mauryan antiquities included a mutilated
polished sandstone lion capital fragment on the west of the stupa,
along with a single sherd of North Black Polished Ware. Ashoka,
we have seen, established stupas marked by his various messages at
many locations, and the first stupa here must have been built with
his patronage.
On the question of Ashoka’s conquest of Sannathi, the evidence
is more tenuous. A great deal has been invested in the etymology of
the name of the large 80-hectare habitational mound here, where
the cultural levels just described were recovered. The mound bears
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 217

the name of Ranamandala, suggesting it was a battlefield. K.P.

Poonacha, who led the excavations of the Archaeological Survey
of India, believes ‘the place may be the historic battlefield or site
wherein the Mauryas subjugated the local Satavahanas in a battle
and included this territory in the Mauryan conquered vijita.’24 This,
of course, is not enough, especially since no part of the emperor’s
message has any reference to or remembrance of the conquest of
Karnataka. What is certain, though, is that Ranamandala revealed
artefacts and antiquities which appear to be Mauryan, ranging
from NBP sherds to a circular medallion bearing reliefs of standing
mother goddesses flanked by trees and animals. These belong to
the same family as those found at Mauryan sites in North India.25
Another suggestion has been that the reason why Kalinga was not
mentioned is that Ashoka did conquer Karnataka. What transpir­
ed in the Karnataka conquest was not comparable to Kalinga,
but because this was a recently annexed region the emperor was
being circumspect in omitting mention of warfare at Sannathi. This
theory would also explain the omission of the Kalinga edict.26
A major problem with the Sannathi edicts as compared to those
in Kalinga is that the slab-bearing part of Ashoka’s message was
not found in situ. When it was discovered it formed the pedestal
of the idol of Kalikamba in the Chandralamba temple. This means
that while it is likely to have been around the early historic city at
Sannathi, or possibly in the vicinity of the Kanaganahalli stupa, we
cannot be sure where it originally stood. From the perspective of
imagining what the ancient landscape looked like, Orissa is easier to
speculate on since the rescripts are exactly where Ashoka had them
engraved. Unlike the Sannathi slab, which bears only part of the
message, the Orissa edicts are fairly complete. This makes it possible
to offer an imaginative yet historically grounded account of how
political exigencies resulted in a changed royal message.

***
218 ashoka in ancient india

In Orissa the process is especially clear because the edicts there have
survived much better. At Dhauli and Jaugada, significant chunks
of Ashoka’s longer message were not inscribed, three edicts being
omitted: No. 11, which reiterated the emperor’s idea of dhamma;
No. 12, the magnificent statement on tolerance; and No. 13, which
records the Kalinga conquest in ghastly detail. Two other edicts,
described by historians as Separate Rock Edict 1 and Separate Rock
Edict 2, exist here.27
Before discussing the nature of the message that these separate
edicts recorded, it seems advisable again to examine their landscape.
Kalinga being the ancient name for the eastern edge of India that
straddles Orissa and part of Andhra, this was the scene of Ashoka’s
infamy and its omission here is thus logical: only a few years had
elapsed and the emperor would not have wanted to rub salt in the
wounds of the wounded. He also took his time getting his long
message inscribed there at all: the engraving was undertaken only
after the entire anthology was complete. The arrangement of the
texts at one of these places, at Dhauli near Bhubaneshwar, reveals
this fact. Two of the three columns here carry edicts 1 to 6 and 7 to
10 as also 14—this last edict would not have appeared here if the
master set prepared at Pataliputra was not already complete. Below
this set, within a border of straight lines, the two separate edicts
were placed.28
The rocks of Dhauli form part of a hill which is in turn part
of three ranges of parallel hills. These ranges are not far from the
banks of the Daya river, some 7 km from Bhubaneshwar.29 Here, an
epigraph and monument combination was created. The rock had a
large space specially created for the edicts, and a little above it was
a terrace where, out of solid rock, an elephant was hewn, one of the
finest specimens of early sculptural art.30 Ashoka’s epigraph refers
to what this elephant represents: at the end of the Sixth Rock Edict
is inscribed the appellation ‘seto’ or the ‘white one’, indicating that
the elephant symbolizes the Buddha. It was as a white elephant that
the Buddha was supposed to have entered the womb of his mother,
Maya. This juxtaposition of a white elephant with an inscription
lauding dhamma is intended to make the emperor’s Buddhism
abundantly clear.
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 219

The other site of Ashoka’s message is Jaugada, much further

south, near the Rushikulya river in Orissa’s Ganjam district. Much
before Ashoka, this area was inhabited first by people who used
neolithic celts and black and red pottery, and then by iron-users
who were fond of beads made of shell, bone, agate, carnelian, crystal,
and quartz.31 By the historical period it had become a township. In
fact, Jaugada is perhaps the only site of Ashoka’s major rock edicts
within what must have been an extensive town surrounded by
high walls. Both Jaugada and Dhauli are in the eastern coastal belt.
Both are also adjacent to hilly jungle-covered regions—the Khurda
area which forms part of the Chhotanagpur plateau in the case of
Dhauli, and the rocky forested stretch from Bastar to Vizianagaram
in the case of Jaugada.32
Can these places be identified with the towns that find mention
in the epigraphs? The Dhauli inscription alludes to Tosali while
Samapa is mentioned in the Jaugada epigraph. Jaugada was likely
to have been located inside Samapa, the city mentioned in the
Separate Edicts. The mahamatras of Samapa, who were the judicial
officers (‘nagalaviyohalakas’) of the city, are specifically address­
ed.33 The inscribed rock was part of a group of outcrops located
inside an old earthen square fort surrounded by a moat. On the
other hand, identifying Tosali is more controversial. While it is
mentioned in later inscriptions both as a region and as a place, here
the mahamatras of Tosali were alluded to as the judicial officers of
the city.34 The location of the city has been a matter of some dispute,
with the fortified early historic site of Sisupalgarh, which lies a short
distance from Dhauli, being the most popular contender.35 It has
deep habitation deposits going back to pre-Mauryan times. On the
other hand, the mound of Radhanagar in the Jajpur sector of Orissa
also appears to have been an important early historic city, situated
some 60 km to the north of Cuttack, on the right bank of the Keula
river. Radhanagar was fortified, with wide (some 40 metres wide)
ramparts and gateways. Its remains are broadly contemporary with
those recovered from Sisupalgarh.36 Either way, Dhauli could not
have been located inside Tosali. However, if Tosali was indeed located
at Sisupalgarh, Dhauli’s rocks were in its immediate hinterland. This
was a crucial hub in the Mauryan scheme of things in Kalinga. A
220 ashoka in ancient india

prince was headquartered there, in the same way as at Suvarnagiri,

Ujjayini, and Taxila. Many other segments of this eastern region
were dotted with settlements, including Manamuda in the Boudh
district which has yielded pottery with a close affinity to that of
the Gangetic plains and Central India; and Asurgarh, a port town
in Kalahandi district which was fortified and contemporary with
Sisupalgarh.37 However, only Tosali and Samapa find mention in
Ashoka’s epigraphs.
What of the place of the fateful battle? While it is likely that
it was in the zone stretching from Jajpur to Ganjam, precisely
where the Mauryan forces were actively resisted by the Kalingans
remains unknown. Where one would like to locate the definitive
milit­ary combat—whether near Bhubaneshwar and not far
from Sisupalgarh and the Dhauli rocks, or much further south
beyond Srikakulam—depends upon the route that one imagines
Ashoka’s forces used in their traverse from Pataliputra to Kalinga.
One view is that the Mauryan troops took the same route that
centuries later was followed by the Gupta king Samudragupta in
his subcontinental campaign. Samudragupta is supposed to have
arrived in Kalinga from Chhattisgarh.38 Dilip Chakrabarti finds
this an acceptable hypothesis because ‘both these monarchs came
from Pataliputra and both had Kalinga in their purview.’39 The
Gupta monarch’s campaign, though, was qualitatively different
from that of the Mauryan. Samudragupta was moving in a very
deter­mined fashion against the confederacy whose kingpin was the
Pallava king of Kanchi. So, his line of movement across Dakshina
Kosala and Ganjam-Srikakulam made eminent political sense. On
the other hand, Ashoka’s campaign was a far more circumscribed
offensive, and for him, the Bhubaneshwar–Jajpur area was likely to
have been strategically significant. The presence of urban centres
like Sisupalgarh and Radhanagar, as also his edicts later engraved
at Dhauli, suggest this. So, his army possibly took the Bengal–
Orissa route, moving south-west from Midnapur. The location of
Radhanagar makes sense in terms of this alignment, as do Dhauli and
Sisupalgarh. If so, the decisive battle would have taken place in this
part of Kalinga. Following a brutal pacification of the area, a strong
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 221

Mauryan provincial government must have been headquartered

there. It was to the administrators of Kalinga that, as we shall see,
Ashoka directly spoke in his separate edicts.

***

How did Kalinga’s landscape recast the message put there? Since
the consequences of his actions haunted Ashoka, it seems likely
that, years later, along with eleven of the original anthology that
made up his major rock edicts, he caused two further edicts to
be engraved there, both qualitatively different from the others.40
In them the emperor, speaking in the first person, instructs the
officials at Tosali and at Samapa, whom he specifically mentions as
being occupied with many thousands of people, his object being to
gain their affection. For the first time, he uses words that indicate a
filial relationship with his people. The Second Separate Edict, which
actually occurs before what is designated as the First, says:

All men are my children.

As on behalf of (my own) children I desire that they may be provided
by me with all welfare and happiness in this world and in the other
world, even so is my desire for all men.41

This became a recurring motif: his officials were asked to fulfil

their duties and inspire people ‘in order that they may learn that the
king is to them like a father, (that) he loves them as he loves himself,
(and that) they are to the king like (his own children).’42 Much the
same can be seen in the First Separate Edict: ‘just as for (my own)
children I desire that they may be provided with all welfare and
happiness in this world and in the other world so I desire for all
men also.’43
In his exploration of ancient kingship B.G. Gokhale has suggest­-
ed that this sentiment was rooted in the idea of early Buddhist king­
ship where political society was depicted as a family presided over
by a morally elevated being in the image of the father.44 However,
222 ashoka in ancient india

if this was so, why were the officials in Kalinga being informed that
the king treated all people as his own children—unlike, for instance,
those who manned the administration in Gujarat and north-west
India? Is it possible that, after its annexation, the newly conquered
people were being treated harshly by Mauryan officials? Among a
people so recently vanquished, could Ashoka have appeared in the
avatara of a father figure? We can only guess that there was a degree
of alienation in Kalinga, and Ashoka was therefore being discreetly
reticent. Enveloping his rescript within an affective mould was one
way of building bridges with them.
His ‘unconquered borderers’ (‘amtanam avijita’) in Separate
Rock Edict 2 were also addressed in this intimate way.45 Border
people could be quite troublesome and those on the borders of the
Mauryan empire certainly were. In addition to describing them as
his children, the emperor used every temperate word at his disposal
to convey to them that he was not an aggrandizing and brutal
overlord but one who wanted their confidence. Simultaneously, he
hoped to induce in them the practice of morality:

It might occur to (my) unconquered borderers (to ask): ‘What does the
king desire with reference to us?
This alone is my wish with reference to the borderers, (that) they
may learn (that) the king desires this, (that) they may not be afraid
of me, but may have confidence in me; (that) they may obtain only
happiness from me, not misery; (that) they may learn this, (that) the
king will forgive them what can be forgiven; that they may (be induced)
by me (to) practice morality; (and that) they may attain (happiness)
both (in) this world and (in) the other world.46

His image suffered from a trust deficit vis-à-vis those addressed:

this is evident. Presumably, these borderers would have been privy
to the ruthless way in which Ashoka had run over Kalinga and
may have feared they were next in line. Ashoka is at pains to per­
suade them otherwise.
As for Ashoka’s subjects in Kalinga, his main concern in Sepa­
rate Rock Edict 1, what exactly was he asking his administration
to do even as he addressed all and sundry as his progeny? If one
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 223

pays heed to a strong hint in the edict, he was looking at ways of

changing and improving an insensitive Mauryan administration in
Kalinga. He alludes to this when he exhorts officials to pay atten­-
tion to being even-handed in the administration of justice (‘niti’),
and to cultivate the right qualities necessary to the discharge of
their duties:
It happens in the administration (of justice) that a single person suffers
either imprisonment or harsh treatment.
In this case (an order) cancelling the imprisonment is obtained by
him accidentally, while (many) other people continue to suffer.
In this case you must strive to deal (with all of them) impartially.
But if one fails to act (thus) on account of the following dispositions:
envy, anger, cruelty, hurry, want of practice, laziness, (and) fatigue.
(You) must strive for this, that these dispositions may not arise
to you.
And the root of all this is the absence of anger and the avoidance of
hurry.
He who is fatigued in the administration (of justice), will not rise;
but one ought to move, to walk, and to advance. 47
Ashoka seems very aware that all was not quiet on the eastern
front. Looking for words to motivate his administration there, he
was unequivocal about the dire consequences of failure: ‘there will
be neither attainment of heaven nor satisfaction of the king’. They
would attain heaven and pay the king’s debt by listening carefully.48
The idea of paying a debt had figured in the Sixth Edict, where
Ashoka spoke of discharging the debt he owed to living beings.49
Now, in this new articulation, it was the officials who by carrying
out their duties would enable Ashoka to discharge this debt. A sense
of solidarity between ruler and administration was being sought,
and one imagines that this message was necessitated by problems
specific to Kalinga.
In most places, Ashoka’s engraved messages were read out
by officials. This, in turn, entailed careful listening by the people
gathered. For his ‘unconquered borderers’ and in Kalinga, the king
practically ordered that these edicts be regularly read out. Separate
Rock Edict 1 is pretty straightforward in telling his officials to get
224 ashoka in ancient india

the job done: ‘And this edict must be listened to (by all) on (every
day of) the constellation Tishya. And it may be listened to even by
a single (person) also on frequent (other) occasions between (the
days of) Tishya. And if you act thus, you will be able to fulfil (this
duty).’50 Considering that the edict is primarily concerned with
improving administration and justice delivery, a reading between
the lines seems called for: the emperor seems to be saying he dis­
approves of the existing state of affairs and has given officials
specific redressal instructions. Via repeated broadcasts heard at least
three times a year (implied by reference to the Tishya constellation),
some sort of accountability is being attempted. The line ensuing
makes this apparent: ‘in order that the judicial officers of the city
may strive at all times (for this), (that) neither undeserved fettering
nor undeserved harsh treatment are happening to (men).’51
He says, further, and specifically at this location, that a quin­
quennial scrutiny will be conducted by a mahamatra of suitable
character, ‘neither harsh nor fierce, [but] of gentle actions’,52 to
ascertain if judicial officers have been acting according to instruc­
tions. This promise of supervision was not restricted to Kalinga:
other centres of provincial administration—Ujjayini and Taksha­
shila are specifically named—were also instructed to send out
maha­matras for the same purpose triennially. On account of this
command it has been assumed that these separate edicts were not
Kalinga-centric but intended for administrators in other parts of
the empire as well.53 This may well be so, and the Separate Edicts
at Sannathi suggest it. All the same, at Kalinga the instruction
will have carried a meaning more loaded by recent events and the
remembrance of them.
Those parts of Ashoka’s message that are found at Dhauli and
Jaugada are neither about the preaching nor the practice of dhamma.
They are centrally concerned with delivering better administra­
tion in a politically sensitive province. The emperor modifies the
content and tenor of his message keeping in mind the situation on
the ground.
At one level, it seems a truism to say that because reception within
specific contexts mediates messages and colours interpretations,
 t h e m e s s ag e i n t h e l a n d s c a p e 225

uniformity of meaning across landscapes is a myth. In the peculiar

case of Ashoka’s edicts, which despite being spread over thousands
of kilometres tend very strongly to be seen as disseminating a single
message, it has seemed worthwhile to me to scrutinize the truth
content of this truism. The valorization of Ashoka by Buddhist
historiography is understandable, yet it cannot be denied that
the religious agenda driving such history has helped immensely
to reinforce the idea that Ashoka’s messages can be reduced to a
singular sermon in defence of the faith. By contrast, because the
ways in which political authority is inscribed in a landscape are
necessarily varied, attentiveness to situational variety is necessary.
Some regions are conquered by the sword and require healing;
others need pacification; yet others may respond best if addressed
in Greek and Aramaic. Landscape, in relation to Ashoka’s edicts,
is not a tabula rasa on which nothing other than contrition and
a new moral agenda, bordering on missionary zeal, are written.
Local history offers possibilities sometimes invisible.
As one anguished king pointed out to his companion in a very
different context: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
 10

Building Beliefs into Edifices

A
shoka’s initiatives and orders, made known
across his empire through epigraphs addressed to his sub-
­jects, are only one of the constitutive elements of the em­-
peror’s authority. There are important others, of a qualitatively
different order, which too left a material imprint. Among these are
Ashoka’s royal programmes for building, renovating, and modify­
ing religious edifices. His epigraphs pertaining to these programmes
are largely about religion, religious personages, and interventions
regarding the practice of his new faith.
The range of such structures is as diverse as the places where they
were constructed. Some are caves that the sovereign got excavated
as abodes for ascetics. Others are spaces sedimented with Buddhist
associations where Ashoka’s stamp can be seen because he journeyed
there as a pilgrim. He installed numerous pillars at places that had
featured in some way in the life and death of the Buddha; others at
places the Buddha could not have visited. Stupas too were built with
Ashoka’s patronage, sometimes over relics of the Sakyamuni that he
is believed to have extracted out of older stupas. The stunning pil­
lared hall in the Magadhan capital, which is likely to have been built
in his time, may well carry the same religious associations.
The points in time of their construction remain uncertain in a
significant number of instances. Unlike the edicts, the chronology
of the edifices usually cannot be delineated with the same degree of
accuracy. Among the epigraphs of the emperor which adorn several
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 227

of these structures, only some bear dates in relation to the king’s

conse­cration, dates which would make it possible to clarify when
they were built. Some carry no inscriptions. In such instances, the
basis on which the structures are said to have either been built or
ex­panded is either literary—the authors of ancient texts describing
them as built by the emperor—or else include elements generally
consi­dered diagnostic for identifying Ashokan edifices, such as
polished pillars and the specific sorts of bricks used. Archaeological
cultures are usually identified by ‘type fossils’. The archetypal objects
of the Harappan civilization, for instance, range from long flint im­
plements to rectangular and square inscribed seals. Similarly, pil­
lars with the polish so typical of inscribed Ashokan pillars, as also
religious structures made of bricks—which, in terms of size and
fabric, resemble other structures built in this period and which have
occasionally been found constructed on the same floors where the
pillars stand—can be reliably identified as type fossils of Ashoka’s
phase.
These locales perhaps had fixed or flexible associations with the
sacred which may have been the initial reason for Ashoka’s jour­
neys to and engagement with them, as for instance Lumbini, the
Buddha’s birthplace. His visits to them were, however, often trans­
formative—personally, they may have made him more devout,
but, more important, via the structures he built there he changed
the existing configurations and gave them new meaning. Other
patrons may have done this as well, but Ashoka’s ability to influ­ence
sacred landscapes was much greater because massive monoliths
and temples required large resources and labour. They also perhaps
required, in many instances, reaching understanding with Buddhist
monastic custodians. At some Buddhist sites Ashoka assumed the
role of a religious instructor. As the powerhouse of belief in his day,
‘both a monk and monarch at the same time’,1 he felt he was entitled
to address the Buddhist Sangha on religious and doctrinal matters.

***
Fig. 10.1: Hills around the Barabar caves, the Phalgu river in the background
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 229

In 257/256 bce, the year that Ashoka issued his rescripts about the
merit of proper courtesy and proper behaviour towards ‘Shramanas
and Brahmanas’—subsequently these appeared in the Third and
Fourth Major Rock Edicts—he had caves excavated, these being
in­carnations, in a way, of his beliefs. Tolerance for all sects, the
honouring of elders in all religious communities, and the desire
that religious sects live across his dominions were thus supervised
and ensured as material events. Appropriately, the four Barabar
caves were not exclusively for Buddhists. One of them may have
been Buddhist; at least two were given to the Ajivikas in the twelfth
year after his coronation.
Barabar is the name of the highest hill among the rocky ridges
that presently lie in the Jahanabad district of Bihar, some twenty-
four km north of Gaya, and therefore only a day’s journey from
Pataliputra. A large part of the area around the hill, like the environs
surrounding Pataliputra, comprised an expanse of cultivated plains.
The monotony of these plains was broken by the dramatic Barabar
alignment of granite, rising ‘like rocks from the sea’.2 Today, the
Sidde­­shwarnath temple crowns one of the peaks. From here the
hilly con­tours, rock exposures, water reservoirs, and the Phalgu
river in the distance form a stunningly beautiful landscape, enough
to evoke some envy for the ascetics who made this hill their abode
in the third century bce. Ascetics of the Ajivika order had, as we saw,
prophesied glad tidings for Ashoka, so a disinterested distri­bution of
caves to sundry sects may not have been the idyllic scenario paint­ed
sometimes by those desiring to boost the emperor’s proto-secular
credentials. This was all the same a major philanthropic act, the first
instance of caves created on this scale in this part of the world, and
very likely to have been widely recognized in Ashoka’s own time.
There are four such caves. Three are located in a prominent
whale-shaped natural outcrop,3 the Lomasha Rishi cave and the
Sudama cave being adjacent to each other. When these names
came to be attached to the caves is unknown, they did not exist
in Mauryan times. The Sudama cave was called ‘Nigoha Kubha’
or Banyan cave,4 and is referred to thus in Ashoka’s short donative
epigraph there. The recessed entrance of the Sudama cave bears a
230 ashoka in ancient india

Fig. 10.2: Interior of the Sudama cave with a hut-like structure carved
into the rock

dedicatory inscription by ‘Priyadarshin’ dating to when he had been

anointed twelve years. A great deal of effort went into the creation
of this cave. It comprises two chambers, both of which were highly
polished, a rectangular outer one with a vaulted roof and an inner
chamber with a hemispherical ceiling circular in plan and imitating
a thatched hut. Like the Sudama cave, the adjacent Lomasha Rishi
cave was two-chambered. What made it different was a carved
architrave above the entrance on its exterior. In this, the central arch
shows a row of elephants in motion, moving towards a central stupa
from both sides. Immediately above this, in the middle arch, a kind
of lattice screen is made up of an intersecting circle design—the type
that is carved on the throne (‘vajrasana’) that Ashoka is supposed
to have given in honour of the Buddha at Mahabodhi. While this
cave does not carry an epigraph, the polished character of the outer
chamber and its general architecture leaves little doubt that this
too was excavated in the time of Ashoka. The third cave, known
as Vishwa Jhopri, is on another outcrop and, like the Sudama cave,
carries a donative record of Ashoka. This cave (‘kubha’) was for the
Ajivikas and is mentioned as being in the Khalatika mountain, the
name by which the Barabar hills were then known.5
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 231

The last of Ashoka’s dedications is now known as Karna Chaupar.

It was chiselled out of the outcrop within which the Lomasha Rishi
and Sudama caves were created. Facing north, it is a one-chamber
edifice with a vaulted roof. Polished to a high lustre, it is marked
by a low rock-cut platform on the western end. However, this was
created seven years after the others, i.e. nineteen years after Ashoka’s
coronation. The Ajivikas are not mentioned here. Instead, the king
speaks in the first person to say that ‘this cave in the very pleasant
Kha(latika mountain) was given by me for (shelter during) the rainy
season.’6 It is possible that wandering mendicants in need of reli­able
shelter during the rainy season used this cave. There may also have
been free-standing structures in Barabar since at places the stone
foundations of walls peep out of the ground. Whether they were
contemporaneous with the caves excavated on the orders of Ashoka
remains uncertain. In any case, recipients of such a substantial
royal donation had to be influential; so, had they approached the
emperor in person? Or did Ashoka, along the lines of the rescripts
issued around the same time—those highlighting the importance of
respect to religious people—create these structures out of regard for
such sentiments? On the whole, after the long hortatory epigraphs,
the brevity of Ashoka’s donative records at Barabar seems both
striking and somewhat unsatisfactory.
Much more is known about the technology and design of cons­
truction of the Barabar caves which, like the writing of public
edicts on rock surfaces, represented an innovation. With their
inclining walls and invariably rounded roofs, they imitate the archi­
tecture of more humble wooden and bamboo dwellings. They
appear to create in rock the form of habitations in which ascetics
usually felt comfortable. Except that, unlike huts, these are rooms
of high quality. The walls are plain but, because of the proportions
of the rooms, have a highly developed aesthetic appearance which,
in turn, is enhanced by the remarkable polish. The lustrous inner
surfa­ces actually are mirror-like in their effect. These surfaces en­-
hance every sound inside the caves and so, living in them, one
imagines, pre­supposed perfect silence. It was this proclivity of the
caves to echo so unusually that is the anti-spiritual centrepoint
of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). Forster comments on
232 ashoka in ancient india

aspects of the Marabar caves (a thinly disguised reference to Bara­

bar), their lack of ornamentation and sculpture, a remarkable
echo in them, the polished stone surface which captures light like
an imprisoned spirit and yields colours and shadings that seem to
reveal the life of granite. One of the characters, Mrs Moore, dies with
the echo of the Marabar Caves in her head; another, Adela Quested,
is misled by the echo, ‘Ou-boom’, in one of the caves into believing
she has been molested. Ashoka could not in his wildest dreams have
thought that his gift to the Ajivikas would, 2000 years later, result in
a classic novel using these caves as the lynchpin of its plot.7
Is it possible to demonstrate the planning that went into the
Ashokan excavation of these Ajivika abodes? While the caves are
of varying dimensions, it has been suggested that they have all
been made on a grid using integers of a unit of circa 85.5 cm.8 This
would mean that the size of the interiors was not random but based
on a fixed measure. Further, the various steps by which this major
building work was executed can be partially reconstructed on the
basis of clues that the incomplete Lomasha Rishi cave has provided.9
The fact that this cave’s interior was only partially finished reveals
that the orders of emperors, even those as powerful as Ashoka,
were not always followed in letter and spirit. The messiness of the
engravings of some of his edicts at Kalsi and Erragudi suggested
this; in the Barabar caves it looks as if the administrators either
did not inspect the caves or did not think it necessary to finish
them to the required standard. Odd—because Kalsi and Erragudi
are at a considerable distance from the Mauryan capital whereas
the Khalatika hill is close to Pataliputra, making it easier for the
emperor to catch recalcitrant building contractors by the neck.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
For those interested in the technology of their construction,
the sloppiness is a blessing. Through the scooping, chiselling, and
grind­ing marks still visible on the floor, ceiling, and walls of the
Lomasha Rishi cave, the construction and finishing processes can
be reconstructed in some detail. The first stage would have involved
removing the rocks to produce a hollow cave. Initially, chunks of
rock were removed with the help of short, heavy chisels along the
required area of the cave. This was followed by rough chiselling to
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 233

bring out the cave’s overall outline. From the chisel marks it appears
that the work progressed from bottom to top. The chisel edges were
very sharp, ranging between 0.7 and 1.3 cm—the marks preserved
inside the cave and outside it suggest this. After this, the dressing of
the interior was done, now with a lighter chisel. Dressing involved
making parallel straight grooves over a comparatively even surface.
These can be seen on the floor and on the outer face of the hut
inside the cave. The depth to which the grooves were cut seems to
have been a consequence of keeping in mind the surface which was
to be eventually polished.
The dressed stone was then treated by pecking and grinding.
Pecking involves thinning the ridges left behind by chiselling so that
some kind of flat surface is produced. The hewn surface, though,
still remained rough. This was evened out by grinding—the sur­
face was rubbed by using coarse sand, water, and a coarse-grained
stone. This removed all marks: the pitted parts, the coarse texture,
etc. The smoothened surface then had to be polished. Polishing was
only a kind of grinding where the rubbing stone used was of a fine
texture, just as the sand too was very fine grained. In these caves, the
polishing actually produced a glistening surface because the rock
had large mineral particles like feldspar and hornblende which have
shining properties. These are the particles which reflect like brilliant
mirrors to this day.
This summary of the several stages involved in creating caves in
a granite hill points to a meticulous process and careful planning.
Creating a set of edifices on this scale needed lavish outlays. The
overall impression of such a construction programme is the trouble
to which the emperor is prepared to put himself to for religious sects
and cults. Mendicants and ascetics of some authority considered
worthy of such abodes by the powerful Magadhan court will, in turn,
have altered social perceptions of the worth and power of asceti­
cism and mendicancy. The hollowing out of a hill is also a landscape
taking a new sacral shape, a reconfiguration with consequences for
posterity, a change in the historical trajectory of a region.
Were these caves benefaction intended only for the Ajivikas?
Two of them, the Sudama and Vishwa Jhopri caves, certainly were.
The Karna Chaupar cave, created as a shelter against rain, specifies
Fig 10.3: Lomasha Rishi cave architrave, with elephants moving towards a stupa
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 235

no sect as recipient and could have been for the Ajivikas or other
mendi­cants. More challenging is the Lomasha Rishi cave. The
architrave on its exterior has strong Buddhist overtones, so it may
have been a dwelling for the desirably faithful. If so, it would suggest
an Ashokan way of promoting harmony among religious cults,
the sort proclaimed in his edicts. Inter-faith coexistence and rivalry
were integral to this period of strife and competition for sectarian
adherents, and relations between Ajivikas and Buddhists were, for
instance, depicted in a variety of ways. In the Buddhist literature
some Ajivikas are cruel and deceitful, others are shown in the com­
pany of Buddhists and, on occasion, fed by them.10 The Jainas were
thought to have had an early and close relationship with the Ajivikas,
but there were tensions when several Ajivikas converted to Jainism.
One may speculate that the frieze on the Lomasha Rishi cave—
with its elephants and stupa and lattice frame design resembling
that on the Mahabodhi throne gifted by Ashoka—signifies a cave
for Buddhists. In that case, at Barabar Ashoka was creating dwellings
for Buddhists, Ajivikas, and sundry sects and ascetics simultane­
ously, the Buddhist connection with Barabar becoming significant
at a later period. Many centuries after, the ancient name of Barabar,
Khalatika, was inscribed on a stupa at Kanaganahalli in Karnataka:
‘Galatiko pavato’ or ‘Khalatika parvata’ is mentioned on a label
inscription engraved on one of the upper drum slabs of the stupa.11
So by then Khalatika had been integrated within Buddhist stories,
elements of which are usually depicted on stupas. At Khalatika itself
there are no early Buddhist stupas or chaityas, the decorative as­pects
of the Lomasha Rishi cave indicating the only possible connection
with Buddhism. Secular abode-donations at single locations were
not unknown. King Pandukabhaya, grandfather of Devanampiya
Tissa (Ashoka’s contemporary in Sri Lanka), was depicted in the
Buddhist tradition as having built proximate hermitages for Nigran­
thas (possibly Jainas), Ajivikas, and Brahmanas.12

***
236 ashoka in ancient india

We are now at the phase when Ashoka’s Buddhist persona becomes

most visible. Though involved in many matters of state and gov­
ernance, taxes and punishments and land grants were evidently not,
within his perspective, matters to be recorded on stone. Subjects
that have attracted the record-keeping of most emperors—such
as provinces lagging in paying taxes, safety measures for state
highways, and complaints of harassment and incompetence by the
administration—if put down anywhere at all by Ashoka have not
survived. They do occasionally appear, but only in relation to his
larger moral agenda. On the other hand he projects the persona of
a devout Buddhist in several of his epigraphs and through these it
seems possible to chart both his progress as a convert and under­
stand the scale of his influence over the monastic community.
Ashoka strove to portray his own illumination, in the tenth year
after his consecration, as a consequence of his pilgrimage to the
site of the Buddha’s enlightenment at Mahabodhi. Unsurprisingly,
the first temple at Mahabodhi is generally attributed to Ashoka.
Whether its building coincided with or followed his visit is not
clear. The large sandstone throne that today lies behind the present
temple and in the shade of the Bodhi tree is also regarded as an
Ashokan donation. The temple that he is thought to have set up
lacked a roof, being in the form of an open pavilion supported by
pillars. As with many other buildings attributed to the emperor’s
patronage, there are no Ashokan epigraphs on the pavilion of the
kind at Barabar: the attribution is largely based on what we know
from other sculptures. A century or so later a representation at the
Buddhist stupa of Bharhut in Central India depicted a throne, with
the trunk of the Bodhi tree behind, surrounded by an open-pillared
pavilion. This was labelled in the Brahmi script: ‘Bodhi tree of the
blessed Sakya Muni’, or ‘Bhagavato Saka Munino Bodhi’.13 Since
the throne (‘vajrasana’) is so realistically depicted at Bharhut, it
seems likely that the pavilion-like temple was also a faithful image.
Which is why the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy took this
to be ‘the representation of the one, asserted by tradition, very pro­
bably correctly, to have been erected by Asoka at Bodh Gaya.’14 The
tradition which remembered the temple as having been built by
Ashoka figures in a fair number of texts. The Divyavadana refers
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 237

to Ashoka having built a chaitya at Bodh Gaya as also at Lumbini,

Sarnath, and Kushinagara.15 Mahabodhi’s seventh century ce
Chinese visitor Xuanzang says Ashoka had surrounded the Bodhi
tree with a nearly three metres high stone wall.16 A Burmese record
of repair of the eleventh century ce says that ‘King Dhamma Asoka’
built a temple on the spot where Buddha took a meal.17 The throne
itself is an enormous carved seat made up of two horizontal slabs.
The lower one is highly polished while the upper has designs on all
four sides of honeysuckle motifs; on one side, these alternate with
those of geese. The carving is very similar to those on some Ashokan
pillars (a further category of monumental sculpture). Considering
the quality of the sculpture, the polish, and the massiveness of the
throne, this was likely to have been a royal commemorative gift.
In the ensuing years the emperor provided vivid glimpses of
other places of Buddhist sanctity by inscribing his presence at them.
We meet him at Nigali Sagar (or Niglihawa) in the Nepal terai, some
four years after his Sambodhi visit. This is in the Kapilavastu dis­
trict and gets its name from a large artificial pool in its vicinity, the
‘Nigali Sagar’. The focus on an epigraph here was a stupa dedicated
to the Buddha Konakamana (or Kanakmuni): Ashoka expanded and
rebuilt it in the fourteenth year after his consecration. Buddhists
believed Konakamana to be twenty-third in the list of twenty-four
Buddhas; many stories about him exist in Buddhist chronicles which
resonate with leitmotifs from the Buddha’s life—such as his early
years being spent in palaces, the practising of austerities at the end
of which the daughter of a Brahman gave him milk-rice, and his
having attained enlightenment under a tree (an Udumbara tree).18
The point is that by the third century bce a cult around the previous
Buddhas was geographically anchored, the Mauryan emperor’s
beneficence and building activity adding to their importance. The
Nigali Sagar edifice that Ashoka enlarged can no longer be traced
on the ground. However, for many centuries after his time, a stupa
did grace the place associated with Konakamana and, as recorded in
Chinese pilgrim accounts, long continued.19
The enlargement of the stupa of Konakamana is mentioned
by Ashoka six years after he had it done, which is when he visited
Nigali Sagar. The pilgrimage is datable to the twentieth year of his
238 ashoka in ancient india

reign. By this time there was already in the Nepal terai a kind of
pilgrim circuit around places associated with the Buddha. This ex­
panded into the Gangetic plains and is possible to recognize from
the emperor’s edifices along the path of his pilgrimage. In that
crucial twentieth year he paid obeisance at three sacred sites: Nigali
Sagar, Gotihawa, and Lumbini, all fairly close to each other. The first
two were native places connected with Buddhas who, within the
cosmogony, antedated Gautama Buddha. Nigali Sagar was connected
to Konakamana, Gotihawa to his immediate predecessor Kraku­-
chhanda, the twenty-second Buddha. Lumbini of course was reput­
ed to be the garden where Maya had given birth to Siddhartha.
How did Ashoka get to these places? The entourage would have
traversed the stretch from Pataliputra across the Ganga through
north Bihar to the terai. This was then, as it is today, a ‘sweep of rich
agricultural plains’: the archaeological sites there show it clearly.20
The arterial alignment that linked Pataliputra with the area where
Lumbini stood was dotted with early historic settlements and
cities—from the Ganga bank opposite ancient Pataliputra, through
Vaishali, Katragarh, and Balrajgarh to the terai area. Considering
the marshes in the terai, travelling by elephant would have been
a sensible option. Alongside, there would have been bullock carts
carrying provisions, and an armed contingent. In the terai, during
the nineteenth century, the cart tracks on which bullock carts tra­
velled were so circuitous that they took double the direct distance
to the destination. It may have been worse in Ashoka’s day. Many
streams will also have had to be crossed: rivers and rivulets such as
the Banganga, Tilar, Jamuar, and Siswa.21 People in the villages and
towns on the route may have been made aware of the king’s travel
plans. The presence of advance parties would have ensured it while
crosschecking the state of repair of roads, vetting the halting pla­
ces along the way, ensuring provisions of animal fodder. Elaborate
arrangements will have been put in place to receive the royal visitor
at each point of his halt.
Over the days that Ashoka was in the terai (there is no knowing
how long), arrangements would have had to be made in the towns he
stayed in. It is possible that he halted briefly at the city of Tilaura­kot
near the eastern bank of the Banganga and not far from the places
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 239

that he would visit. Whether this was then called Kapilavastu or was
known by another another name we don’t know.22 The fortified
site, though, was most impressive. Originally of mud, brick walls,
protected by a deep ditch, were subsequently raised.23 The terai
bristled with habitation sites of all kinds and formed an important
segment of the imperial domain, quite apart from being important
to Buddhists. The local administration will have been on its toes in
many of the locations.
Which of these pilgrim places did Ashoka visit? Lumbini first of
all, perhaps, being already a hoary place of pilgrimage. What today
lies inside the modern Maya Devi temple pre-dated Ashoka by
centuries.24 The Buddha’s birthplace is represented as a square brick
box-like platform on which is a longish sedimentary sandstone
marker pinpointing what was believed to be the exact place of
birth.25 There would in Ashoka’s day also have been a large brick
platform near it. Did Ashoka think it too modest as a shrine given
the Buddha’s stature? Or was the emperor inscribing his presence in
the place of his preceptor’s birth as his most powerful patron? This
question is relevant because Ashoka did not merely pay obeisance.
He erected a pillar and erected a much larger temple-like edifice
over the birthplace. The magnificent monolithic pillar was hewn
out of sandstone. While only part of it has survived (nearly four
metres below the ground and a little more than five metres above),
when it was set up the pillar was likely to have been several metres
taller, with an inverted lotus capital and an animal image on top.
The remnants of the abacus and bell capital have survived, but not
the crowning animal. Xuanzang, much impressed in the seventh
cen­tury, reports seeing the column topped by a stone horse.
Many similar pillars were fashioned during Ashoka’s reign, all
monolithic and freestanding, placed on base-slabs below ground.
Like the Barabar caves, their quality speaks highly of the technical
expertise involved:

The pillars have a certain air of perfection; they are admirably polish­-
ed, their tapering gives them elegance, their proportions are well-
balanced. The threefold capitals have been designed and produced with
a quality never to be reached again by later copyists. It requires some
 240
ashoka in ancient india

Fig. 10.4: Ashokan pillar at Lumbini, with the modern Maya Devi temple by its side
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 241
skill and experience to produce such pieces of art; another sort of ex­
perience is needed to transport them from the quarry to their place
of erection, and it requires still further expertise to erect the pillars
weighing from 8.6 (Lumbini) to 51 (Vesali) tons and finally to top them
with capitals weighing a further two tons.26
Pillars and poles were the kind of paraphernalia constructed at
festivals and religious places. However, it is unlikely that those
erected in times before Ashoka were remotely like his. This com­
bination of a tapering polished monolith topped with animals and
other sacred symbols was an Ashokan innovation.27 The pillars were
fashioned out of Chunar sandstone, a high quality variety com­-
mon in the Vindhya hills on the southern edge of the Gangetic
plains. Transporting the monoliths from there would have been
some task, even if facilitated by the proximity of the Ganga.28 The
cylindrical blocks would have had to be rolled down hills and taken
from the base areas to the river. The archaeologists P.C. Pant and
Vidula Jayaswal, who first drew attention to the Chunar stone
quarries, noted that five stone blocks could still be seen lying partly
submerged in the river. The ancient quarries also yielded several
semi-finished and unfinished cylinder blocks of stone, some of which
bear letters of the Kharoshthi script. However, these are unlikely
to be of Ashokan lineage since their proportions (between 1.65 to
2.25 metres in length) do not match with those of the majestic
Mauryan monoliths.
As for the temple, before Ashoka at least two construction phases
have been unearthed which included brick pavements and a kerb.
A series of postholes below these pavements and kerb defined a
sacred space going back to the sixth century bce, possibly earlier.29
Within the open centre of this area, substantial root features
were located which the excavators interpreted as representing the
remnants of a tree shrine. If so, this is possibly the first tree shrine
to have been identified at a Buddhist place of worship, a feature
which became much more common subsequently in the form of
Bodhigrihas (shrines around living trees).
Large additions were made to the temple in Mauryan times, in
two stages of construction.30 One of these saw the erection of a
242 ashoka in ancient india

rectangular temple or chaitya whose foundation trench had a filling

of material that is thought to be Mauryan. The superstructure was
apparently of timber. After this, the circumabulatory path was
enlarged with paving added on the west and north sides. The temple
enlargement did not carry an Ashokan epigraph, certainly none that
has survived. The pillar, however, did. The emperor inscribed on
it a record of his visit.
When king Devanampriya Priyadarsin had been anointed twenty
years, he came himself and worshipped (this spot), because the
Buddha Sakyamuni was born here.
(He) both caused to be made a stone bearing a horse (?) and caused
a stone pillar to be set up, (in order to show) that the Blessed one was
born here.
(He) made the village of Lummini free of taxes, and paying (only) an
eighth share (of the produce).31
There has been quibbling over some of the terminology used in
this epigraph: what did the term ‘vigadabhi (ca)’ mean? While the
translator Hultzsch thought it a reference to a horse, two words that
occur joined there, ‘silavigadabhiti(ca)’, have also been thought to
mean ‘wall made from, or decorated with stone’. The stone ‘sila’
has also been interpreted as a reference to the marker stone found
inside.32 Similarly, the meaning in the allusion to ‘an eighth share’
or ‘athabhagiya’ is debated. While this has usually been understood
as indicating a reduction in taxes to one-eighth, a competing
theory has pointed out that this would not have shown Ashoka
as a particularly generous donor since the amount of tax from a
village the size of Lumbini was not likely to be a princely sum.33 An
alternative explanation has been to see this as referring to a one-
eighth share of the relics of the Buddha. The remains of the Buddha
after he was cremated have been frequently described in Buddhist
literature as having being divided into eight equal parts which
went to Rajagriha, Vaishali, Kapilavastu, Allakappa, Ramagrama,
Vethadipa, Pava, and Kushinagara. Two centuries or so down the
line, Ashoka is supposed to have had most of the stupas at these
locations reopened so as to redistribute the relics across India. One
part of the remains could well have come to Lumbini, and Ashoka’s
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 243

edict could be read as referring to getting a share for it from one of

those one-eighth portions.34 The problem, however, is that there is
no large or substantial stupa here that can be considered Mauryan,
nor have any relics been recovered at Lumbini. For the moment,
therefore, it seems best to see Ashoka as having made a revenue
concession, even if not a generous one!
Beyond such conflicting interpretations of the royal epigraph,
most striking is the way in which memorialization was combined
here with an overt expression of political power. The emperor
recorded his visit when he came to worship at the place where the
Buddha was born. At the same time, the pillar that he put up was
of such monumental dimensions that it must have more or less
eclipsed the original shrine. So the shrine too was renovated and
expanded via royal patronage. The emperor then used the occasion
to announce a reduction in agricultural taxes for Lumbini village.
This is possibly the earliest documented example in South Asia of a
political patron deploying a sacred landscape to announce revenue
concessions. The example is multiplied in later times: there are plenty
of examples of exemptions and privileges given by kings along­-
side endowments to religious establishments, including on occa­
sion tax exemptions.35
The inscribing of Ashoka’s presence here was followed by Ripu
Malla more than 1600 years later. This king of the Naga dynasty
made a pilgrimage to Lumbini in 1312 ce, where a Buddhist
mantra—‘Om Mani Padme Hum’, or ‘Hail to the jewel of the
lotus’—was engraved along with his name on the very Ashoka pil­
lar recording the emperor’s pilgrimage.36
At Gotihawa can be seen the remnants of a pillar that Ashoka put
up over perhaps the same tour.37 Unlike the grass-covered stupa,
only a small portion of the pillar is now visible. It used to be known
as Phuteshwar Mahadeva—an appellation which suggests it was
worshipped as a broken (or ‘phuta’) Shivalinga. In the late nineteenth
century three pillar fragments, including a portion of the bell capital
base, were also to be seen in the village.38 These fragments were
called ‘gutis’ or broken pieces and the name Gotihawa is apparent­ly
derived from these ‘gutis’.
244 ashoka in ancient india

Fig. 10.6: Gotihawa pillar remnant, once known as

Phuteshwar Mahadeva

Excavations at Gotihawa, associated with Krakuchhanda, have

revealed a very old village going back to the ninth century bce. The
pottery and bones found here are common at such sites, as also
fragments impressed with straw and reeds that were accidentally
baked when huts at the location caught fire.39 The third century
bce shows a brick stupa here with a diameter of some 10 metres
and a core made of bricks of different types. On the basis of there
being North Black Polished pottery, the archetypal early historic
ware—which has been found via the paste in a couple of bricks and
in the clayey layer which constitutes the binder of the bricks—the
stupa could well have been Mauryan. The likelihood is reinforced
by all the bricks being handmade and of different sizes, suggesting
the absence of mass production.
‘Mauryan’ does not of course mean ‘Ashokan’: gaps in our
understanding of Gotihawa persist. There are no such doubts
about the other monumental element here—a pillar, or, to be more
precise, the broken portion of a pillar which stands south-west
of the stupa. Set up by Ashoka, only the lower part has surviv­-
ed, causing the inscription, if any, to have disappeared. Unlike a
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 245

Fig. 10.7: Nigali Sagar pillar segments

num­ber of Ashokan pillars such as that at Lumbini and at Sarnath

where the lower parts are rough (since these were meant to be
embedded), the Gotihawa stump is finished from the base itself.40
The tapering is similar to that of the one at Lumbini. The found­-
a­tion slab bears a simple geometric rendering of the hill-and-
crescent symbol, which is considered typically Mauryan.41
At Nigali Sagar Ashoka had expanded the stupa of Konakamana
six years earlier: this is recorded over his subsequent visit alongside
his worship at the spot and his setting up a pillar.42 The pillar is now
broken, but of the two surviving parts one bears his epigraph. The
pillar capital has not survived, Xuanzang’s sighting of a lion figure
on top of it our only evidence of what it looked like. The emperor
may have set up pillars elsewhere in the terai but they have not come
to light. As it is, the surviving monoliths provide us a bird’s eye view
of the pilgrim circuit that then existed around the predecessors of
and in relation to the Buddha.

***
246 ashoka in ancient india

Ashoka’s terai pilgrimage shows a worshipful monarch combining

obeisance with a building project that modifies and expands the
elements which made up the existing sacred landscape there. He
appears in this respect to have been an innovator on a grand scale.
The cartography of Buddhism was now subcontinental: the faith
was substantially transformed from its original small base in North
India. The increased or expanded monumentality of each sacred
place also made the individual site much more prominent than it
had been, altering regional micro-economies.
This is most evident in the religious architecture of Vaishali.
Situated some 29 kms north of Hajipur on the left bank of the
Ganga river in Bihar, present-day Basarh has many ruins that can be
identified with the ancient city and its suburbs. Ruins and structural
remains have also been found in neighbouring villages and areas
like Baniya, Charamdas, Lalpura, Virpur, and Kolhua. Vaishali, as
we saw, was the Vajji confederacy’s bustling capital much before the
third century bce: the Buddha lived many times in it, specifically in
the vicinity of Mahavana where the Kutagarshala or hall stood on
the banks of the ‘Monkey Pool’ (‘markataharadarira’); and at the
monastery in the Amrapalivana, built for him by Vaishali’s famous
courtesan Amrapali.43 Because of the Buddha’s close association
with the clan, the Lichchavis received a share of the relics collected
from the pyre after he was cremated.
The cadence around the archaeological landscape of Basarh
confirms these literary allusions. At the large mound known as
Raja Visala ka Garh, a fortified town was revealed, whose twenty-
foot wide mud rampart appears to have been constructed around
the sixth century bce.44 The Abhisheka Pushkarni, a tank that had
been used to consecrate the Lichchavi rajas, was also identified with
the Kharauna Pokhar which lies less than a couple of kilometres
from the garh. In this case, while a wall complex protected the tank,
this was apparently a second century bce construction. There are
earlier layers too, their exact antiquity uncertain. The most striking
part of the landscape of the Lichchavis is the relic stupa in which
they are said to have placed their share of the Buddha’s remains.
Excavated out of a mound north of the Kharauna Pokhar, the stupa
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 247

was built in about the fifth century bce. Constructed of mud, it was
subsequently enlarged on four different occasions with bricks. This
makes it one of the oldest stupas in India. Made entirely of earth,
with as many as twenty-seven mud layers, each separated from the
next by a thin layer of gravel, it stood at a height of a little more
than three and a half metres with about an eight metre diameter.45
The original stupa was probably constructed around 550–450
bce and continued to stand till the first century of the Christian
era. The stupa was built on the foundations of an earlier shrine.
That edifice, though, was of an entirely different order from the
Buddhist monument constructed over it. Its excavated floor has
yielded goat bones, which appear to be part of offerings, and for
this reason it was described by the excavators as a pre-Buddhist
shrine (‘chaitya’).46 So, obviously, the Lichchavis used a place that
they already considered sacred to create an entirely new kind of
hallow­ed structure over it.
It is, however, the earlier phases of the stupa’s construction which
concern us here. The mud stupa was said to have been constructed
after the Buddha’s death, when relics were placed inside it. It was
this relic-bearing stupa which Ashoka is believed to have changed
in an altogether novel way. The Buddhist literature is full of allu­
sions to Ashoka’s ambitious programme of opening up seven of the
eight original stupas containing the Buddha’s relics. Remarkably,
the Vaishali relic stupa confirms that this was indeed dug into. The
dug-up section was not a pit. If it had been, it would have contained
lots of waste material. Evidently, an intentional breach was made
in the stupa to reach the relics: the relic casket was found in this
breach. The breach extended beyond the relic casket to a distance
of nearly a metre. Probably, more relic caskets were expected, or the
original position of the casket was somewhere near the end of the
present breach. In any case, when it was redeposited it came to be
placed higher up in the breach, which was then filled up.47
Those who had dug into the stupa in the first millennium bce had
done so with the intention of reaching the relics. Their only purpose
would have been to remove a large portion of these. Apparently,
three-fourths of the relics were removed; the portion left contained
Fig. 10.8: The mud stupa of Vaishali is in the centre, surrounded by later brick constructions
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 249

Fig. 10.9: Relic box from the Vaishali stupa (now in the Patna Museum)

no bones but only ash mixed with earth, a punch-marked coin, two
glass beads, a conch, and a tiny piece of gold.
This, of course, invites speculation on whether the event des­
cribed in Buddhist texts is the one detectable at Vaishali. An in­
tentional breach is clearly discernible but why it was made is not.
Theoretically, there are many possibilities, including mischief by
miscreants in unsettled times and desecration by a rival religious
group. Their likelihood, though, is weakened by the casket having
been reinterred inside the stupa rather than removed from it,
which then raises the plausibility of the hypothesis that the breach
was caused in order to remove a portion of the relics, perhaps by
Ashoka as the literature asserts. If so, Ashoka was expanding not
just the monumentality of these sites but also future perceptions
of their degree of sacredness, an imaginative innovation towards
altering the dimensions of pre-existing religiosity. The proliferation
of stupas beyond North India seems to have been at least partly a
result of this innovation.
Some 5 km north-west of Vaishali’s relic stupa, a pillar and pos­
sibly a stupa too were also built by Ashoka. A magnificent monolith
250 ashoka in ancient india

with a stone lion still standing on the capital, the Vaishali specimen
is not merely the heaviest of all Ashoka’s pillars but also one of the
most impressive.48 Though uninscribed (unclear why), its other
characteristics show it as indisputably Ashokan. The stupa in its
vicinity is contemporary with the pillar. It yielded the fragment of
a stone umbrella and pieces of a relic casket, all bearing the polish
typical of monuments and artefacts associated with the emperor.49
Not all stupas attributed to Ashoka can be so easily identified. The
original fabric of the Dharmarajika stupa in Taxila, for instance, has
not survived, and the only tangible indication is the name Dharma­
raja, linked with Ashoka as he who built dharmarajikas, i.e. stupas
over relics of the Buddha. The presence of two small mullers of
sand­­stone, of the kind used in Ashokan pillars, is considered as the
clinching evidence for the excavator.50
Xuanzang, when describing the many structures associated with
the Buddha, noted that the Vaishali stupa built by ‘Ashoka-raja’
had on its side a high stone pillar with a lion on top.
Oddly, Ashoka’s presence in Pataliputra is much less in evid­
ence. This is perhaps because much of ancient Pataliputra is buried
under Patna and most excavations have been in the outskirts. No

Fig. 10.10: The Vaishali pillar in the vicinity of a brick stupa

 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 251

inscribed Ashokan pillar or stupa ruin has appeared, the only major
architectural relic that may have had something to do with Ashoka
being a pillared hall at the Kumrahar locality of Patna.51 Traces
of eighty monolithic pillar bases and fragments of pillars bearing
Mauryan polish were found here. Access was through a pillared
porch approached by steps constructed on wooden platforms. The
platforms themselves stood in the waters of a canal which brought
visitors to the hall by boat. The pillared hall was possibly open on
all sides (since no screen walls of any kind were found) and huge
quantities of wood were possibly used in making the ceiling, a thick
layer of ash at the site suggesting this.
Those who believe that Ashoka facilitated the meeting of a
Buddhist council to give the final touches to sacred Buddhist texts
argue that it was likely to have been held here. The Mahavamsa
mentions this council, presided over by Moggaliputta Tissa. The
pillared structure could well have been the religious assembly
hall where the discussants gathered,52 though there are no posit­
ive indications on the matter. At the same time it is worth remem­
bering—and this feeling constantly recurs as one wades through
the archaeology of sites showing Ashoka’s patronage—no secular
constructions such as palaces or sculptures that the emperor may
have built have survived. If he had indeed invested substantial re­
sources in such structures, it is unlikely that they would have all
disappeared. His building ambitions evidently were an extension of
his religious beliefs. It is thus likely that the Pataliputra pillared hall
was made for religious use, even if the specifics of what transpired
there remain unknown.
Ashoka as Buddhist convert, patron, and pilgrim is inseparable
from Ashoka as spiritual regulator and protector of Buddhist unity.
He styled himself a spiritual guide in a quite remarkable way on the
hillside of Bairat, a Rajasthan town in a narrow valley surround­
ed by three concentric ranges of hills, some 85 km from Jaipur.
The ancient settlement lies buried beneath the town. A couple of
kilometres to the south-west of it, on top of a hill known as Bijak-ki-
Pahari (‘inscription hill’), beneath a large boulder, a stone slab with
a message for the Buddhist Sangha was installed by Ashoka, who
Fig. 10.11: The circular temple at Bairat. The Ashokan inscription was found
below the overhanging rock at the edge of the hill
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 253

identified himself as the ‘Magadha king’. This is today described as

the Calcutta-Bairat edict because the stone bearing this record was
taken away, after it was discovered in the middle of the nineteenth
century, to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta.
In this edict, after a traditional Buddhist greeting the king
offered advice on religious expositions. Even while acknowledging
that what the Buddha had spoken was well spoken, he made it
clear that he desired ‘many groups of monks and (many) nuns’ to
repeatedly listen to and reflect on particular dhammic expositions.53
The expositions were several and specific: the epigraph mentions
Vinaya-samukasa, the Aliya-vasas, the Anagata-bhayas, the Muni-
gathas, the Moneya-suta, the Upatisa-pasina, and the Laghulovada.
There is no clarity about the exact canonical writings to which
he alludes because what is recognizable today as part of the Buddh­
ist canon is not in the form in which it figures in this epigraph.
Scholars of Buddhism, though, maintain that such expositions were
likely to contain all kinds of advice on how ‘to conform to their
discipline, be content with their lot, overcome their temptations,
delight in solitude, enclose themselves in wise silence’, and so on.54
What seems remarkable is the confidence with which the emperor
gives this advice to the Buddhist community: it is as though he sees
himself as the Buddha’s preacher-successor.
Much was also built for the Buddhist community of Bairat.
Most unusual and impressive is a temple for the community on a
platform on the hilltop where his advice is inscribed. This was in the
form of a circular chamber with a circumabulatory passage, in turn
surrounded by an encircling wall. The wall of the inner shrine was
made of panels of brickwork alternating with twenty-six wooden
columns.55 The circumambulatory passage was covered by an
inclined roof supported on one side by the outer brick wall and on
the inner side by the wooden architraves of the pillars of the central
shrine. Interestingly, the outer wall of the temple had Mauryan
Brahmi on it: several bricks inscribed with one or two characters
were found built into the wall. Daya Ram Sahni, the excavator, read
a few (‘pasam, visa, vi, kama’) and considered the possibility that
they could have been ‘extracts from the very texts from the Buddhist
254 ashoka in ancient india

Fig.10.12: Chunar monolithic railing at Sarnath

scripture, which in the Bairat-Calcutta edict, Ashoka had exhorted

his subjects to listen to and study for the furtherance of the Buddhist
religion.’56 Sahni also believed that originally Ashokan pillars had
been erected here. This was what the hundred-odd polished Chunar
stone pieces and several thousand small fragments that he found
there seemed to suggest. The pieces included a fragment from the
base and one broken from the shaft summit which preserved part of
the well-cut tapering hole into which a metallic bolt slid to support
the abacus of the capital that crowned the pillar. Obviously, the
pillars were battered into tiny bits at some later point in time.
Fortunately, the monoliths with a specific message for the Bud­
dh­ist community have survived better. The most famous one is the
pillar at Sarnath with its superbly carved quadruple lion capital,
the national symbol of India since Independence. Sarnath, some
5 km north of Banaras, is where Buddha preached his first ser­mon
to his first disciples. The symbol of that first sermon, a wheel flanked
by two deer, would later become the accepted emblem of the seals
of many Buddhist monastic establishments across India.57 As one
who trudged every path the Buddha is supposed to have walked,
Ashoka could hardly not have come to Sarnath, the pillar and stupa
strongly indicating he did. The pillar was brought here along an
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 255

ancient channel which connected the Ganga river to Sarnath. This

is how the monolithic railing made of Chunar sandstone which
was recovered from the foundation of a later Gupta period shrine
here, either in an unfinished or semi-finished state was also
brought here.58 It could have been erected around the top of a stupa
or may have surrounded a tree or pillar. If it was on top of a stupa,
it was likely to have been the stupa that Ashoka built. Known as
the Dharmarajika, this building, enlarged six times after it was
built (the last being in the twelfth century ce) was largely destroyed
in the latter part of the eighteenth century. However, inside its core
a sandstone box with a green marble relic casket was found con­
taining gold leaves, decayed pearls, and a few human bone pieces.
Could this have been one of the stupas that Ashoka built over the
relics of the Buddha that he is supposed to have exhumed? No
identifying inscription has been found.
The edict inscribed on the Sarnath pillar shows a new persona—
a king opposed to divisions (‘samghabheda’) among monks and
nuns:

.  .  .  the Samgha [cannot] be divided by any one.

But indeed that monk or nun who shall break up the Samgha, should
be caused to put on white robes and to reside in a non-residence.
Thus this edict must be submitted both to the Samgha of monks and
to the Samgha of nuns.
Thus speaks Devanampriya:
Let one copy of this (edict) remain with you deposited in (your)
office; and deposit ye another copy of this very (edict) with the lay-
worshippers.
These lay-worshippers may come on every fast-day (posatha) in
order to be inspired with confidence in this very edict; and invariably
on every fast-day, every Mahamatra (will) come to the fast-day
(service) in order to be inspired with confidence in this very edict and
to understand (it).
And as far as your district (extends), dispatch ye (an officer) every­
where according to the letter of this (edict).
In the same way cause (your subordinates) to dispatch (an officer)
according to the letter of this (edict) in all the territories (surrounding)
forts.59
256 ashoka in ancient india

Fig.10.13: The broken Sarnath pillar with the edict inscribed on it

Several aspects of this unusual edict are worth highlighting. A

royal patron and builder speaks now not as a king with Buddhist
inclinations but as a Buddhist head of government. Sarnath’s
epi­graph takes Ashoka beyond the mere practice of supporting
Buddhist Shramanas and that of enlarging and building in the
holy places associated with the faith. Fighting dissension within
the Sangha makes him sound for the first time papal. On doctrinal
and disciplinary issues, as few as nine dissenting monks could be
fissiparous, suggesting the high possibility of upheaval even during
the Buddha’s lifetime.60 Ashoka seems opposed to the ease with
which factional breakaways have been happening and proposes to
punish dissidents by forcing them to give up their monastic robes
and take on the white clothes (‘avadatavasana’) of householders.
Whether this came to be enforced is not known; the existence
of groups and sub-groups within the Buddhist faith in ancient
India suggests that schisms of the kind which bothered Ashoka
were common enough. What is extraordinary is that the emperor
seems to have displaced senior monks and councils of monks who
would normally discourage factional breaks. Ashoka wants his
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 257

administration to ensure wide circulation of the proscription: a

copy was to be submitted to the Sangha, the laity was to be inspired
by it on every fast day (every fortnight, most likely), and maha­
matras were ordered to retain a copy so that they too could be
similarly inspired.
At Sarnath there was a large and influential Buddhist establish­
ment, so the exhortation was logical. Shorter versions of this edict
appear on monoliths at Kaushambi and Sanchi. At Kaushambi this
was inscribed below after a much longer message issued twenty-six
years into Ashoka’s reign, making it a late work. The pillar on which
the Kaushambi edict was inscribed stands today inside the Fort area
of Allahabad, but since it mentions the mahamatras of Kaushambi,
that may well have been its original location. Kaushambi, one of
the six great cities of the Buddha’s time, had several monasteries
built by merchants for the Buddha.61 Of these the Ghositarama,
built by the merchant Ghosita, was identified with the structure of a
big vihara in the north-eastern corner of the city. That Ashoka put
up a schism edict at the city suggests that it was an important estab­
lishment of the Sangha. It was also one which in the time of the
Buddha was known to have witnessed monastic disputes.62
Can any such direct connection with the Buddha be suggested for
Sanchi, where Ashoka also set up his proscription against schisms?
This is unlikely since the Buddha spent his life in the middle
Gangetic plains. It is, though, possible that Buddhist monks moved
along the network of routes that linked such areas with the Gangetic
plains and that, consequently, before the time of Ashoka, Buddhist
communities existed in several places like Vidisha and Ujjayini: the
importance of the former on account of his spouse Devi, we have
noted already. ‘Chetiyagiri’, where Devi took their son Mahinda
before he set out on a Buddhist mission to Sri Lanka, may well be
a reference to Sanchi.63
If there was already a resident Buddhist community on the hill
of Sanchi, Ashoka now built his presence into their lives in the way
that he had done at Sarnath, by constructing a pillar and a stupa.
The magnificent lustrous Sanchi stone pillar, or at least a part of
it, remains in situ. Sanchi was one of the two places in the Central
258 ashoka in ancient india

Indian hills and plateaus to get a pillar of this kind, suggesting the
location had some special place in his life. Sodanga was probably
another such: it was where the elephant and lotus capital was found
(the supporting pillar was missing). This was close to Ujjayini, with
its close associations for Ashoka and Devi.64
The Sanchi pillar like the monolith at Sarnath has a capital with
four lions and was constructed near a brick stupa. That the brick
stupa was on the same floor level as the lion pillar near its South
Gateway suggests that this too can be attributed to Ashoka.65 The
bricks themselves resemble those used in other structures of Ashoka’s
time, while the umbrella that crowned it was made of fine Chunar
sandstone, polished in the manner typical of stone monuments
attributed to the emperor. The inscription on the edict is a shorter
version of the one at Sarnath. Its lettering is poor and the lines are
rarely horizontal. This ‘slovenly character of the engraving’ was,
in Marshall’s opinion, because it was inscribed after the pillar had
been set up.66 It may also be that the scribe was careless in trans­
cribing the king’s message to the Sangha. The inscription is greatly
damaged; what has survived suggests that, unlike at Sarnath and
Kaushambi, there is no reference to officials. Provisions for the
Sangha are set forth; Ashoka added a line highlighting the impor­
tance of monastic unity: ‘The Samgha both of monks and of nuns is
made united as long as (my) sons and great-grandsons (shall reign,
and) as long as the moon and the sun (shall shine).’67
These edicts, focussed as they are on disciplinary punishment for
dissenting monks and nuns, make the tradition of Ashoka having
convened a Buddhist council at Pataliputra for suppressing heresy
seem historical. Whether the council was held before or after these
edicts, Ashoka appears as a figure whose power to impose disci­
pline among the Sangha was accepted. It has been suggested that
the recurrence of serious schisms made the Buddhist establishment
seek the monarch’s intervention of the king in imposing stronger
measures against factionalism. While segregation—where the
offend­ing monk was made to dwell in ‘what is not a residence’
(‘anavasa’)—is mentioned in the Vinaya, the imposition of white
robes on a lay person is not. One historian sees this as a crucial
intervention:
 bu i l d i n g b e l i e f s i n t o e d i f i c e s 259
The Sarnath–Kausambi–Sanchi edict leaves no doubt as to the firm
determination of Asoka to put down all attempt at creating a schism in
the Buddhist Church. The earnest, almost severe tone of the edict and
the fact that copies of it are found at all places of important Buddhist
monastic establishments presupposes that in his time the Buddhist
Church was at least threatened with disruption, to prevent which he
was straining every nerve  .  .  .  The Edict was no doubt intended to
arrest disruption, but that does not preclude us, it may be contended,
from supposing that the Samgha had already broken up into a num­
ber of sections, and Asoka’s endeavour was directed against further
division.68
 11

An Ageing
Emperor’s Interventions

W
hen ashoka set down strictures against
schismatic monks and nuns, he had been reigning for
some thirty years. It appears that as he reached middle
age and before positioning himself as a regulator of the faith, he
resumed communicating with his subjects at large in the familiar
mode be­gun a dozen years earlier. Around 243 bce, a set of six edicts
elu­cidating his policies and ideas was inscribed. This compilation,
like the major rock edicts, was put up in multiple places though
not on natural rock: it was engraved on pillars. Speaking in the first
person, Ashoka picks up from where he had left off. He appears
consumed by the need to bring the people of his realm to greater
virtue. The intervening years—from the time when the major rock
edicts were inscribed to the engraving of these pillar edicts—had
altered his perception of the endeavour to promote morality root­ed
in dhamma. Consequently, he tweaks his policies in line with the
changed viewpoint.
The pillars are mainly across a fairly large part of North India.
They were set up roughly in the north Bihar segment of the Gange­
tic plains—at Lauriya-Araraj, Lauriya-Nandangarh, and Rampurva.
East­wards, a pillar with a similar message stands at Allahabad, which,
 a n ag e i n g e m p e r o r’s i n t e rv e n t i o n s 261

as noted, was possibly originally located at Kaushambi. As their

posi­tioning on the Allahabad pillar makes evident, the edicts on
them may have been engraved before the king’s proscription against
schisms. The long pillar edicts were for his subjects as a whole, not
for members of any specific religious community. Moving along the
Ganga, further west, in the vicinity of Meerut, this set of six edicts
(later brought to Delhi by Sultan Firuz Shah Tughlaq) was put up
on a monolith; and beyond, at Topra in Haryana (also subsequent­
ly transported to Delhi by the same sultan), another pillar with the
same message was erected. The Topra pillar was singular because
it had an additional rescript, a seventh edict that has not been
found in its entirety anywhere else. A short Aramaic inscription at
Kandahar was drafted in a way suggesting that the engravers were
aware of the seventh pillar edict, but, unlike at Topra, it is not there
part of a set. Beyond North India is an inscribed sandstone slab
(cut from a pillar), apparently from the Amaravati stupa site in the
lower Krishna valley of Andhra. However, the few lines that have
survived suggest that its language and terminology were similar
to rock edicts rather than the expansive message put on pillars.1
It is entirely possible that the edicts were put up elsewhere too, for
inscribed pillars with messages purportedly by Ashoka were des­
cribed centuries later by Chinese pilgrims. However, they have
since disappeared.
The pillars carry practically identical messages. As with the rock
edicts earlier, they seem consciously compiled into a kind of antho­
logy. They include a record of various past Ashokan actions and
initiatives and so have been described as ‘a compilation of origin­
ally independent, isolated documents.’2 Ashoka himself makes this
evident by specifying the points in time at which particular policies
had been initiated or implemented, the bulk having been in the
twenty-sixth year of his anointment. The edicts could only have
been disseminated as a connected group after that crucial year, the
single exception being Topra, where the seventh edict was written in
the twenty-seventh year.
The imprint of age and experience can be seen in the emperor’s
words as, for instance, in the very different way in which they were
262 ashoka in ancient india

set down. The edicts that formed Ashoka’s fourteen major rock
epigraphs had, as we saw, been issued over some four years. When
the emperor decided to carve them on rock they had, in several
instances, been dispatched in batches. The six pillar edicts were
not staggered, being all engraved like a single prearranged bunch
from Haryana to Bihar, and all at around the same time. This is
evident also from the edicts at all sites being in the same dialect,
set down from a common exemplar and thus involving no trans­
lation changes. In the earlier rock edicts, a variety of dialects had
been used.3 Had adverse feedback modified the earlier way of
transcribing? Had the variety of dialects suited to each region un­
satis­factorily altered the meanings of the messages? Only specu­
lation is possible on the reasons for the new singularity: by the time
of the pillar edicts Ashoka seems likely to have been an impatient
and imperious old sovereign who wanted his words conveying
precisely what he wanted to say and be done.

***

The places where these pillars were set up do not seem to have been
in the vicinity of important provincial cities or major settlements,
as was the case with many of the major rock edicts, which seems
at odds with the pillar messages being non-sectarian addresses to
the populace at large. Pataliputra, Hastinapur, and Mathura, all
important settlements of the day, were bypassed and the monoliths
put in locations entirely of a different character. At Rampurva, en­
dowed with two Ashokan pillars, one of them inscribed, no vestiges
of buildings were found in the vicinity. There does not appear to
have been an ancient town at the location. A couple of mounds
nearby contained no structures, only bits of potsherds, bricks,
beads, and burnt ore. Practically the only structural remnants that
emerged from excavations at Rampurva were around the pillars,
in the form of an extensive brick floor of Mauryan times and an
ancient well made of terracotta rings. These were in the trenches
that had been made to remove the pillars from the sand and water
morass in which they were found buried.4
 a n ag e i n g e m p e r o r’s i n t e rv e n t i o n s 263

One reason for lack of detail about the contexts of the pillar
edicts may be that some were not found in situ or even close to
their original locations. The Meerut pillar in Uttar Pradesh and the
Topra pillar from Haryana were brought to Delhi in the fourteenth
century ce by the medieval sultan Firuz Shah Tughlaq and set up
on the Delhi Ridge and at Firoz Shah Kotla, respectively.5 The places
where they stood in Meerut and Topra have not been satisfact­
orily identified, leaving us in the dark about the reasons for those
locations. Unlike the fourteenth-century sultan, whose chroniclers
clearly described how these pillars were shifted to Delhi, Ashoka
neither mentioned the places where he placed his edicts nor why
he chose to position them there. Segments of Ashokan pillars were
integrated into Sultanate architecture in the Lat ki Masjid at Hissar
and in the Firuz Shah column of the Purana Qila at Fatehabad as
well.6 It has been suggested that the two segments were part of the
same ancient column. While large parts of the original polish were
removed for the Persian inscriptions, palimpsest traces of earlier
writing can still be seen, though not, unfortunately, any Ashokan
message, stray characters apart.
Some of these monoliths appear to have been placed close to
pre-existing religious structures. Lauriya-Nandangarh, the only
Ashokan column bearing these edicts which has survived in its
entirety and still stands,7 is located in the Gandak valley, not far from
Bettiah in the Champaran area of Bihar. Here a series of mounds,
mostly round at the base and conical on top, are also in evidence,
some being pre-Ashokan burial grounds. In two of them (mounds
M and N), human bones and a standing female figure imprinted on
a small gold leaf were found, while at the bottom of one of them
(mound N) was found the end of a fairly intact wooden post.8 This
female figure was given the appellation ‘Prithvi’ or earth goddess by
the archaeologist Theodor Bloch, who excavated the mounds in the
early years of the twentieth century. Bloch believed that that goddess
was, in a hymn in the Rig Veda, entrusted with the care of the dead.
Incidentally, this figure was also found impressed on a gold leaf at
Piprahwa in Uttar Pradesh, again in a funerary mound and close
to a Buddhist stupa that carried an inscription saying the relics
of the Buddha were made by his brethren, the Sakyas.9 Structural
264 ashoka in ancient india

Fig. 11.1: Ashokan pillar

at Hissar fort (the lowest
part) which was made
part of a composite pillar

Fig. 11.2: A close-up of the

Ashokan segment of the
Hissar pillar with some Brahmi
letters still intact
 a n ag e i n g e m p e r o r’s i n t e rv e n t i o n s 265

Fig. 11.3: Fatehabad segment of Ashokan pillar

(the bottom part)

por­tions of stupas have also emerged at Lauriya-Nandangarh, but

their chronology is uncertain and they are likely to be later than
Ashoka.10 So, it appears that the early burial mounds were not
Buddhist, but as the location attracted congregations for rituals and
worship, a pillar in the neighbourhood was thought a good idea.
Traders and travellers would in their passage have seen it and thought
of halting, for it was positioned where the two principal routes leading
to the Nepal terai met. The religious significance of such routes was
evident to all, as borne out by Ashoka’s pilgrimage and his build­-
ing programme over the trail. The terai was fairly populous at the
time, dotted with settlements, some of them fortified. Such routes
266 ashoka in ancient india

emerge out of ‘acts of consensual making’, marked out by regular

journeys across them over centuries, sometimes millennia.11 Records
of such journeys have enabled modern observers to make sense of
objects such as ossuaries and relics along them, in this instance the
objects observed being above ground in the shape of pillars.
Keeping in mind this perspective, the intersection of the pillars
and communication routes in this part of Bihar was highlighted by
the archaeologist N.G. Majumdar. One of the routes, he showed,
connected Lauriya with the area where the modern frontier station
of Bhikhna Thori, leading to Narkatiaganj, stood; the other passed
along the Gandak river to reach Triveni on the borderland, at the
junction of the Gandak with two other streams.12 Along the first
route lay Rampurva with two of Ashoka’s pillars (one of which had
the same edicts as the one at Lauriya-Nandangarh) while towards
the south, at Lauriya-Araraj, was located the site of another similar­
ly inscribed pillar. These were routes that merchants and caravans
continued to use into modern times. Such commercial connections
also marked the sites of the pillar edicts in the Indo-Gangetic Doab.
The significance of their geographical locations in relation to routes
of communication has been highlighted in Chakrabarti’s work on
the Ashokan inscriptions. He points out that Meerut was on the
straight route towards the Siwaliks in the area of modern Najibabad,
from where a road went to Pauri via Kotdwar.13 As for Topra, it
was likely to have been on the direct line between Sirsawa and
Ambala. Whether the Hissar and Fatehabad pillar segments were
part of a monolith that was originally in the Hissar area, which
shows early historic occupation, or from an important ancient
site like Rohtak or Agroha in that area, remains unclear. An arter­
ial route, though, used to pass through this region, to go towards
Multan, eventually ending up in Afghanistan. This route was used
well into the medieval era. Hissar town, historically known as
Hisar-i Firuza, came to be founded by Firuz Shah partly because
it was located on the old Delhi–Multan route which branched to
Khorasan.14
Another kind of archive is arrived at from the hundreds of ob­
jects at ancient places along these routes. Their distant origins help
in tracking the significance of lines of communication. Lapis lazuli
 a n ag e i n g e m p e r o r’s i n t e rv e n t i o n s 267

beads originating from north Afghanistan are found in the entire

axis from the Swat valley of Pakistan till the Burdwan district of
Bengal, at places like Bir Kot Ghundai, Taxila, Sravasti, Rajghat,
Prahladpur, and Pandu Rajar Dhibi.15 Similarly, artefacts made of
sea shell from the eastern coast were found in the middle Gangetic
and the lower Gangetic plains, at places like Rajghat, Prahladpur,
Vaishali, and Bangarh. That raw materials of various kinds moved
across the Gangetic plains to reach the Nepal terai is evident from,
among other things, the range of beads found at the ancient town
of Tilaurakot.16 Chalcedony, carnelian, onyx, topaz, shell, garnet,
amethyst, and jasper are among them. One also encounters a simi­
lar proliferation in the usage and manufacture of beads from the
wide range of stones in cities and settlements of the minerally poor
middle Gangetic plains. To all such imprints of commerce and craft
along old tracks, Ashoka added his own in the form of epigraphs,
virtually ensuring wide dissemination of his moral worldview.

***

The messages began in a fairly uniform way. Promoting morality to

secure worldly and otherworldly happiness would continue as the
core of state policy: such happiness was not possible ‘without great
love of morality, careful examination, great obedience, great fear
(of sin) (and) great energy.’17 Much remained to be accomplished,
he added, requiring encouragement and monitoring. The king’s
officials were said to be practising dhamma, and now publicly
recognized as being ‘able to stir up fickle (persons)’; mahama­
tras for people on the borders were similarly charged.18 Implicit
in the enunciation seems the acknowledgement that, given an in­
constant and vacillating populace, state vigilance was a perennial
requirement.
In the second edict of this set, the emperor described his
dhamma as marked by ‘few sins, many virtuous deeds, compassion,
liberality, truthfulness (and) purity.’19 Ways to perform virtuous
deeds and be compassionate were then explained in relation to
what he had himself done:
268 ashoka in ancient india
The gift of spiritual insight has also been bestowed by me in many
ways.
On bipeds and quadrupeds, on birds and aquatic animals various
benefits have been conferred by me, (even) to the boon of life.
And many other virtuous deeds also have been performed by me.
For the following purpose was this rescript of morality caused to be
written by me, (viz.) in order that (men) might conform to it, and that
it might be of long duration.
And he who will act thus will perform good deeds.20

Each of these aspects was then amplified in separate edicts, making

the pillar edict quoted from above a kind of table of contents listing
the various ways in which the cause of dhamma was sought to be
furthered.21
In order of precedence, the spiritual well-being of people ap­
pears at the top. The Third Pillar Edict encourages everyone to
take responsibility for their actions, both ‘virtuous deeds’ and evil
actions. Had he heard Shakespeare’s Antony argue that ‘The evil
that men do lives after them/ The good is oft interred with their
bones’, he would have vehemently disagreed: the human tendency,
he believes, is to acknowledge good deeds while suppressing the
unpalatable—a peculiarly Ashokan notion elicited almost certainly
by a recollection of his post-Kalinga contrition where he had public­
ly accepted his culpability. The harbouring of negative emotions is
castigated: ‘These (passions), viz. fierceness, cruelty, anger, pride,
envy, are called sinful. Let me not ruin (myself) by (these) very
(passions).’22 Vincent Smith, while examining this insistence on
self-responsibility, was reminded of a passage in the Dhammapada:

By ourselves is evil done,

By ourselves we pain endure,
By ourselves we cease from wrong,
By ourselves become we pure.

No one saves us but ourselves,

No one can and no one may,
We ourselves must tread the Path;
Buddhas only show the way. 23
 a n ag e i n g e m p e r o r’s i n t e rv e n t i o n s 269

In the Separate Rock Edicts of Kalinga too, envy, anger, cruelty,

hurry, want of practice, laziness, and fatigue had been specifically
warned against, the difference being that in the Kalinga version the
warning was intended to keep state officials on their toes.
The spiritual well-being of individuals is followed in the Fourth
Edict, which takes up how the harshest punishments handed out
by the administration might be mitigated. The edict is primarily
concerned with making the rajukkas functionally autonomous.
These officials, as noted in relation to the minor rock edicts, had
been ordered to disseminate the Ashokan message in the country­
side. Now in this edict their authority over rural people is re-
emphasized, for they are to be ‘occupied with the people, with
many hundreds and thousands’ of people.24 The rajukka is a state
equivalent of the nurse that parents put their faith in when caring
for children: ‘For, as one feels confident after having entrusted (his)
child to an intelligent nurse, (thinking): “the intelligent nurse will
be able to keep my child well”, so that Rajukas were appointed by
me for the welfare and happiness of the country-people.’25 His faith
in these officials is clear for he grants them independence in the
discharge of their judicial functions: ‘rewards or punishment are
left to their discretion, in order that Lajukas perform (their) duties
confidently (and) fearlessly, that they should bestow welfare and
happiness on the people of the country, and that they should confer
benefits (on them).’26 Ashoka is at pains to emphasize that these
are moral guardians to whom he is delegating full responsibility
for the common weal.27 The intent is, for the time, rather amazing
and is described by a legal scholar as ‘an extraordinarily progressive
measure for its time, amounting to a guarantee of due process of
law.’28 The rajukkas were responsible for justice outside the cities,
so the endeavour seems to have been to ensure consistency in the
judicial process.
This also raises questions: had the king’s proactive administrat­
ive measures demoralized the state machinery? Had there been a
weakening in the administration now being redressed? Why was
such functional autonomy being granted only to officers in charge
of the countryside? The mahamatras who acted as judges in the
270 ashoka in ancient india

city had in relation to Kalinga been exhorted to be more sensitive,

proactive, and even-handed. The emperor had not spoken of
their judicial independence: on the contrary he had in relation to
them put in place a system of scrutiny. The reasons for taking a
diametrically opposite view in relation to rajukkas is not clear, but
the result would have been administrative decentralization.
Ashoka’s views are also here spelt out on the death penalty, and
in some detail; as in virtually every sphere of administration, he
comes out here as the prototype of benevolence. If the Arthashastra
is to be believed, the penalty was prescribed for a range of offences:
the sale of human flesh, killing a person (even by accident), sup­
plying murderers and thieves with counsel or nourishment, acts
against the king and the kingdom, stealing weapons, and some
other crimes considered heinous.29 Ashoka is silent about the
offences that the condemned prisoners alluded to in this edict
are charged with, but orders that there be an interlude of three
days from the time punishment is pronounced by the rajukkas to
when condemned prisoners are led to the gallows. The respite was
to allow the relatives of prisoners on death row to appeal against
such decisions, or, as Ashoka’s edict put it, so that relatives of the
accused could persuade rajukkas to reconsider. Simultaneously,
the interlude might ensure a more dignified death by allowing the
condemned time to prepare: ‘they will bestow gifts or will undergo
fasts in order to (attain happiness) in the other (world). For my
desire is this, that, even when the time (of respite) has expired, they
should attain (happiness) in the other (world).’30 Ashoka appears
to have had very ambivalent feelings about the death sentence
but did not get it removed from the state’s judicial provisions. He
did, however, on as many as twenty-five occasions from the time
of his anointment, release prisoners, and some of these were con­
ceivably commutations.31
A slew of substantive injunctions against the killing of animals,
birds, and fish constitute another dimension of the emperor’s ex­
ceptionally humane provisions. From the modern ecological pers­
pective this edict is without doubt the most substantive royal public
message in early India, and possibly anywhere in the ancient world,
 a n ag e i n g e m p e r o r’s i n t e rv e n t i o n s 271

against a species hierarchy favouring Homo sapiens and for the

protection of living beings in general. The persona of Ashoka as a
guardian of animals first became evident, as noted, in his major rock
edicts which outline personal and public measures for animal proto-
conservation: sacrifices were proscribed, the slaughter of animals
for consumption in the royal kitchen drastically reduced, veteri­
nary hospices established, provisions made for pack animals along
roads. Abstention from the slaughter of life was constantly invoked.
These ideas were now being inscribed in the Gangetic heartland.
An older and wiser man desires an extension in the imperium of
welfare to cover every species in every area of the kingdom. Here,
for the first time, an entire edict is devoted to the subject—even
if the policy in mind is more pragmatic than the one in the edicts
recommending vegetarianism to the Afghans. The emperor seems
to have realized that blanket prohibitions on hunting and fishing
will not succeed and a more calibrated policy which designates
some animals inviolable while allowing others to be consumed may
work. There are also other measures here concerning the protection
of the habitat of such living creatures and preventing unnecessary
cruelty towards them. This early environmentalism is perhaps the
most remarkable aspect of Ashoka’s philosophy and deserves to be
seen at some length:

(When I had been) anointed twenty-six years, the following animals

were declared by me inviolable, viz. parrots, mainas, the aruna,
ruddy geese, wild geese, the nandimukha, the gelata, bats, queen-ants,
terrapins, boneless fish, the vedaveyaka, the Ganga-puputaka, skate-fish,
tortoises and porcupines, squirrels (?), the srimara, bulls set at liberty,
iguanas (?), the rhinoceros, white doves, domestic doves, (and) all the
quadrupeds which are neither useful nor edible.
Those (she-goats), ewes, sows (which are) either with young or in
milk, are inviolable, and also those (of their) young ones (which are)
less than six months old.
Cocks must not be caponed.
Husks containing living animals must not be burnt.
Forests must not be burnt uselessly or in order to destroy (living
beings).
272 ashoka in ancient india
Living animals must not be fed with (other) living animals.
Fish are inviolable, and must not be sold, on the three Chaturmasis
(and) on the Tishya full-moon during three days, (viz.) the fourteenth,
the fifteenth, (and) the first (tithi), and invariably on every fast-day.
And during these same days also no other classes of animals which
are in the elephant-park (and) in the preserves of the fishermen, must
be killed.
On the eighth (tithi) of (every) fortnight, on the fourteenth, on the
fifteenth, on Tishya, on Punarvasu, on the three Chaturmasis, (and)
on festivals, bulls must not be castrated, (and) he-goats, rams, boars,
and whatever other (animals) are castrated (otherwise) must not be
castrated (then).
On Tishya, on Punarvasu, on the Chaturmasis, (and) during the
fortnight of (every) Chaturmasi, horses (and) bullocks must not be
branded.32

The first question about this massive range of animals needing

protection is whether such care is enjoined in sacred texts. For
the most part, animals in the texts of ancient India are classified
according to various principles such as anatomical characteristics
and modes of procreation, domestication and wildness, suitability
for sacrifice or not, edible or inedible.33 In some texts (such as the
Satapatha Brahmana, Aitareya Brahmana, and the Manu Smriti)
beasts not worthy of sacrifice are considered unfit for human
consumption.34 Ashoka could in theory have had such injunctions
in mind when compiling his don’t-hit list.
The scholar K.R. Norman believes parallels are discernible be­
tween the Ashokan list and certain Jaina texts. Ashoka’s list is not
random but carefully organized to include two talking birds, a
series of aquatic birds (the bat mentioned here being a water-
haunting one), aquatic animals, reptiles (legged and legless), and
three birds of the pigeon/dove family.35 Ashoka, in Norman’s
opinion, is following a division of animal life enumerated in Jaina
texts: sky-goers, water-goers, and land-goers, which shows the in­
fluence upon him in this respect of Jainism. Even the creature named
‘palaste’ in the list, which Hultzsch translates as ‘rhinoceros’, is read
by Norman as ‘paravata’, which is similar to the Jaina ‘parevaya’ or
 a n ag e i n g e m p e r o r’s i n t e rv e n t i o n s 273

turtle dove. But the influences and rationale of the list are difficult
to conclusively establish because it includes birds like geese and
doves that are likely to have been widely enjoyed in a way that
queen ants and bats were not. If Hultzsch is right and the creature
in Ashoka’s list is a rhinoceros, a general anti-brahmanism could be
detected: the Manu Smriti suggests that eating rhinos pleases dead
ancestors, specifically enjoining that its flesh be eaten by the ‘twice-
born’ because this satisfies ‘the manes for endless times’.36
The zoologist Sunder Lal Hora, who specialized in fish and fish­
eries, points out that there are five species of fish in the list that
are inedible and therefore not worth the killing. These are sharks
and boneless fish (‘Anathikamachhe’), eels or fish easily eluding
the grasp (‘Vedaveyake’), the porpoise, or a fish-like animal with
a lumpy body (‘Gamgapuputake’), skate or ray (‘Samkujamchhe’),
and globe-fish or a fish like a porcupine with the ability to feign
death when in danger (‘Kaphatasayake’).37 These five varieties, he
says, are not consumed even in modern India, because—

Globe-fishes and their allies are poisonous and should not be eaten.
Unless properly treated, the flesh of Sharks, Rays, and Skates is bitter
to taste and gritty on account of the deposition of uric acid crystals
in their flesh. The Gangetic Porpoise is revered among the Hindus of
the Indo-Gangetic Plain and its flesh is not eaten. With the exception
of certain parts of South India, eels are not eaten on account of their
strong resemblance to snakes. It would thus appear that the present-day
prejudices of not eating these fishes are as old as the Asoka period.38

Culinary habits are culturally formed and what Hora shows as un­­­-
desir­able species had much to do with the traditional Hindu
society of his own time. But over the same period, tribal and fishing
communities may well have had more catholic tastes and not ad­
hered to such taboos. Ashoka may well have been addressing fishing
communities in which virtually anything caught was cooked.
The prohibitions required on certain days may well have been
for sound environmental reasons. The days against catching fish
were the fourteenth and fifteenth days of the moon, the first day
after the full moon, on days of fasting and during the rainy season
274 ashoka in ancient india

(the period of ‘chaturmasya’ being July to September). Many of

these days are connected with the breeding habits of fish. Several
fish breed in the rainy season beginning in July and usually lasting
till September.39 This is well recognized. What is less known is that
there is also a lunar rhythm to the spawning of some freshwater
fish such as carp and the ‘hilsa’, with new-moon and full-moon
periods being most favourable.40 On the basis of these injunctions,
various calculations have been made about the number of such
‘fish-prohibition’ days, ranging from fifty-one to seventy-two, not a
small number even if the days are spread over the whole year.
There is in the edict the combination of an extraordinary sens­
itivity to protecting the natural breeding patterns of living creat­
ures while accepting that their slaughter will continue. An emperor
pleading to his people to spare pregnant and lactating she-goats,
ewes, and sows needs to say nothing else to appear extraordinary.
The young of these animals, below the age of six months, were to
be protected when their herds were culled for slaughter. Branding
horses and bullocks is frowned upon, with a series of days specified
when such cruelty is prohibited.
The prohibition days relating to Tishya, Punarvasu, and Chatur­
masis are astrologically significant, Tishya and Punarvasu being
lunar constellations which may have had some special significance
for Ashoka. In the Arthashastra the two which were special cons­
tellations were supposed to be the birth-stars and consecration stars
of kings (‘raja-nakshatra’ and ‘desha nakshatra’). Possibly, Tishya
signified Ashoka’s birth-star and Punarvasu his anointment.41 The
Chaturmasis make sense in terms of the breeding season of fish,
but there do not seem to be environmental reasons for forbidding
the castration and branding of animals in that time slot. Basically,
the provisions were instruments of control for reducing animal
slaughter and cruelty. The purpose of stipulating days for such pro­
tective measures endowed moral meaning to what had, till then,
been auspicious days in the calendar of kingship and ritual.
Did these measures lead to a change in the food habits of the em­
peror’s subjects? There is no doubt that Ashoka’s intent was taken
seriously by his officers and governors. An epigraph at Deotek
 a n ag e i n g e m p e r o r’s i n t e rv e n t i o n s 275

near Nagpur in Maharashtra, which recorded the command of a

lord (‘Sami’) prohibiting the capture and slaughter of animals, is
indicative, punishments being specified for those who dared disobey
his command.42 Even so, there is no way of ascertaining the impact
of Ashoka’s vegetarian predilection. In an archaeological calendar,
processes that can be detected exist as relatively large chunks of
time. Thus, within the layers of excavated cities and villages of his
time, it becomes impossible to specify the archaeological levels that
constitute the reign of Ashoka. If coins had been minted that bore
the portrait of the king or had there been other kinds of artefacts
em­­blematic of his time, a reasonably precise archaeological chro-
no­logy for this Mauryan emperor would have been reached. So, on
the question of whether the king’s orders modified meat consump­
tion, all one can do is to look for clues indicating a reduction in the
early historic period (which includes but is not limited to the time
of Ashoka).
Since the pillar edicts are overwhelmingly in North India, we
could look at the fauna at sites excavated there. At several such,
bones show the range of meat that was consumed and offer a broad
picture. At some sites large quantities of bones have appeared: at
Raja Nala-ka-Tila in the Sonabhadra area of Uttar Pradesh, there
were nearly 1600 fragments of animal bones in Period III (the early
historic North Black Polished Ware phase), suggesting there was
no reduction in meat-eating over this time.43 The overwhelming
preference here was for cattle and buffalo meat, followed by that
of the sheep and the goat. Wild animals and birds were eaten,
including wild cattle (‘gaur’ and buffalo), deer, wild pigs, cranes,
and peafowl. The early historic phase (North Black Polished Ware
phase) at Siswania in the Basti district of Uttar Pradesh too shows
various domesticated and wild animals and other fauna—cattle,
sheep/goat, pig, various varieties of deer, wild boar, three species of
turtles, and at least two species of fish.44 The ancient city of Rajghat
in the Varanasi district suggests a reduction in animal species over
time, from the time period of 600–400 bce to 400–200 bce.45 While
in the first sub-period a total of fifteen species were represented,
the numbers came down to about nine. Among the species present
276 ashoka in ancient india

earlier but not in Mauryan times was fish (Teleost). The time
period, though, for which the abrupt reduction in species has been
suggested includes the time of Ashoka but is not limited to it. So
there is no way of working out the results of Ashoka’s exhortations
against animal slaughter.
If this edict is read along with the measures for animal wel­fare
in the earlier rock edicts, what stands out is the sheer compre­
hensiveness of Ashoka’s intentions. He lists every variety of cruelty
in order to express his abhorrence. The regulation of animal cast­
ration becomes an imperial obsession: this is nothing short of
jaw-dropping. One does not know about methods of animal
castration in ancient India, but if the crude methods followed in
rural India are anything to go by, the painful crushing of testicles
or the removal of testicles of animals through the ‘open method’
will have been practised, the pain being unimaginable.46 Veterinary
facilities too become an important part of state activity, as does the
enforcing of ‘closed seasons’ to protect breeding. Normally, the state
protects fauna when numbers decline.47 The language and idiom
of Ashoka’s concern is radically different: it is a code of ahimsa,
or non-violence. It was as if Ashoka’s own self-image as a morally
credible monarch involved laying down a humane code of conduct
towards all living creatures.

***

Ashoka had, by this time, set down in stone all the measures that he
had promulgated in that crucial twenty-sixth year. For some reason,
in that same year, he also put out a kind of summarized account of
his life and moral effort. Was this remembrance, where he men­tions
measures promulgated some fourteen years earlier, a sign that he
was reaching the end of his days? We do know that this was close
to the last time that he would speak in this way. Or perhaps being
a preacher of sorts he knew the importance of repeating for effect
the same idea in various forms.
The dominant impression remaining at the end of the pillar
edicts is the unusually inclusive character of Ashoka’s endeavour—
 a n ag e i n g e m p e r o r’s i n t e rv e n t i o n s 277

the new directions, as well as the number of humans and other

species sought to be uplifted by the new directions. The emperor’s
self-image as a people’s monarch emerges movingly and powerfully.
No emperor in the ancient world expresses such deep and abiding
concern for the underprivileged, the dispossessed, the suffering,
the oppressed, both human and animal. No other emperor of the
ancient world is heard saying that his principal duty ought to mean
visiting people personally.48
With one exception, on this note the pillar edicts end. The ex­
ception is the Seventh Edict added on the Topra pillar, now in
Delhi. Why it appeared only at one place is unclear. It seems un­
likely that the officers at Lauriya-Araraj, Kaushambi, and Meerut
did not follow the emperor’s instructions, or that the instructions
were not communicated properly to them. This Seventh Edict is an
amplification of the Sixth. Its importance stems from the fact that
it is an overtly retrospective statement, the kind of testimony that
could only have come from an ageing sovereign looking back on his
life’s work with pride and humility. They are the last words of the
emperor to have survived.
In them Ashoka explores the distinction between him and past
rulers. Earlier kings too had desired that ‘men might (be made to)
progress by the promotion of morality; but men were not made
to progress by an adequate promotion of morality.’49 This led
him to consider ways of succeeding where his predecessors had
failed: namely, by issuing public proclamations and instructions,
and giving muscle and teeth to his administration. He sees this
innovation as being responsible for his success, and presumably
desiring emulation by future rulers considers it necessary to ex­-
plain how he came to evolve such a policy:
How then might men (be made to) conform to (morality)?
How might men (be made to) progress by an adequate promotion
of morality?
How could I elevate them by the promotion of morality?
Concerning this, king Devanampriya Priyadarsin speaks thus.
The following occurred to me.
I shall use proclamations on morality, (and) shall order instruction
in morality (to be given).
278 ashoka in ancient india
Hearing this, men will conform to (it), will be elevated, and will (be
made to) progress considerably by the proclamation of morality.
For this purpose proclamations of morality were issued by me, (and)
manifold instructions in morality were ordered (to be given), [in order
that those agents] (of mine) too, who are occupied with many people,
(and who) will exhort (them) and will explain (morality to them) in
detail.50

A range of officials, from rajukkas to dharma-mahamatras, who

figure in his earlier messages, are again mentioned; trees that he
planted and wells dug on his orders also figure here—banyan trees
for shade to cattle and men, and mango groves. The concern with
the ordinary is extraordinary.
New also is the description of the ways in which his officials
were occupied with the delivery of gifts and charities by him and
his larger family. The recipients of charity were in Pataliputra and
the provinces, and their ‘dana’ promoted morality. We know that
donations were indeed made by his family, this being suggested by
what is known as the Queen’s Edict on the Allahabad pillar.

At the word of Devanampriya, the Mahamatras everywhere have to be

told (this).
What gifts (have been made) here by the second queen, (viz.) either
mango-groves, or gardens, or alms-houses, or whatever else, these
(shall) be registered (in the name) of that queen.
This (is) [the request] of the second queen, the mother of Tivala, the
Karuvaki.51

The queen Karuvaki seems to have been no pushover. She want­ed

to be known as the giver of these gifts; the emperor informs his
officers; the registration is done as she desires.
Family philanthropy is not of course sufficient, and Ashoka is at
pains to point out that moral restrictions and conversion through
persuasion have been his main methods for initiating change,
the second of these having proved to be more meaningful: ‘moral
restrictions are of little consequence; by conversion, however,
(morality is promoted) more considerably.’52 Honesty and finality
resonate in this last self-reflexive statement. Through much of his
 a n ag e i n g e m p e r o r’s i n t e rv e n t i o n s 279

life and via his edicts Ashoka had tried to communicate the need
to transform state governance from a system based on force to one
anchored in morality. Looking back he acknowledges the futility
of restrictions imposed from above and the gentler, more effective
power of persuasion for the achievement of a dharmic life and
empire. It was what he wanted to say in the end to his people and
successors, and he hoped his views ‘may last as long as (my) sons
and great-grandsons (shall reign and) as long as the moon and the
sun (shall shine), and in order that (men) may conform to it.’53
 12

Of Wifely Woes and the

Emperor’s Death

A
cross the preceding pages the historical ashoka
has emerged over nearly two decades of his reign in many
avataras: the remorseful conqueror of Kalinga, the pro-
active propagandist of non-violence, the imperious king threaten­
ing violence against forest people, the pious Buddhist pil­grim at
Lumbini, the supportive spouse implementing his con­sort’s wishes.
A variety of people in the India of his time have also ap­peared: offi­
cials, scribes, travellers, neighbouring monarchs, Hindu and Jaina
vegetarians, Afghan meat-eaters, monks and nuns.
With the pillar edicts done, Ashoka’s compelling voice falls silent
all at once. No more messages appear on rocks and pillars address­
ed to administrators and the populace. The metaphors that he had
used, the idiom and language of his edicts, the examples and intent
to forge connections between his own life and that of his subjects—
they all finish. The silence, because of its suddenness, is deafening.
Why? It is not as if Ashoka suddenly passed away. In fact if the
literary chronicles in which the last years of his rulership and death
figure are to be believed, he continued to rule for about a decade
after promulgating the Seventh Pillar Edict till around 232 bce.
But he ceased to speak through public messages on stone. It is
 o f w i f e ly wo e s a n d t h e e m p e r o r ’s d e at h 281

pos­sible that new inscriptions will be discovered bearing regnal

dates of that last decade, but as things stand our knowledge of
Ashoka’s dotage comes from the same old chronicles that were
composed centuries after his reign and which were written often
with the in­tention of deifying him. The story of Ashoka’s life, then,
is back where it began, embedded in unverifiable tradition. The
histori­cal issue remains: is there a way of making sense of Ashoka’s
un­happy twilight years from these sources that are for such pur­
poses dubious?
We don’t for a start know exactly how many years elapsed from
the last edict in the twenty-seventh year after his coronation to
the year of his death. His end is surmised as having happened less
than ten years after the last edict from ‘dates’ mentioned in the
Mahavamsa of Sri Lanka, a text dated to the fifth century ce. The
twentieth chapter of this work provides a summary description of
Ashoka’s last years in the form of a kind of regnal calendar:

In the eighteenth year (of the reign) of king Dhammasoka, the great
Bodhi-tree was planted in the Mahameghavanarama. In the twelfth
year afterwards died the dear consort of the king, Asamdhimitta, the
faithful (believer) in the Sambuddha. In the fourth year after this the
ruler of the earth Dhammasoka raised the treacherous Tissarakka to
the rank of queen. In the third year thereafter this fool, in the pride
of her beauty, with the thought: ‘Forsooth, the king worships the great
Bodhi-tree to my cost!’ drawn into the power of hate and working her
own harm, caused the great Bodhi-tree to perish by means of a mandu-
thorn. In the fourth year after did Dhammasoka of high renown fall
into the power of mortality. These make up thirty seven years.1

If these years are totalled, the events seem to have transpired across
some forty-one years and not thirty-seven. However, Ananda
Guruge points out that a later commentary on this text explains
each year in its account after calculating it twice—as both the pre­
ceding and the succeeding year: thus the figure of thirty-seven years.
This would mean that there was a gap of some eight years between
the death of Ashoka’s queen Asamdhimitta (in the twenty-ninth year
from his consecration) and Ashoka’s death (in the thirty-seventh
282 ashoka in ancient india

year from his consecration).2 Asamdhimitta died, it appears, in

241 bce within a year from the time the emperor issued his
Seventh Pillar Edict. If this is what happened, grief and personal
preoccupations may have prevented the composing of further
edicts.
While the corroboration of calendrical exactitude in the Maha­
vamsa is a difficult matter, the condensed way in which it provides
the information—as a stray departure with no seeming link at
all with the main story—is significant. Six short verses speak of
Ashoka’s end before the narrative resumes its history of Buddhism
in Sri Lanka. The Mahavamsa is known to have derived a great deal
from the Dipavamsa but the latter text is silent about Ashoka’s last
years. The only possible conclusion is that the brief account in the
former is some version of the popular view about Ashoka’s last
years in this part of South Asia in the fifth century.
In terms of the internal logic of the Mahavamsa, it is not for-
tuitous that the account of Ashoka’s later years begins in the
eighteenth year of his rule, with a sapling of the Bodhi tree
being brought to Sri Lanka: the chapter preceding the passage
quoted primarily concerns itself with ‘The coming of the Bodhi-
tree’ to Sri Lanka,3 carried there from the eastern Indian port of
Tamralipti by Ashoka’s daughter Sanghamitra. She had become
a nun and appears as the tree’s primary guardian on this voyage,
terrifying into submission certain serpents (‘Nagas’) who seemed
interested in acquiring it. The sacred sapling was planted in the
Mahameghavanarama, where ‘the king of trees, the great Bodhi-
tree, lasted a long time on the island of Lanka.’4 This section of the
text is followed almost immediately by six verses which recount the
manner in which the ‘great Bodhi-tree’ of Mahabodhi came to be
destroyed, the juxtaposition serving the purpose of underlining the
different destinies of the two trees, the original in the north and
its offshoot on the island. Ashoka’s end, recounted immediately
after the fate of the Bodhi tree, seems to indicate that even while the
chronology of his twilight regnal years is not a calendar concocted
by this chronicle, positioning Ashoka’s death after elaborating in
detail on the fate of the Bodhi tree in Sri Lanka is not incidental
 o f w i f e ly wo e s a n d t h e e m p e r o r ’s d e at h 283

but deliberate. The underlying logic seems to be to decry the fate of

the faith in the land of its origin while hailing its reception and
long life in Lanka.
The contrast in the actions of the two women associated with
Ashoka also links with the differing histories of Buddhism in the
main­land and the island. Sanghamitra is the protector of the plant
in Sri Lanka, Tissarakkha its destroyer back home. The chronicle re­
members the last years of Ashoka in relation to the divergence in the
behaviour of his queens and the differing nature of their engage­
ment with Buddhism. Asamdhimitta, his ‘dear consort’, was a faith­
ful devotee of the Buddha and her death is the beginning of Ashoka’s
end. Her place was taken, after an interregnum, by the beautiful but
jealous Tissarakkha whose resentment of Ashoka’s devotion to the
Buddha results in a protracted vengeance with the emperor passing
away after four years. The evil queen’s ability to destroy something
as sacred to the emperor as the Bodhi tree suggests that her hus­band
was by then no longer the master of state affairs.
Ashoka’s wives evidently become either good or bad here de­
pend­ing upon whether they supported or thwarted the emperor’s
engagement with the Buddha and his faith.5 At the same time, the
powerful voice of his queen in accounts of his later life supplements
that of his queen Karuvaki in the epigraphs. The image of the latter
there is of a self-possessed and strong-willed consort wanting an act
of philanthropy recorded as specifically hers. The king’s later consort
as powerful figure—via the story of Tissarakkha’s violence against
the Bodhi tree—is in line with the motif of a king somewhat often
besotted by his queens to the point of being under their thumbs.
An emotional monarch, it might be inferred—if his queens can
be interpreted as having been allowed so considerable a degree of
control over his life and the realm’s. Such an inference would be in
keeping with the sentimentality of several of the edicts.
The Lady Macbeth figure in Ashoka’s life is a character in the
Northern Buddhist tradition as well, the villainous queen Tishya­
rakshita occupying substantial space in the Ashokavadana, which
like the Mahavamsa narrates her animosity towards the Bodhi tree.
Truth or myth, the story seems to have been widely believed across
284 ashoka in ancient india

various Buddhist traditions of the first millennium ce, from China

to Lanka. The Ashokavadana version is far more elaborate though
different in several of its details. It shows the jealousy of Tishya­
rakshita as stemming from her ignorance about who this ‘Bodhi’
really was. Apparently, because Ashoka offered his most precious
jewels to Bodhi, she thought Bodhi was a woman and thus a rival.
She was incensed because ‘although the king pursues his pleasure
with me, he sends all the best jewels to Bodhi’s place.’6 She paid
money to a sorceress to destroy Bodhi. The sorceress chanted ‘some
mantras and tied a thread around the Bodhi tree.’ The tree began
to wither and Ashoka fainted when the news reached him. Upon
regaining consciousness the heartbroken monarch said he would
die if the Bodhi tree perished. When Tishyarakshita consoled the
sorrowful Ashoka by saying that if Bodhi died she would pleasure
him, he realized how ignorant she was: ‘Bodhi is not a woman’, said
the king, ‘but a tree; it is where the Blessed One attained unsurpass­
ed enlightenment.’7 Realizing her mistake, the queen summoned
the sorceress to revive the tree and the dying tree was restored to
life. The queen’s vengeance and violence are leitmotifs in both
accounts but the outcomes of their actions differ radically, the
moral of the story in the Mahavamsa being doom laden in relation
to Buddhism in India after Ashoka, while the Ashokavadana suggests
revival and subsequent continuity.
Tishyarakshita figures again and more powerfully some chapters
later in connection with Kunala, Ashoka’s son by Queen Padmavati.
Named after a variety of avifauna called ‘Kunala’—his bright and
beautiful eyes were similar to those of the bird—the infant grew
into a solitude-loving prince. During one of his meditative sojourns
Tishyarakshita is consumed by a burning desire for this handsome
prince. Finding him alone, she embraces him and declares: ‘I get a
burning feeling inside as though a forest fire were consuming a dry
wood.’8 Kunala says she is akin to his mother and spurns her ‘non-
dharmic’ advance, whereupon she tells him he is not destined to last
much longer. When Taxila rises in rebellion, Kunala is sent to quell it.
In the meantime Ashoka is struck by a virulent ailment: ‘excrement
began to come out of his mouth, and an impure substance oozed
out of all his pores.’9 No doctors can cure him and made desperate
 o f w i f e ly wo e s a n d t h e e m p e r o r ’s d e at h 285

by the thought of his impending end Ashoka expresses a desire to

get Kunala to return and succeed him on the throne. Tishyarakshita,
fearful of the consequences to her life if this transpires, is now de­
termined to cure the emperor. She first asks Ashoka to forbid all
doctors from tending to him. She next instructs his doctors to bring
anyone suffering from the same disease to her; in fact, her modus
operandi in finding a cure for Ashoka is the most compelling part
of this tale:
Tisyaraksita said to the doctors: ‘If any man or woman should come to
you suffering from a disease similar to that of the king, I would like to
see him immediately.’
Before long, it happened that a certain Abhira man was stricken with
just such a disease. His wife went to see a doctor and described the ill­
ness to him. ‘Bring him in’, said the doctor, ‘I will examine him and then
prescribe some medicine.’ However, as soon as the Abhira was brought
to him, he took him straight to Tisyaraksita. She, in secret, had him
killed, and when he was dead, she split open his belly and examined the
stomach. She found inside it a large worm; when it moved, excrement
would ooze out of the man’s mouth, and when it went down, it would
flow out down below.
The queen then ground some peppercorns and gave them to the
worm, but he did not die. She tried long peppers and ginger, but again
with no success. Finally, she gave some onion to the worm; imme­-
di­ately it died and passed through the intestinal tract.
She then went to Asoka and prescribed this treatment. ‘My lord, eat
an onion and you will recover.’
‘Queen’, the king objected, ‘I am a ksatriya; how can I eat an onion?’
‘My lord’, she replied, ‘this is medicine; take it for the sake of life!’
Asoka then ate it; the worm died, and passed out through his
intestines, and he fully recovered.10
Killing another woman’s ill husband to cure her own is not very
dharmic, but as we have seen in relation to Kunala this was not a
queen to be kept at bay by minor dharmic considerations when
something desperate and compelling required doing. Women of
decisive action and swift intervention in the lives of monarchs are
something of a rarity in ancient India, making Tishyarakshita seem
admirable for her singularly surgical way of dealing with life in
difficult times.
286 ashoka in ancient india

The malevolence of his intelligent queen is expanded upon at

length with Ashoka’s recovery, the grateful monarch granting
Tishya­rakshita a boon. She asks to be made the monarch for seven
days, and, the wish granted, shows she has lost none of the old
decisiveness by moving quickly to destroy Kunala. A letter addressed
to the people of Taxila orders them to put out his eyes. After some
understandable hesitation by the letter’s recipients, they do as
requested and gouge the eyes out. The blinded Kunala and his wife
return to Pataliputra where they learn of Tishyarakshita’s villainy.
A furious Ashoka disowns her in a very un-Ashokan manner,
threatening to tear her eyes out and ‘rip open her body with sharp
rakes, impale her alive on a spit, cut off her nose with a saw, cut
out her tongue with a razor, and fill her with poison and kill her.’11
Kunala’s view of the matter, luckily, is less un-Buddhist than his
father’s and he pleads forgiveness for her. This magnanimity results
in his own sight returning but does not lead to absolution for the
queen. On Ashoka’s orders, Tishyarakshita is burned to death in a
‘lacquer house’; for good measure, we are told, he ‘had the citizens
of Taksasila executed as well.’12
There is clearly a recurrence of elements ascribed in the Ashoka­
vadana to Ashoka’s last years which formed part of his life as a
prince. Like Kunala, he had as a young man been sent to Taxila to
put down a provincial revolt, this being followed at once by his
father falling very ill. Court intrigue—by ministers in Bindusara’s
court earlier, by the chief queen at Ashoka’s end—is the calculation
coming into play among power-brokers of state who seek to en­
sure a transition favourable to themselves. The recurrence of such
a pattern of departure, illness, and intrigue to indicate the condi­
tions of regime change is essentially a literary trope for signalling
the conclusion of a monarchical tenure. But Ashoka’s story does
not end here.
Some last episodes of his life remain to be recounted. The blood
and gore of Tishyarakshita and Taxila give way to a pleasanter,
gen­tler tapestry of the dying days, ‘dana’ being the peg on which
the Ashokavadana hangs its final tale, aptly titled ‘Ashoka’s Last
Gift’.13 From the time he became a Buddhist, Ashoka has been
shown as regularly making all kinds of donations to the Sangha.
 o f w i f e ly wo e s a n d t h e e m p e r o r ’s d e at h 287

In this he was hoping to equal what a celebrated householder,

Anathapindaka, had donated to the Buddha, namely one hundred
‘kotis’ of gold pieces. Ashoka’s donations, as he neared his end,
amounted to only ninety-six kotis. When he became ill he felt
he had to make up the balance soon and had begun sending gold
coins to the Kukkutarama monastery.
At this point Ashoka’s heir apparent Sampadin (Kunala’s son)
and the state counsellers stepped in, issuing an order prohibiting
such disbursement from the treasury. The emperor subverted
them by finding other routes for donation, first giving away the
gold dishes in which his food was served, then his silver plates, and
finally the copper. His powers clipped, he is depicted as stating in
the Ashokavadana: ‘Who now could deny the saying of the Blessed
One that “All fortune is the cause of misfortune?” Truth-speaking
Gautama asserted that, and indeed he was right! Today, I am no
longer obeyed; no matter how many commands I think of issuing,
they are all countermanded just like a river that is turned back
when it dashes against a mountain cliff.’
Thwarted and reduced, his sole possession now is only half
an ‘amalaka’ (myrobalan). And yet he summons a man to take it
to the monks at Kukkutarama, instructing him to say to them that
this, his last offering, should be ‘distributed in such a way that it is
offered to and enjoyed by the whole community.’ The half-fruit is
mashed and put into a soup distributed to the whole community.
This happens even as the Elder of the Sangha tells the monks
about the nature of the emotions that come into play at the sight of
an unhappy emperor shorn of all that distinguished his rule:

A great donor, the lord of men,

the eminent Maurya Asoka,
has gone from being lord of Jambudvipa
to being lord of half a myrobalan.
Today this lord of the earth,
his sovereignty stolen by his servants
presents the gift of just half a myrobalan,
as though reproving the common folk
whose hearts are puffed up
with a passion for enjoying great splendour.
288 ashoka in ancient india

The final embellishment given to the image of Ashoka is that of

Supreme Donor. On the eve of his death, thanks to this last gift,
his sovereign powers are restored to him—whereupon the dying
emperor promptly proceeds to donate the whole earth to the
Sangha, excluding only the state treasury (what the earth was worth
minus the state treasury is conjectural). The donation of the earth
to the Sangha was inscribed with his teeth. This act of using his
teeth to seal a bequest asserted royal authority in the most unambi­
guous way. The composer of the Ashokavadana would no doubt
have been surprised had he known that, many centuries later in
England, the gift of lands to Paulyn de Rawdon was said to have
been formalized in an identical way by William the Conqueror:
I William, king, the third of my reign,
Give to Paulyn Rawdon, Hope and Hopetowne,
With all the bounds both up and downe,
From heaven to yerthe, from yerthe to hel,
For thee and thyne there to dwell.
As truly as this kingright is mine,
For a crossbow and an arrow.
When I sal come to hunt on yarrow;
And in token that this thing is sooth,
I bit the whyt wax with my tooth,
Before Meg, Mawd, and Margery,
And my third son Henry.14
Ashoka is supposed to have died after sealing the document con­
taining his donation. It was said that eventually a new king could
only succeed Ashoka after the whole earth had been bought back
by the ministers of the Maurya court, who agreed to give four kotis
of gold pieces to complete Ashoka’s shortfall.
The end is poignant, dramatic, and ironic all at once. His dying
words emphasize that his last act was not to seek the rewards of
rebirth or the glories of kingship but mastery over the mind:
‘because I give it with faith, I would obtain as the fruit of this gift
something that cannot be stolen, that is honoured by the aryas and
safe from all agitation: sovereignty of the mind.’
With his last breath, the emperor sacrifices an entire empire—the
empire that he had once so fiercely usurped.
 Epilogue
The Emperor’s Afterlife

W
hen ashoka’s communications to his people
ceased, his historical persona, for all practical pur­-
poses, ceased as well; and some years later, around
232 bce, he passed away. Yet in the centuries after his death his mem­
ory lived on, and in ways that go well beyond the events and drama
of his life. His afterlife is in fact a configuration of diverse and fasci­
nating threads made up of material relics and writings stretching
across more than two millennia. In ancient and medieval India
Ashoka was remembered in legendary accounts, court chronicles,
travel tales, and epigraphs. To this one may add what more con­
temporary times have contributed to that memorialization: he
has figured in film and fiction, on public architecture, in the lives
and work of India’s national heroes, and through Indian national
symbols. The desire to deploy remembrances and memorializations
of this emperor is practically irresistible among Indians. A con­
sequence of this has been that in reconstructions of the life and
times of Ashoka the line which divides history and memory is
frequently blurred.
In attempting to recover the historical Ashoka I have tried to
separate out these threads, highlighting in the early chapters the
various possibilities and challenges of using later legends and
chronicles which evoke him. Even as I have dipped into those
accounts to reconstruct large parts of his life and times—for which
290 ashoka in ancient india
there is nothing remotely contemporary—the core of my narrative
revolves around Ashoka’s own voice and the archaeological hist­-
ories of the landscapes where it resonated. Now, I return to recall
Ashoka’s afterlife, or some of the meanderings that have not
found a place in my narrative, through which the memory of
this extraordinary emperor survived before modern scholarship
discovered him.1 While a monograph is waiting to be written on
the pastiche of stories and images around him, here I look only
at elements in the remembrance of things Ashokan. I do this to
highlight the fact that he was a sovereign around whom a long
tra­dition of memorialization came to be consolidated, as also to
assess in broad brushstrokes what was retained of his historical life
and what forgotten.
It is necessary, first, to keep in mind that, even though a great deal
is not known about them, the Maurya dynasty’s kings continued to
rule for several decades after Ashoka’s death. While narratives of
Ashoka’s unhappy last days are entangled within legends, historical
events in the lives of the emperor’s successors are not even known
by such; and the dearth of contemporary chronicles and accounts of
the Ashoka years persists into those of his successors. No Mauryan
ruler after Ashoka set down a substantial body of epigraphs on
stone. None was visited by a chronicler-ambassador from a foreign
land, as Chandragupta was by Megasthenes. Even when these years
find mention in traditions that were put together several cen­-
turies later, elementary information, such as the names and number
of kings in the succession line of the later Mauryas, remains in
dispute.
Ashoka’s successors do not figure in the Pali chronicles of
Sri Lanka either. Those texts lose interest in the Maurya dynastic
line after the emperor’s death, presumably because by then his
Buddhist progeny were firmly ensconced on the island. There are,
moreover, discrepancies in the list of successors that figure in texts
of the Northern Buddhist tradition and the Brahmanical Puranas;
in the Puranas the succession details are not uniformly similar.
Much of the literature on Ashoka’s successors consists of hair-
splitting disputes over royal names, regnal numbers, and precise
orders of succession.
 e p i l o g u e : t h e e m p e r o r ’s a f t e r l i f e 291

The Puranic litany of names of Mauryan rulers, depending on

the text, mention anything between four and seven as the number
to follow Ashoka, while the variations in the Buddhist tradition
about the number of monarchs after Ashoka range between two
and five.2 Evidently, those who ruled in the decades after Ashoka did
not manage to emulate the long reigns of the first three emperors
of the line. The Puranas are unanimous that Maurya dynastic
suzer­ains ruled for some 137 years. So if the first three—Chandra­
gupta, Bindusara, and Ashoka—account for some 85 years, the
later Mauryas will have ruled for only 52. Whether there were three
or seven rulers who shared this half century from circa 232 bce to
180 bce, each will have followed his predecessor far more quickly
than did the big three.3
Still, some ancient Indian kings seem to have managed to do a
great deal to be remembered by in their short reigns of eight to
ten years. Pulumavi, the last king of the later Andhra Satavahana
dynasty, ruled for only seven years (c. 226–232 ce) but is known
by the coins that he struck, from inscriptions issued in his time
as a shrine builder, and as a monarch who ruled over large parts
of Maharashtra and Karnataka.4 Naturally, one imagines that the
kings who succeeded Ashoka made a range of interventions as they
administered their patrimony. But what these interventions were
or who they patronized, and whether Ashoka’s legacy of humane
governance was followed or jettisoned by them, are issues that
don’t figure in contemporaneous sources. Most of the later Mauryas
remain mere names, unknown in the sources of the late centuries
bce and only rarely appearing as rounded historical subjects in
later texts.
The Ashokavadana’s list typically underlines this when the
seven kings succeeding Ashoka are mentioned thus: ‘Sampadin’s
son was Brhaspati who, in turn, had a son named Vrsasena, and
Vrsasena had a son named Pusyadharman, and Pusyadharman
begot Pusya­mitra.’5 Sampadin, it has been suggested, was the same
as the Samprati mentioned in Jaina literature. He featured some
pages ago, in the account of Ashoka’s unhappy last years, as in­-
heritor of the kingdom. In Jaina literature, on the other hand,
Samprati is said to have converted to the Jaina faith and ‘he did for
292 ashoka in ancient india

Jainism nearly everything that Ashoka did for Buddhism such as

building temples and spreading the faith.’6 So, different traditions
provide different versions of Samprati. Strangely, the last Maurya
ruler in the Ashokavadana, Pushyamitra, is also the name of the
person who is said to have killed the last ruler—an event which,
in effect, ended the Maurya dynastic line.7 Pushyamitra, according
to the Puranas and the Harshacarita, was a general in the army
of Brhidratha, from whom he usurped the throne and founded
a new dynasty—that of the Shungas.8 So, one is not even sure of
the reliability of the names that make up the Maurya line in the
Ashokavadana. What one can gather is that this text considered
the Maurya Pushyamitra anti-Buddhist. Apparently he became so
on the advice of a mean-minded Brahman priest and undertook
to eradicate the religion by destroying the very monasteries and
killing the very monks Ashoka had so zealously nurtured. It was
a Yaksha along with his future son-in-law who eventually rescued
Buddhism and ensured Pushyamitra’s death. With this, we are told,
‘the Mauryan lineage came to an end.’9 Is it possible that this is a
jumbled up remembrance of how the Maurya line ended? That
the dynasty dropped off the horizon of ancient India because its
last scion unsuccessfully sought to overturn Ashoka’s legacy is a
wonderful story, especially for Buddhist admirers of the emperor,
but its historical accuracy is impossible to determine.
One thing is certain. Of the later kings that figure in the Puranic
and Buddhist traditions, there is only one Maurya, namely Dash­
aratha, who appears as a historical figure in the sense that he hap-
pens to feature in a source contemporary with his reign. This
Dasharatha was a grandson of Ashoka, and, following in his grand­
father’s footsteps, he made himself known through engravings on
rock in structures that he caused to be built. Ashoka’s imprint on
him can in fact be seen in more ways than one. Calling himself
‘Devanam-priya’, Dasharatha put up dedicatory inscriptions at
caves similar to those at Barabar, in the adjacent Nagarjuni hill.
Like Ashoka again, Dasharatha had these caves excavated for the
Ajivikas.10 They were highly polished chambers, with names like
Gopika, Vahiyaka, and Vadathika, created as rainy season shelters:
 e p i l o g u e : t h e e m p e r o r ’s a f t e r l i f e 293

the donative epigraph on the Vahiyaka cave tells us that it ‘has

been given by Dasalatha, dear to the gods, to the venerable Ajivikas,
immediately on his accession, to be a place of abode during the
rainy season as long as the moon and sun shall endure.’
We do not know why Dasharatha chose to follow his grand­-
father in patronizing the Ajivikas, but his hope that the shelters
would serve for them ‘as long as the moon and sun endure’ re­
mained unfulfilled. Subsequently, ‘Ajivikehi’ was the one expression
removed or defaced from Maurya epigraphs in the Barabar and
Nagarjuni caves, and this selective removal very likely means that
the caves were taken over by other religious groups.11 Since those
who chose to so carefully cut out the name of the Ajivikas would
have been familiar with the Brahmi script, it is likely that they did
so soon after the demise of the Mauryas. In the ensuing centuries,
no ruler in North India is known to have provided any kind of
patronage to the Ajivikas. There are no inscriptions of any king
among the slew of dynasties that followed—the Shungas, Kushanas,
and Guptas to name a few—alluding either to the Ajivikas or to
donations to them.
On the other hand Buddhism continued to consolidate and
prosper, and it was within its religious iconography and texts that
parts of Ashoka’s life came to be vividly imaged. The spectacular
growth of the religion was visible in the construction and expansion
of monumental stupas, viharas, and chaityas. Interestingly, these
seem to have depended no longer on the patronage of proact­
ive Buddhist rulers. Instead, common folk from diverse walks of
life now made this possible. Sanchi in Central India was one of
the places to which Ashoka had been partial, possibly because
of his association with Devi: as we saw, he had had a brick stupa
constructed and a sandstone pillar put up adjacent to it. This stupa
saw a virtual reconstruction in the second century bce, following
the end of the Maurya dynasty. Not only did it expand visibly in
size, its enlarged brick dome now came to be encased in stone and
surrounded by a stone balustrade. The epigraphs on the balus­-
trade reveal a staggering extravagance of donations by sundry
peo­ple who supported the building programme here, including the
294 ashoka in ancient india

pupils of particular teachers, lay worshippers, bankers, merchants,

mothers, housewives, monks, and nuns. The donors came from
near and far, from cities associated with the early life of Ashoka such
as Vidisha and Ujjayini, and from more distant ones like Prathis­
thanapura and Pokhara.12
Around the same time there becomes visible the start of a tra­
dition of sculptural art marked by strikingly carved Buddhist
reliefs of events and individuals, real and legendary. Within this
tradition we now see, for the first time, the imaging of elements
of architecture and artefacts that Ashoka had set up at places of
Buddhist worship. Among the earliest of these Ashoka-centred
portrayals are features that Ashoka had added to the Mahabodhi
sacred area—such as the throne that he had donated and the
temple which he had had built. Less than a hundred years after
his interventions, these additions were represented on a massive
stone railing at Bharhut near Rewa in Central India. The railing
surrounded a stupa and, like the Sanchi specimen, was built with
donations by pilgrims from distant places like Vidisha, Kaushambi,
and Pataliputra.13 Unlike Sanchi’s relatively plain railing, though,
the one in Bharhut was luxuriantly carved with bas reliefs devoted
to various subjects ranging from life scenes of the Buddha to Jataka
stories about the Buddha’s previous births.14 Naturally, Mahabodhi,
where the Buddha attained enlightenment, appears graphically
re­presented. Ashoka’s embellishments to the scene of supreme holi­
ness thereby themselves gain concrete embellishment.
At this point in time the Great Sage was not represented in
human form, his presence being indicated by a series of symbols.
Several of these—a Bodhi tree, a wheel, and a stupa, for instance—
were integrally associated with his enlightenment, his first sermon,
and the aftermath of his demise. A symbol that now gained
popularity to denote the Buddha was what Ashoka had donated at
Mahabodhi—the majestic stone throne known as the vajrasana.15
A sculptural relief on a pillar at Bharhut shows the Bodhi tree
with the vajrasana in front. An identifying epigraph alludes to ‘the
building round the Bodhi tree of the holy Sakamuni’. The vajrasana
is recognizable because of its monumental size, its slab and four
 e p i l o g u e : t h e e m p e r o r ’s a f t e r l i f e 295

supporting pilasters making it look somewhat similar to how it

appears today. The relief also shows a pillar with a bell-shaped
capital bearing the figure of an elephant, which could well be the
sculptor’s remembrance of an Ashokan specimen.16 Similarly, the
pillared religious sanctuary depicted here—the building mentioned
in the inscription—was possibly the temple that Ashoka is said to
have constructed at Mahabodhi.
The emperor himself is absent from the Buddhist iconography
at Bharhut. This is not because rulers do not figure in such icono­
graphy. They do: rulers such as Pasenadi of Kosala and Ajatashatru
of Magadha do appear, but these were monarchs who happened
to be contemporaries of the Buddha.17 It would take a couple of
centuries for Ashoka to be similarly imaged. Eventually, he came
to be remembered in this form in the early part of the first century
ce on sculpted columns and lintels of the remarkable gateways
which were set up at the four entrances to the stupas at Sanchi.
There was, however, one major difference. Unlike Bharhut, where
labels identify the kings, no identifying epigraphs accompany the
figures depicted at Sanchi—neither those relating to incidents in
the life of the Buddha nor to those of his patron Ashoka nor even to
mythical characters from old tales and legends. Identifications have
been subsequent, worked out on the basis of the subject matter of
reliefs which follow the textual narratives of Buddhist stories. So,
Ashoka’s presence on them is based on correlations made between
sculpture and story. Scholars centrally involved in the conservation
and documentation of the wonderful narrative friezes at Sanchi
had little doubt that some of Ashoka’s visits to Buddhist places
of pilgrimage were interwoven with the various stories carved on
parts of the Sanchi monuments, and it is on their judgement that
we must rely.
The southern gateway (or torana) of the great stupa, for ins­
tance, shows Ashoka’s visit to the Ramagrama stupa.18 In the
Ashokavadana account he had travelled there to take possession of
one of the original relic deposits of the Buddha. Ashoka is shown
with the royal insignia—a turban, ewer, and fly whisk, the tradi-
tional umbrella being absent—on a chariot in an impressive
296 ashoka in ancient india

procession including elephants and arms-bearing troops. The

sculpted narrative—dominated by hooded Nagas and Nagis wor­
ship­ping the stupa—also tells us that the Nagas resisted Ashoka
and successfully circumvented his quest to dig out the relics. The
southern gateway’s western pillar shows the same royal personage,
but quite differently: this time on his visit to the Bodhi tree.19 The
sacred tree was, as we saw in the Ashokavadana’s account of the
unhappy last years, dying out because of the jealous ignorance of
Queen Tishyarakshita. So Ashoka is not here a king leading a regal
procession but a figure of sorrow evoking sympathy. He is sup­­-
ported by two queens and seems about to swoon with grief
(Fig. Epilogue 1). Above this, another panel shows the Bodhi tree,
decorated with streamers and a crowning umbrella and surround­
ed by a temple—presumably the one Ashoka built. The same sort
of representation, and of the same period, can be seen on another
stupa at Sanchi (Stupa 2). This is halfway down the hill on which
the great stupa stands, its railing adorned by many carvings. One of
these is of Ashoka supported by his two queens and surrounded by
attendants carrying the insignias of royalty.20
Other emblems associated with the emperor also figure. Wheel-
bearing pillars, monoliths crowned with capitals of four lions, the
vajrasana at Mahabodhi—all clearly recognizable as Ashokan—
were constantly and conspicuously carved into the gateways of
Sanchi. Several pillars of Shunga and Gupta times also imitated
the Ashokan monoliths. The Shunga period pillar at Sanchi, with
its capital of lotus leaves, and the four lions capital of the Gupta
pillar there, have elements modelled on the Ashokan pillar.21 These
commemorations in stone help preserve memory of the emperor,
though once Ashoka himself starts being engraved as a figure in
sculptural reliefs he assumes an even clearer historical shape which
then grows into his best-known avatara. Interestingly, in modern
India it is the connection between the Bodhi tree and the women
in Ashoka’s life which continues as a popular leitmotif among
artists, especially in the works of those who were part of the Indian
nationalist art movement. Tishyarakshita looking at the Bodhi tree,
for instance, was painted by Abanindranath Tagore, while Nandlal
 e p i l o g u e : t h e e m p e r o r ’s a f t e r l i f e 297

Fig. Epilogue 2: Depiction of wheel-bearing pillar at Sanchi

Bose and Upendra Maharathi drew Sanghamitra carrying the

Bodhi tree to Sri Lanka.
About a hundred years after the Sanchi depictions, in the second
century ce a variation of their version of Ashoka came to be carved
at the stupa in Kanagana­halli in Karnataka. This stupa stood,
as we saw earlier, in the vicinity of the location where Ashoka’s
major edicts were inscribed on both faces of a stone slab. The
upper drum (or Medhi) of the stupa here, unlike at Sanchi, was
veneered with large sculpted panels that depicted events in the life
of the Buddha and most uniquely included several portraits of royal
personalities.22 This gallery includes kings with their consorts, most
often rulers of the Satavahana dynasty who happened to be the
chief patrons of Kanaganahalli at this point in time.23 Each appears
298 ashoka in ancient india

with an epigraphic label designating them ‘Raya Matalako’, ‘Raya

Sundara Satakarni’, and so on. It is at Ashoka, or ‘Raya Asoko’ as
he is described here, that we need to pause.
There are two panels whose subject matter is Ashoka, with
label inscriptions identifying him by name. One of these is like the
Satavahana portraits. By this I mean that, unlike Sanchi, Ashoka
does not feature on the panel as part of a narrative scene. Instead,
his queen and he dominate the register. Apart from the queen,
there are female ‘chauri’ bearers and a female umbrella bearer.24
The royal couple seems to be sharing a tender moment: Ashoka’s
face is turned towards his queen while she looks at him with adora­-
tion. The subject matter of the second panel’s lower register, also
bearing the five-lettered label ‘Raya Asoko’, is qualitatively different
from the portrait depiction. Ashoka stands to the left of the Bodhi
tree with several others who are shown worshipping in a similar way.
The excavator of Kanaganahalli believed one of these was Prince
Mahinda and the woman behind the king his daughter Sangha­
mitra.25 Whether this was so or not, the frieze is a powerful re­
minder that in the imagination of ancient India the presence of the
emperor was frequently evoked in relation to Mahabodhi, snap­shots
of which can be seen all the way from Bharhut to Kanaganahalli.
The strength of this association—between the place where
the Buddha attained enlightenment and where India’s Buddhist
emperor built a shrine in his memory—is evident from its spread
beyond the territories over which Ashoka had ruled. Bodh Gaya
was an exceptionally important place for pilgrims and patrons
from Myanmar.26 The historian Upinder Singh points out that
the importance attached to the Mahabodhi temple is manifest in
Myanmar from epigraphs, as also from its representation in the
form of temple models, and depictions on seals and plaques. The
inscriptions which record Myanmarese ‘repair missions’ to Maha­
bodhi, ranging from the medieval to the modern, are those in
which Ashoka figures prominently. A thirteenth century ce epi­-
graph from Bodh Gaya, written in the Burmese language and script,
while recording a mission for repair dispatched by a king Dhamma­
raja from Burma, simultaneously remembers the building of the
 e p i l o g u e : t h e e m p e r o r ’s a f t e r l i f e 299

original temple there by Ashoka. ‘When 218 years of the Buddha’s

dispensation had elapsed, one of the 84,000 caityas built by Siri
Dhammasoka (i.e. the Maurya emperor Asoka), king of Jambud­
vipa, at the place where the milk rice offering had been made
(a clear reference to Sujata’s offering of payasa to Siddhartha at
Bodhgaya) fell into ruin due to the stress of age and time.’ 27 A simi­
lar association was made more than five hundred years later when,
in 1875, Mindon, king of Burma, sought permission to renovate
the Mahabodhi complex: he too invoked Ashoka. Two millennia
had passed since the Mauryan emperor was active there, with
many phases of renovation since, and yet the Burmese king said he
wanted to undertake the ‘repair of the sacred chaitya built by the
King Dharmasoka over the site of the Aparajita throne.’28
A different kind of remembrance which also stretched across
a wider expanse appeared in the accounts of another group of
Asian pilgrims, the Buddhist Chinese monks who travelled to India.
This began in around the fifth century ce, before the Burmese
endowments at Bodh Gaya, when Faxian came from Changan city
in Shensi across a northern route that traversed Central Asia. He
travelled extensively in India and then moved to Sri Lanka. His
purpose in India was to obtain the correct rules and regulations of
the Vinaya Pitaka texts. His travels were simultaneously a variant
on anthropological fieldwork, a kind of ethnographic document­
ation of what he noticed, ranging from the topography of the lands
through which he passed to the sorts of clothes that people wore,
the festivals and tales around places and people, the nature of shrines
(Buddhist and Brahmanic) and monasteries, and a great deal else.
His account highlights the fact that, some six hundred years after
Ashoka’s death, his memory was alive and well and had wormed its
way into places stretching from the hilly ranges of north-west India
to the Gangetic plains in the east. The Chinese monk mentions
Gandhara as the place where Ashoka’s son had governed; Sankisa as
the holy place where Ashoka was reported to have ‘erected a stone
pillar thirty cubits high, and on the top placed the figure of a lion’;
Ramagrama as the stupa site whose relics the emperor unsuccess­
fully coveted; and Pataliputra as the city where he reigned.29
300 ashoka in ancient india

Faxian described practically every place in relation to legends

around Ashoka. Some of these he would have known from the
Chinese version of the Ashokavadana, others would have been
recounted by local people. Sometimes there is a mixture of both.
This is suggested by his description of a message that he believed
was encoded in Ashoka’s epigraph at Pataliputra. The inscription
was on a stone pillar and, in the words of Faxian, recorded that
‘King Asoka presented the whole of Jambudvipa to the priests of
the four quarters, and redeemed it again with money, and this he
did three times.’30 This story, as the poignant end to Ashoka’s life
has highlighted, figures in the Ashokavadana and Faxian would have
been familiar with it. However, there was no allusion in that text to
these deeds of the emperor being engraved on a pillar. Possibly, this
tale was told to him by the local folk at Pataliputra who, like him,
would have seen the surface of a pillar ascribed to Ashoka as bear­
ing an indecipherable inscribed message. Evidently, by this time,
the Brahmi script in which the Ashokan epigraphs were written,
was no longer understood, allowing the writing to be ‘read’ in ways
which satisfied the beliefs and expectations of local antiquarians
and pilgrim travellers.
Local folk memory around Ashokan relics seems in this instance
to have been uncommonly long lived. Some two hundred years
later, such evidence of Ashoka’s long afterlife in popular memory
centres on a story around the Pataliputra pillar told by that other
famous Chinese pilgrim, Xuanzang, who came to India in the
seventh century. The principal part of the ‘mutilated inscription’ on
the pillar, in his words, stated that ‘Asoka-raja with a firm principle
of faith has thrice bestowed Jambudvipa as a religious offering on
Buddha, the Dharma and the assembly, and thrice he has redeem­
ed it with his jewels and treasure; and this is the record thereof.’31
Xuanzang had a remarkable appetite for antiquarian detail, noting
such facts about many other places to which he travelled or where
he halted.
He encountered Ashokan stone pillars at many places, including
Sravasti, Varanasi, Niglihawa (described as the place of the Kraku­
chhanda Buddha), and Lumbini. Occasionally, the existing state
 e p i l o g u e : t h e e m p e r o r ’s a f t e r l i f e 301

of the pillar is also described. The Lumbini pillar was broken in

the middle. This was because it fell to the ground, we are told, ‘by
the contrivance of a wicked dragon’.32 The glittering veneer of an
Ashokan column near Varanasi is admired, ‘bright and shining as a
mirror; its surface is glistening and smooth as ice.’33
While the memory of Ashoka having set up stone pillars per­
sisted, what his epigraphs recorded was entirely forgotten. The
pillar at Niglihawa, while recognized as Ashokan, is said to have
been engraved with ‘a record connected with the nirvana’ of an
earlier Buddha.34 Later, even the connection of such pillars with
Ashoka was forgotten. One sees, from an absence in chronicles
about the fourteenth-century ruler Firuz Shah Tughlaq, that when
he brought the Topra and Meerut pillars of Ashoka to Delhi their
creator king’s name does not feature, suggesting it was not known.
The Buddhist connections of some of the pillars may have sur­viv­
ed all the same. In Nepal, as we saw, Ripumalla, also a fourteenth-
century ruler, inscribed his name and the message ‘Om Mani Padme
Hum’—the mantra common among Tibetan Buddhists—on the
Ashokan pillars at Lumbini and Nigali Sagar. This suggests that
these locations continued to be important places of pilgrimage,
even among royalty. Ripumalla’s decision to inscribe his message
on Ashoka’s pillars may well mean that he saw these monoliths as
connected with an important Buddhist king of past times.
But coming back to Xuanzang: in addition to Ashokan pillars
his account preserves vivid memories and graphic stories about
stupas constructed by ‘Ashoka Raja’. Stupas that he believes were
built by Ashoka are among the shrines he documents, all the way
from Gandhara to the Gangetic plains. Almost inevitably, from this
pilgrim’s progress through India it would seem that most stupas
commemorated places relating to incidents in the Buddha’s life.
Nagar­hara is an example of this. Here a carved stone stupa ‘built
by Ashoka Raja’ was said to stand, marking the place where ‘Sakya,
when a Bodhisattva’ had met the Dipankara Buddha.35 Again, an
Ashoka stupa, he tells us, stood between the ‘Mo-su’ sangharama
and the ‘Shan-ni-lo-shi’ valley. In a clear reference to the Sibi Jataka,
he asserts that this was where in a previous birth the future Buddha
302 ashoka in ancient india

was said to have chopped up his own body into pieces so as ‘to re­
deem a dove from the power of a hawk’.36 Then there are the stupas
that Xuanzang describes as having been opened up by Ashoka to
remove and redistribute the relics they contained. The Vaishali stupa
was one such, and to authenticate the event he cites Indian texts
which stated that ‘In this stupa there was first a quantity of relics
equal to a “hoh” (ten pecks). Asoka-raja opening it, took away nine-
tenths of the whole, leaving only one-tenth behind.’37 He tells us
that this was something only Ashoka could have done. Apparently,
after Ashoka ‘there was a king of the country who wished again to
open the stupa, but at the moment when he began to do so, the
earth trembled, and he dared not proceed to open (the stupa).’38
Finally, there were those rare spots where Asoka appears to have
commemorated people and incidents in his own lifetime. Outside
Taxila, for instance, Xuanzang believes he built a stupa which
mark­ed the place where Kunala was blinded on the orders of his
unprincipled stepmother; and ‘when the blind pray to it (or before
it) with fervent faith, many of them recover their sight.’39 How many
of these stupas had actually been constructed by Ashoka? Stone
stupas were unlikely to have been built on his orders, Ashokan
examples being mainly of brick. But evidently, in the seventh cen­
tury these had come to be regarded by many Buddhist believers as
being of Mauryan antiquity. Interestingly, Xuanzang drew atten­
tion to the ruined condition of several such shrines. North-west of
Navadevakula, and at Prayaga, for instance, the stupas seem to have
been in ruins. The traveller has a typical way of alluding to their
state: they are described as possessing a reduced height, invariably
around 100 ft, and the reduction is thought to be a consequence of
their having sunk.40
Ashoka’s association with many of the places to which Xuanzang
travelled persisted well into the medieval centuries. A good exam­
ple of this is Sarnath. Here, in the twelfth century the queen of
Govindachandra of Kanauj was inscribed into a record about a
vihara that she had constructed at Sarnath. Kumaradevi was the
name of this queen while the gift was recorded as being made to
‘Sri-Dharmachakra Jina’. More specifically, the copper plate grant
says the renovations undertaken at her instance are meant to restore
 e p i l o g u e : t h e e m p e r o r ’s a f t e r l i f e 303

what existed in the time of Ashoka: ‘This Lord of the Turning of

the Wheel was restored by her in accordance with the way in which
he existed in the days of Dharmasoka, the ruler of men, and even
more wonderfully, and this vihara for that sthavira was elaborately
erected by her, and might he, placed there, stay there as long as the
moon and sun (endure).’41 Fourteen hundred years after Ashoka’s
time a queen’s donation chooses to evoke what he built at Sarnath.
This is a powerful reminder of the stamp of the emperor having
survived, especially in connection with Buddhist sacred places.
We know from Ashoka’s own epigraph that he had a close
asso­ciation with Sarnath’s monastic community; later sources
like Xuanzang’s account and Govindachandra’s inscription show
that this association was never forgotten. There are, on the other
hand, a few instances of places where Ashoka’s presence came to
be invoked that are not specifically associated with the emperor
during his lifetime. The kingdom of Kashmir is an example of this.
It is described by Xuanzang in ways that strike a resonance with
anyone who has visited it—surrounded by high mountains, with
a ‘cold and stern’ climate, people ‘handsome in appearance’ who
loved learning and were ‘well instructed’.42 It also happened to be a
region which had its own history, and from this the pilgrim quotes
to give Ashoka’s connection with the kingdom. Ashoka is said to
have built four stupas there. The Chinese visitor believes ‘each of
these has about a pint measure of relics of the Tathagata.’43 Ashoka
is described as a king of Magadha who ‘extended his power over the
world, and was honoured even by the most distant people. He deeply
reverenced the three gems, and had a loving regard for all living
beings.’44 Of the priests whom the king honoured, though, was a
group that became schismatic, and this group Ashoka intended to
drown in the Ganga. They, ‘having seen the danger threatening their
lives, by exercise of their spiritual power flew away’, and arriving in
Kashmir concealed themselves.45 When Ashoka-raja heard of this he
repented and begged them to return. They refused. Consequently,
as atonement, he built 500 monasteries for them in Kashmir.
These vignettes are revealing. It seems that in Kashmir, if Xuan­
zang is to be believed, there was a strong tradition linking Ashoka
with the valley. Within this tradition the emperor was recognized
304 ashoka in ancient india

in his political persona—as ruling a large empire; and in his reli­

gious role—as the builder of stupas and monasteries. Some five
hundred years later Ashoka was again invoked, now in Kashmir’s
twelfth-century chronicle, the Rajatarangini of Kalhana. A learned
Sanskrit poet, Kalhana had put together this chronicle replete
with historical detail, causing it to be described by its modern
translator, M.A. Stein, as a text that came ‘nearest in character to
the Chronicles of Mediaeval Europe and of the Muhammad[an]
East.’46 Regarding the possibility that the Chinese pilgrim used
an early history of Kashmir, Stein noted that Kalhana had got the
information on Ashoka in the Rajatarangini from an earlier author
called Chavillakara.47 In Chavillakara’s list, Ashoka figures first in
the king list—as he does in Xuanzang’s account of Kashmir.
That said, there are similarities as well as differences in how
Ashoka was remembered in the twelfth-century chronicle as against
Xuanzang’s account. Kalhana, like Xuanzang, drew attention to
Ashoka’s political prowess, clear from the statement that he reigned
‘over the earth’.48 Kalhana drew attention to his religious persona
as well: this king had ‘freed himself from sins’ and ‘embraced the
doctrine of Jina’.49 The reference to Jina is exactly how the twelfth-
century Sarnath inscription of Govindachandra had referred to
the Buddha. While we are uncertain about how this should be
contextualized, what seems certain is that the emperor’s personal
metamorphosis is what the text appears to be hinting at, and this
appears to be based on the memory of a reliable older tradition.
Ashoka is also chronicled here as a builder. For the first time,
however, we hear of him as the founder of a town, Srinagari, not far
from present-day Srinagar. This is described with uncharacteristic
hyperbole as ‘most important on account of its ninety-six lakhs of
houses resplendent with wealth.’50 As for religious structures, there
were two places where he built stupas, Suskaletra and Vitastatra;
at the latter he also built a chaitya. He is even said to have built
Shiva shrines at Vijayeshvara. One of these was in the form of a
stone enclosure, which replaced the old enclosure there, and within
it he erected two temples. They were called Ashokeshvara, evidently
after the king himself.51 It was also from the god Shiva, whom ‘he
 e p i l o g u e : t h e e m p e r o r ’s a f t e r l i f e 305

had pleased by his austerities’, that Ashoka obtained a son—who

then exterminated the Mlecchas from Kashmir.52
Kalhana’s account of Ashoka is followed by his description of the
exploits of the son, Jalauka, who succeeded him. No such son is
mentioned in any other textual source, not even in the list of kings
in the Puranas. The family name ‘Maurya’, which figures in other
sources that mention the dynasty, is missing too. The point which
emerges from all these reminiscences is that there were genuine
local traditions that kept the memory of Ashoka alive, and within
these he and his son were seen as having been among Kashmir’s
early rulers.
The story of Ashoka’s association with Kashmir does not end
here. It continues into the sixteenth century because the Rajata­
rangini is mentioned in Abu’l Fazl’s famous Ain-i Akbari. When
the imperial standards were carried into Kashmir, Akbar was pre­-
sented with a copy of this history of Kashmir. Abu’l Fazl says: ‘a
book called Raj Tarangini written in the Sanskrit tongue contain­
ing an account of the princes of Kashmir during a period of some
four thousand years, was presented to His Majesty. It had been
the custom in that country for its rulers to employ certain learned
men in writing its annals. His Majesty who was desirous of extend­
ing the bounds of knowledge appointed capable interpreters in
its translation which in a short time was happily accomplished.’53
Among the kings narrated as having ruled Kashmir is Ashoka,
who ‘abolished the Brahmanical religion and established the Jaina
faith’.54 Probably ‘Jaina’ is a mistranslation of ‘Jina’—the word in
Kalhana’s Rajatarangini now repeated in Abu’l Fazl’s account. Two
of Ashoka’s descendants, Jalauka and Damodar (II), also figure here.
So Ashoka would have been known in Akbar’s court and possibly
beyond, via texts that used the Rajatarangini.55
The several mnemonic ways in which Ashoka’s religion and
rule survived from his death in the third century bce to Akbar’s
day about 1700 years later show that the existence of this an­-
cient ruler was never entirely forgotten. What one may well ask
at this point is whether these memories of Ashoka were based on
what he had himself put in the public domain or were a kind of
306 ashoka in ancient india

concoction. Throughout, my own analysis of the historical Ashoka

and of how he fashioned his image has highlighted the centrality
of his representation as a Buddhist. His image as royal convert via
edicts, his stupas and pillars, his stern proscriptions against the
schismati­cally inclined, his prescriptions to the Sangha—all rein­
force the image of the monarch as virtually a Buddhist zealot. Sure­
ly, if this image of Ashoka as Buddhist sovereign is so obvious to
us, it was also likely to have been the way in which his own subjects
would have seen him. The archetypal Buddhist king that so often
recurs seems clear evidence of how he had fashioned his image.
Yet there was another pivotal image, also nurtured in Ashoka’s
own lifetime and through his own edicts: of a compulsively commu­
nicative and accessible emperor seeking to reach out to his people,
a sharer with them of his atonement for the carnage at Kalinga, a
humane governor benevolently engaged with all living beings. In
the Buddhist chronicles and texts there was no recollection of this
persona, nor even the real reason for Ashoka’s rethink on rulership
in the wake of Kalinga. A similar amnesia marks the representations
of events relating to his rulership in the art of ancient India. Story­
tellers and artists, instead of being attentive to the complexities and
several aspects of Ashoka’s own words, appear anxious to see him
primarily through a Buddhist lens. Thus it was that the political
genius of Ashoka faded away, just as knowledge of the scripts in
which the words of the emperor were inscribed shrivelled into the
dust. Ironically, even when those words came to be recovered and
deciphered in the nineteenth century, artistic representations, as
we saw with Tagore and Bose, continued to be anchored in Bud­-
dhist stories.
Closer to our own time, in the 1960s the artist Meera Mukherjee
etched out a more nuanced historical Ashoka in the form of a
massive metal sculpture. She is said to have cast Ashoka in this form
as a protest against the violence of the Naxalite movement in Bengal
during the 1960s.56 The volume and size of Mukherjee’s Ashoka
suggests the great power of the emperor, but the sword turned
down and the anguished face reflect his transformation at Kalinga
(Fig. Epilogue 3).
 e p i l o g u e : t h e e m p e r o r ’s a f t e r l i f e 307

For all we know, if knowledge of Ashoka’s words had survived

in all their nuances—as did the memory of Ashoka’s Buddhist
avatara—he may have been remembered as the founder of a unique
political model of humane governance, one which would have
been closer to the historical emperor. But in this respect the afterlife
of Ashoka, like his real life, remains poised between legend and
the truth.
 Appendix
The Inscriptions of Ashoka

Inscription Year of Location Substance

and Type Discovery

1. Girnar— 1822 Junagadh district Fourteen edicts which

major rock Gujarat concern diverse
edicts subjects: protection of
animals from mindless
sacrifice; reduction in
royal meat consumption;
centrality of dhamma;
inauguration of dhamma
yatras; Kalinga war and
its atonement; denuncia­-
tion of social rituals
regarded as superficial;
proper courtesy to all
kinds of people ranging
from slaves to Brahmans;
cessation in killing of
living beings; public
culture in which every
 appendix: the inscriptions of ashoka 309
Appendix (contd.)

Inscription Year of Location Substance

and Type Discovery

sect honours every other;

king’s power to punish
forest dwellers; spread
of dhammic message to
borders and states
beyond borders; a foreign
policy based on welfare
measures; creation of
senior officials called
dharma-mahamatras.
Below 13th rock edict, a
surviving line which
mentions a ‘white
elephant’ bringing
happiness to the world

2. Allahabad- 1834 Allahabad city Six edicts which concern

Kosam (could have come various subjects: pro-
pillar from Kaushambi) moting morality
edicts Uttar Pradesh to secure worldly and
otherworldly happiness;
state vigilance in
encouraging people to
practice dhamma;
insistence on self-respon-
sibility for virtuous and
evil deeds; granting
functional autonomy to
rajukkas; recording the
release of prisoners and
respite for death row
convicts; injunctions
against killing of ani­-
mals, birds and fish on
particular days, and
310 appendix: the inscriptions of ashoka
Appendix (contd.)

Inscription Year of Location Substance

and Type Discovery

mitigating cruelty
towards them
3. Queen’s Edict 1834 On Allahabad Records donation of
pillar Queen Karuvaki: mango
groves, gardens, alms-
houses which on her
request were registered in
her name
4. Lauriya- 1834 Champaran Similar to Allahabad-
Araraj pillar district Bihar Kosam edicts
edicts
5. Lauriya- 1834 Champaran Similar to Allahabad-
Nandangarh district Bihar Kosam edicts
pillar edicts
6. Shahbazgarhi 1836 Mardan district Similar to Girnar edicts
major rock Pakistan
edicts
7. Dhauli-major 1837 Puri district Edicts 1 to 10 and 14
rock edicts Orissa similar to Girnar edicts.
Nos. 11–13 here replaced
by two separate edicts
specifically addressed to
Tosali Mahamatras
whose affective mould
underlines Ashoka’s
attempt at building
bridges with the people
of Kalinga. Separate
Rock Edict 2 addresses
border people in a
similar way and is aimed
at winning their
confidence
 appendix: the inscriptions of ashoka 311
Appendix (contd.)

Inscription Year of Location Substance

and Type Discovery

8. Delhi-Meerut 1837 Meerut district Similar to Allahabad-

pillar edicts (original pillar Kosam edicts
brought to Delhi)
Uttar Pradesh
9. Delhi-Topra 1837 Ambala district Six edicts similar to
pillar edicts (original pillar Allahabad-Kosam edicts
brought to Delhi) with the addition of a
Haryana seventh edict, a retros-
pective statement where
Ashoka sums up the
work he had done and
points out that while
moral restrictions and
conversion through
persuasion have been his
main methods for
initiating change, the
second of these has been
more meaningful
10. Hissar (and 1838 Hissar district Fragments of a few letters
Fatehabad) Haryana that have survived,
pillar insufficient to under-
epigraph stand message
11. Sasaram- 1839 Shahbad district Edict speaks of Ashoka
minor rock Bihar becoming a Buddhist,
edict the greater morality he
created in Jambudvipa,
the availability of this
path for everyone, and
instructions about
engraving his message
12. Bairat- 1840 Jaipur district Edict asks Buddhist
Buddhist rock Rajasthan community to listen
edict and adhere to
312 appendix: the inscriptions of ashoka
Appendix (contd.)

Inscription Year of Location Substance

and Type Discovery

specific dhammic
expositions
13. Barabar cave 1847 Jahanabad district Three epigraphs about
inscriptions Bihar donation of caves to
ascetics, with Ajivikas
mentioned by name
14. Jaugada— 1850 Ganjam district Same as Dhauli edicts
major rock Orissa (with Samapa Mahama-
edicts tras being addressed)
15. Kalsi—major 1860 Dehradun district Similar in content to
rock edicts Uttarakhand Girnar edicts. Figure of
elephant on north face of
the rock has the word
‘gajatame’ (‘the best
elephant’) inscribed
below it
16. Sanchi 1863 Raisen district Commands against
Schism edict Madhya Pradesh breaking the Sangha
and prescribes punish-
ment in case that was
to happen
17. Rupnath— 1871 Jabalpur district Similar in content to
minor rock Madhya Pradesh Sasaram edict
edict
18. Bairat— 1872 Jaipur district Similar in content to
minor rock Rajasthan Sasaram edict
edict
19. Jaugada— 1872 Ganjam district Edicts 1 to 10 and 14
major rock Orissa similar to Girnar edicts.
edicts Like Dhauli, nos 11–13
here replaced by two
separate edicts
 appendix: the inscriptions of ashoka 313

Appendix (contd.)

Inscription Year of Location Substance

and Type Discovery

20. Allahabad- 1877 On Allahabad Similar to Sanchi edict

Kosam Schism pillar with the mahamatras of
edict Kosambi mentioned
(they were being
commanded)
21. Sopara— 1882 Thana district Two fragments contain­-
major rock Maharashtra ing 8th and 9th edicts
edicts
22. Mansehra— 1888-9 Hazara district Similar in content to
major rock Pakistan Girnar edicts
edicts
23. Brahmagiri— 1892 Chitaldrug district First segment similar to
minor rock Karnataka Sasaram. Second
edicts1 segment speaks about the
ancient rule which must
be acted upon: obedience
to parents, elders,
compassion to animals,
importance of speaking
the truth and reverence
that students must show
to elders and relatives
24. Siddapura mi- 1892 Chitaldrug district Similar to Brahmagiri
nor rock edicts Karnataka edicts
25. Jatinga- 1892 Chitaldrug district Similar to Brahmagiri
Rameshwara Karnataka edicts
minor rock
edicts
26. Lumbini pillar 1896 Rupandehi district Records Ashoka’s
inscription Nepal pilgrimage to the place of
the Buddha’s birth
1  UnlikeUdegolam and Nittur, the edicts here are not on separate surfaces but
appear as a single message.
314 appendix: the inscriptions of ashoka

Appendix (contd.)

Inscription Year of Location Substance

and Type Discovery

Mentions that he set up a

pillar and reduced taxes
of Lumbini village

27. Nigali Sagar 1895 Kapilavastu district Records two events:

pillar in- Nepal enlargement of stupa of
scription Buddha Konakamana
by Ashoka and his
pilgrimage there when
he set up a pillar

28. Rampurva 1902 Champaran district Similar to Allahabad-

pillar edicts Bihar Kosam edicts

29. Sarnath 1904 Varanasi district Similar to Allahabad-

Schism Uttar Pradesh Kosam Schism edict, but
edict with instructions that it
was to be submitted to
the sangha of monks
and nuns as also those
pertaining to dissemi-
nation

30. Taxila stone 1914–15 Rawalpindi district Concerns avoidance of

edict Pakistan killing of living beings,
respect for elders,
parents, Brahmans,
monks, and relatives

31. Maski minor 1915 Raichur district Similar to Sasaram edict

rock edict Karnataka

32. Erragudi 1928 Kurnool district Similar to Brahmagiri

minor rock Andhra Pradesh with one major differ-
edicts ence in that in its
second segment, where it
outlines the nature of the
 appendix: the inscriptions of ashoka 315
Appendix (contd.)

Inscription Year of Location Substance

and Type Discovery

morality to be propa-
gated by officials, the
manner in which this is
to be done is outlined in
an overly officious tone

33. Erragudi— 1929 Kurnool district Similar in content to

major rock Andhra Pradesh Girnar edicts
edicts

34. Gavimath 1931 Raichur district Similar to Maski edict

minor rock Karnataka
edict

35. Palkigundu 1931 Raichur district Similar to Maski edict

minor rock Karnataka
edict

36. Pul-I Pre-1932 Jalalabad district Aramaic edict concerned

Darunta Afghanistan with prevention of
edict killing living beings

37. Rajula- 1953 Kurnool district Similar to Erragudi edicts

Mandagiri Andhra Pradesh
minor rock
edicts

38. Gujjara minor 1953 Datia district Similar to Sasaram edict

rock edict Madhya Pradesh

39. Shari-i-Kuna 1957 Kandahar district Greek and Aramaic edict

edict Afghanistan which says that the
doctrine of piety,
along with restraint in
killing living beings, led
to hunters and fishermen
following suit
316 appendix: the inscriptions of ashoka

Appendix (contd.)

Inscription Year of Location Substance

and Type Discovery

40. Ahraura 1961 Mirzapur district Similar to Sasaram edict

rock edict Uttar Pradesh
41. Kandahar 1963 Kandahar district Fragmentary edict which
Afghanistan deals with parts of Rock
Edicts XII and XIII
42. Kandahar 1963 Kandahar district Aramaic-Magadhi edict
Aramaic Afghanistan about obedience to
stone edict parents and teachers;
respect for Brahmans
and Shramanas; respect
for the humble and slaves
43. Bahapur 1966 East of Kailash Similar to Bairat edict
minor rock New Delhi
edict
44. Laghman I 1969 Jalalabad district Mentions the king’s
Aramaic Afghanistan success in pushing out
edict hunting and fishing
45. Laghman II 1973 Jalalabad district Similar to Laghman I
Aramaic Afghanistan
edict
46. Panguraria 1975 Sehore district Similar to Sasaram edict
minor rock Madhya Pradesh with one addition: the
edict first line mentions that
the king was addressing
a ‘Kumara’ from his
march to ‘Upunitha-
vihara’ in Manema-desha
47. Nittur minor 1977 Bellary district Two separate rocks with
rock edicts Karnataka edicts but with the
message being similar to
Erragudi
 appendix: the inscriptions of ashoka 317
Appendix (contd.)

Inscription Year of Location Substance

and Type Discovery

48. Udegolam 1978 Bellary district Two separate rocks with

minor rock Karnataka edicts similar to Nittur
edicts (Minor Rock Edict I
on one of the rocks can
barely be seen)

49. Sannathi— 1989 Gulbarga district Stone with 12th, 14th and
major rock Karnataka two separate edicts, as at
edicts Jaugada and Dhauli

50. Ratanpurwa 2009 Bhabua district Similar to Sasaram edict

minor rock Bihar
edict

 Notes

Notes to Prelude
1. For a recent overview of these political units, Sarao (2014).
2. The nine monarchs of the Nanda dynasty were Mahapadma, the
founder, who was followed—according to a Buddhist text, the
Maha­bodhivamsa—by Panduka, Pandugati, Bhutapala, Rashtrapala,
Govin­shanaka, Dassiddhaka, Kaivarta, and Dhana. The Puranas say
that Mahapadma was succeeded by his eight sons, probably kings in
succession. Raychaudhuri (1953): 208.
3. The Dipavamsa 12.5–6 says Ashoka sent the following message to the
Lanka ruler: ‘I have taken my refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma,
and the Samgha; I have avowed myself a lay pupil of the Doctrine
of the Sakyaputta. Imbue your mind also with the faith in this triad,
in the highest religion of the Jina, take your refuge in the Teacher.’
Oldenberg (1879): 167.
4. Tambiah (1976): 5.
5. Deeg (2009): 128–9. Also see Deeg (2012): 370–1.
6. Wells (1920): 394.
7. Nehru (1946): 52. Nehru also wrote about his emotional apprecia­
tion of India through key historical figures, ‘men who seemed to
know life and understand it, and [who] out of their wisdom  .  .  .  had
built a structure that gave India a cultural stability which lasted for
a thousand years’ (ibid.: 51–2). Ashoka was one of three figures he
specifically mentioned, the other two being the Buddha and Akbar.
 n o t e s t o p r e lu d e 319
8. For a discussion of these authors, Edde (2011): 4–7.
9. For a comparison between Achaemenid and Ashokan epigraphs,
Salomon (2009): 45–7.
10. An early statement on the differences between the West and Asia is
a chapter on ‘Characteristics of Asian Rhetoric’ in Oliver (1971):
258–72.
11. This and other references have been discussed by Robert J. Connors in
his work on Greek rhetoric. Connors (1986): 42–3.
12. Ibid.: 55.
13. Oliver (1971): 101.
14. Ibid.: 89.
15. Ibid.: 132.
16. Orality and memorization continue to be part of priestly culture in
contemporary India. See Fuller (2001).
17. Lopez (1995): 38.
18. While there is a debate on the date of the Buddha’s death—or his
‘Parinibbana’ as it is called in Buddhist tradition—with the dates
ranging from the fifth to the fourth centuries bce, it is c. 480 bce that
I accept here as the date of his death. Since he is said to have lived for
about eighty years, his birth would have been around 540 bce. For a
summary of the various dates, Singh (2009): 257.
19. ‘Thus have I heard’ is how the Maha-Parinibbana-Sutta (The Book of
the Great Decease), I.1, begins. See Rhys Davids (1881): 1. In the same
chapter, while recounting the Buddha’s interaction with bhikkhus
(Buddhist monks), the Buddha is on more than one occasion shown
as addressing the monks thus: ‘Listen well, and attend, and I will
speak.’ Maha-Parinibbana-Sutta 1.6 and 1.7. See Rhys Davids (1881):
6–7.
20. Arthashastra (AS hereafter) 1.5.14. Kane (1972): 11. ‘Itihasa’, in the
opinion of the text, was made up of the Puranas, Itivrtta, Akhyayika,
Udaharana, Dharmashastra, and Arthashastra.
21. Fittingly, the title of Chakrabarti’s (2011) book on Ashoka is Royal
Messages by the Wayside.
22. The silver tetradrachm of Ptolemy I of Egypt, for instance, showed
Alexander with an elephant headdress and the horns of the Egyptian
god Ammon. For a description and photograph, Cherry (2007):
259. Allen’s book contains an illustration of a silver coin issued by
Alexander which bears an image of the conqueror himself, which
Allen says is ‘the only known image of Alexander to survive from
320 n o t e s t o p r e lu d e
his lifetime.’ No specific details are provided: see Allen (2012): 47.
Apparently, this medallion was issued in very small numbers after
the battle of the Hydaspes (the name of the Jhelum river in classical
sources). Romm (2012): 216.
23. Cherry (2007): 295.
24. Historians of the ancient world, such as Plutarch and Cassius Dio
Cocceianus, wrote about Cleopatra. While Plutarch saw her as mani­
pulative, Dio’s Cleopatra had insatiable passion and avarice. In the
medieval world, the traveller and historian Al-Masudi introduced
another version of the queen—as a philosopher and author. Among
the most popular depictions has been Shakespeare’s, which saw the
queen as a heroine ruined by passion. For a brief overview of the
afterlife of Cleopatra, Tyldesley (2008): 205–17.
25. Ibid.: 7–8. Joyce Tyldesley’s very readable account of Cleopatra’s
life and times is upfront about the lack of primary material: ‘Given
these limitations of evidence it is clearly never going to be possible
to write a conventional biography of Cleopatra; there are simply too
many important details missing’ (p. 7).
26. Cherry (2007): 7.
27. The names of prominent historical figures, ranging from Cleopatra
to Mahatma Gandhi, frequently figure in the titles of books on them.
The same holds true for Ashoka: scores of books carry his name on
their title pages: Asoka (Bhandarkar, 1925), Asoka, the Righteous: A
Definitive Biography (Guruge, 1993), Asoka (Mookerji, 1928), Asoka
and the Decline of the Mauryas (Thapar, 1961), Asoka – The King
and the Man (Thaplyal, 2012), Ashoka (Allen, 2012), and Asoka as
Depicted in his Edicts (Hazra, 2007) are a few such. For a detailed
biblio­graphy on Ashoka, Falk (2006).
28. This is evident from the handful of books on them, as compared to
the scores of writings on Ashoka. For Samudragupta, Gokhale (1962);
for Chandragupta, Mookerji (1952); for a recent study of Didda,
see the relevant chapters in Rangachari (2009).
29. Hinghausen (1966), Mookerji (1926), Devahuti (1970), Sharma
(1970), S.R. Goyal (1986), and S. Goyal (2006).
30. Guha (2004): 246. Ramachandra Guha himself has written the
biographies of Verrier Elwin (1999) and Mahatma Gandhi (2013),
apart from essays on a range of scientists, statesmen, academics, and
litterateurs.
 n o t e s t o p r e lu d e 321
31. The historian of Buddhism T.W. Rhys Davids describes Ashoka as
one of the most striking and interesting personalities in world history
because of his simple, sane, and tolerant view of conduct and life, a
man who was ‘free from all the superstitions that dominated so many
minds, then as now, in East and West alike.’ See Rhys Davids (1903):
306.
32. Among scholars Romila Thapar, more than fifty years ago, stated this
with greater clarity than most. It was widely felt, she said, that ‘a long
political tradition beginning with Asoka, of conscious non-violence
and a toleration of all beliefs political and religious, continued un­
broken through the centuries culminating in the political philosophy
of Gandhi’. Thapar (1961): 214.
33. For Tagore’s invocation of Ashoka, see Sen (1997): 9.
34. Ananya Vajpeyi argues that Nehru may well have seen himself as ‘the
new Asoka’. For this and various elements which made Ashoka a major
figure in Nehru’s quest as a political leader, Vajpeyi (2012): 194–200.
35. For the text of the resolution moved by Nehru, see Agrawala (1964).
36. Allen (2012); Kejariwal (1988): 202–9; Chakrabarti (1988): 33–4.
37. This has been discussed at length in the epilogue of the present
book.
38. Cunningham (1877).
39. By the time Hultzsch’s Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum was pub­­-
lished in 1925, several minor rock edicts in Karnataka had been
discovered and their texts were, thus, included in it. For a chronology
of the discoveries of the edicts and inscriptions, see the appendix of
the present book.
40. Indraji was also the discoverer of some of the Sopara edicts. Virchand
Dharamsey’s book (2012) is essential reading for an understanding of
the remarkable life of this pioneering archaeologist.
41. Ibid.: 139.
42. See the appendix of the present book.
43. See Thaplyal (2009).
44. Smith (1909).
45. Ibid.: 23.
46. He is known to have said that ‘the best elements in the plastic, pict­
orial, numismatic and dramatic arts of ancient India are of foreign,
chiefly Graeco-Roman origin.’ Smith (1889).
47. Smith (1909): 46, 47.
48. Bhandarkar (1925): vii.
322 notes to chapter 1
49. Ibid.: 61.
50. Mookerji (1928).
51. Barua (1946): 329–30.
52. Thapar (1961).
53. Ibid.: 138–40.
54. Ibid.: 5.
55. Ibid.: 214–15.
56. Ibid.: 215.
57. Falk (2006): 13–54.
58. This is the reason why all the finer points pertaining to the sources
which have been explored and analysed in hundreds of scholarly
articles and books are not discussed in exacting detail. Where they
figure, I have tried to write about such points in a way that will be
intelligible to the general reader.

Notes to Chapter 1: An Apocryphal Early Life

1. The Harshacarita of Bana (IV.142) describes the birth of Harsha thus:
‘At length in the month of Jyaistha, on the twelfth day of the dark
fortnight, the Pleiads being in the ascendant, just after the twilight
came, when the young night had begun to climb, a sudden cry of
women arose in the harem. Hurriedly, issuing forth, Suyatra, daughter
of Yasovati’s nurse and herself dearly beloved, fell at the king’s feet,
crying, “Good news! your majesty, you are blessed with the birth of
a second son.”’ Cowell and Thomas (1968): 109. Also see Devahuti
(1970): 65.
2. Beveridge (1902): vol. I, 43.
3. Kosmin 2014: 57.
4. For a detailed and learned exposition of the date of Ashoka, see Egger­
mont (1956). This examines all sources which preserved the chronicle
of Ashoka and arrives at the date, mentioned here, by comparing
the data of his inscriptions with those that can be gleaned from the
literary traditions.
5. For systems of dating used in the inscriptions of ancient India, see
Salomon (1998): 172–6. For the chronology of Ashoka, Eggermont
(1956). The chronology of the Maurya dynasty has been variously
worked out and is usually based on a combination of the Buddhist
sources and Puranic evidence. The dates can still differ depending
 notes to chapter 1 323
on the aspect of a particular tradition relied upon. Compare Thapar
(1961): 14–16 with, for instance, Mookerji (1957): 9–10.
6. Saha (1953): 4.
7. For regnal and other ‘dates’ in ancient Indian inscriptions, Salomon
(1998): 170–98.
8. Sarnath stone inscription of Kumaragupta II, verse 1. Chhabra and
Gai (1981): 179, 321–2.
9. The historian Beni Madhab Barua had this to say about his reticence:
‘Nothing is more striking and more disappointing to the students
of Asoka’s inscriptions than that nowhere in them he has either
mentioned or referred to his father and grandfather, his mother
and maternal relations, as well as relations of his queens. He has not
even cared anywhere to introduce himself as a scion of the Maurya
family.’ Barua (1946): 5.
10. Line 2, Jayaswal and Banerji (1933): 86.
11. Rock Edict 9 makes this evident. See Girnar version in Hultzsch
(1925): 16.
12. AS 2.10.4, Kangle (1972): pt II, 92.
13. For a bibliography on the life of the Buddha, Nakamura (1989):
16–21. For a popular account of the life of the Buddha, Strong
(2000).
14. Schober (1997): 4.
15. For the Ashokavadana, Strong (1989). While there may have been
earlier literary versions of the story of Ashoka, this is chronologically
the earliest text to have survived.
16. For Avadana literature, Winternitz (1933): vol. II, 277–94.
17. Schober (1997): x.
18. For this story, aptly called ‘The Gift of Dirt’, Strong (1989): 200–4.
19. This section, including the quotations, is based on Strong (1989):
198–204.
20. For a discussion of this ‘inaccuracy’, Strong (1989): 21–2.
21. See Moore (1921): 102.
22. In the Ashokavadana, Ashoka’s mother is not named. For the vari­-
ous names of Ashoka’s mother, Guruge (1993): 26–9.
23. Strong (1989): 204.
24. Chakrabarti (2001): 166–7; Sinha (2000): 22–5; and Prasad (2006).
This was a city marked by burnt brick structures ranging from an
earthen rampart revetted with burnt bricks to wells and drains.
324 notes to chapter 1
25. The fair, good-looking, and gracious daughter who would become
Bindusara’s wife and Ashoka’s mother is in the Ashokavadana men­
tioned as being the daughter of a Brahman from Champa. See Strong
(1989): 204.
26. AS 1.17.18–19. Kangle (1972): pt II, 39–41.
27. Strong (1989): 204.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. This forms the subtitle of the book written by Basham (1951).
32. Ibid.: 3–9.
33. Ibid.: 135.
34. Ibid.
35. Vinaya ii.284, cited in Basham (1951): 136. Also see ‘Maha Parinibbana
Suttanta’, Digha Nikaya ii.162, in Rhys Davids (1910): vol. II, 183–4.
Here too, the same story, about the encounter between Maha-
Kassapa with monks and an Ajivika along the high road to Pava, is
mentioned.
36. Basham (1951): 140–1.
37. Vamsatthappakasini is cited on this point by Guruge (1993): 26
38. Law (1954): 8–9.
39. For the texts of the epigraphs, Hultzsch (1925): 181–2.
40. For a description of the Barabar caves, Gupta (1980): 189–221.
41. Strong (1989: 27), draws our attention to the presence of some Ashoka
stories being represented on the second–first centuries bce bas-reliefs
of the great stupa at Sanchi.
42. Strong (1989): 174.
43. Chapter VI of the Mahavamsa. See Geiger (1912): 51. The text tells
us that on seeing the tiger she ‘bethought of the prophesy of the
soothsayers which she had heard, and without fear she caressed
him stroking his limbs.’ Twins, a son and a daughter, were born of
this union. All the following references to Geiger (1912) refer to his
translation of the Mahavamsa.
44. Geiger (1912): 65.
45. Kane (1994): vol. V, pt I, 526.
46. VII.64. See Karambelkar (1959): 154.
47. For a summary, Hilton (1996). Also see Kargupta (2002), especially
chapter 5.
 notes to chapter 2 325
48. The ones mentioned are: Jyestha or Vicrt (i.e. Mula nakshatra) or a
day called tiger-like (on an evil or terrible nakshatra). Kane (1994):
vol. V, pt I, 524.
49. Ibid.: 531.
50. Ibid.: 532.
51. Rowley (1956): 7–8.
52. Tottoli (2002): 22.
53. See Moore (1921): 110.
54. Kane (1994): vol. V, pt I, 527. A similar disdain is evident in a Buddhist
legend aptly called Nakkhata Jataka. In this, a town family loses out
on a country girl whom they want wedded to their son because the
family’s favoured ascetic maintains out of pique that the stars are not
favourable on that particular day. The family of the girl, having made
all the required arrangements, then marry her off to someone else.
The advice of a wise man in the town at the end of the tale, sums up
the story’s attitude to ‘lucky days’ and planetary dispositions:
‘The fool may watch for ‘‘days,’’
Yet luck shall always miss;
‘‘’Tis luck itself is luck’s own star
What can mere stars achieve?’
See Cowell (1990 reprint): I, 124–6.
55. AS I.9.9. Kangle (1972): pt II, 18.
56. ‘Nalakasutta’, Sutta Nipata 11, in Chalmers (1931): 165–73.
57. Sutta Nipata 11.690. See Chalmers (1931): 167.
58. Goswami (2001): 99–105.
59. Cowell and Thomas (1968): 109–10.

Notes to Chapter 2: Pataliputra and the Prince

1. Beal (1884): vol. III, 332–3.
2. It is surprising that Xuanzang got this basic fact wrong. One wond­
ers if the Chinese translations of the Ashokavadana, with which he
must have been familiar, had omitted the section on Ashoka’s birth in
which his conception is described in some detail.
3. Watters (1904–5): vol. II, 87.
4. Strong (1989): 8.
5. Beal (1884): vol. III, 327. This is Book VIII, which has a large section
on Pataliputra and Ashoka.
326 notes to chapter 2
6. Strong (1989): 7.
7. There were two Chinese translations of versions of the Ashokavadana,
one going back to c. 300 ce and another compiled in 512 ce. See
Strong (1989): 16, n.46.
8. In a seminar held in 1971, the issue of whether the designation of the
North Black Polished Ware should be changed was discussed. This
is because such pottery was found in western India and the Deccan,
and we now know that it is found in the peninsular South as well.
Moreover, there are shades other than black, ranging from golden to
brown, and also because the term ‘polished’ can be misleading since
the surface lustre was not produced through polishing. Archaeologists
stayed with the existing designation because the material is found in
much larger quantity in the North than elsewhere. Additionally, more
than 80 per cent of the specimens of this pottery are black. As for
the term ‘polished’, it accurately described what the pottery surface
looked like and thus was taken to be a reference to the resultant effect
that was created. See Sinha (1971–2): 29–33.
9. For an overview of the archaeology of Pataliputra, Sinha (2000):
88–134, and Kumar (1987). Kumar has summarized the issue of the
dating of the NBP phase on the basis of the excavations of B.P. Sinha
and L.A. Narain (p. 220): ‘The NBP level in Pataliputra as based upon
the excavations at Sadargali and Mahavirghata has been ascribed to
a period ranging from 6th century bc to 2nd century ad. The NBP
sherds continued right from the earliest occupation levels but in its
upper level the NBP was found associated with coins of the lanky
bull type of Kausambi prevalent before circa 100 bc. The coins were
collected in fairly good number but immediately after this level the
NBP sherds disappear completely, hence, the upper limit of this ware
has been placed somewhere towards the end of 150 bc or later. The
lower limit of the NBP ware was mainly fixed on the basis of the
fragments of couchant bull and other polished stone pieces of the
Mauryan period which came from the mid level of Period I. Right
below the level the 5’ deposit must have taken 2 or 3 centuries to set
at the site. Punch-marked and cast coins generally belonging to the
period between 5th century bc to 2nd century bc were also found in
association with the NBP sherds. Thus the chronology of the NBP
at Pataliputra has been determined taking into account the Mauryan
sculptural fragments bearing typical Mauryan polish from the mid-
level and the 5’ deposit yielding NBP sherds continuing right below
 notes to chapter 2 327
this level upto the natural soil. This indicated an earlier time span of
the NBP types at Pataliputra.’ For the prediction of the Buddha, ‘Maha
Parinibbana Suttanta’, Digha Nikaya ii.86, in Rhys Davids (1910):
vol. 2, 92.
10. ‘Maha Parinibbana Suttanta’, Digha Nikaya ii.86, in Rhys Davids
(1910): vol. 2, 92.
11. Ghosh (1989): vol. 2, 362–5.
12. It now seems that, contrary to received wisdom, Megasthenes was
part of the entourage of Sibyrtius (as stated by Arrian) rather than of
Seleucus. See Bosworth (1996): 117. For an alternative view, Kosmin
(2014): appendix.
13. Bosworth (1996).
14. Brown (1957): 15.
15. Majumdar (1958) and (1960); Sethna (1960).
16. McCrindle (1877): 80 and 114.
17. Ibid.: 69.
18. Ibid.: 66.
19. Allchin (1995): 202.
20. This is George Erdosy’s estimate on the basis of Megasthenes’ ac­count.
See ibid.
21. Remnants of the palisade have been traced at Lohanipura, Bulandi­
bagh, Bahadurpur, Kumrahar, Maharajakhand, Sevai Tank, and
Gandhi Tank. Altekar and Mishra (1959): 7.
22. Allchin (1995): 202.
23. McCrindle (1877): 72–3.
24. AS 1.21.1 and I.21.13. Kangle (1972): pt II, 51, 53.
25. Luders (1963): 118–19.
26. Sinha (2000): 127–8.
27. Altekar and Mishra (1959): 7.
28. Page (1926–7): 135.
29. Beglar (1878): 27.
30. Waddell (1903):15.
31. Ibid.
32. For an account of how this hall was discovered, Lahiri (2005): 134–8.
33. Bose (2009): 81–2, 109. At Chirand and Senuar, sal has been found
in neolithic horizons which go back to many centuries before the
construction of Pataliputra’s ramparts. The remains in Senuar be­-
long to c. 2200–1950 bce; in the case of Chirand these go back to
328 notes to chapter 2
c. 2600 bce. For the excavations of Chirand, Verma (2007), and
Senuar, Singh (2003).
34. Dhavalikar (1977): 21.
35. Gupta (1980): 157–8.
36. Shere (1951).
37. Gupta (1980): 55–9.
38. In later sources Kautilya is sometimes known by other names:
Vishnugupta and Chanakya. The Arthashastra’s first chapter men­
tions towards the end that the ‘shastta’ was composed by Kautilya.
In the colophons at the end of the various books as well, that is was
composed by Kautilya is also mentioned.
39. Shamasastry cites several such sources such as the Vishnupurana,
Kamandaka’s Nitisara, Dandin’s Dasakumaracarita and the Pancha­
tantra. Importantly, as he pointed out, these mention the Mauryas
and the nature of this text when they allude to the author of the
Arthashastra. The Vishupurana, for instance, noted that ‘(First)
Mahapadma; then his sons, only nine in number, will be the lords
of the earth for a hundred years. Those Nandas Kautilya, a Brahman,
will slay. On their death, the Mauryas will enjoy the earth. Kautilya
himself will install Chandragupta on their throne. His son will be
Bindusara, and his son Asokavardhana.’ The author of the Pancha­-
tantra ascribed the text to the author in this way: ‘Then the Dharma ­-
sastras are those of Manu and others, the Arthasastras of Chanakya
and others, the Kama Sutras of Vatsyayana and others’. See Shama­
sastry (1915): vii–viii.
40. See Shamasastry (1915).
41. For details, see Kangle (1969): pt I, xi–xviii.
42. The Arthashastra has been used for writing on different aspects of
Mauryan times by Sastri (1967), Thapar (1961), and Singh (2009),
among others. Even Trautmann, who has pointed out the possibility
of multiple authors for different parts of the text, has no hesitation in
using it as a source for his work on elephants and the Mauryas (1982).
For an early discussion on the controversy, Kangle (1965): pt III,
ch. 4.
43. Olivelle (2013): 9–25.
44. An example of this is the importance that Olivelle gives to allusions
to coral—which he believes to be Mediterranean coral—in the
Arthashastra. Trade with the Mediterranean, he argues, could not
have been flourishing before the first century bce, which would be
 notes to chapter 2 329
the earliest date for Kautilya to mention coral. Actually, if we look
at the archaeological evidence for coral in India, it is present much
before the first century bce. Coral, in fact, has a long history of usage
going back to the time of the Indus civilization when it is present,
for instance, at Harappa. Again, in the second millennium bce, coral
has been found at the neolithic-chalcolithic sites of Navdatoli in
Central India, Prakash in Maharashtra, and Maski in Karnataka. In
early historic India, much before c. 200 bce, coral beads are found
at Taxila, Rajghat, Ganwaria-Piprahwa, and Vaishali. They are also
found in Nevasa and Paunar in Maharashtra, and at T. Kallupati
in Tamil Nadu. This long history of usage may be one reason why it
was considered sacred by Buddhists and Hindus. The references to
coral form part of the data that I had compiled for my PhD thesis
in the early 1990s; there is no clarity on whether these were from the
Mediterranean or Indian seas. In fact, the early presence of coral from
Taxila to Tamil Nadu is evidence of the possibility of the Arthashastra’s
core being Mauryan, and not later, as argued by Olivelle. See Olivelle
2013: 26–7 for the argument relating to coral. For references to coral
in pre-Mauryan and Mauryan times, Lahiri (1992).
45. AS 2.4.6. Kangle (1972): pt II, 68.
46. AS 1.20.2. Kangle (1972): pt II, 48.
47. AS 1.20.6–8. Kangle (1972): pt II, 49.
48. For a discussion of this, Guruge (1993): 29–31.
49. AS 1.19.6–24. Kangle (1972): pt II, 46.
50. Tyldesley (2008): 33.
51. A prince’s training has been described in the AS (all citations in the
following footnotes pertaining to it are from Kangle (1972), pt II,
AS 1.5.7–12). For the age of tonsure (called ‘Chaula karma’ in
AS 1.5.6) and initiation (or Upanayana in AS 1.5.7), Asvalayana-grhya
Sutra says that the first should be performed in the third year after
birth or according to family usage, and the second according to caste,
i.e. for a brahmana, kshatriya, or vaisya boy the proper ages are 8th,
11th, and 12th from conception. See Kane (1994): vol. V, pt I, 606–7.
52. AS 1.5.14 states that the ‘Puranas, Itivrtta, Akhyayika, Udaharana,
Dharmshastra and Arthshastra—these constitute Itihasa.’ See Kangle
(1972): pt II, 11. Puranas deal with the creation and destruction of
the universe, king lists, heroes, sages, geography, and philosophy.
Arthashastra is as a discipline the ancient equivalent of modern eco­
nomics.
330 notes to chapter 3
53. AS 1.20.12. Kangle (1972): pt II, 50. The term used is ‘kumara­a­-
dhyaksa sthanam’.
54. AS 1.17.23 says that ‘like a piece of wood eaten by worms, the royal
family, with its princes undisciplined, would break the moment it is
attacked.’ See Kangle (1972): pt II, 41.
55. See AS 1.17. Kangle (1972): pt II, 39–43. The section’s heading is
‘Guarding against Princes’.
56. AS 1.17.42. Kangle (1972): pt II, 42.

Notes to Chapter 3: Mauryan Taxila

1. Strong (1989): 208.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.: 52–3.
4. Mukherjee (1984): 56; Dani (1986): 56. Marshall (1951): vol. I, 165,
though, provided an entirely different reading. An official of Taxila,
Romedote by name, he noted was mentioned here and the fact that
he owed his advancement to the patronage of ‘Priyadarshi’.
5. Mukherjee, for this reason, noted that the epigraph could be compared
to Ashoka’s rock edict IV. See Mukherjee (1984): 26.
6. For Taxila, Sir John Marshall’s three-volume excavation report is
the best available publication: Marshall (1951). For later excavations
there, Ghosh (1948) and Sharif (1969).
7. For an excellent analysis of this disjunction in the case of ancient
Greece, Snodgrass (1985).
8. On forests in the Gangetic plains, Lal (1986): 84. There were, however,
areas where, much before the time of the Mauryas, land seems to
have been cleared. The widely occurring ‘woody’ monocotyledon
that has emerged out of the wood charcoal analysis of Alamgirpur
suggests clearing of tracts of forest there for agricultural purposes.
See Singh, et al. (2013): 52–3.
9. Chandra (1977): 12; Lahiri (1992): 367–77.
10. Mahavagga VIII. I, 5–7. Rhys Davids and Oldenberg (1882): 174–6.
11. For the distribution of lapis lazuli and other raw materials in the
upper and middle Gangetic plains cities and settlements in Mauryan
times, Lahiri (1992): 204–314.
12. For the Indus to the Oxus orbit, Chakrabarti (2010): 18–19.
13. Marshall (1951): vol. I, 13.
 notes to chapter 3 331
14. Arrian’s account of the campaign of Alexander mentions his sojourn
there. Romm (2012): 208.
15. Marshall (1951): vol. I, 20.
16. Ibid.: 3.
17. Ibid.: 93.
18. Ibid.: 88–9.
19. Ibid.: vol. 2, 477.
20. The other streets are narrower and vary between some 3 and 6 m.
21. Ibid.: vol. 1, 90.
22. Ibid.: 91.
23. The description of Mohenjodaro in Marshall (1931), especially of the
city’s eastern sector, is peppered with such details.
24. Marshall (1951): vol. 1, 89–90. For a graphic sense of the alignment of
the streets and lanes, Plate I in ibid.: vol. 3.
25. Ibid. (1951): vol. 1, 89.
26. Ibid.: 91.
27. Ibid.: 90. The streets and lanes mentioned here all belong to the
second stratum.
28. Marshall (1951): vol. 1, 90. The bin measures 2.7 m. by 1.5 m.
29. This is shown as square 29.33” in the plan.
30. Marshall (1951): vol. 1, 94. Marshall’s suggestion that the well was
filled up with pottery vessels so as to prevent the sides from collapsing
may well be true for unlined wells. However, in this instance, the well
was lined with stone to a considerable depth.
31. The pillared hall measures 17.9 x 7.3 m.
32. Marshall (1951): vol. 1, 98.
33. Ibid.: vol. 2, 449.
34. Ibid.: 447.
35. Ibid.: 450.
36. Ibid.: vol. 1, 92.
37. Ibid.: 97. Rooms 3 and 4 had a drain below and room 17 was the one
which had subterranean jars.
38. Marshall (1911–12): 31.
39. Sali (1986): 98, 133–7.
40. Marshall (1951): vol. 1, 95.
41. Ibid.: 97.
42. Dani (1986): 87.
43. This is no. 6 in Marshall (1951): vol. 2, 677.
44. This is no. 41 in ibid.: 682.
332 notes to chapter 4
45. This is no. 7 in ibid.: 677.
46. Marshall (1951): vol. 1, 109.
47. Ibid.: vol. 2, 425, 501.

Notes to Chapter 4: Affairs of the Heart and State

1. For South Asian discourses on love, Orsini (2007).
2. This was how the Mahavagga (V.13.7) described it. Rhys Davids and
Oldenberg (1882): 34.
3. Singh (1996): 1.
4. Banerjee (1989): 448.
5. These reliefs bear identifying labels that mention the names of the
kings—‘King Pasenaji, the Kosala’ and ‘Ajatsatu worships the Holy
one.’ See Luders (1963 ): 113, 118.
6. AS 10.2.1–3. Kangle (1972): pt II, 435. Here, the preparations for a
military march are described: ‘After calculating the halts on the way
in villages and in forests, in accordance with the supply of fodder,
fuel and water, and (calculating) the time for camping, halting and
marching, he should start on the expedition. He should cause food
and equipment to be transported in double the quantity required
to meet the case. Or, if unable to do so, he should assign it to the
troops, or should store them at intervals on the route.’ It is unlikely
that similar preparations were not undertaken when a viceroy-prince
travelled to take charge in a distant province.
7. Chandra (1977): 54.
8. Mahavagga (VIII.I.23). Rhys Davids and Oldenberg (1882b): 186.
9. AS 7.12.24. Kangle (1972): pt II, 360.
10. Hare (1947): 143–67.
11. Mahavagga (V.13.13). Rhys Davids and Oldenberg (1882b): 39.
12. For a brief description of the Ujjayini road, Banerjee (1989): 448.
13. Deloche (1993): 272.
14. For the significance of Sasaram, especially in relation to the Rajgir-
Gaya-Bhabua alignment, Chakrabarti (2011): 17.
15. Chakrabarti (2005): 26. Chakrabarti points to the presence of early
historic North Black Polished Ware on the mound of thirty acres at
Deo Markandeya, as also Black and Red Ware which is protohistoric.
16. Ibid.
17. The Imperial Gazetteer of India, XXI (1908): 280.
18. Sharma and Misra (2003): 110–12.
 notes to chapter 5 333
19. A summary of the later evidence in the form of Gupta gold coins,
sculptural remains, and temples is available in Chakrabarti (2005):
85.
20. For the excavations at Eran, Sharma and Mishra (2003): 102–6.
21. Dipavamsa VI.16. Oldenberg (1879): 147.
22. Mahavamsa XIII.10–11. Geiger (1912): 88–9.
23. Thapar (1973): 22–3.
24. The Sri Lankan texts, for example, do not mention the battle
of Kalinga that Ashoka himself refers to at great length in Rock
Edict XIII.
25. For a summary of the arguments, Guruge (1993): 44.
26. This is the argument of Thapar (1973): 23.
27. Guruge (1993): 40.
28. See Dhauli Separate Rock Edict I. Hultzsch (1925): 94 and 97.
29. Ancient Vidisha is also known as modern Besnagar. For excavations,
Mishra and Sharma (2003): 90–4.
30. Marshall, Foucher, and Majumdar, The Monuments of Sanchi (1940):
vol. I, 2.
31. See Lamotte (1988): 56.
32. Mahavamsa V.40. Geiger (1912): 29.
33. Dipavamsa VI.21–2. Oldenberg (1879): 148.
34. ‘When Mahinda was ten years old, his father put his brothers to
death; then he passed four years reigning over Jambudvipa. Having
killed his hundred brothers, along continuing his race, Ashoka was
anointed king in Mahinda’s fourteenth year. Dipavamsa VI.21–2.
Oldenberg (1879): 148.
35. Strong (1989): 208–9.
36. Ibid.: 209.
37. Dipavamsa VI.22. Oldenberg (1879): 148. This is unlikely to be true
since, as we shall see later, Ashoka does mention the households of
his siblings in his epigraphs.

Notes to Chapter 5: The End and the Beginning

1. Strong (1989): 210–13. The ensuing discussion and quotations are
from this section of the text.
2. AS 1.10.3. Kangle (1972): pt II, 19.
3. This paragraph and the quotations in it are from Strong (1989):
210–11.
334 notes to chapter 5
4. The quotations are from Strong (1989): 211–12.
5. The Mahavamsa, V.189–90. Geiger (1912): 42.
6. The Dipavamsa 6.24–28. Oldenberg (1879): 148.
7. This is what Ashoka said to his minister when asking him to bring
Nigrodha to him. The Dipavamsa 6.45. Oldenberg (1879): 150.
8. AS 2.19 has provisions on the various aspects mentioned here. See
Kangle (1972): pt II, 55–9.
9. The quotation about the Rod is from AS 1.4.11. Kangle, (1972):
pt II, 10.
10. AS 8.2.1; Kangle (1972): 390.
11. AS 7.1.20; Kangle (1972): pt II, 322.
12. Bradford (2001): 53–9.
13. For the campaigns of Alexander, Romm (2012).
14. Ebrey (1996): 60.
15. Parker (1995): 2.
16. Bradford (2001): 42.
17. See Hultzsch (1925): xxxv.
18. AS, 9.1.37 and 9.1.45. Kangle (1972): pt II, 408–9.
19. Apparently, Chandragupta’s army according to Megasthenes, had
600,00 foot-soldiers, 30,000 cavalry, and 9000 elephants. Megasthenes
also provides a vivid description of the governing body which
directed military affairs in the time of Chandragupta. This consisted
of six divisions, with five members each: ‘One division is appointed
to cooperate with the admiral of the fleet, another with the superin­
tendent of the bullock-trains which were used for transporting
engines of war, food for the soldiers, provender for the cattle, and
other military requisites. They supply servants who beat the drum,
and others who carry gongs; grooms also for the horses, and mechan­
ists and their assistants. To the sound of the gong they send out foragers
to bring in grass, and by a system of rewards and punishments ensure
the work being done with dispatch and safety. The Third division
has charge of the foot-soldiers, the fourth of the horses, the fifth of
the war-chariots, and the sixth of the elephants  .  .  .  The chariots are
drawn on the march oxen but the horses are led along by a halter, that
their legs may not be galled and inflamed, nor their spirits damped by
drawing chariots. In addition to the charioteer, there are two fighting
men who sit up in the chariot beside him. The war-elephant carries
four men– three who shoot arrows, and the driver.’ McCrindle (1877):
79–80 and 139.
 notes to chapter 6 335
20. Line B of Rock Edict XIII at Kalsi. See Hultzsch (1925): 47–8.
21. G-I and K of Rock Edict XIII, Kalsi version. Hultzsch (1925): 47.
22. Lines 6, 8, and 12 of the Hathigumpha inscription of Kharavela.
Jayaswal and Banerji (1933): 87–8.
23. Line 11 of the Junagadh inscription of Rudradaman; Kielhorn
(1905–6): 47.

Notes to Chapter 6: The Emperor’s Voice

1. For the location and distribution of Ashoka’s edicts, Allchin and
Norman (1985); Mukherjee (1997); Falk (2006).
2. The minor rock edicts are brief as compared to the more expansive
major rock edicts. There is also a basic difference in the subject matter,
with minor rock edict 1 being overtly Buddhist in character.
3. AS 2.10.38–46; Kangle (1972): pt II, 94–5.
4. AS 2.10.3–4; Kangle (1972): pt II, 92.
5. For an overview of writing materials and the oldest documents to
have survived in those materials, Buhler (1904): 112–18.
6. These are the findings of the palaeobotanist K.S. Saraswat. See Bose
(2003): 82.
7. Cartledge (2012): xv.
8. The discovery of the edicts is not something I get into as it has al­-
ready been described at length in many monographs, most
recently in Allen (2012). But it is worth mentioning that they were
documented and discovered under very diverse circumstances. The
Rajula-Mandagiri inscription, for instance, was first copied by Colin
Mackenzie in the nineteenth century, although its significance was
only discovered in the middle of the twentieth century. Sircar (1960):
211. The Delhi epigraph, on the other hand, was discovered in 1966
when one Sri Jang Bahadur Singh noticed the inscribed rock before
it could be blasted—a residential colony was under construction at
the site. See Joshi and Pande (1967): 96.
9. For the texts of these inscriptions, Sircar (1942): 79–80 and 82–3.
10. The ‘Great Conqueror’ (‘maha-vijayo’) is how Kharavela described
himself. The conquests included the sack of Goradhagiri, the seige of
Rajagriha, the breaking up of the confederacy of the Dramira, among
various other places and kingdoms. See Jayaswal and Banerji (1933).
11. Singh (2012): 133. Also see Norman (2012): 58.
12. Hultzsch (1925):175–80.
336 notes to chapter 6
13. Norman (2012): 49. As he has pointed out, the mahamatras at Isila
had the edict inscribed as they received it, incorrectly retaining the
address at the beginning.
14. Line R in Brahmagiri inscription, Hultzsch (1925): 178; Line 22 in
Siddapura edict, Hultzsch (1925): 179; as for the Jatinga-Rameshwara
inscription, it has not survived well, and the name is missing. There
is little doubt that it was originally inscribed since the end of the last
sentence—which mentions Capada and alludes to the writer, has
partially survived.
15. Falk (2006): 58.
16. Sircar (1979): 4.
17. Anderson (1991): 268.
18. On orality and textuality in Europe, Ong (1984) and Connors
(1986).
19. For text and translation, Hultzsch (1925): 166–9.
20. Norman (2012): 51.
21. These are Brahmagiri, Erragudi, Gavimath, Jatinga-Rameshwara,
Maski, Nittur, Palkigundu, Rajula-Mandagiri, Siddapura, and Udego­­
lam.
22. Lamotte (1988): 76.
23. I have used association to describe Ashoka’s relationship with the
Sangha because it subsumes the various ways in which the term
‘upagamana’ has been interpreted: as an attachment to the Sangha, as
a visit to it, even as a stay with the Sangha. See Sircar (2000): 64–5.
24. Lamotte (1988): 77.
25. Strong (2012): 349–57.
26. For a scholarly account of the life of the Buddha, Lamotte (1988):
ch. 1. Also see Reynolds (1976).
27. Falk (2006): 55.
28. Lines N-P of Brahmagiri edict. Hultzsch (1925): 178.
29. Olivelle (2012): 172.
30. Ibid.
31. Falk (2006): 58.
32. See Line II of the Nittur version of Minor Rock Edict II, for ins­-
tance. Sircar (1979):128. This paragraph is based on that version and
what it says.
33. Raychaudhuri (1953): 255.
34. Thapar (1957). B.K. Thapar’s excavations revealed a cultural se-
quence of four periods, stretching from chalcolithic times till the
 notes to chapter 6 337
medieval. Period II, the megalithic culture, as he designated it, was
assigned to the last three quarters of the first millennium bce. For
this, also see Ghosh (1989): 282. Thus, it was likely to have existed
in the time of Ashoka. For an earlier assessment of Maski, Gordon
and Gordon (1943).
35. Thapar (1957): 103.
36. Ibid.: 21, 24.
37. Hultzsch (1925): xxvi refers to the inscriptional references to Maski.
The battlefield of Musangi is referred to in the Tirumalai rock
inscription of Rajendra Chola I. See Hultzsch (1907–8): 233.
38. Thapar (1957): 119.
39. This is what K. Rajan’s work has revealed. His unpublished work has
been extensively cited in Chakrabarti (2006): 312–13.
40. Rajan and Yatheeskumar (2010–12): 290.
41. Wheeler (1947–8): 186.
42. While Mortimer Wheeler believed that the Polished Stone Axe
culture’s last phase was coterminous with the time of Ashoka, much
earlier dates have been suggested for it subsequently, as also for the
megaliths. See Ghosh (1989): 84.
43. Falk (2006): 65.
44. Wheeler (1947–8): 186–7.
45. Hultzsch (1925): xxvii.
46. Ibid.
47. Although Indian Archaeology—A Review (1976–7: 60) says the in­
scription was in the Prakrit language and Brahmi characters of
about the second century bce, the accompanying plate (LVIII C)
reveals that the Brahmi characters could well be Mauryan. The shaft
and the umbrella have a Mauryan polish on them.
48. Ghurhupur/Ratanpurwa in Bhabua district (Bihar), not far from
Ahraura, is the other place where an Ashokan minor rock edict has
been found amidst painted rock shelters. This was reported in 2009
and published by K.K. Thaplyal. There has been some controversy
about the genuineness of the edict, although archaeologists like
Rakesh Tiwari (personal conversation) and Dilip Chakrabarti believe
it is not a fake. See Chakrabarti (2011): 19–22.
49. Sircar (1979): 94–5.
50. Line I, ibid.: 102.
51. This is surmised by Dilip Chakrabarti: Chakrabarti (2011): 28.
52. Ibid.: 29.
338 notes to chapter 7

Notes to Chapter 7: Extending the Arc of Communication

to Afghanistan
1. For the geographic zones of Afghanistan, Dupree (1997): 3–31.
2. Dupree (1997): 19–21. For routes of communication, Channing
(1885).
3. Lahiri (1992): 64.
4. Shaffer (1978): 172.
5. Ciarla (1981): 57. For ceramics that are commonly found in this
time in the Indo-Iranian borderland, Biscione (1984).
6. Chakrabarti (2006): 147.
7. Bernard (2005): 16–17.
8. MacDowall and Taddei (1978): 188–9; also Stoneman (2010): 365.
9. Kosmin (2014): 33.
10. Ibid.
11. Channing (1885): 360.
12. Mukherjee (1984): 35–42.
13. Ibid.: 9–22.
14. Ibid.: 28–32.
15. Vogelsang (1985): 55.
16. Helms (1982): 1.
17. Vogelsang (1985): 64; also see Ball and Gardin (1982): 145.
18. Helms (1979): 4.
19. Scerrato (1958): 4.
20. Sircar and Krishnan (1957–8).
21. Izre’el and Drorp (1997): 43.
22. Oikonomides (1984): 145–7.
23. Fraser (1979): 11.
24. Diringer (1996): 255–9.
25. Carratelli and Garbini (1964): 32.
26. Bernard (2005): 19.
27. Wheeler (1968): 69.
28. See Afterword in the 2008 impression of Thapar (1961): 276. Here,
she argues that the intention of using eusebeia was to introduce
dhamma to the local people.
29. Sick (2007): 258.
30. This is the translation published in Mukherjee (1984):33.
 notes to chapter 8 339
31. Ibid.: 12, 14, and 30.
32. For a recent statement see Afterword in the 13th impression of
Thapar (1961): 317.
33. Ibid.: 319.
34. These are mentioned by Ashoka in the thirteenth rock edict.
35. Filliozat (1961–2): 5.
36. Adrados (1984): 4. Here, the commonalities and differences between
the Bishutun inscription and those of Ashoka have been dealt with at
length.
37. Dupree (1997): 224–35.
38. Shaffer (1978): 74–5.
39. Ibid.: 149.

Notes to Chapter 8: An Expansive Imperial Articulation

1. This information about Kalinga is absent at Dhauli, Jaugada, and
Sannathi and the reasons for this will be discussed in the next
chapter.
2. Line B of Rock Edict XIII at Kalsi. Hultzsch (1925): 47.
3. The term dhamma occurs about 111 times in Ashoka’s edicts. See
Hiltebeitel (2011).
4. Line E of Rock Edict VIII at Kalsi. Hultzsch (1925): 37.
5. Mahabharata, Vanaparva, chapter 238, shloka 5 and shloka 20. Cited
in Bose (1998): 114–15.
6. Lines 4–7 of Erragudi Rock Edict III, in Sircar (1979): 17.
7. See Lamotte (1988): 230–3 for the similarities between the advice
that Ashoka gave and that of the Buddha. So, for instance, he points
out: ‘In the field of domestic virtues, Asoka unceasingly counselled
obedience to one’s father and mother, obedience to one’s teachers,
irreproachable courtesy towards one’s friends, acquaintances, com­
panions and family, kindness to the poor, the old and the weak as
well as to slaves and servants, generosity towards brahmins and
sramanas. The Buddha gave exactly the same advice to the young
householder Singalaka: “How does the noble disciple protect the six
regions of space? These six regions are composed as follows: father
and mother are the east; teachers are the south; sons and wife are the
west; friends and companions are the north; slaves and servants are
the nadir; sramanas and brahmins are the zenith.”’
8. Line I, Erragudi Edict IV, in Sircar (1979): 27.
340 notes to chapter 8
9. Line III, ibid.
10. Line V, ibid.
11. Line XIV, Erragudi Rock Edict V, in Sircar (1979): 24.
12. For the various classes of people whose welfare and happiness was the
concern of this class of officials, Lines X–XIII, ibid.
13. Lines II–VIII of Erragudi Edict VI, ibid.: 18–19.
14. AS 1.19.28. Kangle (1972): pt II, 47.
15. AS 1.20.22. Kangle (1972): pt II, 51.
16. AS 1.19.34–5. Kangle (1972): pt II, 47.
17. This is a different view from that of scholars who see the genesis of
Ashoka’s welfare measures in his Buddhist faith. S.J. Tambiah, for
instance, argued that ‘Asokan political Buddhism and social ethics
committed kingship and state to the creation of welfare facilities and
a prosperous society as the precondition for the support of monastic
institutions, and for the escape from suffering and the realization
of moral law (the Dhamma) in the society as a whole.’ Tambiah
(1973): 5.
18. For a description of the engraved rocks, Hultzsch (1925): xii.
19. Falk (2006): 111.
20. The three engraved boulders are described in Hultzsch (1925):
xii–xiii.
21. For an excellent analysis of the dispatch pattern of the rock edicts,
Falk (2006): 111–12.
22. In the case of the major rock edict fragments at Kandahar, it seems
that these were actually on a stone slab.
23. This is the translation of Lines II–V of the first rock edict at Erragudi
as provided by Sircar (1979): 14. That the sort of festive gathering—
samaja—where animals were sacrificed is what Ashoka did not want
held is implied here since it is an adjunct of the earlier sentence
that no living being should be killed for sacrifice. See Bose (1998):
111–12.
24. Falk (2006): 111.
25. Chakrabarti (2011): 52.
26. Thomas and Joglekar (1994): 196–8.
27. Kane (1997): 781 notes this statement from Vanaparva 208.11–12 of
the Mahabharata.
28. Ibid.: 775, quoting Satapatha Brahmana XI.6.1.3.
29. Lines VI to IX of Erragudi Rock Edict I, in Sircar (1979): 14.
30. Lines II, III, V, and VI of Erragudi Edict V, ibid.: 23.
 notes to chapter 8 341
31. Line XV of Erragudi Edict V, in Sircar (1979): 24.
32. K. Rajan’s excavations at Kodumanal in this regard have been most
crucial. The excavator and his team have obtained three AMS dates—
275 bce, 330 bce, and 408 bce (all uncalibrated)—from well-stratified
layers. These come from layers which have yielded a considerable
number of potsherds bearing inscriptions in the Tamil-Brahmi
script. Around 100 such potsherds have been found in 2012 alone,
while, on the whole, the excavations have yielded 500 Tamil-Brahmi
inscribed sherds. The names on these potsherds, in several instances,
have affiliations with names from the North. The excavations have
also yielded a couple of sherds of North Black Polished Ware which
is associated with the first phase of the early historical period in
North and Central India. Considering that in earlier seasons at Kodu­
manal silver punch-marked coins were found, there is now excellent
evidence to argue that this commercial centre had well-established
trade and cultural contacts with the middle Gangetic plains in the
fifth century bce. Rajan and Yatheeskumar (2010–12). Also see
Rajan, Selvakumar, Ramesh, and Balamurugan (2013) for scientific
dates from Porunthal.
33. Line II, Erragudi Edict IV. See Sircar (1979): 27.
34. Lines II–III, Erragudi Edict VII, ibid.: 25
35. Line XIV, Erragudi Edict V, ibid.: 24.
36. Lines III–IV, Erragudi edict IX, ibid.: 40.
37. Line VIII, ibid.
38. See Rich (2008): 166.
39. Sircar has translated the word ‘samavaya’ as ‘restrained speech’ where­
as it is generally understood as ‘concord’. See Hultzsch (1925): 21,
and Pandeya (1965): 16, for the later interpretation.
40. Line XIV, Erragudi Edict XIII. Sircar (1979): 85.
41. AS 8.4.43. Kangle (1972): pt. II, 400.
42. Lines XVIII–XIX, Erragudi Edict XIII. Sircar (1979): 85.
43. While the impact of such measures in the various independent
kingdoms must have depended on a variety of issues, scholars like
Rhys Davids read this part of the rock edict with an element of
disbelief, bordering on disdain: ‘It is difficult to say how much of
this is mere royal rhodomontade. It is quite likely that the Greek
kings are only thrown in by way of make-weight, as it were; and that
no emissaries had been actually sent there at all. Even had they been
sent, there is little reason to believe that the Greek self-complacency
342 notes to chapter 9
would have been much disturbed. Asoka’s estimate of the results
obtained is better evidence of his own vanity than it is of Greek
docility. We may imagine the Greek amusement at the absurd idea of
a “barbarian” teaching them their duty; but we can scarcely imagine
them discarding their gods and their superstitions at the bidding of
an alien king.’ See Rhys Davids (1903): 298–9. Possibly, this disdain
may have been partly a consequence of Rhys Davids being a colonial
civil servant: he served as one in Sri Lanka.
44. A strong political connotation of the term ‘dharmavijaya’ has been
suggested by Dikshitar (1944): 81–3.
45. See Norman (1997–8): 483. Norman also states, quite rightly, that
the many elements of dhamma that are mentioned in this edict as
forming what was presumably preached abroad cannot be considered
Buddhist doctrine. Therefore, Ashoka cannot be seen in his edicts as
propagating Buddhism among contemporary rulers.
46. Norman (1997–8): 483.
47. Line V of Erragudi Edict XIV, in Sircar (1979): 20.

Notes to Chapter 9: The Message in the Landscape

1. Tod (1839): 370–1.
2. Later, the need to understand Ashokan epigraphs as integrated wholes
was underlined by Upinder Singh, who spoke of them as epigraph-
monuments: Singh 1997–8: 1–3.
3. Line 8 in Kielhorn (1905–6): 47.The epigraph provides an excep-
tionally vivid account of the lake and bund and its destruction in
150 ce in a storm: ‘the clouds pouring with rain the earth had been
converted as it were into one ocean.’ Consequently, the swollen
flood­waters simply ‘tore down hill-tops, trees, banks, turrets, upper
stories, gates and raised places of shelter’ (lines 5–7). The dam, built
during the time of Chandragupta, suffered a huge breach and the
Sudarshana lake drained out. Rudradaman’s minister Suvishaka
then carried out repairs, creating a dam three times larger than the
original.
4. These details and those pertaining to what was added in the time of
Ashoka are there in Line 8 of the epigraph.
5. Spodek (1974): 451 demonstrates this.
6. Rajyagor (1975–9): 8.
7. Tod (1839): 401.
 notes to chapter 9 343
8. Ghosh (1989): 350.
9. Spodek (1974): 450.
10. Marshall (1951): 95.
11. How this was identified is described in Jamsedjee (1890–4): 47–55.
12. Jamsedjee (1890–4): 54.
13. Lahiri (2011). A great deal mentioned here formed part of my field
survey in 2011 in Junagadh and its surrounding area.
14. The bricks used for the stupa measure 45.7 x 38.1 x 7.62 cm.
15. Cousens (1891): 21.
16. Rawat (2009): 99–100.
17. Strong (1989): 219. In the words of the Ashokavadana: ‘Asoka had
eighty-four thousand boxes made of gold, silver, cat’s eye, and crystal,
and in them were placed the relics. Also, eighty-four thousand urns
and eighty-four thousand inscription plates were prepared. All of this
was given to the yaksas for distribution in the (eighty-four thousand)
dharmarajikas he ordered built throughout the earth as far as the
sur­rounding ocean, in the small, great, and middle-sized towns,
and wherever there was a (population of) one hundred thousand
(persons).’
18. For this and the observations that follow, Lahiri (2011).
19. Pramanaik (2004–5): 181.
20. Chhabra (1949–50): 174–5.
21. For the four surviving Ashokan edicts at Sannathi, Sarma and Rao
(1993): 3–56.
22. Poonacha (2013): 1. Sannathi has also been called Sannati and
Sonthi.
23. These Mauryan finds were recovered from two excavations, those
conducted by the Department of Archaeology and Museums, Mysore,
in 1993–5 and the Archaeological Survey excavations in 2001–2 and
2005–6. See Devraj and Talwar (1996): 9–17 and Poonacha (2013):
16–18. A stupa mound was excavated by the Society for South Asian
Studies along with the Archaeological Survey of India between
1986 and 1989. However, no Mauryan remains were found in that
excavation. See Howell (1995).
24. Poonacha (2013): 14.
25. Ibid.: 162.
26. Veluthat (2000): 1085.
27. For the separate rock edicts, Hultzsch (1925) and Norman (1997):
82–5.
344 notes to chapter 9
28. Hultzsch (1925): xiii.
29. Patra (2006): 50.
30. Gupta (1980): 85.
31. Mohanty and Tripathy (1997–8): 87.
32. Chakrabarti (2011): 71.
33. Line 1 (B) of Separate Rock Edict I at Jaugada. Hultzsch (1925): 111.
34. For an analysis of the references to Tosali, Chakrabarti (2011):
67–71.
35. B.B. Lal, the excavator of Sisupalgarh, was of the view that there was
only circumstantial evidence of this which could not be considered
conclusive. See Lal (1949): 66. Allchin, in 1995, however, had no
hesitation in identifying it with the ancient city of Tosali. Allchin
(1995): 142.
36. Mohanty and Tripathy (1997–8): 88–9.
37. Ibid.: 90.
38. Chakrabarti (2011): 82.
39. Ibid. Interestingly, if at Sannathi there is a mound known as
Ranamandala, it has been pointed out by Chakrabarti that between
Srikakulam and Vizianagaram, there is a place called Ranasthalam
which means ‘the place of battle’.
40. The numbering of the Orissa edicts—Separate Rock Edicts 1 and
2—follows the arrangement that Prinsep first used in the case of
Dhauli, although there is unanimity that what is called the first
separate edict was actually engraved after the second separate edict.
This is the case at Jaugada as well where No. 2 is actually placed
above No. 1.
41. Hultzsch (1925): 113. Lines E and F of Jaugada Separate Rock
Edict 2.
42. Hultzsch (1925): 118. Line J of Jaugada Separate Rock Edict 2.
43. Norman (1997): 83.
44. Gokhale (1966): 21.
45. Hultzsch (1925): 116. Line 4 (G) of Separate Rock Edict 2 of
Jaugada.
46. Hultzsch (1925): 117.
47. Lines K-P of Separate Rock Edict 1. Hultzsch (1925): 96.
48. This is the reading in Norman (1997): 84.
49. Line L, Edict 6. See Hultzsch (1925): 58–9.
50. Line 9 (W and X) of Separate Rock Edict I of Jaugada and Lines 17
and 18 (V and W) of Separate Rock Edict I of Dhauli. Hultzsch
(1925): 94 and 113.
 notes to chapter 10 345
51. Line Z of Separate Rock Edict I of Dhauli. Hultzsch (1925): 97.
52. Lines Z-BB of Separate Rock Edict I of Dhauli. Hultzsch (1925): 97.
53. Norman (2012): 61.

Notes to Chapter 10: Building Beliefs into Edifices

1. Smith (1909): 35. Ashoka himself never mentions becoming a
monk in any of his edicts. Still, the links with the Buddhist Sangha
were very strong and he exercised an unusually powerful influence
over it.
2. Jackson (1925): 11. This contains the journal of Buchanan Hamilton
which is among the most evocative accounts of the Barabar hill and
its environs.
3. For the caves and their architecture, Gupta (1980): 189–92 and
202–21. For the inscriptions, Hultzsch (1925): 181–2.
4. Line 2 of First Cave Inscription. Hultzsch (1925): 181.
5. Lines 1 and 2 of Second Cave Inscription, ibid.
6. Third Cave Inscription, ibid.: 182.
7. Forster (1924): 198.
8. Falk (2008): 246.
9. See Gupta (1980): 206–9 for an excellent reconstruction of the pro­
cess. The summary here presented is based on his description and
my field observations.
10. Basham (1981): 135–7.
11. Poonacha (2013): 447, 466.
12. Mahavamsa X.96–102; Geiger (1912): 75.
13. Cunningham (1892): 4.
14. Coomaraswamy (1927): 33.
15. Sinha (2000): 9.
16. Watters (1904–5): 115.
17. Cunningham (1892): 76.
18. Bidari (2007): 83–5 cites such episodes from the life of Konakamana.
19. Xuanzang, for instance, wrote about it in the seventh century ce: ‘To
the north-east of the town of Krakuchchhanda Buddha, going about
30 li, we come to an old capital (or, great city) in which there is a
stupa. This is to commemorate the spot where, in the Bhadra-kalpa
when men lived to the age of 40,000 years, Kanakamuni Buddha was
born  .  .  .  Further north there is a stupa containing the relics of his
bequeathed body; in front of it is a stone pillar with a lion on the
top, and about 20 feet high; on this is inscribed a record of the events
346 notes to chapter 10
connected with his Nirvana; this was built by Ashoka-raja.’ Beal
(1884): vol. III, 272.
20. Chakrabarti (2001): 191. There is a very useful section in Chakra­
barti’s book on the archaeological geography of this stretch.
21. Mukherji (1901): 1.
22. For a long time after Cunningham’s survey, the location of Kapila­-
vastu remained uncertain. This is why Vincent Smith, in his
instructions to P.C. Mukherji—who undertook a tour of the Nepal
terai—asked him to ‘first try and fix the position of Kapilavastu,
as a whole, accurately as possible.’ Smith (1901): 1. The location
of Kapilavastu, though, still remains controversial with academics
divided about whether it was Tilaurakot in Nepal and Piprahwa-
Ganwaria in India that was known by this name.
23. Mukherji (1901): 19.
24. The recently published results of the excavations conducted there in
2011 and 2012, by a team directed by Robin Coningham and Kosh
Prasad Acharya, have provided radiocarbon dates that go back to the
eight century bce. For details, Coningham and Acharya, et al. (2013).
25. Tiwari (1996): 2–3. Also Rai (2010): 93–4. This marker stone and other
archaeological remains were revealed in archaeological excavations
conducted jointly by the Japan Buddhist Federation and Lumbini
Development Trust between 1993 and 1996.
26. Falk (2006): 139.
27. For a discussion of Indradhvajas and their intrinsic difference in re­
lation to Ashokan pillars, Gupta (1980): 318–20. Gupta also sees the
pillars as an Ashokan innovation.
28. Pant and Jayaswal (1990–1): 49. Also see Jayaswal (1998).
29. Coningham and Acharya, et al. (2013).
30. This is based on what was reported in Tiwari (1996): 5–10.
31. Rummindei pillar inscription in Hultzsch (1925): 164–5.
32. A summary of these interpretations is available in Falk (2006): 179.
33. See Falk (2012): 206.
34. Falk believes this is a more likely explanation. In this context, he has
drawn attention to an inscription from Kanaganahalli which bears
an inscription which in translation reads: ‘Above (you see) the stupa
of Ramagrama (containing) one eighth part.’ The term used for one
eighth part is ‘athabhaga’. Falk (2012): 206.
35. A few of the grants made to Buddhist and Hindu temple establish­
ments in Orissa carry such exemptions. See the Mallar plates of a
 notes to chapter 10 347
Pandu­vamsi king to a small Buddhist monastery at Taradamshaka,
as also the Santa-Bommali plates of Indravarman in Singh (1994):
253, 258.
36. Rai (2010): 96.
37. For an early description of Gotihawa, Mukherji (1901): 31.
38. Ibid.: 32.
39. Verardi and Coccia (2008): 255–6.
40. Mitra (1972): 228.
41. Verardi (2002).
42. Lines A and B of Nigali Sagar pillar inscription. Hultzsch (1925):
165.
43. The textual references to Vaishali have been cited in detail by Sarao
(1990): 106–7.
44. Deva and Mishra (1961). For a summary of the 1950 excavations of
Deva and Mishra, Sinha (2000): 211.
45. Sinha and Roy (1969): 21.
46. Ibid.: 23.
47. Ibid.: 22.
48. The monolith stands 14.6 m.
49. Chakrabarti (2011): 109–10.
50. Marshall (1951): vol. I, 234–5.
51. Kumrahar was excavated twice, first by D.B. Spooner as part of
‘Mr Ratan Tata’s excavations at Pataliputra’, and then in 1951–5 by
A.S. Altekar and V. Mishra. See Spooner (1912–13) and Altekar and
Mishra (1959).
52. The Mahavamsa XII.1–2. Geiger (1912): 82.
53. Line E of Calcutta-Bairat inscription, Hultzsch (1925): 174.
54. Lamotte (1988): 236.
55. The temple and the archaeological remains on Bijak-ki-Pahari
are described at length in the excavation report. See Sahni (1937):
19–38.
56. Ibid.: 31.
57. Mitra (1971): 66–7.
58. Jayaswal (2009): 14.
59. Sarnath edict in Hultzsch (1925): 162–5.
60. Lamotte (1988): 237.
61. Ghosh (1936): 25.
62. Sarao (1990): 76. Sarao mentions the Kosambi Jataka and the Vinaya
as sources for this story.
348 notes to chapter 11
63. Marshall, Foucher, and Majumdar (1940): vol. I, 14.
64. Ali, Trivedi, and Solanki (2004): 113–15.
65. Marshall, Foucher, and Majumdar (1940): vol. I, 20.
66. Ibid.: 27.
67. Line C of Sanchi pillar edict, Hultzsch (1925): 161.
68. Bhandarkar 1925: 85–6.

Notes to Chapter 11: An Ageing Emperor’s Interventions

1. This is what Sircar (1979): 121 noted: ‘the language of the inscription
resembles that of the Girnar version of Asoka’s Rock Edicts and also
some MRE texts of the south.’ MRE means Minor Rock Edict.
2. Tieken (2012): 185.
3. Norman (2012): 56.
4. Sahni (1907–8): 181–2.
5. For an evocative account of the medieval and modern histories of
those ancient Ashokan pillars in Delhi, see Singh (2006): xxx–xxxii.
6. Shokoohy and Shokoohy (1988): 32, 118.
7. Chakrabarti (2011): 111.
8. Bloch (1906–7): 123.
9. This discovery was made by W.C. Peppe in the late nineteenth century.
For a summary, Srivastava (1996): 5–6.
10. Majumdar (1935–6).
11. For ‘acts of consensual making’—by which paths become habits of a
landscape—Macfarlane (2012): 17.
12. Majumdar (1935–6): 55.
13. Chakrabarti (2011): 145–7.
14. Shokoohy and Shokoohy (1988): 6.
15. Understanding the pattern of routes on the basis of artefacts of
non-local origin formed the core methodology of my PhD thesis.
Specifically for lapis lazuli in early historic India, Lahiri (1992): 371.
16. For an extensive description of the beads, Mitra (1972): 123–40.
17. Line C of the 1st Delhi-Topra pillar edict, Hultzsch (1925): 120.
18. Lines E and F of the 1st Delhi-Topra pillar edict, ibid.
19. Line C of 2 nd Delhi-Topra pillar edict, ibid.: 121.
20. Lines E to H of 2nd Delhi-Topra pillar edict, ibid.
21. This has been discussed by Tieken (2012): 185.
22. Line F of 3rd Delhi-Topra pillar edict. Hultzsch (1925): 122.
 notes to chapter 11 349
23. Smith (1909): 34.
24. Line C of 4th Delhi-Topra pillar edict, Hultzsch (1925): 124.
25. Line I of 4th Delhi-Topra pillar edict, ibid.
26. Line D of 4th Delhi-Topra pillar edict, ibid.
27. Line J of 4th Delhi-Topra pillar edict, ibid.
28. Rich (2008): 175.
29. See 4.11.1–26. The death penalty is also mentioned in other chapters,
as for instance in 4.12.1 where a woman who has not attained puberty
dies because she has been violated by a man of the same ‘varna’, the
punishment being death. Kangle (1972): pt. II, 282–5.
30. Lines M and N of 4th Delhi-Topra pillar edict, Hultzsch (1925): 125.
31. Line L of the 5th Delhi-Topra pillar edict states that ‘Until (I had been)
anointed twenty-six years, in this period the release of prisoners was
ordered by me twenty-five (times).’ Ibid.: 128.
32. 5th Delhi-Topra pillar edict, ibid.: 127–8.
33. Smith (1991): 527–8.
34. Ibid.: 537.
35. Norman (1967): 31.
36. Bose (2014).
37. Hora (1950): 49.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.: 51.
40. Ibid.: 51–3.
41. Barua (1946): 132.
42. Mirashi (1960): 111.
43. Joglekar (2013): 247–51.
44. Bose (2003): 144–5.
45. Ibid.: 139.
46. For a description of these methods, Report of the Committee for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1957): 126.
47. See ‘Contests over Game’, in Rangarajan (2001): 46–59.
48. Line F of 6th Delhi-Topra edict, Hultzsch (1925): 130.
49. Line B of 7th Delhi-Topra edict, ibid.: 133.
50. Lines F-M of 7th Delhi-Topra edict, ibid.: 134.
51. Hultzsch (1925): 159.
52. Line KK of 7th Delhi-Topra pillar edict, ibid.: 136.
53. Line OO of 7th Delhi-Topra edict, ibid.: 137.
350 notes to chapter 12

Notes to Chapter 12: Of Wifely Woes and the

Emperor’s Death
1. Mahavamsa XX.1–6. Geiger (1912): 136. The name of this queen
occurs in three forms in this chapter, depending upon the source—as
Tissarakha in the Mahavamsa, Tishyarakshita in the Ashokavadana,
and Tissarakshita in Abanindranath Tagore.
2. Guruge (1993): 260. He refers to the Vamsatthappakasini.
3. Mahavamsa XIX. Geiger (1912): 128–35.
4. Mahavamsa XIX.85, ibid.: 135.
5. For an essay on the ambiguities of Buddhist kingship as seen through
the microcosm of Ashoka’s wives, Strong (2002).
6. Strong (1989): 257.
7. Ibid.: 258.
8. Ibid.: 270.
9. Ibid.: 273.
10. Ibid.: 273–4.
11. Ibid.: 284.
12. Ibid.: 285.
13. This entire section is based on that chapter. See Strong (1989):
286–92.
14. Beal (1880): 86.

Notes to Epilogue: The Emperor’s Afterlife

1. For the memory of Ashoka, see the collection of articles in Olivelle
(2009), especially Deeg (2009). Also see Strong (1989) and Ray (2012).
For the historical traditions of ancient India, Thapar (2013).
2. While the Vayu Purana and the Brahmanda Purana mention Kunala,
Bandhupalita, Indrapalita, Devavarma, Shatadhanus, and Brhad­
ratha, the Matsya Purana list is made up of four names—Dasharatha,
Samprati, Shatadhanvan, and Brhadratha. A list of seven is provided
in the Vishnu Purana—Kulala, Bandhupalita, Dashona, Dasharatha,
Samprati, Shalisuka, Devadharman, Shatadhanvan, and Brhadratha.
As for Buddhist texts, the Ashokavadana’s list is made up of several
names that do not figure in the Puranas. The five kings mentioned are
Sampadi, Vrihaspati, Vrishasena, Pushyadharman, and Pushyamitra.
The Tibetan scholar Taranatha, on the other hand, mentioned only
Vigatashoka and Virasena.
 notes to epilo gue 351
3. Pargiter (1913): 29.
4. For the Satavahanas and their successors, Chattopadhyay (2014):
71–95.
5. Strong (1989): 292.
6. Sastri (1967): 245.
7. While the dynasty is said to have come to an end around 180 bce,
there are occasional references to later rulers related to the Mauryas.
Bhandarkar, for instance, draws attention to Xuanzang’s allusion to
Purnavarman, a king of Magadha who ruled some time before the
Chinese traveller’s visit. Purnavarman is said to have restored the
Bodhi tree destroyed by Sashanka, king of Karnasuvarna (Bengal). He
is described by the Chinese pilgrim as the ‘last of the race of Asoka-
raja’. Bhandarkar (1957): 49.
8. Raychaudhuri (1953): 328.
9. Strong (1989): 294.
10. For details of the caves at Nagarjuni hill and Dasharatha’s epigraphs,
Basham (1951): 151–2,154–6. The Gopika cave is a single rectangular
chamber with a vaulted roof; the Vahiyaka cave is similarly shaped;
the Vadathika cave is smaller and less imposing than the other two.
11. The Sudama cave and the Vishvamitra cave at Barabar, as also the
Vahiyaka and Vadathika caves at Nagarjuni, show such defacement.
Basham (1951): 157.
12. Pratishthanapura is modern Paithan in Maharashtra while Pokhara
is Pushkar in Rajasthan. Many other place-names figure as well. See
Marshall, Foucher, and Majumdar (1940): vol. 1, 297–362. There are
more than 600 inscriptions on Stupa 1, of which nearly 350 are on
the ground balustrade.
13. For donations where the domicile of donors is mentioned at Bharhut,
Luders, Waldschmidt, and Mehendale (1963): 16–35. The railing and
other surviving elements of the Bharhut stupa were dismantled on the
initiative of Alexander Cunningham in the nineteenth century and
brought to the Indian Museum, Calcutta where they are on display.
14. Ibid. : 66–178.
15. Ibid.: 95–6.
16. For a description of the sculptural relief and the epigraph, ibid.:
95–6.
17. An inscription mentions ‘King Pasenaji, the Kosala’ and another label
inscription refers to Ajatashatru as he who ‘worships the Holy One’.
Luders, Waldschmidt and Mehendale (1963): 113, 118.
352 notes to epilo gue
18. Marshall, Foucher, and Majumdar (1940): vol. 1, 215–16; vol. 2,
Plate 11. This is on the middle lintel.
19. Ibid.: vol. 2, Plate 18.
20. Ibid.: vol. 3, Plate 79.
21. Nagar (1992): 58–9, 88–9.
22. Each panel was divided into two or three registers with as many as
32 registers in 16 panels devoted to narratives in the life of the
Buddha. For the dimensions and details of the drum slabs and their
subject matter, Poonacha (2011): 86–90, 262–304.
23. Their names being Chhimuka, Satkarni, Pulumavi, and Sundara
Satakarni.
24. Ibid.: 293–4.
25. Ibid.: 296–7.
26. A connection most recently highlighted in all its spatial and tem­
poral resonances in Singh (2014 forthcoming). Also see Singh (un­
published).
27. This is the purport of the relevant (from our perspective) part of
the inscription as presented by Singh from the translation offered by
Gordon H. Luce. For an early translation of this inscription, Sein Ko
(1911–12): 119.
28. This figured in the text of the proposals sent by the foreign minister
of the Government of Burma when he wrote to the governor general.
Quoted in Ahir (1994): 86.
29. Beal (1884): vol. I, 17, 22–3, 30, 34–6.
30. Ibid.: 35.
31. Ibid.: vol. 3, 327.
32. Ibid.: 277.
33. Ibid.: 292.
34. Ibid.: 272.
35. Beal (1884): vol. 2, 145.
36. Ibid.: 170.
37. Ibid.: 308.
38. Ibid: 309.
39. Ibid.: 181.
40. Ibid.: 246, 251.
41. See verse 23 in Konow (1907–8): 328.
42. Beal (1884): vol. 2, 188–9.
43. Ibid.: 189.
44. Ibid.: 190.
 notes to epilo gue 353
45. Ibid.
46. Stein (1900): vol. I, 4.
47. Ibid.: 74.
48. Rajatarangini I.101. Ibid.: 19.
49. Rajatarangini I.104. Ibid.
50. Rajatarangini I.104. Ibid.
51. Rajatarangini I.105–6 for Shiva shrines. Ibid.:20.
52. Rajatarangini I.107. Ibid.
53. Jarrett (1896 ): vol. 2, 375–6.
54. Ibid.: 377.
55. Stein’s preface states: ‘As early as the seventeenth century Dr. Bernier,
to whose visit to Kashmir in the summer of 1664 we owe the first
European account of the Valley, and one as accurate as it is attractive,
had turned his attention to the “histories of the ancient Kings of
Kachemire.” The Chronicle, of which he possessed a copy, and of
which, as he tells us, he was preparing a French translation, was,
however, not Kalhana’s work, but a Persian compilation, by Haidar
Malik Cadura, prepared in Jahangir’s time avowedly with the help
of the Rajatarangini. Also the summary of Kasmir rulers which
Father Tieffenthaler a century later reproduced in his “Description de
l’Inde” was still derived from that abridged rendering.’ Stein (1900):
vol. I, viii.
56. Guha-Thakurta (1996): 54.
 Bibliography

Agrawala, V.S. 1964. The Wheel Flag of India—Chakra-Dhvaja. Varanasi:

Prithvi Prakashan.
Ahir, D.C. 1994. Buddha Gaya through the Ages. Delhi: Sri Satguru
Publications.
Allchin, F.R. 1995. ‘Early Cities and States beyond the Ganges Valley’, in
F.R. Allchin The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia—The Emer­
gence of Cities and States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 123–51.
———  and K.R. Norman. 1985. ‘Guide to the Asokan Inscriptions’, South
Asian Studies 1: 43–50.
Ali, R., A. Trivedi, and D. Solanki. 2004. Buddhist Remains of Ujjain Region—
Excavation at Sodanga. Delhi: Sharada Publishing House.
Allen, C. 2012. Ashoka. London: Little, Brown.
Altekar, A.S. and V.K. Mishra. 1959. Report on Kumrahar Excavations (1951–
53). Patna: K.P. Jayaswal Research Institute.
Anderson, P.K. 1991. ‘Notes on the Engraving Procedures for the Erragudi
Version of Asoka’s Minor Rock Edict’, Indo Iranian Journal 34:
267–91.
Adrados, F.R. 1984. ‘Asoka’s Inscriptions and Persian, Greek and Latin
Epigraphy’, in S.D. Joshi (ed.), Amrtadhara Professor R.N. Dandekar
Felicitation Volume. Delhi: Ajanta Publishers, pp. 1–14.
 b i b l i o g r a p hy 355

Armstrong, K. 2000. Buddha. London: Phoenix.

Ball, W. and J.C. Gardin. 1982. Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan I.
Paris: Editions recerche sur les civilisations.
Banerjee, N.R. 1989. ‘Ujjain’, in A. Ghosh (ed.), An Encyclopaedia of Indian
Archaeology, vol. 2. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers
Private Ltd., pp. 447–9.
Barua, B.M. 1946 (rpntd 1968). Asoka and His Inscriptions. Calcutta and
New Delhi: New Age Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Basham, A.L. 1951 (rpntd 2009). History and Doctrine of the Ajivikas—
A Vanished Indian Religion. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers
Pvt. Ltd.
Beal, S. 1880. ‘The Tooth-seal of Asoka’, The Indian Antiquary IX: 86.
———.  1884 (rpntd 1963). Buddhist Records of the Western Countries,
Volume One. Calcutta: Susil Gupta (India) Pvt. Ltd.
———.  1884 (rpntd 1980). Buddhist Records of the Western Countries,
Volumes Two and Three. Delhi and Varanasi: Bharatiya Publishing
House.
Beglar, J.D. 1878 (rpntd 2000). ‘Archaeological Survey of India Report of
a Tour in the Bengal Provinces, 1872–73’, in A. Cunningham (ed.),
Archaeological Survey of India Report of a Tour through the Bengal
Provinces, vol. VIII. New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India.
Bernard, P. 2005. ‘Hellenistic Arachosia: A Greek Melting Pot in Action’,
East and West 55 (1/4): 13–34.
Beveridge, H. (trans). 1902 (rpntd 1979). The Akbar Nama of Abu-l-Fazl,
Volume I. New Delhi: Ess Ess Publications.
Bhandarkar, D.R. 1925. Asoka. Calcutta: University of Calcutta.
———.  1957 (rpntd 1987). ‘Asoka and his Successors’, in K.A. Nilakanta
Sastri (ed.), A Comprehensive History of India—Volume Two. New
Delhi: People’s Publishing House, pp. 20–49.
Bidari, B. 2007. Kapilavastu: The World of Siddhartha. Lumbini: The
Author.
Biscione, R. 1984. ‘Baluchistan’s Presence in the Ceramic Assemblage of
Period I at Shahr-I Sokhta’, in B. Allchin (ed.), South Asian Archaeology
1981. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 69–80.
Bloch, T. 1906–7 (rpntd 1990). ‘Excavations at Lauriya’, Archaeological
Survey of India Annual Report 1906–7. Delhi: Swati Publications,
pp. 119–26.
Bose, M.M. 1928. ‘Ashoka’s Rock Edicts I, VIII, IX and XI’, Indian Histor­-
ical Quarterly (IV): 110–23.
356 b i b l i o g r a p hy
Bose, S. 2003. ‘Forests and Fields in the Middle Gangetic Plains (from the
Mesolithic upto c. 3rd century bc)’, M.Phil. dissertation, University of
Delhi.
———.  2009. ‘Human–Plant Interactions in the Middle Gangetic Plains’,
in U. Singh and N. Lahiri (eds), Ancient India—New Research. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 71–123.
———.  2014. ‘From Eminence to Near Extinction: The Saga of the Greater
One-Horned Rhino’, in M. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan
(eds), Shifting Ground: People, Mobility and Animals in India’s Environ­-
mental Histories. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 65–87.
Bosworth, A.B. 1996. ‘The Historical Setting of Megasthenes’ Indica’,
Classical Philology 91: 113–27.
Bradford, A.S. 2001. With Arrow, Sword and Spear—A History of Warfare in
the Ancient World. Westport: Praeger Publishers.
Brown, T. 1957. ‘The Merits and Weaknesses of Megasthenes’, Phoenix 11:
12–24.
Buhler, G. 1901 (rpntd 1987). Indian Palaeography—From About B.C. 350
to About A.D. 1300. Patna: Eastern Book House.
Carratelli, G.P. and G. Garbini. 1964. A Bilingual Graeco-Aramaic Edict by
Asoka—The First Greek Inscription Discovered in Afghanistan. Roma:
Instituto Italiano Per Il Medio Ed Estremo Oriente.
Cartledge, P. 2012. ‘Introduction’, in James Romm (ed.), The Landmark
Arrian—The Campaigns of Alexander. New York: Anchor Books,
pp. xiii–xxviii.
Chakrabarti, D.K. 1968. A History of Indian Archaeology from the Begin­-
ning to 1947. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
———.  2001. Archaeological Geography of the Ganga Plain—The Lower
and the Middle Ganga. Delhi: Permanent Black.
———.  2005. The Archaeology of the Deccan Routes—The Ancient Routes
from the Ganga Plain to the Deccan. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal
Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
———.  2006. The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology: The Archaeo­
logical Foundations of Ancient India, Stone Age to AD 13th Century.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———.  2010. The Geopolitical Orbits of Ancient India: The Geographical
Frames of the Ancient Indian Dynasties. New Delhi: Oxford Univer­-
sity Press.
———.  2011. Royal Messages by the Wayside—Historical Geography of the
Asokan Edicts. New Delhi: Aryan Books International.
 b i b l i o g r a p hy 357
Chalmers, Lord. 1931 (rpntd 2000). Buddha’s Teachings, being the Sutta-
Nipata or Discourse-Collection. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers
Pvt. Ltd.
Chandra, M. 1977. Trade and Trade Routes in Ancient India. New Delhi:
Abhinav Publications.
Channing, E. 1885. ‘Roads from India to Central Asia’, Science 5 (117):
360–2.
Chattopadhyay, R.K. 2014. ‘The Satavahanas and their Successors’, in
D.K Chakrabarti and M. Lal (eds), History of Ancient India Volume
IV—Political History and Administration (c. 200 BC–AD 750). New
Delhi: Vivekananda International Foundation and Aryan Books Inter­
national.
Cherry, J.F. 2007 (rpntd 2009). ‘The Personal and the Political—The Greek
World’, in S.E. Alcock and R. Osborne (eds), Classical Archaeology,
USA, UK, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 288–306.
Chhabra, B. Ch. 1949–50. ‘Intwa Clay Sealing’, Epigraphia Indica XXVIII:
174–5.
———  and G.S. Gai. 1981. Inscriptions of the Early Gupta Kings. Corpus
Inscriptionum Indicarum Volume III. New Delhi: Archaeological Survey
of India.
Ciarla, R. 1981. ‘A Preliminary Analysis of the Manufacture of Alabaster
Vessels at Shahr-I Sokhta and Mundigak in the 3rd Millennium B.C.’, in
H. Hartel (ed.), South Asian Archaeology 1979. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer
Verlag, pp. 45–63.
Coningham, R.A.E. and K.P. Acharya, et al. 2013. ‘The Earliest Buddhist
Shrine: Excavating the Birthplace of the Buddha, Lumbini (Nepal)’,
Antiquity 87: 1104–23.
Connors, R.J. 1986. ‘Greek Rhetoric and the Transition from Orality’,
Philosophy & Rhetoric 19 (1): 38–65.
Coomaraswamy, A. 1927 (rpntd 1972). History of Indian and Indonesian
Art. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Cousens, H. 1891. ‘Report on the Boria or Lakha Medi Stupa near Junagadh’,
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal LX: 17–23.
Cowell, E.B. 1990 (rpntd). The Jataka, or Stories of the Buddha’s Former
Births. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
———  and F.W. Thomas, trans. 1968 (rpntd 1993). The Harsa-Carita of
Bana. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Cunningham, A. 1877 (rpntd 1961). Inscriptions of Asoka. Corpus Inscrip­
tionum Indicarum Volume 1. Varanasi: Indological Book House.
358 b i b l i o g r a p hy
———.  1892 (rpntd 1998). Mahabodhi, or the Great Buddhist Temple under
the Bodhi Tree at Buddha-Gaya. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal
Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Dani, A.H. 1986. The Historic City of Taxila. Paris and Tokyo: The United
Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization and the
Centre of East Asian Cultural Studies.
Deeg, M. 2009. ‘From the Iron-Wheel to Bodhisattvahood: Asoka in
Buddhist Culture and Memory’, in P. Olivelle (ed.), Asoka in History
and Historical Memory, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Pvt Ltd,
pp. 109–44.
———.  2012. ‘Asoka: Model Ruler without a Name?’, in P. Olivelle,
J. Leoshko, and H.P. Ray (eds), Reimagining Asoka: Memory and
History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 362–79.
Deloche, J. 1993. Transport and Communication in India Prior to Steam
Locomotion Volume 1. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Deva, K. and V. Mishra. 1961. Vaisali Excavations. Vaisali: Vaisali Sangh.
Devahuti, D. 1970. Harsha: A Political Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Devraj, D.V. and H.T. Talwar. 1996. Interim Report on the Excavations at
Sannati 1993–95. Mysore: Directorate of Archaeology and Museums.
Dharamsey, V. 2012. Bhagwanlal Indraji—The First Indian Archaeologist.
Vadodara: Darshak Itihas Nidhi.
Dhavalikar, M.K. 1977. Masterpieces of Indian Terracottas. Bombay:
Taraporevala.
Dikshitar, V.R.R. 1944 (rpntd 1948). War in Ancient India. Madras, Bombay,
Calcutta, London: Macmillan and Co.
Diringer, D. 1996 (rpnt). The Alphabet—A Key to the History of Mankind.
New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Dupree, L. 1997. Afghanistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Ebrey, P.B. 1996. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Edde, A.M. (trans. J.M. Todd). 2011. Saladin. Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press.
Eggermont, P.H.L. 1956. The Chronology of the Reign of Asoka Moriya—A
Comparison of the Data on the Asoka Inscriptions and the Data of the
Tradition. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Falk, H. 2006. Asokan Sites and Artefacts—A Source-Book with Bibliography.
Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern.
———.  2008. ‘Barabar Reconsidered’, in E.M. Raven (ed.), South Asian
Archaeology 1999. Groningen: Egbert Forsten, pp. 245–51.
 b i b l i o g r a p hy 359
———.  2012. ‘The Fate of Asoka’s Donations at Lumbini’, in P. Olivelle,
J. Leoshko, and H.P. Ray (eds), Reimagining Asoka—Memory and
History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 204–16.
Filliozat, J. 1961–2. ‘Graeco-Aramaic Inscription of Asoka near Kandahar’,
Epigraphia Indica, XXXIV: 1–8.
Forster, E.M. 1924 (rpntd 2005). A Passage to India. London: Penguin.
Fraser, P.M. 1979. ‘The Son of Aristonax at Kandahar’, Afghan Studies 2:
9–21.
Fuller, C.J. 2001. ‘Orality, Literacy and Memorization: Priestly Educa­-
tion in Contemporary South India’, Modern Asian Studies 35   (1):
1–32.
Geiger, W. 1912 (rpntd 1964). The Mahavamsa or the Great Chronicle of
Ceylon. London: Pali Text Society and Luzac & Company, Ltd.
Ghosh, A. 1948. ‘Taxila (Sirkap), 1944–5’, Ancient India 4: 41–84.
———.  1989. An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology. New Delhi: Munshi­
ram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Ghosh, N.N. 1936 (rpntd 1985). Early History of Kausambi (from the Sixth
Century BC to the Eleventh Century AD). Delhi: Durga Publications.
Gokhale, B.G. 1962. Samudra Gupta—Life and Times. Bombay: Asia
Publishing House.
———.  1966. ‘Early Buddhist Kingship’, Journal of Asian Studies 26 (1):
15–22.
Gordon, D.H. and M.E. Gordon. 1943. ‘The Cultures of Maski and
Madhavpur’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. Letters IX:
83–98.
Goswami, B. 2001. Lalitavistara—English Translation with Notes. Kolkata:
The Asiatic Society.
Goyal, S. 2006. Harsha: A Multidisciplinary Political Study. Jodhpur:
Kusumanjali Book World.
Goyal, S.R. 1986. Bharat ke Mahan Naresh Granthmala—Harsha Shiladitya.
Meerut: Kusumanjali.
Guha, R. 1999. Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India.
Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.
———.  2004. The Last Liberal and Other Essays. New Delhi: Permanent
Black.
———.  2013. Gandhi Before India. New Delhi: Penguin India.
Guha-Thakurta, T. 1996. ‘Meera Mukherjee: Recasting the Folk Form’,
in G. Sinha (ed.), Expressions & Evocations—Contemporary Women
Artists of India. Bombay: Marg Publications, pp. 48–59.
360 b i b l i o g r a p hy
Gupta, S.P. 1980. The Roots of Indian Art (A Detailed Study of the Formative
Period of Indian Art and Architecture: Third and Second Centuries BC—
Mauryan and Late Mauryan). Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation.
Guruge, A.W.P. 1993. Asoka, the Righteous: A Definitive Biography. Colombo:
The Central Cultural Fund.
Hare, E.M. 1947. Woven Cadences of Early Buddhists (Sutta Nipata).
London: Geoffrey Cumberlege.
Hazra, K.L. 2007. Asoka as Depicted in His Edicts. New Delhi: Munshiram
Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Helms, S.W. 1979. ‘Old Kandahar Excavations 1976: Preliminary Report’,
Afghan Studies 2: 1–9.
———.  1982. ‘Excavations at the City and the Famous Fortress of Kandahar,
the Foremost Place in all of Asia’, Afghan Studies 3–4: 1–24.
Hiltebeitel, A. 2011. Dharma: Its Early History in Law, Religion and Narrat­
ive. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hilton, J. 1996. ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Birds, Animals and Omens
in Ancient Indian Literature’, in S.D. Singh (ed.), Culture through the
Ages. Delhi: Agam Kala Prakashan, pp. 59–83.
Hinghausen, M.L. 1966. Harsa Vardhana Empereur et Poete. Londres, Paris,
Louvain: Lusac & Co, Ernest Leroux, and J.B. Istas.
Hora, S.L. 1950. ‘Knowledge of the Ancient Hindus concerning Fish and
Fisheries of India—Fishery Legislation in Asoka’s Pillar Edict V’,
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal: Letters, XVI (1): 43–56.
Holt, F. 2012. Lost World of the Golden King—In Search of Ancient Afghan­
istan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Howell, J.R. 1995. Excavations at Sannathi 1986–89. Memoirs of the Archa­
eo­logical Survey of India No. 93. New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of
India.
Hultzsch, E. 1907–8. ‘Tirumalai Rock Inscription of Rajendra-Chola I’,
Epigraphia Indica IX: 229–33.
———.  1925 (rpntd 1991). Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum Vol. I:
Inscriptions of Asoka. New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India.
Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. XXI. 1908 (rpntd, n.d.). New Delhi: Today
and Tomorrow’s Printers and Publishers.
Izre’el, S. and R. Drorp. 1997. Language and Culture in the Near East. Leiden:
Brill.
Jackson, V.H. 1925. Journal of Francis Buchanan (afterwards Hamilton),
Kept during the Survey of the Districts of Patna and Gaya in 1811–1812.
Patna: Superintendent, Government Printing, Bihar and Orissa.
 b i b l i o g r a p hy 361
Jamsedjee, A. 1890–4. ‘The Sudarshana or Lake Beautiful of the Girnar
Inscriptions, B.C. 300–A.D. 450, with an Introduction by O. Codring­
ton’, Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, XVIII:
47–55.
Jarrett, H.S. (corrected and annotated by J. Sarkar). 1949 (1978). The Ain-i
Akbari by Abu’l Fazl Allami. Volume II. New Delhi: Oriental Books
Reprint Corporation.
Jayaswal, K.P. and R.D. Banerji. 1933. ‘The Hathigumpha Inscription of
Kharavela’, Epigraphia Indica XX (1929–30): 71–89.
Jayaswal, V. 1998. From Stone Quarry to Sculpturing Workshop—A Report on
the Archaeological Investigations around Chunar Varanasi & Sarnath.
Delhi: Agam Kala Prakashan.
———.  2009. Ancient Varanasi: An Archaeological Perspective (Excavations
at Aktha). New Delhi: Aryan Books International.
Joglekar, P.P. 2008. ‘A Fresh Appraisal of the Animal-based Subsistence and
Domestic Animals in the Ganga Valley’, Pragdhara (18): 309–21.
———.  2013. ‘Faunal Remains from Raja-Nala-ka-Tila, District Sona­
bhadra, Uttar Pradesh’, Pragdhara (21–2): 227–77.
———,  V. Tripathi, and P. Upadhyay. 2012. ‘Faunal Diversity at Agiabir,
District Mirzapur, a Multi-Cultural Site in Uttar Pradesh’, Pragdhara
(20): 43–59.
Joshi, M.C. and B.M. Pande. 1967. ‘A Newly Discovered Inscription of
Asoka at Bahapur, Delhi’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1967:
96–8.
Kane, P.V. 1994 (rpntd). History of Dharmasastra (Ancient and Medieval
Religious and Civil Law). Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research
Institute.
———.  1997 (rpntd). History of Dharmasastra (Ancient and Medieval
Religious and Civil Law), II (ii). Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research
Institute.
Kangle, R.P. 1965 (rpntd 2000). The Kautilya Arthasastra. Part III. Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited.
———.  1972 (rpntd 2000). The Kautilya Arthasastra. Part II. Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Karambelkar, V.W. 1959. The Atharvavedic Civilization: Its Place in the Indo-
Aryan Culture. Nagpur: University of Nagpur.
Kargupta, S. 2002. Understanding the Prophetic—The History and Philo­
sophy of Prognostication in Ancient India. Kolkata: The Asiatic Society.
362 b i b l i o g r a p hy
Kejariwal, O.P. 1988. The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of
India’s Past. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Kielhorn, F. 1905–6. ‘Junagadh Rock Inscription of Rudradaman; The Year
72’, Epigraphia Indica VIII: 36–49.
Konow, S. 1907–8. ‘Sarnath Inscription of Kumaradevi’, Epigraphia Indica
9: 319–28.
Kosmin, P.J. 2014. The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory and
Ideology in the Seleucid Empire. Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press.
Kumar, B. 1987. Archaeology of Pataliputra and Nalanda. Delhi: Ramanand
Vidya Bhawan.
Lahiri, N. 1992. The Archaeology of Indian Trade Routes Upto c. 200 BC—
Resource Use, Resource Access and Lines of Communication. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
———.  2005 (rpntd 2011). Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus
Civilization was Discovered. Gurgaon and Delhi: Hachette India and
Black Kite/Permanent Black.
———.  2011. ‘Revisiting the Cultural Landscape of Junagadh in the Time
of the Mauryas’, Puratattva 41: 114–30.
Lal, B.B. 1949. ‘Sisupalgarh 1948: An Early Historical Fort in Eastern India’,
Ancient India 5: 62–105.
Lal, M. 1986. ‘Iron Tools, Forest Clearance and Urbanisation in the Gangetic
Plains’, Man and Environment, X: 83–90.
Lamotte, E. 1988. History of Indian Buddhism—From the Origins to the Saka
Era. Louvain-Paris: Peeters Press.
Law, B.C. 1954 (rpntd 1984). Historical Geography of Ancient India. New
Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation.
Lopez, D.S. 1995. Religions of India in Practice. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Luders, H.E. Waldschmidt and M.A. Mehendale. 1963. Bharhut Inscrip­
tions—Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, II (ii). Ootacamund: Govern­
ment Epigraphist for India.
MacDowall, D.W. and M. Taddei. 1978. ‘The Early Historic Period:
Achaemenids and Greeks’, in F.R. Allchin and N. Hammond (eds), The
Archaeology of Afghanistan—From Prehistoric Times to the Timurid
Period. London, New York, San Francisco: Academic Press, pp. 187–
232.
Macfarlane, R. 2012. The Old Ways—A Journey on Foot. New York: Viking.
 b i b l i o g r a p hy 363
Majumdar, N.G. 1935–6. ‘Explorations at Lauriya-Nandangarh’, Annual
Report of the Archaeological Survey of India 1935–36, pp. 56–66.
Majumdar, R.C. 1958. ‘The Indika of Megasthenes’, Journal of the American
Oriental Society 78 (4): 273–6.
———.  1960. The Classical Accounts of India. Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukho­
padhyay.
Marshall, J. 1911–12. ‘Excavations at Bhita’, Archaeological Survey of India
Annual Report 1911-12, pp. 29–94.
———  (ed.). 1931 (rpntd). Mohenjodaro and the Indus Civilization
(3 vols). Delhi: Swati Publications.
———.  1951 (rpntd 1975). Taxila—An Illustrated Account of Archaeo­-
logical Excavations carried out At Taxila under the Orders of the Govern­
ment of India between the Years 1913 and 1934. Delhi, Varanasi and
Patna: Motilal Banarsidass.
———,  A. Foucher, and N.G. Majumdar. 1940 (rpntd 1983). The Monu­
ments of Sanchi. Delhi: Swati Publications.
McCrindle, J.W. 1877. Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and
Arrian. Calcutta and Bombay: Trubner & Co.
Mirashi, V.V. 1960. ‘New Light on Deotek Inscriptions’, in V.V. Mirashi
(ed.), Studies in Indology Volume I. Nagpur: Vidarbha Samshodhana
Mandal.
Mitra, D. 1971 (rpntd 1980). Buddhist Monuments. Calcutta: Sahitya
Samsad.
———.  1972. Excavations at Tilaurakot and Kodan and Explorations in the
Nepalese Terai. Kathmandu: The Department of Archaeology.
Mohanty, P. and B. Tripathy. 1997–8. ‘The Prehistoric, Protohistoric and
the Early Historic Cultures of Orissa’, Pragdhara 8: 69–98.
Mookerji, R. 1926 (rpntd 1965). Harsha. Delhi, Varanasi, Patna: Motilal
Banarsidass.
———.  1928 (rpntd 2007). Asoka. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
———.  1952 (rpntd 1960). Chandragupta Maurya—Emperor of Northern
India. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
———.  1957. ‘The Foundation of the Mauryan Empire’, in K.A. Nilakanta
Sastri (ed.), A Comprehensive History of India Volume 2: The Mauryas
& Satavahanas 325 BC—AD 300. New Delhi: People’s Publishing
House, pp. 1–19.
Moore, C.H. 1921. ‘Prophecy in the Ancient Epic’, Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology 32: 99–175.
364 b i b l i o g r a p hy
Mukherjee, B.N. 1984. Studies in the Aramaic Edicts of Asoka. Calcutta:
Indian Museum.
———.  1997. ‘Locations of the Asokan Edicts’, in H.B. Chowdhury (ed.),
Asoka 2300—Jagajjyoti: Asoka Commemoration Volume 1997. Cal­cutta:
Bauddha Dharmankur Sabha.
Mukherji, P.C. 1901 (1969 rpntd). A Report on a Tour of Exploration of
the Antiquities in the Tarai, Nepal the Region of Kapilavastu; During
February and March 1899. Varanasi: Indological Book House.
Nagar, S.L 1992. Indian Monoliths. New Delhi: Intellectual Publishing
House.
Nakamura, H. 1987 (rpntd 2007). Indian Buddhism: A Survey with
Bibliographical Notes. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Nehru, J. 1946 (1990 rpntd). The Discovery of India. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Norman, K.R. 1967. ‘Notes on Asoka’s Fifth Pillar Edict’, Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland: 26–32.
———.  1997. ‘Asoka’s Debt to His People’, in H.B. Chowdhury (ed.), Asoka
2300—Jagajjyoti: Asoka Commemoration Volume. Calcutta: Bauddha
Dharmankur Sabha, pp. 81–97.
———.  1997–8. ‘Asoka’s Thirteenth Rock Edict’, Indological Taurinensia
(23–4): 459–84.
———.  2012. ‘The Languages of the Composition and Transmission
of the Ashokan Inscriptions’, in P. Olivelle, J. Leoshko, and H.P. Ray
(eds), Reimagining Asoka—Memory and History. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, pp. 38–62.
Oikonomides, Al. N. 1984. ‘The [Teuevoc] of Alexander the Great at
Alexandria in Arachosia (Old Kandahar)’, Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie
und Epigraphik 56: 145–7.
Oldenberg, H. 1879 (rpntd 1982). The Dipavamsa: An Ancient Buddhist
Historical Record. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services.
Olivelle, P. 2009. Asoka in History and Historical Memory. Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass Publishers.
———.  2012. ‘Asoka’s Inscriptions as Text and Ideology’, in P. Olivelle,
J. Leoshko, and H.P. Ray (eds), Reimagining Asoka—Memory and
History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 157–83.
———.  2013 (rpntd 2014). King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India—
Kautilya’s Arthashastra. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Oliver, R.T. 1971. Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
 b i b l i o g r a p hy 365
Ong, W.T. 1984. ‘Orality, Literacy and Medieval Textualization’, New Literary
History 16 (1): 1–12.
Orsini, F. (ed.). 2007. Love in South Asia—A Cultural History. New Delhi:
Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd.
Page, J.A. 1926–7 (rpntd 1990). ‘Bulandi Bagh, near Patna’, in Annual
Report of the Archaeological Survey of India 1926–27. Delhi: Swati
Publications.
Pandeya, R. 1965. Ashoka ke abhilekha. Varanasi: Gyanmandal Ltd.
Pant, P.C. and V. Jayaswal. 1990–1. ‘Ancient Stone Quarries of Chunar: An
Appraisal’, Pragdhara 1: 49–52.
Pargiter. F.E. 1913 (rpntd 1962). The Purana Text on the Dynasties of the
Kali Age. Varanasi: The Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office.
Parker, G. (ed.). 1995. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare—The
Triumph of the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Patra, B. 2006. ‘Dhauli: An Early Historic Urban Centre of Orissa’, Orissa
Review: 49–53.
Poonacha, K.P. 2013. Excavations at Kanaganahalli (Sannati) Taluk Chita­
pur, Dist. Gulbarga, Karnataka. Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey
of India No. 106. New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India.
Pramanaik, S. 2004–5. ‘Significant Discoveries around Sudarshan Lake,
Junagadh’, Puratattva 35: 179–81.
Prasad, A.K. 2006. ‘Champa, an Ancient Urban Centre of Bihar—A Case
Study’, in B.R. Mani and S.C. Saran (eds), Purabharati Studies in
Early Historical Archaeology and Buddhism (Commemoration Volume
in Respect of Prof. B.P. Sinha). Delhi: Sharada Publishing House,
pp. 48–50.
Rai, H.D. 2010. Lumbini: The Supreme Pilgrimage. Kathmandu: Holy
Ashoka Tours & Travels Pvt. Ltd.
Rajan, K. and V.P Yatheeskumar. 2010–12. ‘New Evidences on Scientific
Dates for Brahmi Script as Revealed from Porunthal and Kodumanal
Excavations’, Pragdhara 21–2: 279–95.
———,  S. Selvakumar, R. Ramesh, and P. Balamurugan. 2013. ‘Archaeo­
logical Excavations at Porunthal, District Dindugul, Tamil Nadu’, Man
and Environment XXXVIII (2): 62–85.
Rajyagor, S.B. 1975. Gujarat State Gazetteers, Junagadh District. Ahmeda­
bad: Government of Gujarat.
Rangachari, D. 2009. Invisible Women, Visible Histories: Gender, Society
and Polity in Northern India (Seventh to Twelfth Century AD). New
Delhi: Manohar.
366 b i b l i o g r a p hy
Rangarajan, M. 2001. India’s Wildlife History—An Introduction. Delhi:
Permanent Black and Ranthambhore Foundation.
Rawat, Y.S. 2009. ‘Hill Fort of Anarta: Discovery of a Unique Early Histori­
cal Fort with Cave Dwellings, Buddhist Idols and Remains at Taranga
in North Gujarat’, Purattatva 39: 96–106.
Ray, H.P. 2006. ‘Archaeology and Asoka: Defining the Empire’, in P. Olivelle,
J. Leoshko, and H.P. Ray (eds), Reimagining Asoka—Memory and
History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 17–37.
Raychaudhuri, H. 1953 (1972 edition). Political History of Ancient India—
From the Accession of Parikshit to the Extinction of the Gupta Dynasty.
Calcutta: University of Calcutta.
Report of the Committee for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 1957.
New Delhi: Government of India.
Reynolds, F.E. 1976. ‘The Many Lives of Buddha: A Study of Sacred
Biography and Theravada Tradition’, in F.E. Reynolds and D. Capps
(eds), The Biographical Process—Studies in the History and Psychology
of Religion. The Hague and Paris: Mouton & Co., pp. 37–61.
Rhys Davids, T.W. (trans.) 1881 (rpntd 1965). Sutta Pitaka. Sacred Books of
the East XI. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
———.  1903 (rpntd 1971). Buddhist India. Delhi, Patna, Varanasi: Motilal
Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
———  (trans.) 1910 (rpntd 2001). Dialogues of the Buddha. Translated
from the Pali of the Digha Nikaya. Delhi: Low Price Publications.
———  and H. Oldenberg (trans). 1882 (rpntd 1968). Vinaya Texts Part I
and II. Sacred Books of the East XVII. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Rich, B. 2008. To Uphold the World—The Message of Ashoka & Kautilya for
the 21st Century. New Delhi: Viking.
Romm, J. (ed.). 2012 (trans. P. Mensch). The Landmark Arrian: The
Campaigns of Alexander—Anabasis Alexandrou. New York: Anchor
Books.
Rowley, H.H. 1956. Prophecy and Religion in Ancient China and Israel.
New York: Harper & Brothers.
Saha, M.N. 1953. ‘Different Methods of Date-recording in Ancient and
Medieval India, and the Origin of the Saka Era, Journal of the Asiatic
Society: Letters, XIX (1): 1–24.
Sahni, D.R. 1907–8 (rpntd 1990). ‘Excavations at Rampurva’, Archaeo-
logical Survey of India Annual Report 1907–8. Delhi: Swati Publications,
pp. 181–8.
———.  1928–9 (rpntd 1990). ‘The Yerragudi Rock Edicts of Asoka’,
 b i b l i o g r a p hy 367
Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India 1928–29. Delhi:
Swati Publications.
———.  1937. Archaeological Remains and Excavations at Bairat. Jaipur:
Department of Archaeology & Historical Research, Jaipur State.
Sali, S.A. 1986. Daimabad 1976–79. New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of
India.
Salomon, R. 1998. Indian Epigraphy—A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions
in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan Languages. New Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
———.  2009. ‘Asoka and the “Epigraphic Habit” in India’, in P. Olivelle
(ed.), Ashoka in History and Historical Memory, Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd, pp. 45–52.
Sarao, K.T.S. 1990 (rpntd 2010). Urban Centres and Urbanisation—As
Reflected in the Pali Vinaya and Sutta Pitakas. New Delhi: Munshiram
Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
———.  2014. ‘Janapadas, Mahajanapadas, Kingdoms, and Republics’, in
D.K. Chakrabarti and M. Lal (eds), History of Ancient India, Volume
III: The Texts, Political History and Administration till c. 200 BC, New
Delhi: Vivekananda International Foundation and Aryan Books Inter­
national, pp. 183–204.
Sarma, I.K. and J.V. Rao. 1993. Early Brahmi Inscriptions from Sannati. New
Delhi: Harman Publishing House.
Sastri, K.A.N. 1967. Age of the Nandas and Mauryas. Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass.
Scerrato, U. 1958. ‘An Inscription of Asoka Discovered in Afghanistan: The
Bilingual Greek-Aramaic of Kandahar’, East and West 9 (1/2): 406.
Schoeber, J. 1997. ‘Trajectories in Buddhist Sacred Biography’, in J. Schoe­
ber (ed.), Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and
Southeast Asia, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 1–15.
Sein Ko, T. 1911–12.‘Burmese Inscription at Bodh-Gaya’, Epigraphia Indica
XI: 118–20.
Sen, P. 1997 ‘Asoka: The Great Emperor—Rabindranath Tagore’, in H.B.
Chowdhury (ed.), Asoka 2300—Jagajjyoti: Asoka Commemoration
Volume. Calcutta: Bauddha Dharmankur Sabha, pp. 9–10.
Sethna, K.D. 1960. ‘Note on R.C. Majumdar’s Objections against
Megas­thenes and Schwanbeck’, Journal of the American Oriental
Society 80: 243–50.
Shaffer, J. 1978. ‘The Later Prehistoric Periods’, in F.R. Allchin and
N. Hammond (eds), The Archaeology of Afghanistan—From Earliest
368 b i b l i o g r a p hy
Times to the Timurid Period. London, New York, San Francisco:
Academic Press, pp. 71–186.
Shamasastry, R. (trans). 1915 (rpntd 1960). Kautilya’s Arthasastra. Mysore:
Mysore Printing and Publishing House.
Sharif, S.M. 1969. ‘Excavations at Bhir Mound, Taxila’, Pakistan Archaeology
6: 7–99.
Sharma, B.N. 1970. Harsa and His Times. Varanasi: Sushma Prakashan.
Sharma, R.K. and O.P. Misra. 2003. Archaeological Excavations in
Central India (Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh). New Delhi: Mittal
Publications.
Shere, S.A. 1951. ‘Stone Discs of Murtaziganj 1951’, Journal of the Bihar
Research Society XXXVII: 178–90.
Shokoohy, M. and N.H. Shokoohy. 1988. Hisar-i Firuza—Sultanate and
Early Mughal Architecture in the District of Hisar, India. London:
Monographs on Art Archaeology and Architecture.
Sick, D. 2007. ‘When Socrates Met the Buddha: Greek and Indian Dialectic
in Hellenistic Bactria and India’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 17
(3): 253–78.
Singh, B.P. 2003. Early Farming Communities of Kaimur: Excavations at
Senuar. Jaipur: Publication Scheme.
Singh, V.L. 1998. Ujjayini: A Numismatic and Epigraphic Study. New Delhi:
Khama Publishers.
Singh, R.N., C.A. Petrie, P.P Joglekar, S. Neogi, C. Lacelotti, A.K. Pandey,
and A. Pathak. 2013. ‘Recent Excavation at Alamgirpur, Meerut Dis­-
trict: A Preliminary Report’, Man and Environment XXXVIII (1):
32–54.
Singh, U. 1994. Kings, Brahmanas and Temples in Orissa—An Epigraphic
Study AD 300–1147. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers
Pvt. Ltd.
———.  1997–8. ‘Texts on Stone: Understanding Asoka’s Epigraph-
Monuments and their Changing Contexts’, Indian Historical Review 24
(1–2): 1–19.
———.  2006. Ancient Delhi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———.  2009. A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the
Stone Age to the 12th Century. Delhi: Pearson Longman.
———.  2012. ‘Governing the State and the Self: Political Philosophy and
Practice in the Edicts of Asoka’, South Asian Studies 28 (2): 131–45.
———.  2014. ‘Gifts from Other Lands: Southeast Asian Religious Endow­
ments in India’, in U. Singh and P.P. Dhar (eds), Asian Encounters:
Exploring Connected Histories. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
 b i b l i o g r a p hy 369
———.  Unpublished. ‘Bodhgaya: The View from Myanmar’. Paper pre­
sented at the conference on ‘Bodh Gaya through the Centuries’ at
Bihar Heritage Development Society, 7–9 March 2014.
Sinha, B.P. 2000. Directory of Bihar Archaeology Silver Jubilee Year Publi­
cation. Patna: Bihar Puravid Parishad.
———  and S.R. Roy. 1969. Vaisali Excavations 1958–1962. Patna: Direct­
orate of Archaeology and Museums.
Sinha, K.K. 1971–2. ‘Remarks’, Purattatva, 5: 29–33.
Sircar, D.C. 1942 (rpntd 1993). Select Inscriptions Bearing on Indian
History and Civilization, vol. I. Delhi: V.K. Publishing House.
———.  1960. ‘Rajula–Mandagiri Inscription of Asoka’, Epigraphia Indica
XXXI (1955–6): 211–18.
———.  1979 (rpntd 2000). Asokan Studies. Calcutta: Indian Museum.
———  and K.G. Krishnan. 1957–8. ‘Bhubaneswar Inscription of Ganga
Narasimha’, Epigraphia Indica XXXII: 229–38.
Smith, B.K. 1991. ‘Classifying Animals and Humans in Ancient India’,
Man (New Series), 26 (3): 527–48.
Smith, V.A. 1889. ‘Graeco-Roman Influence on the Civilization of India’,
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 58: 107–98.
———.  1901 (rpntd 1969). ‘Prefatory Note’, in P.C. Mukherji, A Report on
a Tour of Exploration of the Antiquities in the Tarai, Nepal the Region of
Kapilavastu; During February and March 1899. Varanasi: Indological
Book House, pp. 1–22.
———.  1909 (rpntd 1957). Asoka The Buddhist Emperor of India. Delhi,
Lucknow and Jullunder: S. Chand & Co.
Snodgrass, A.M. 1985. ‘Greek Archeology and Greek History’, Classical
Antiquity, 4 (2): 193–207.
Spodek, H. 1974. ‘Rulers, Merchants and Other Groups in the City-States
of Saurashtra, India around 1800’, Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 16 (4): 448–70.
Spooner, D.B. 1912–13 (rpntd 1990). ‘Mr Ratan Tata’s Excavations at
Pataliputra’, Archaeological Survey of India Annual Report 1912–13.
Delhi: Swati Publications, pp. 53–86.
Srivastava, K.M. 1996. Excavations at Piprahwa and Ganwaria. New Delhi:
Director General, Archaeological Survey of India.
Stein, M.A. 1900 (1989 rpntd). Kalhana’s Rajatarangini—A Chronicle of
the Kings of Kasmir, vol. I. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.
Stoneman, R. 2010 (rpntd 2012). ‘The Persian Empire and Alexander’, in
J. Romm (ed.), The Landmark Arrian—The Campaigns of Alexander
Anabasis Alexandrou, New York: Anchor Books, pp. 361–6.
370 b i b l i o g r a p hy
Strong, J.S. 2002. ‘Asoka’s Wives and the Ambiguities of Buddhist Kingship’,
Cahiers d’Extreme-Asie 3: 35–54.
———.  1989 (rpntd 2008). The Legend of King Asoka: A Study and Trans­
lation of the Asokavadana. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
———.  2012. ‘The Commingling of Gods and Humans, the Unveiling of
the World, and the Descent from Trayastrimsa Heaven—An Exegetical
Exploration of Minor Rock Edict I’, in P. Olivelle, J. Leoshko, and H.P.
Ray (eds), Reimagining Asoka—Memory and History. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, pp. 348–61.
Tambiah, S.J. 1973. ‘Buddhism and This-worldly Activity’, Modern Asian
Studies 7 (1): 1–20.
——. 1976. World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism
and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Thapar, B.K. 1957. ‘Maski 1954: A Chalcolithic Site of the Southern Deccan’,
Ancient India 13: 4–142.
Thapar, R. 1961 (second edition 1997). Asoka and the Decline of the
Mauryas. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———.  2013. The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India.
Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
Thaplyal, K.K. 2009. A New Asokan Inscription from Ratanpurwa. Vara­-
nasi: Jnana Pravaha.
———.  2012. Asoka—The King and the Man. New Delhi: Aryan Books
International.
Thomas, P.K. and P.P. Joglekar. 1994. ‘Holocene Faunal Studies in India’,
Man and Environment XIX (1–2): 179–203.
Tieken, H. 2012. ‘The Composition of Asoka’s Pillar Edict Series’, in
P. Olivelle, J. Leoshko, and H.P. Ray (eds), Reimagining Asoka: Memory
and History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 184–94.
Tiwari, S.R. 1996. ‘Recent Discoveries and its Implications on History of
Building at Lumbini’, Tribhuvan University Journal XIX: 1–14.
Tod, J. 1839 (rpntd 1971). Travels in Western India Embracing a Visit
to the Sacred Mounts of the Jains and the Most Celebrated Shrines of
Hindu Faith between Rajpootana and the Indus; with an Account of the
Ancient City of Nehrawala. Delhi: Oriental Publishers.
Tottoli, R. 2002. Biblical Prophets in the Qu’ran and Muslim Literature.
Surrey: Curzon.
Trautmann, T.R. 1982. ‘Elephants and the Mauryas’, in S.N. Mukherjee (ed.),
India: History and Thought. Calcutta: Subarnarekha, pp. 254–81.
 b i b l i o g r a p hy 371
Tyldesley, J. 2008. Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt. New York: Basic Books.
Vajpeyi, A. 2012. Righteous Republic—The Political Foundation of Modern
India. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Veluthat, K. 2000. ‘The Sannathi Inscriptions and the Questions they
Raise’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. Golden Jubilee
Session 1999, Calicut, pp. 1081–6.
Verardi, G. 2002. Excavations at Gotihawa and a Territorial Survey in
Kapilavastu District of Nepal. Lumbini: Lumbini International
Research Institute.
———  and S. Coccia. 2008. ‘Further Excavations at Gotihawa (1998–99)’,
in E.M. Raven, South Asian Archaeology 1999. Groningen: Egbert
Forsten, pp. 254–63.
Verma, B.S. 2007. Chirand Excavations Report 1961–64 and 1967–1970.
Patna: Directorate of Archaeology, Dept. of Youth, Art and Culture
(Govt of Bihar).
Vogelsang, W. 1985. ‘Early Historical Arachosia in South-East Afghanistan:
Meeting-place between East and West’, Iranica Antiqua XX: 55–99.
Waddell, L.A. 1903 (rpntd 1975). Report on the Excavations at Pataliputra
(Patna), The Palibothra of the Greeks. Delhi: Sanskaran Prakashak.
Watters, T. 1904–5 (rpntd 2012). On Yuan Chwang’s Travels in India
AD 529–645. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Wells, H.G. 1927. The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and
Mankind. London: Macmillan.
Wheeler, R.E.M. 1947–8. ‘Brahmagiri and Chandravalli 1947: Megalithic
and Other Cultures in the Chitaldrug District, Mysore State’, Ancient
India 4: 180–310.
———.  1968. Flames over Persepolis. New York: Reynal.
Winternitz, M. 1933 (rpntd 1972). A History of Indian Literature Volume II.
Buddhist Literature and Jaina Literature. New Delhi: Oriental Books
Reprint Corporation.
 Index
Note: ‘n’ stands for notes; ‘f ’ for figures

Abhijanashakuntala 87 and Barabar caves 37, 229, 230, 233

Achaemenids 7, 71, 133, 162–3 Buddha and 35
and Aramaic 167 and Buddhists 35–6, 235
epigraphs of 7 Dasharatha’s patronage of 292, 293
multilingual inscriptions of 166 and doctrine of predestination 35
Afghani food 175 and Jainas 36, 235
Afghanistan 70, 120, 162, 163f, 266, and Nagarjuni caves 292–3, 351n.10
267 prophecy regarding Ashoka 34–5,
Ashoka’s epigraphs in 10, 164. See 36–7, 38
also Kandahar edict; Laghman Akbar, emperor 6, 206
edicts; Pul-i-Darunta stone Akbar Nama 24
inscription Alexander of Macedon 4, 51, 163, 114
cultural and trading connections expansion of empire 112
through 161–2, 164 narrative accounts of 11, 121,
as part of Mauryan empire 5, 161, 319n.22
164 Taxila, capture of 66, 71
multicultural heritage of 173 Allahabad pillar 257, 260–1
See also Arachosia, Kandahar and Queen Karuvaki’s edict 278
Ain-i Akbari 305 Allen, Charles 14, 15
Airikina 95 Allchin, F.R. 54
Ajatashatru, king 49, 56, 64, 89, 90 Amrapali 246
Ajivika ascetics 34, 35, 36, 293 Ananda, Buddha’s disciple 26, 45, 46,
Ashoka’s patronage of 37 47
374 index
Anathapindaka 134, 287 ancient chronicles on 6–7
Ancient historical records, lack of 3–4 appeal of 4–5, 12
Animal archaeology and 7, 10, 12, 21–2
life, division in ancient texts 272 birth of 24, 25
sacrifice 191–2, 193, 271 birth prophecies and 28–9, 31,
in scriptures 192–3 32–3
welfare measures 271, 274–5, 276 bordering states and 185–6
Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedon 25 and Buddhism 108–10, 132–6, 181,
Antiochus II Theos of the Seleucid 209–10, 236, 305–6
kingdom 25 Buddhist literary sources 87
Arachosia 52, 161, 163–4. See also consecration of 103, 107–8
Kandahar death of 288
Aramaic 163 early life, legends on 27–9, 30,
Kandahar edict and 166, 167, 168, 31–3
170–1 early years as emperor 104–5, 106
Archaeology, as source material 7, 10, extent of empire 5
12, 21–2 historians’ interest in 13
Arthashastra (Kautilya) 9, 19, 59–60 image as sovereign 105–7, 305–6
Ashoka’s familiarity with 187–8 link with modern India 195
Atavikas, description in 198 memorialization 289, 293–305
conquest and empire-building 111, mother, legends regarding 31–4
113–14 nationalist interest in 13–14
Dakshinapatha, description of 91 Orientalist discovery of 15
death penalty in 270 regnal dates 25–6
discontented sons and 64, 65 scholarly texts on 18–22
education of princes in 63 siblings 62
foreign relations in 186, 188 spiritual quest of 108–10
ideal of kingship in 110–12 state affairs and 110
ideal urban layout in 76 successors 290–1
king’s life in 61–3, 186–7 training of 63–4
out of favour sons and 64 Ashokavadana 6, 38
preparations for military march in Ashoka’s accession 102–3, 105
332n.6 Ashoka’s arrival in Taxila 67–9, 71
qualification for royal purohit 41 Ashoka’s birth 28–30, 31–4
royal communications and 120 Ashoka’s cruelty 105–7
royal palaces in 60–1 Ashoka’s donations 286–8
as source of Mauryan times 19, Ashoka’s future 34–5, 36–7, 38
59–63 Ashoka’s last years 286–8, 296
test of officials’ integrity in 105, 106 Ashoka’s successors 291–2
women as king’s trusted helpers and Ashoka as supreme donor 288
55 Ashoka’s visit to Ramagrama 295
Asamdhimitta, queen 281–2, 283 Faxian’s familiarity with 300
Ashoka (D.R. Bhandarkar) 18 Queen Tishyarakshita in 283–6
Ashoka Taxila in 71
accession 101–3, 104, 105, 107 Asiatic Society of Bengal 14–15
 index 375
Asita, prophecy about Buddha 41 Bhoria stupa 210f, 211, 212, 213
Ashokan edifices 226–7. See also Caves; Bhurjapatra 120, 121
Pillars; Stupas Bijak-ki-Pahari (‘inscription hill’)
Asoka (Radhakumud Mookerji) 18–19 251–2
Asoka and His Inscriptions (Beni Madhab Bimbisara 64, 89
Barua) 19 Bindusara 4, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37,
Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas 61, 62, 65, 67, 70, 89, 101,
(Romila Thapar) 19–20, 97 102–3
Asokan Sites and Artefacts (Harry Falk) Birds, as omens 39
20, 140 Bloch, Theodor 263
Asoka—The Buddhist Emperor of India Bodh Gaya 289
(Vincent Smith) 17–18 Mahabodhi temple. See Mahabodhi
Asurgarh 220 temple
Atavikas 197–8 Bodhi tree 296, 297
Avadana class of literature 28 destruction by Tishyarakshita 282,
Avanti 89, 91, 98, 172 283, 284
Ashoka’s march to 90–1, 92, 93–5 reception in Sri Lanka 282–3
Mauryan control over 89–90 Bodhigrihas 241
Borderers, Ashoka’s message for 138
Bairat 251 in separate rock edicts 222
circular temple at 252f, 253–4 Bose, Manindra Mohan 181
minor rock edict 16, 121 Bose, Nandlal 296, 306
Balgoti Tirtha 155 Boustrophedonic form of writing 128
Baluchistan 162 Brahmagiri 149, 152, 153
Bana 42 Buddhist connection 153
Barabar caves 228f, 229–32, 236 location of 152–3, 155
and Ajivikas 37, 229, 230, 233 minor rock edict 127, 141, 142,
defacement of 293 149, 151f
design and construction of 232–3 tradition (porana pakiti), emphasis on
religious harmony and 235 141, 142
Barabar hills 229 Brahmi script 1, 15, 126, 147, 167
Barua, Beni Madhab 19 Buddha 5, 13, 28, 30
Basarh, archeological excavations at 246 Ajivikas and 35
Basham, A.L. 35 and Ashoka 139, 339n.7
Bavari, of Sravasti 91 Ashoka’s birth and 28–9, 31
Beadon, C. 146 Asita’s prophecy and 41
Beglar, J.D., archaeological account of communication through oral dis­
Pataliputra 57 course 8–9
Behistun inscription of Darius 166, 174 Pataliputra, prophecy on 28, 45,
Bernard, Paul 169 46–7, 49–50
Bettiah funerary mounds 263 relics and 242–3
Bhandarkar, Devadatta Ramakrishna 18 representations of 294
Bharhut stupa 90, 236, 294–5, 332n.5, Buddha Konakamana (or Kanakmuni)
351n.13 237, 238
Bhir mound 66, 72, 74 Buddhism 157, 284
376 index
Ashoka’s conversion to 108–10, China, oral tradition in 8
132–6, 181, 209 Chitradurga cluster 127–8, 141–2, 149.
Ashoka’s role in 5, 19, 246 See also Brahmagiri minor edict;
Ashoka’s wives’ reaction to 283. See Siddapura minor edict; Jatinga-
also Tishyarakshita Rameshwara minor edict
growth of 293 Cholas 25, 186, 194
Sanghamitra and 98, 282, 283 Chunar sandstone 241, 254, 258
in Sri Lanka 5, 98, 109, 318n.3 Cleopatra 11–12, 63, 320n.24
Buddhist Confucius 8
council 251, 258 Conquest and empire-building 111,
hagiography 107 112–14
pilgrim circuit 238–46 Constantine, emperor 18, 136
Sangha 135–6, 227, 251, 253, Coomaraswamy, Ananda 236
255–9, 287, 288, 289 Coral 328–9n.44
sculptural art 294–6, 297–8 Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum (A.
Buddhists, and Ajivikas 35–6, 235 Cunningham) 16
Bulandibagh, archaeological excavations Cunningham, Alexander 15–16
at 57, 59
Burnt brick 212, 213–14 Dakshinapatha 91
Damoh 95
Calcutta-Bairat edict 251, 253, 254 Dani, Ahmad Hassan 84
Campbell, J.M. 211 Darius I 166
Capada (engraver) 127–8 Dasharatha (Ashoka’s grandson) 292–3
Caves 226, 229 patronage of Ajivikas 292, 293,
Barabar caves 228f, 229–32, 236 351n.10
Gopika cave 292 Delhi epigraph 121, 335n.8
Hathigumpha cave 123 Deloche, Jean 92
Karna Chaupar cave 231, 233 Deo Markandeya 94
Lomasha Rishi cave 229, 230, Deotek epigraph 274–5
232–3, 234, 235 Devi 87, 95, 97–8, 99, 100, 108, 293
Nagarjuni caves for Ajivikas 292–3, Buddhist connection of 99–101
351n.10 Dhamma
Saru-Maru cave 157 core principle of edicts and 196
Sudama cave 229–30 description in pillar edicts 267–8
Vadathika cave 292 Greek ‘eusebeia’ and 170
Vahiyaka cave 292, 293 idea of 19–20, 181, 182, 191, 193,
Vishwa Jhopri cave 230 195
Chakrabarti, Dilip 94, 220, 266 influence over rulers and 198–9
Champa 31, 32–3, 72 local officials’ role in 182, 197
Chamunda, ancient Mauryan town at religious tolerance and 196, 197
207 scale of dissemination of 194
Chandagirika 106–7 social transformation and 183–4
Chavillakara 304 state policy and 193
Cheras 194 yatra 181, 182
Cherry, John 11 Dhamma-lipi 199
 index 377
Dhammaraja, king 298 variety of dialects in 166, 262. See
Dharma-mahamatras 184–5, 278 also Kandahar edict
Dharmarajika 250 variety of surfaces and 121, 123
stupa at Sarnath 212, 255 See also Epigraphs
stupa at Taxila 68, 85–6, 250 Epigraphs 17, 26, 27, 110
Dhauli 218, 219, 220 discovery of 14–16
major rock edicts 180, 192, 215, donative 123, 126. See also Hathi­
218, 219, 224 gumpha epigraph
See also Separate rock edicts language of 126
Didda, queen of Kashmir 12–13 local additions to texts and 129
Dipavamsa 6, 17, 282 as means of royal communication
Ashoka’s accession to throne and 102 7
Ashoka’s spiritual quest and 109–10 medium of inscription 123, 126
Devi, account of 97 multilingual 166. See also Kandahar
Discovery of India, The 5, 14 edict
Diviners, role of 40, 41 official 123, 126
Divyavadana 236 personal affairs and 26, 27, 323n.9
Donative epigraphs 123 as sources of Ashoka 18–19, 26
‘Double utopia’, idea of 136–7, 138 See also edicts
Dupree, Louis 175 Erragudi 1–3
altered royal culinary practice and
Edicts 3, 5–6, 7, 9, 12, 121, 123, 176, 193
184, 225, 280–1 Atavikas, warning to 197–8
confessional mode and 176 conversion to Buddhism and
dissemination of 10, 126–7, 129, 209–10
132 dhamma, emphasis on 191, 193,
early life and 103, 104 195, 196, 197, 198–9
engravers of 127–8, 129 engraving style of 128, 232
evolution of Ashoka’s ideas and 22 Kalinga war and 197–8, 200
individualistic style of 9 layout of 121, 177, 205
language and script of 126 major rock edicts 142, 182–5,
local additions to texts and 129 186–201, 205, 209
location and distribution of 119–20, morality and 182–3
121, 123, 202–3 past and present in 194–5
Major rock edicts. See Major rock prohibitions in 191–2, 193
edicts religious tolerance and 195, 196,
means of royal communication 120 197
Minor rock edicts. See Minor edicts social rituals and 195, 197
Pillar edicts. See Pillar edicts variation in 199–200
placement of 9–10 Yavanas and 199
Separate edicts. See Separate rock Eusebeia, concept of 170
edicts
symbol of political authority 200–1 Falk, Harry 20, 140
variations in 199–200, 214–15, 218, Fatehabad pillar segment 263, 265f,
225. See also Sannathi edicts 266
378 index
Faxian 299–300 Hultzsch 272, 273
Fazl, Abu’l 24, 305
Filial relationships, in early Buddhism Indica (Megasthenes) 52–3, 54–5,
221 56–7, 60, 119
Flower Wars, of Aztecs 113 Inscriptions of Asoka (A. Cunningham)
Forster, E.M. 231 15
Intawa, Buddhist monastic site 213,
Gandhara 299 214
Gandhi, Mahatma 13, 14, 321n.32 Iran, links with Afghanistan 162
Gauri-Kedara temple 166 Indraji, Bhagwanlal 16, 17
Gavimath minor rock edict 17 Isila 152, 153
Ghosh, Manoranjan 57
Ghosha Yatra, in Mahabharata 181–2 Jainas, and Ajivikas 36
Ghositarama monastery 257 Jainism 108
Girnar hills 206, 207, 209 influence on Ashoka 272
Buddhist pilgrim circuit 213–14 Jalauka 305
major rock edicts 177, 192, 203, Jambudvipa 37, 45, 136, 299, 300
205, 209, 211 Jamsedjee, Khan Bahadur Ardeseer
engraving pattern 190f, 191 208
Gokhale, B.G. 221 Janasana, prediction of Ashoka’s future
Gopika cave 292 37
Goshala, Makkhali 35, 36 Jatinga-Rameshwara minor rock edicts
Gotihawa 238, 244 127, 141, 154–6
pillar 243–5 Jatinga-Rameshwara hill 149, 150,
Greece 173 154–5
prophecy and 40 Jaugada 219
rhetoric in 7 major rock edicts 180, 192, 215,
Guha, Ramachandra 13 217, 218, 219, 224. See also
Gujjara minor rock edict 129, 134 Separate rock edicts
Guruge, Ananda 98, 281 Jayaswal, Vidula 241
Gupta pillar at Sanchi 296 Jetavana monastery 134
Jina Baba ki Samadhi 213, 214
Hajam Chora brick complex 213, Jivaka, physician of Rajagriha 70, 91
214 Junagadh 203
Harshacarita 13 Buddhist connection 211–12. See
Harshavardhana 13, 24, 42, 322n.1 also Bhoria stupa
Hathigumpha Mauryan dam in 116, 204f, 205–6,
inscription of Kharavela 26–7, 207–8, 209
116 as provincial capital 206–7
rocks 123 Rudradaman’s rock inscription
Herodotus 113 205–6, 208, 116–17
Hissar 266
pillar segment 263, 264f, 266 Kaimur hills 93, 94
Homer 113 Kakrehta 94–5
Hora, Sunder Lal 273 Kalhana 304–5
 index 379
Kalinga 218 Kukkutarama monastery 286–8
campaign route 115, 220 Kumaragupta II 26
edict 17, 197–9, 215, 217, 218 Kunala, prince 284–5, 286
idea of kingship and 118 commemorative stupa of 302
location of 220
preparations for 114–15 Laghman edicts 164, 171
repentance over 115–16, 117, 118, Lakha Medi stupa. See Bhoria stupa
197–8, 200 Lalitavistara, Asita’s prophecy in 41
war 112, 139, 180–1, 218 Lapis lazuli 162, 266–7
Kalsi 189 Lauriya-Araraj pillar edicts 260, 266
major rock edicts 178f, 180, 189 Lauriya-Nandangarh pillar edicts 260,
record of Kalinga war 115–16, 117 263
Kambojas 164 Lichchavis. See Vajjis
Kanaganahalli stupa 216, 217, 235, 297 Life of Antony 11
Ashoka’s presence 298 Lomasha Rishi cave 229, 230, 232–3,
Kandahar 161, 162, 165 234f, 235
Achaemenid conquest of 162–3 Lumbini 237, 238, 239, 277
Greek culture in 167, 170, 173 Ashoka’s epigraph and 242–3
See also Arachosia Maya Devi Temple at 239, 240f,
Kandahar edict 161, 165–6, 168–9, 241–2
171–2, 174, 175, 180 pillar 239, 240f, 241, 243, 245
form and content 168–9 Ripumalla’s inscription and 243,
Greek and Aramaic language 166, 301
167, 168, 170–1 Xuanzang’s description of 301
language quality 169–70
Kangle, R.P. 60 Magadha 4, 29, 34, 36, 44, 45, 47, 49,
Kanipura stupa 100 51f, 89, 98, 102, 172
Kanishka, king 200 Pataliputra as capital of. See
Kapilavastu 239, 346n.22 Pataliputra
Karna Chaupar cave 231, 233 Magas of Cyrene 25
Karuvaki, queen 278, 283 Mahabharata, prophecies in 39
edict on the Allahabad pillar 283 Mahabodhi temple 135, 181
Kashmir, Ashoka’s connection with 305 Ashoka’s connection to 237,
Xuanzang, account of 303–4 345n.19
Kaushambi 143, 257 Burmese repair missions 298–9
pillar edict 257, 259 sculptural representation 294
Kautilya 59, 60, 328n.38 stone throne at 236, 237, 294
Kharavela, king 335n.10 Mahamatras 123, 142, 197
Hathigumpha inscription of 26–7, Maharathi, Upendra 296
116, 123, 126 Mahavamsa 6, 17, 38, 107, 251
Kharoshthi script 128, 167, 189 Ashoka’s accession in 101–2
Kodumanal 194, 341n.32 Ashoka’s last years in 281–3
Kosmin, Paul 164 Bodhi tree in 282–3, 284
Krakuchhanda Buddha 238, 244, 300 Devi portrayal in 100
Krishna M.H. 152 Mahinda 97, 98, 100, 101, 109
380 index
Major rock edicts 176–80, 188–9, 201, Maski
262 archaeological excavations 143–5,
animal protection in 271. See also 146, 336n.34
Erragudi major rock edicts graffiti 146–7
dhamma and 196. See also Dhamma, location of 143–4, 147–9
idea of minor rock edict 17, 121, 129, 130f,
Dharma-mahamatras and 184–5 146, 152, 154
Dhauli major rock edicts. See Dhauli significance of location 145–6
major rock edicts Maurya, Chandragupta 4, 51, 52, 53
Erragudi rock major edicts. See 114, 161, 163, 206, 290
Erragudi rock major edicts army of, Megasthenes’ account
Girnar major rock edicts 177, 334n.19
190f, 191, 192, 203, 205, 209, and Junagadh dam 205
211 regnal dates 25
governance in 176 Taxila, conquest of 70, 71
individual composition of 188–9, Maya Devi Temple, at Lumbini 239,
191 240f, 241–2
Jaugada major rock edicts 180, Meat eating, prohibition of 191–2, 193
192, 215, 217, 218, 219, Meerut pillar 263, 301
224 Megasthenes 4, 51–3, 290
Kalinga and 200 Chandragupta’s army, account of
Kalsi major rock edicts. See Kalsi 334n.19
major rock edicts emperor’s security and 55
locations of 188 Pataliputra, account of 52, 53, 54–5,
Mansehra major rock edicts 177, 56, 57
189 royal hunt and 55
minor rock edicts and 176, 177 Mindon, king of Burma 299
moral empire and 184, 185–6 Minor rock edicts 118–19, 121, 123,
morality and 185–6 126, 132–5, 136, 143, 147–8,
norms of conduct in 176 177, 200, 335n.2
officials in 186, 187 Bairat minor rock edict 16, 121
past and present in 183–4 Brahmagiri minor rock edicts. See
patterns of engraving in 188–91 Brahmagiri minor rock edicts
public morality in 182–3 Buddhist content of 132–4, 135,
Sannathi major edicts 179f, 180, 200, 209
192, 215, 217, 224 dissemination of morality through
Shahbazgarhi major rock edicts 177, 200
180, 189 Erragudi minor rock edicts 177. See
spirituality in 200 also Erragudi major rock edicts
Majumdar, N.G. 266 Gavimath minor rock edict 17
Manamud 220 Gujjara minor rock edict 129, 134
Mansehra 192 Jatinga-Rameshwara minor rock
major rock edicts 177, 189 edicts 127, 141, 154–6
Marshall, John 69, 71–2, 75, 78, 79, location of 121, 123, 126, 143
80, 99, 258 mahamatras role and 123, 126
 index 381
major rock edicts and 176, 177 Niglihawa pillar. See Nigali Sagar pillar
Maski minor rock edict. See Maski Nigrodha, role in Ashoka’s conversion
minor rock edict 109–10
Nittur minor rock edicts 121, 142, Nittur minor rock edicts 121, 142, 154
154 Norman, K.R. 272
Palkigundu minor rock edict 123,
124f, 125f Odyssey 30
Panguraria minor rock edict 157–60 Oedipus Rex 30
placement of 121, 123 Official epigraphs 123, 126
Rajula-Mandagiri minor rock edicts Olivelle, Patrick 60, 141
121, 122f, 123f, 335n.8 Orality, as form of communication 7–9
Ratanpurwa minor rock edict 17, Orissa edicts 192, 217–18. See also
134 Dhauli major rock edicts; Jaugada
Rupnath minor rock edict. See major rock edicts
Rupnath minor rock edict Outline of History, The (H.G. Wells) 5
Sasaram minor rock edict 123
Siddapura minor rock edicts 127, Palas 25
129, 131f, 141, 153–4 Palkigundu minor rock edict 123, 124f,
Udegolam minor rock edicts 154 125f
Mohenjodaro 75, 85, 145 Panguraria painted rock shelters 156,
Mookerji, Radhakumud 13, 18–19 157, 158, 159, 160, 337n.47
Morality, idea of 7, 18, 135, 136, 181, minor rock edict 157–60
192, 194, 200, 222 Pant, P.C. 241
and moral empire 184, 185–6 Parantapa Jataka 39
public instruction of 182–3 Pasandas 109
as state policy 185–6, 267–8, 277–9 Pasenadi, king of Kosala 64
through tradition 141, 200 Passage to India, A (E.M. Forster)
universal 136, 140–1 231–2
See also Dhamma, idea of Pataliputra 29, 42, 47, 49–50, 51, 52,
Mukherjee, Meera 306 54, 299
Mundigak 162, 175 Ashoka’s association with 44–5, 101,
Mundy, Peter 91–2 250–1
Buddha’s prophecy regarding 28, 45,
Nagarhara stupa, Xuanzang and 301 46–7, 49–50
Nagarjuni caves for Ajivikas 292–3, Buddhist council at 258
351n.10 defence of 57, 58
Nandas 4, 52, 318n.2 drainage system 57, 75
Nehru, Jawaharlal 5–6, 14, 318n.7 early settlements 46, 326n.9
Nepal terai, Ashoka’s pilgrimage route J.D. Beglar’s account of 57
237–8, 265–6. See also Nigali Maurayan court art and 59
Sagar; Gotihawa; Lumbini Megasthenes’ account of 52, 53,
Nigali Sagar 238 54–5, 56, 57
Konakamana (or Niglihawa) stupa pillar epigraph, Xuanzang’s
237, 245 interpretation of 300
pillar 245, 301 pillared hall at 58, 226, 251
382 index
sal wood and 57, 58 Political authority
size, archaeological assessment 53–4 in Mauryan empire 172
Xuanzang’s description of 43–5 royal symbols of 200–1
Pataligrama 46, 49. See also Pataliputra Poonacha, K.P. 217
Persian empire, extent of 112 Prabhas Patan, Mauryan settlement at
Pillar edicts 260–2, 263, 276–80 206, 207
animal slaughter in 270–6 Pradyota, ruler of Avanti 4, 89, 91
animal welfare measures in 271–4 Prakrit 126, 167, 168
death penalty and 270 Predestination, Ajivika doctrine of 35
dhamma, description in 267–8 Prinsep, James 15
Lauriya-Araraj pillar edicts 260, 266 Prophecy and prognostications 38,
Lauriya-Nandangarh pillar edicts 39–42
260, 263 as narrative technique 30–1, 38
location of 262–3, 265–6 Proto-secularism 195, 196
morality as state policy in 267–8, Ptolemies 113
277–8 Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt 25
prohibition days in 273–4 Pul-i-Darunta stone inscription 164,
rajukkas in 269–70 171
Rampurva pillar edicts 260, 262, Pulumavi, king, record of 291
266 Punic wars 112
Sanchi pillar edict 257–8, 259 Puranas 4
Sarnath pillar edict 255–7, 259 Ashoka’s successors, details of 290–1,
Self-responsibility, insistence on 268 350n.2
Topra pillar edicts 261, 263, 301 Pushyamitra 292
See also Pillars
Pillared hall of Pataliputra 58, 226, 251 Radhanagar, historic site of 219, 220
Pillars 226, 227, 239, 241, 301 Raja Nala-ka Tila, evidence of meat
Fatehabad pillar segment 263, 265f, eating 275
266 Rajagriha 29, 49
Gotihawa pillar 243–5 fortification of 89
Gupta pillar at Sanchi 296 as Magadhan capital 46, 47– 9, 51,
Hissar pillar segment 263, 264f, 266 52
Lumbini pillar 239, 240f, 241, 243, Rajatarangini, account of Ashoka in
245 304–5
Meerut pillar 263, 301 Rajendra Chola I 145
Nigali Sagar pillar 245, 301 Rajukkas 142, 269–70, 278
Sarnath pillar 245, 254–5, 256, Rajula-Mandagiri minor edicts 121,
300–1 122f, 123f, 335n.8
Shunga pillar at Sanchi 296 Ramagrama relic stupa 242, 295, 299
Taxila pillar 68 Ramayana 35, 90, 154–5
See also pillar edicts prophecies in 39–40
Pingalavatsajiva, prophecy about Ashoka Ramnath Mahadev mandir 214
34–5, 36–7 Rampurva pillar edicts 260, 262, 266
Planetary conjunctions 39–40 Ranamandala, archaeological excavations
Plutarch 114 at 217
 index 383
Ratanpurwa minor rock edict 17, 134 Shunga pillar at 296
Rawat, Y.S. 212 stupa 257, 258, 293–4, 295–6,
Religious tolerance, espousal of 195, 297f
196–7, 229 Sanghamitra 98, 101, 282, 283, 297
Rewa, jungles of 94 Sankisa 299
Rhetoric as mode of communication 7 Sannathi 143, 192
Ripumalla, inscriptions on Ashokan Mauryan occupation 215–17
pillars 243, 301 Sannathi major rock edicts 179f, 180,
Royal 192, 215, 224
biographical tradition 24–5 omission of Kalinga edict 215, 217
communications 120, 121. See also Sariputra 134
epigraphs, edicts Sarnath 237, 254
processions 90 Buddhist community and 303
travel 90, 332n.6 Dharmarajika stupa at 212, 255
Rudradaman, Junagadh rock inscription Govindachandra’s inscription 302–3,
of 116–17, 205–6, 207, 208 304
Rudrasena I 213 Kumaradevi’s vihara at 302–3
Rupnath minor rock edict 94, 132–40 Kumaragupta II epigraph at 25–6
analysis of 134–5, 136–40 Sarnath pillar 245, 254– 5, 255–7,
commingling of humans and gods 256, 259
136–7, 138 Saru-Maru cave 157
conversion to Buddhism 132–4, Sasaram minor rock edict 123
135 Satapatha Brahmana 192
idea of double utopia 136–7, 138 Satavahanas 25, 217, 291, 297–8
message of social inclusiveness 137, Saurashtra, Mauryan control over 206
138 Seleucus I Nicator 161, 163–4
missionary intent 138–9 Separate rock edicts 215, 218, 219,
similarities between Buddha and 269
Ashoka 139 address to Borderers 222
wording and meaning 139–40 message to Kalinga administrators
221–4
Sagar 93, 95 Shahbazgarhi major rock edicts 177,
Sahni, Daya Ram 253, 254 180, 189, 192
Sal wood, use in urban architecture 57, Shahr-i Sokhta 162
58 Shamasastry, R. 59–60
Saladin, Sultan 6 Shortughai, Harappan connection 162
Samapa 219, 220, 221 Shramanas 180, 181, 183
Sampadin (Kunala’s son) 287, 291–2 Shunga dynasty 292, 293, 296
Samprati. See Sampadin Sibi Jataka 301–2
Samudragupta, king 12, 13, 15, 220 Siddapura minor rock edicts 127, 129,
Samvasa, interpretations of 97–8 131f, 141, 149, 153–4
Sanchi 99–100, 156 Siddhartha Gautama 41, 139, 238
Gupta pillar at 296 See also Buddha
pillar edict 257–8, 259 Singh, Upinder 298
rock shelters of 157 Sirkap 68
384 index
Sisupalgarh, early historic site of 219, Ashoka’s arrival in 65, 66–7, 68–70,
220 71
Smith, Vincent 17–18, 268 Ashokavadana’s account of 67–9, 71
Social inclusiveness, idea of 137, 138 city plan 74
Social rituals, Ashoka’s opinion of 195, conquest by Alexander 71
197 Dharmarajika stupa at 68, 85–6,
Socratic dialogues 7 250
Sodanga 258 drainage system of 73, 75
Sonarekha river 207, 208 houses and public buildings 72
Soothsayers, role in ancient India 40–1 houses, layout of 80–3
Sopara 143, 192 importance of 70–1
major rock edicts 180, 192 pillar at 68
Sri Lanka, Buddhism in 5, 98, 109, refuse disposal system 77–8
318n.3 seals 83, 84–5
Stupas 44, 212–13, 226, 343n.17 size of 72
Bharhut stupa 90, 236, 294–5, soak wells 82–3
332n.5, 351n.13 street and lane layout 73–7
Bhoria stupa 210f, 211, 212, 213 stupa 301
Dharmarajika stupa at Sarnath 212, temple at 78–80
255 Thapar, Romila 19
Dharmarajika stupa at Taxila 68, Ashoka’s marriage to Devi, views on
85–6, 250 97–8
Kanaganahalli stupa. See Dhamma, views on 19–20
Kanaganahalli stupa Mauryan administration, description
Kanipura stupa 100 of 172, 173
Konakamana (or Niglihawa) stupa Tilaurakot 238–9
237, 245 Tissa, Devanampiya, conversion to
Mauryan brick stupas 211–12 Buddhism 5, 109
Nagarhara stupa, Xuanzang’s account Tishyarakshita, queen 296
301 Ashokavadana’s account of 283–6
Ramagrama relic stupa 242, 295, destruction of Bodhi tree 282, 283
299 Tissarakkha. See Tishyarakshita, queen
Sanchi stupa 257, 258, 293–4 Tod, James 206
Vaishali stupa 246–9, 250, 302 Girnar rock edicts, description of
Sudama cave 229–30 203, 205
Sudarshana lake 205, 208–9, 214 Topra pillar edict 261, 263, 301
Surajkund, brick well at 213, 214 addition of Seventh Edict 277–9
Susima 35, 102, 103 analysis of 267–8, 269–72, 277
Sutta Nipata 41 location 266
Suvarnagiri 127, 152 Tosali 219, 220
Tughlaq, Firuz Shah 263, 266, 301
Tagore, Abanindranath 296, 306 Tushaspha, Yavana king 206
Tagore, Rabindranath 14
Talpura rock shelters 156, 157 Udegolam minor rock edicts 154
Tamra nala 66, 83, 208 Ujjayini 87, 88f, 89, 91, 92, 97, 98,
Taxila 54, 56, 66, 68, 69–71, 72–85 99, 101, 143, 257, 258, 294
 index 385
Upunita-vihara, Ashoka’s journey to Wells, H.G. 5
157–9 Wheeler, Mortimer 170
Uttarapatha (northern road) 70 William the Conqueror 288
Wu Zetian, empress 5
Vadathika cave 292 Wu, emperor 5
Vahiyaka cave 292, 293
Vaishali 238, 242, 246 Xuanzang 13, 47
Ashokan pillar at 249–50 Ashokan pillars and 239, 241,
brick stupa at 212, 249, 250 300–1
mud stupa at 246–9 Ashoka’s Kashmir and 303–4
religious architecture of 246 Ashoka’s Mahabodhi, reference to
stupa, Xuanzang’s description of 237, 345n.19
250, 302 Pataliputra, account of 43–5
Vajjis 9, 46, 49, 246, 247 Pataliputra pillar epigraph and 300
Vamshatthapakasini, prediction of stupas, account of 301–2
Ashoka’s destiny 38 Vaishali stupa, description of 250,
Varna system 137 302
Vatsa, kingdom of 89
Vidisha 54, 89, 93, 98–9, 143, 294 Yatra 182
association with Devi 87, 95, 97–8, dhamma yatra 181, 182
99, 257 ghosha yatra 181–2
Vihara yatras 181 vihara yatra 181
Vishwa Jhopri cave 230 Yavanas 185, 198, 199

Waddell, Laurence Austin 58 Zheng, king 113