15

Ashoka in the Twentieth Century

The Ashokan lion capital at Sarnath, with the inscribed pillar in the foreground. Only fragments were
found of the Wheel of the Moral Law, which die four lions had originally supported. Photographed by
Madho Prasad in 1905. (APAC, British Library)

It seems entirely appropriate that the man who introduced modern

archaeological methods to India should have had the same name as the
first British Orientalist, John Marshall - and that the man who appointed
him, Lord Curzon, should have been almost alone among British
proconsuls in India in sharing Warren Hastings's fascination for Indian
culture and history. It was Curzon who declared that 'the sacredness of
India haunts me like a passion' and it was this empathy for Indian culture
that led him to insist that the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) should
be thoroughly overhauled, centralised and equipped with enough founds to
do its job property.
He refused to countenance the appointment of a local man to head the ASI
and saw to it that a professional trained in the latest techniques was
brought in, even if he was a twenty-six-year-old who had never set foot in
Asia.
This second John Marshall arrived in India 238 years after the first. In the
course of the next twenty-six years he transformed the entire
archaeological scene in India and the ASI with it. 'Even at that early date 1,
he wrote some years after his retirement, 'it was patent to me that the
future of archaeology in India must depend more and more on the degree
of interest taken in it by Indians themselves, and that the surest way of
strengthening my own Department was to provide it with an increasing
number of Indian recruits.'1 Marshall began by setting up government
scholarships, the first person to win one being Daya Ram Sahni, who
subsequently followed Marshall as Director-General, and the second R. D.
Banerjee, whose excavations at Mohenjo-Daro in 1922 revealed the
existence of the pre-Aryan Indus Civilisation. Initially, however, Marshall
had to make the best use of what European experts were available, some
highly qualified, and others who were no more than local enthusiasts - the
last in a long line of amateurs.

John Marshall and his wife seated on the slopes of a stupa mound at Rajgir,
Bihar, C. 1918 (APAG, British Library)
One of the latter was Mr F. O, Oertal, executive engineer of Benares
Division, whose only archaeological qualification was that he had spent
some years in Burma in the Public Works Department (PWD). In the Cold
Weather of 1904-5, with John Marshall's permission and acting on his
advice, Oertal conducted his own excavation at Sarnath, exposing an area
west of the great Dharmekh stupa that Cunningham had left relatively
untouched. It proved to be the site's main shrine, a square temple
constructed during the Gupta period but overlaying an earlier structure,
which included polished monolithic railings cut from Chunar sandstone
that were unmistakably Ashokan. Immediately to the west of the shrine
Oertal uncovered the lower section of an Ashokan column still embedded
on its base but broken just at the point where the fourth line of the oldest
of its three sets of inscriptions had been cut (see illustration, p. 331). Three
inscribed fragments of pillar found nearby were enough for most of the
inscription to be read. It was another of Emperor Ashoka's Schism Edicts,
directed at the monks and nuns of the Buddhist Sangha, warning them
against dividing their community.
At Sanchi the pillar had been capped by a magnificent but damaged capital
made up of four lions back to back, brought to light by Cunningham and
Maisey in 1851. It now fell to Oertal to improve upon that at Sarnath. He
disinterred his lion capital a few yards away from the pillar upon which it
had stood when Xuanzang came to the Deer Park in about the year 637
(see illustration, p. 331). To the delight of all who witnessed the discovery,
it was not only in much better condition than the Sanchi capital but of far
superior artistry, suggesting that here was the original and the other a
copy. Where the two capitals also differed was in the abacus. At Sanchi
this had been decorated with pairs of geese, whereas here the frieze
showed four perfectly modelled animals: a lion with twitching tail, an
elephant, a bull and a galloping horse, interspersed with the twenty-four-
spoked Wheel of the Moral Law.
Each of these four animals has its place as a symbol of Buddhism: the lion
represents Sakyasimha, lion of the Sakya clan, with the voice of a lion; the
elephant signifies Sakyamuni entering the womb of his mother Mayadevi
in her dream, but also Sakyamuni as the tamer of wild elephants; the horse,
besides being a symbol of temporal royalty, is the vehicle that carried
Prince Siddhartha on his journey of renunciation; finally, the bull is the
great inseminator, here symbolising the Buddha's teaching, the Dharma.
The horse and elephant together support the Wheel-turning Monarch.
Both at Sarnath and Sanchi the four lions had originally supported a large

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too many pieces to attempt a reconstruction. At Sanchi Cunningham had

concluded that an earthquake or some other natural cause had brought
down pillar and capital, but here it seemed more likely that human
violence had been responsible.
There is no finer demonstration of the state of sculpture at the time of
Ashoka than the Sarnath lion capital. It is no exaggeration to speak of it as
the work of a Mauryan Michelangelo, a craftsman whose mastery over his
material was as complete as anything produced by the Assyrians, the
Persians or the Greeks -and who could well have been the same genius
who sculpted the Didarganj Yakshi. Yet he and his school, which would
include those who produced the few surviving Ashokan pillar capitals,
bells and drums, appear as if from nowhere. They have no known
precedents in India other than the clumsy monumental figures found by
Cunningham's assistants at Parkham and Besnagar. This new fluency had
to come from somewhere, and the surviving works themselves point to
Seleucid Bactria and its Graeco-Persian craftsmen, which is entirely
plausible given Ashoka's family ties, his grandfather's and father's known
links with their Western neighbours, and his own ties as set down on the
Rock Edicts. It points to the arrival of a group of sculptors and
stonemasons and a dramatic move away from working in wood to stone, a
very costly break with tradition only made possible by royal command and
patronage.
But if this same master sculptor enjoyed the patronage of Ashoka, why is
it that we have no sculptures of his employer? Ashoka would have been
aware of the cult of royal personality on the Persian and Greek models
exemplified by their coinage, yet it seems that he declined to follow suit.
No iconic images of the Buddha himself were permitted in Ashoka's
lifetime so it may be that the Mauryas extended this prohibition to images
of themselves. But what is equally feasible is that images of Ashoka were
indeed made in his lifetime but that none have survived - unless that
massive stone figure of a supposed demigod found by Cunningham at
Parkham is actually the statue of a Mauryan king.
Whoever those first sculptors and stonemasons were, they appear to have
come from the north-west and set up one workshop under royal patronage
at Mathura and possibly another at Varanasi, which laid the foundations
for an increasingly indigenous Indian school of sculpture whose works
subsequently graced Bharhut, Sanchi, Amaravati and many other Buddhist
and Jain monuments now lost and forgotten.
On seeing what Oertal had dug up at Sarnath, Marshall reognised that it
was too important a site to be left to the PWD. So extensive were his
subsequent finds and of such outstanding quality that Marshall asked for
and secured funds to build India's first onsite museum to house them. He
went on to do the same at Sanchi and Taxila, returning to these last two
sites again and again over the next twenty-five years.
In the meantime more Rock Edicts continued to be discovered, mostly of
the Minor Rock Edict (MRE) category, with a notable cluster in Mysore
State: at Maski in Raichur District, Karnataka, in 1915; at Erragudi in
Anantapur District, Andhra Pradesh, in 1928 - this one found in close
proximity to a major Rock Edict site bearing REs 1-13 spread over five
boulders, now known as the Erragudi Rock Edict; at Govimath, in Raichur
District, Karnataka, in 1931; at Palkigundu, also in Raichur District,
Karnataka, in 1931; and at Rajula-Mandagiri, Kurnool District, Andhra
Pradesh, in 1946.
Of these, one stood out from the rest: the Maski MRE, discovered by a
gold prospector. The lettering was severely damaged in parts but it was
still possible to see that in place of the standard opening found on the other
MREs the Maski MRE begins:

To this day the Rupnath MRE remains the only place where Ashoka's
name has been found carved in stone on one of his edicts, although it is
quite possible that other such examples have yet to be discovered, just as
others have probably been lost forever, destroyed either by human activity
or the forces of nature.
In Afghanistan the distrust of the British engendered by the First and
Second Afghan Wars continued well into the twentieth century. It meant
that when Afghanistan finally began to open up to the West in the 1920s,
under the modernising King Amanullah, it was the French who won
exclusive rights to conduct excavations in Afghanistan under the
leadership of Dr Alfred Foucher, who had studied at the Sanskrit College
in Benares and, courtesy of John Marshall, had cut his teeth at excavations
in India's North-West Frontier Province and at Sanchi. It was Foucher who
invented the term 'Graeco-Buddhist' to describe the religious art produced
in Gandhara, and who argued, like Cunningham before him, that the
influence of classical Gandharan art penetrated deep into India and
beyond.- Foucher spent months following the trails of Alexander the Great
and Xuanzang across Afghanistan, leading to the

discovery of numerous archaeological sites. Under his aegis, the

excavation of the Gandharan summer capital of Kapisha at Begram, begun
in 1936, and the subsequent unearthing of the Begram Treasure, proved to
be the first of a series of spectacular discoveries that provided ample
evidence of Gandhara's dominant role as an international crossroads and as
a major catalyst for change in the region before, during and after the
Mauryan era.
In the course of these excavations numerous texts written in Greek,
Aramaic and Brahmi script were discovered, but only one of these could
be directly linked to Ashoka: a triangular fragment of rock inscribed in
Aramaic, found in the Laghman region just west of the town of Jalalabad
in 1930. This turned out to contain elements of both Ashoka's Rock and
Pillar Edicts in Prakrit language but transliterated into Aramaic script. No
further Ashokan finds were made until 1958, when an inscribed rock
boulder was spotted by chance at the foot of a ridge beside the ancient
highway leading out of Kandahar westwards to Herat. It was a bilingual
Ashokan edict, written in Greek and Aramaic. The two texts differed
slightly but both carried the same message from Ashoka, his name being
written in Greek as 'Piodasses'. It was dated from the tenth year after
Ashoka's consecration and echoed the prohibitions against killing and
respect for others to be found in a number of the Rock and Pillar Edicts.
Five years later a second inscribed rock was found not far from the first in
the ruins of ancient Kandahar. This was entirely in Greek and carried the
end of RE 12 and the beginning of RE 13. In that same year part of a quite
different inscription was picked up in Kandahar bazaar: a scrap of rock
inscribed with part of PE 7, written in Aramaic. These finds show that a
number of Ashoka's Rock Edicts and Pillar Edicts or their amalgams, had
at one time been erected in ancient Gandhara at least as far west as
Kandahar - which is approximately 1300 miles from Patna.
It is John Marshall's restoration work that makes Sanchi such a delight to
visit today. He kept being drawn back to the site, in 1918 writing to a
friend that Sanchi was 'just as beautiful and fascinating as ever - nay, more
so than it ever was in the old days'. 2 Part of this fascination lay in the fact
that his old friend Alfred Foucher - 'a first rate scholar and a Frenchman of
the nicest type' - had realised that the gateways of the Great Stupa of
Sanchi and the single gateway of Stupa 2 were essentially memorials to
the spread of the Dharma.4
At the end of the Great War Marshall resigned on doctor's advice, leaving
his unfinished work at Sanchi with a long sigh of regret. The sweetener of
a knighthood helped to change his mind and after some months' leave he
returned
reinvigorated and ready to serve as Director-General of the ASI for
another decade. This extra term allowed Marshall to work intermittently
with Foucher at Sanchi for another two years until the latter was made
director of the Delegation Archeologique Franchise en Afghanistan in
1921. It meant that almost two decades passed before their joint
masterwork, the massive three-volume The Monuments of Sanchi, was
ready for publication, not helped by the death of their third collaborator,
killed while providing new readings of the Sanchi inscriptions by robbers
who believed him to be digging for buried treasure. Another Marshall
protege, the Sanskritist N. G. Majumdar, stepped in and a limited printing
of the book appeared at the outbreak of war in 1939, with a second and
equally limited printing in 1947, just as India was in the throes of
independence and partition.
Marshall and Foucher showed in The Monuments of Sanchi that the
Buddhist stupa cult could be traced back directly to the relic stupas erected
by Emperor Ashoka and that his stupas and his Rock and Pillar Edicts
'came to be invested with.a peculiar sanctity of their own ... as accepted
emblems of the Faith'. They further demonstrated that the Great Stupa's
four gateways were Ashokan in spirit and in kind - in particular, the South
Gateway, the first to be completed and in their estimation the finest of the
four despite its damage.
The South Gateway had been erected beside Ashoka's pillar and was itself
intrinsically Ashokan, beginning with the two lion capitals on its two
pillars, patently copied from the Ashokan pillar's lion capital right down to
the geese and acanthus leaves on the drum. What is now the outer panel of
the middle architrave shows Emperor Ashoka himself in a two-horse
chariot visiting the Buddha relic stupa at Ramagrama and being met by its
guardian deities, the Naga kings, here shown 'in human form with serpent
hoods, worshipping at the stupa, bringing offerings, or emerging from the
waters of a lotus pond'5 This is precisely the scene that Major Franklin and
Captain Murray had drawn in the early nineteenth century (see pages
108,159 and 240).

The middle architrave of the incorrectly restored South Gateway. It shows Emperor Ashoka visiting
the Buddha stupa at Ramagrama to claim its relics, only to find it guarded by the Naga kings.
(Photograph by Andrew Whittome)

The story continues on the inner face of the bottom, damaged crossbeam.
This shows the other scene that Captain Murray drew and submitted to
James Prinsep back in 1837. On the right a king stands in a chariot with an
escort on an elephant, in the centre a city is under attack, and on the left a
king is shown apparently directing the siege. This is usually interpreted as
a scene from the so-called 'War of the Relics', when eight rulers fought
over Sakyamuni Buddha's relics, other and more clear versions of the same
story occuring on the architraves of the North, West and East Gateways.
But what Murray had failed to show in his drawing is that the giant
elephant is actually carrying away a relic casket, which a turbaned raja
rests on his head as shown on Lieutenant Fred Maisey's later drawing.
A detail from Fred Maisey's finished drawing of the inner panel of the bottom architrave on the South
Gateway at Sanchi, showing King Ashoka seated on a giant elephant bearing away the Buddha relics
from Rajgir. (From Maisey, Sanchi and its Remains, 1892)

What is actually being portrayed here is Ashoka's attack on the city of Rajgir
with a 'fourfold army' and his removal of its Buddha relics back to Pataliputra,
as related in the Legend of King Ashoka. He then proceeded to the Ramagrama
stupa, which was originally shown on the panel immediately above but was
accidentally reversed during restoration so that it now appears on the outer side.
It is no coincidence that the scene portrayed on the inner side of the top
architrave shows a row of stupas and Bodhi trees being worshipped by a Naga
king, a yakshi fertility goddess and, on the left, a human king, presumably King
Ashoka (see original photo of fallen South Gateway on p. 239).
Other scenes portrayed on the same South Gateway strengthen the case for its
being raised specifically as an act of homage to King Ashoka; in particular, two
adjacent panels on its west pillar. Again a king is shown riding a two-horse
chariot preceded by a giant guard holding a club. The same king then reappears
on the next panel, now flanked by his two queens. They stand directly
underneath the Bodhi tree at Bodhgaya and the pavilion constructed around it
by Ashoka. His posture, his right arm over one queen while the other queen
holds his right arm, is most unusual. There we see only a royal personage
apparently supported by two of his queens,' writes Alfred Foucher of this crucial
scene. 'But... he can only be Asoka. Hence we cannot fail to be reminded, by his
tottering attitude, either of the immense grief which overcame him when he was
told that his beloved tree was perishing - he declared that he would not be able
to survive it - or, in another simpler version of the pilgrimage, of the emotion
which seized him at sight of a spot so sacred.

A modern photograph of this scene shows what Lieutenant Maisey's drawing

from 1851 (see p. 241) failed to show, which is that the Ashoka here is short
and fat, with a balloon-like head. The sculptor could not have seen Ashoka
himself but memories of Ashoka would still have been green in the area, which
suggests that this image is based on the emperor's actual physical appearance. It
is surely no coincidence that the Brahmi inscription carved on the panel
immediately below records that this was the work of the ivory workers of the
nearby town of Vidisha.

Other gateways show more Ashokan scenes. At the East Gateway the outer
panel on the bottom architrave again shows Ashoka paying homage to the
Bodhi tree. 'He is wearily getting off his elephant, supported by his first queen/
writes Foucher. Then both go forward in devout posture towards the same
Bodhi-tree surrounded by the same stone-enclosure ... From the other side, to
the sound of music, people are advancing in procession to the tree; and the
figures in the foreground are plainly carrying pitchers for watering it.'
Emperor Ashoka faints into the arms of his queens at the sight of the Bodhi tree. A modern
photograph capturing the detail that earlier depictions missed. (Photo by Andrew Whittome)

Foucher leaves it to John Marshall to provide the explanation: This is the

ceremonial visit which Asoka and his queen Tishyarakshita paid to the
Bodhi tree, for the purpose of watering it and restoring its pristine beauty
after the evil spell which the queen in a fit of jealousy had cast upon it.'

On the West Gateway several panels may represent Ashoka on his

pilgrimage to the holy places of Buddhism, one showing the same
corpulent figure as that depicted fainting at the Bodhi tree on the South
Gateway, here seen praying beside a much simpler Bodhi tree. Fred
Maisey unwittingly drew this same scene back in 1851 (see p. 242). The
panorama on the back of the middle architrave shows another of the 'War
of the Relics' scenes, which can equally be read as representing Ashoka
collecting his Buddha relics - an interpretation strengthened by the fact
that one end of that same beam shows a melon-faced king riding in a
chariot, and the other end that same king looking exhausted and resting on
a very modern-looking chair. He is being looked after by a bevy of women
attendants and holds in his right hand what looks like a ball or fruit.
Neither Marshall nor Foucher were prepared to speculate on what this
might be intended to represent, but it is tempting to see it as the dying
Ashoka and his last possession, the myrobalan or cherry plum fruit.

A modern photograph of the outer panel of the bottom architrave on the East Gateway shows Emperor
Ashoka (standing) with his queen (kneeling) as they worship the Bodhi tree, having dismounted from
an elephant. On the left side of the panel musicians play and standard bearers watch as pitchers of
milk are brought to pour over the Bodhi tree to revive it. The tree itself is depicted within the
enclosure built for it by Ashoka, which also covers the Diamond Throne. Carved on the supports
above are three distinctive Ashokan symbols: (left to right) an edict pillar topped by a four-lion
capital; the Wheel of the Moral Law symbol; and the Bodhi tree. (Detail of a photo by Andrew
Whittome)

Because of its delays and bad timing, the revelations contained in Marshall
and Foucher's The Monuments of Sanchi were largely overlooked by a
generation of historians in India - and continue to be viewed with
suspicion by those who find Founcher’s views on Greek influence too
much for their patriotic sentiments.

Indeed, it is striking - even downright disheartening - how this

quintessentially Indian monarch still fails to be accorded a wholehearted
welcome in the land of his birth more than a century after he first emerged
as a subject fit for biography. To start with, Ashoka was ill-served by the
English historian Vincent Smith who in writing Asoka: The Buddhist
Emperor of India (1901) rejected the two prime Buddhist sources as 'the
silly fictions of mendacious monks'. This work was swiftly denounced by
the Welsh Pali scholar T. W. Rhys Davids, whose own book Buddhist
India (1903) reflected a growing fascination with Buddhism in the West.
That in turn led the writer and social reformer H. G. Wells to declare in his
popular work The Outline of History that Ashoka was the very paradigm
of the model ruler:

In the history of the world there have been thousands of kings and
emperors who called themselves 'their highnesses,' 'their majesties,' and
'their exalted majesties' and so on. They shone for a brief moment, and as
quickly disappeared. But Ashoka shines and shines brightly like a bright
star, even unto this day.

Indian nationalists, looking for pre-colonial models of government, were

quick to seize on this idea, among them Dr Radhakumud Mookerji, whose
lectures on early Indian history at Lucknow University in the early 1920s
became the basis for the first truly scholarly account of Ashoka and his
times. He, too, sought to put Ashoka in a wider historical context:

In his efforts to establish a kingdom of righteousness after the highest ideals

of a theocracy, he has been likened to David and Solomon of Israel in the
days of its greatest glory; in his patronage of Buddhism, which helped to
transform a local into a world religion, he has been compared to
Constantine in relation to Christianity; in his philosophy and piety he recalls
Marcus Aurelius; he was a Charlemagne in the extent of his empire and, to
 some extent, in the methods of his administration, too; while his Edicts,
'rugged, uncouth, involved, full of repetitions,' read like the speeches of
Oliver Cromwell in their mannerisms. Lastly, he has been compared to
Khalif Omar and Emperor Akbar, whom also he resembles in certain
aspects.6

Hot on Mookerji's heels came a new wave of home-grown Ashokan

scholarship that continued into the post-independence era. Almost without
exception these Indian historians took a patriotic line, presenting Ashoka
as untainted by foreign influences, his philosophy totally in keeping with
the ideals of ahimsa, or 'nonviolence', and satyagraha, or 'soul-force',
promoted by the political and spiritual leader M. K. Gandhi as the moral
basis of the freedom struggle against the British Raj. Perhaps for the same
reason these same historians tended also to downplay Pali sources in
favour of Sanskrit, with more than a hint of Brahminical bias. They also
ignored the new evidence presented by Sir John Marshall and Alfred
Foucher of Emperor Ashoka's commemoration on the Sanchi gateways.
Since independence three more Ashokan edict sites have been found in
Karnataka State: Minor Rock Edicts at Nittur and Udegolam, found in
1977 and 1978, and a Rock Edict at Sannati in 1989. All are sited near
major rivers, the first two beside the Tungabhadra River, the third on a
bend of the River Bhima in Gulbarga District of South Karnataka. This last
came to light when an abandoned Hindu shrine beside the village's
Candralamba temple was being cleared for restoration. When the workmen
came to remove a large stone slab upon which the deity had stood, they
found it inscribed on both sides: parts of Ashoka's RE 12 and RE 14 on
one side and the Kalinga Separate Rock Edicts 1 and 2 on the other. It was
clear that the slab had originally stood upright along with other slabs
carrying the remaining edicts but now missing. To date no more such slabs
have been found.
Up to that point these particular major edicts had only been found carved
on large rock boulders, hence their naming as Rock Edicts, but here was
evidence that in some parts of Ashoka's empire these same edicts had been
carved on slabs as well as boulders.
Mention must also be made of four Minor Rock Edict sites discovered in
northern and central India in the post-war period: at Gujarra in the Datia
District of Madhya Pradesh in 1953; at Ahraura, in Mirzapur District,
Bihar, in 1961; at Bahapur in the east of Kailash District in New Delhi in
1965; and at Panguraria, Sehore District, Madhya Pradesh, in 1971. This
last site has to be considered as very special indeed.
Panguraria is the name of a tiny hamlet sited on the northern bank of the
River Narmada, which the British knew as the Nerbuddha. This is one of
the largest rivers in India, and because it flows westwards for some eight
hundred miles across the subcontinent's widest point, it has traditionally
been seen as a natural boundary between North and South India. It helps
that the Narmada flows along a rift valley with the Vindhya mountain
range to the north and the Satpuras on the south. Panguraria village lies
within this rift, between the river and a spur jutting out from the main
Vindhya range. These hills contain a great many natural caves and rock
shelters, and in this instance the find was made by a survey party of
archaeologists from the Nagpur Circle of the ASI, who were looking for
evidence of early human settlement.

What drew them to the Panguraria site were the remains of nine small
stupas placed along the spine of a low ridge overlooking a side valley. The
largest of these stupas was the highest, and just above it was a rock shelter,
in which was found an Ashokan inscription in the form of a Minor Rock
Edict crudely cut into the rock face. The MRE's opening preamble is only
partly readable, but enough survives to show it to be significantly different
from the usual opening statements of other MREs in that it was addressed
by Ashoka to a prince named Samva. Whether this Prince Samva - the
word means 'concord' in Sanskrit -was one of Ashoka's sons is open to
speculation, since the name is found nowhere else. From all the surviving
evidence, the monastery at Panguraria over which Prince Samva was
placed in authority was a typical early monastic centre where the monks
slept in rock shelters rather than monastic cells. Yet the place clearly had a
very special significance for Emperor Ashoka, for just to the left of the
cave containing the MRE is a second rock shelter set into the same low
cliff, and on its brow is another, shorter inscription, set high up on the rock
face in big bold letters.
Unlike the MRE next door, this inscription has not been incised using a
mallet and chisel but clumsily tapped out, probably by the writer standing
on a rock and using a chisel attached to a stick. It is not so much a planned
edict as a piece of casual graffiti, albeit one carried out on the orders of a
powerful ruler. According to one of the outstanding epigraphists of our
own times, Professor Harry Falk, it reads:

Piyadasi nama
rajakumara va
samvasamane
imam desam papunitha
vihara (y) atay (e)
This Falk translates as :

The king, who (now after consecration) is called Piyadassi, (once) came to
this place on a pleasure tour while he was still a (ruling) prince, living
together with his unwedded consort.7

Panguraria is just forty-five miles due south of Vidisha, the district in

which Sanchi and its surrounding Buddhist sites falls - and from which
Ashoka's first wife hailed. Ashoka's graffiti at Panguraria is a sort of
informal memento, placed there when the emperor returned to a place he
had visited in his youth, when as viceroy of Ujjain he had toured these
parts with his girlfriend, the woman who would bear him his eldest son
and daughter Mahinda and Sanghamitta. It is a touchingly human
document that shows the emperor with his guard down.

Panguraria may also mark the moment when Ashoka first began to use the
new Brahmi alphabet to spread his edicts across the land, beginning with
his Minor Rock Edicts, which in nearly every instance tell us - most
obligingly -that this process was initiated two and a half years after he had
converted to Buddhism and while he was on tour: This proclamation (was
issued by me) on tour. Two hundred and fifty-six nights (had then been)
spent on tour.'8

To date sixteen complete and incomplete sets of MREs have been found,
well spread out but with a cluster of eleven in the Karnataka region of
South India. Together they form the oldest certain examples of Brahmi
writing - and thus the oldest examples of written Prakrit, precursor of Pali
and Sanskrit. They represent the first wave of Ashoka's proclamations set
in stone. Although the order went out while Ashoka was out on tour, it
seems logical to suppose that the earliest of these MREs went up in the
Magadha region and the Gangetic plains, as at Ahraura and Sassaram. And
indeed, only at Ahraura, Sassaram and Rupnath do the MREs actually state
how Ashoka's commands are to be spread: 'And cause ye this matter to be
engraved on rocks. And where there are stone pillars here (in my
dominions), there also cause (it) to be engraved.' 9 The later MREs have
dropped this order.

Nearly all of these sixteen known MRE sites are associated with caves or
rock shelters on rocky outcrops or small hills, and always away from
population centres, even if close to roads or river crossings. Ashoka may
have chosen these sites deliberately as places where crowds might gather
at annual religious fairs, so that his promotion of Buddhism might become
associated with local cults.10 It can equally be argued that Ashoka in the
early days of his conversion to Buddhism chose not to challenge directly
the powerful forces of the Brahman establishment, who would have been
concentrated in the big towns. However, we have no idea to what degree
Ashoka's monumental decrees were targeted by those who came after him.
If they were attacked, the first to be pulled down or broken up would have
been those sited in or near population centres. His pillars would have made
the most visible targets and would have been the first to go. The edicts we
see today - with considerable difficulty since the majority are so isolated -
must be seen as the survivors of many.
This first round of Ashokan edicts - the Minor Rock Edicts - were
followed by the Schism Edicts, starting with the Bairat-Calcutta Schism
Edict, which is addressed directly to the Sangha and not to the mahamatras
or religious officers, who have been placed in charge of the Buddhist
Church by the time the Sanchi and Sarnath Schism Edict pillars go up. The
next to be set in stone were the Separate or Kalinga Rock Edicts at Dhauli
and Jaugada in Orissa and Sannati in South Karnataka, which also
anticipate the creation of the special cadre of religious officers. They
would have been followed by the remaining Rock Edicts, of which
fourteen have been identified to date, ranging from Karnataka to Kandahar
in Afghanistan.
Only five of the Ashokan columns carrying the emperor's Pillar Edicts can
be described as complete or nearly so. The remains of another eleven or
possibly twelve survive as fragments. These were erected twenty-six years
after Ashoka's anointing as bold public statements, no longer tucked away
on hillsides or among monastic communities but placed at or near
population centres or major thoroughfares, and in many cases beside well-
constructed wells where people would gather. PE 7 is the last to go up,
dated to the twenty-seventh year after his coronation, and found only on
Firoz Shah's Lat.
The largest of these magnificent columns stands 46 feet high and weighs
more than 50 tons, with its capital, bell and abacus adding another 6 feet
and 3 more tons - major achievements in themselves, requiring not only a
school of skilled monumental masons but also equally skilled engineers
capable of transporting them across land and water, to say nothing of their
erection. Their size must have presented a logistical headache to those
charged with transporting them, so it is easy to see why they were
confined to the Mauryan heartland, with the Ganges and its tributaries
providing the means of transportation. No Ashokan pillars have been
found south of Sanchi, although it has been argued that the Amaravati
stupa had such a pillar that was destroyed soon after its erection, parts of
which were then recycled.11 They would have been obvious targets for
those who considered Buddhism to be heretical or who saw them as
manifestations of idolatry, so we can only speculate as to how many such
monuments were actually cut from the quarry at Chunar, upstream of
Benares, and possibly also from the quarry at Pabhosa, across from
Kausambi on the River Jumna.12

What is equally remarkable is that Emperor Ashoka's edicts appear out of

nowhere, fully formed. The probability is that the first Kharosthi and
Brahmi scripts were tried out on palm leaves, perhaps even bits of cloth as
Alexander's admiral, the Greek Nearchos, seemed to suggest - probably
beginning at Taxila.13 Taking his cue from the Persian Achaemenids and
the Greeks, Ashoka initiated the practice of writing monumental
inscriptions on stone, using lettering inspired from outside but locally
determined to better convey his own local spoken Magadhan Prakrit, so
that these inscriptions should be read throughout his empire and for
posterity.

Despite the best efforts of bigots, iconoclasts and the elements, Ashoka's
song has survived the vicissitudes of some 2270 years. And yet, for all his
brave words and despite all the Buddhist tales about Dharmashoka, the
Wheel-turning Monarch, the man himself still remains intangible, more
myth than real personage, little known and little valued, a subject
seemingly fit only for academics and not the wider world.

This is particularly - especially - the case in India itself. The nation that
adores Rama - the mythical warrior-hero of the epic Ramayana, who
fought the demon king Ravanna before returning to be crowned king of
Ayodhya and rule over India for eleven thousand years as the perfect
monarch - has little time for the real thing: the man who first forged India
into a single nation state, and thus has a real claim to be its founding
father; the first Indian ruler with a distinctive, identifiable voice; the pre-
Gandhian pioneer of nonviolence, the first proponent of conquest by moral
force alone, whose words remain absolutely, unequivocally, unique among
rulers as a statement of governing principles.
Those stirring sentiments reached and helped shape the culture in the
furthest corners of Asia. Yet today in India itself they are shown scant
respect - and the monuments upon which they are inscribed receive only
cursory protection from the ASI.

Why this indifference? It cannot be put down to ignorance. In 1927,

writing from his prison cell to his fourteen-year-old daughter Indira -
whom he had also named Priyadarshini in direct homage to the emperor
who liked to call himself Priyadasi, or 'Beloved-of-the-Gods' - the
Harrow-educated secularist Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru put Ashoka on a par
with Jesus Christ as a source of inspiration in his nonviolent struggle
against the British rulers of India. Two decades later, when Nehru became
a more modern father of the nation as independent India's first Prime
Minister, he selected as the symbols of the new India two images directly
linked to Emperor Ashoka: the twenty-four-spoked wheel known as the
chakra, or 'Wheel of Law', which was set at the centre of the Indian
tricolour; and, for its national emblem, the Ashokan capital excavated at
Sarnath in 1904-5 showing four lions standing guard over four chakras,
representing the 'lion's roar of the Buddha' spreading to the cardinal
directions.
These symbols were expressly chosen to represent the new, secular India,
free of any specific religious affiliation, as the author and journalist Gita
Mehta remembers: 'As children, we were often told by our parents that
these 2300-year-old symbols were not mere deference to antiquity; they
were to inspire us to create a country governed by righteousness.' 14 There
was also the romance associated with the name of Ashoka, a great
conqueror who had become a great teacher, as Mehta goes on to explain:

At the very pinnacle of his glory as a conqueror Emperor Ashoka

embraced the philosophy of ahimsa, 'nonviolence', declaring, 'Instead of
the sound of the war drum, the sound of Dharma will be heard.'
Two-and-a-half millennia later, the sound of Dharma would once again be
heard when Mahatma Gandhi used nonviolence to expel the British from
India. In the newly liberated nation, Ashoka's Dharma Chakra, the Wheel
of Law, would be given pride of place in the centre of free India's flag.
Ashoka's pillar crowned with four lions facing the four points of the
compass and denoting the peaceful coexistence of Dharma would become
free India's national symbol - a constant reminder to India of what
government should be.

Nehru's choice of two Ashokan symbols was also a very deliberate riposte
to the thinking of his great co-liberator, M. K. Gandhi. The Mahatma's
vision of a free India was very different from his own, being based on the
ideal of Ram Raj, of a return to the mythical Hindu golden age of Rama
wherein life would revolve around the spinning wheel, the bullock cart and
the village well, with local councils of elders and a benevolent but distant
government - rooted in tradition but somehow free of caste and gender
oppression. To Nehru this was a fantasy. He wanted an India free of the
'communal malaise' that had prevented it from keeping pace with the
modern world, which only a strong, secular and centralised government
could deliver. In Ashoka's India he found his model.
In the event, Nehru's dilemma and Gandhi's dream ended with the letter's
assassination at the hands of a Hindu fundamentalist in the grounds of
Birla House, New Delhi, on 30 January 1948. So it came about that in the
first, idealistic decades of the secular Indian Republic, 'Ashok' and
'Ashoka' were the buzz words, symbolised by the building in the 1960s of
the mammoth four-star hotel in New Delhi known as the Ashok, which
became the flagship of a group of government-run hotels scattered across
India. A cast was made of the great granite boulder at the foot of the
Girnar hill inscribed with Ashoka's fourteen Rock Edicts and a bronze
replica placed in the grounds of Jai Singh's Observatory in New Delhi.
Ashoka - or, more usually, Ashok - also became a popular boy's name, not
because it had Buddhist associations but because it seemed in accordance
with the spirit of the times, an India 'without sorrow'. More importantly,
India's new constitution, drafted by the Dalit (untouchable caste) Minister
of Justice Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and made law on 26 November
1949, provided constitutional guarantees for a wide range of civil liberties
that included freedom of religion and the outlawing of all forms of caste
discrimination.
Sadly for India, this spirit of idealism failed to move the reactionaries - in
particular, that noisy minority of sectarians and chauvinists whose
rallying-cry was Hindutva or 'Hinduness'. To them a good Indian was a
Hindu Indian, which was an underhand way of getting at members of
India's large Muslim population and, to a lesser degree, its Christians,
Parsis - and its increasingly politicised Dalit underclass. Six weeks before
his death in December 1956, a disillusioned Dr Ambedkar had organised a
mass conversion of himself and many thousands of his followers to
Buddhism, arguing that caste discrimination was still entrenched in Indian
society and that large numbers of India's Dalits were in fact the
descendants of Buddhists who had been driven out of society. These Dalits
today constitute a quarter of India's population, and in the last two decades
Dalit power has become a political reality, challenging but also threatening
the traditional conjoined authority of India’s Brahmin and Kshatriya ruling
classes.

One of the pillars of the Hindutva movement is its rejection of what its
theorists term the 'Aryan Invasion tJieory' in favour of 'Out of India': the
belief that Indian civilisation was rooted in the subcontinent and owed
nothing to external influences. That rejection somehow extends to include
Buddhism and Emperor Ashoka, portrayed in some circles as un-Indian by
virtue of his rejection of Brahmanist religion in favour of Buddhism - this
despite the fact that the Dharma he set out on his Rock and Pillar Edicts
took as much from Hindu and Jain ethics as it did from Buddhism.
A prominent target of the Hindutvas in the late 1990s was Professor
Romila Thapar, whose reading of the early history of India as set down in
the national school syllabus was altered in what she saw as an attempt to
replace mainstream history with a 'Hindutva version of history'. 15 Thapar's
protests led to her being accused of being anti-Hindu and, after she took up
an appointment at the US Library of Congress in 2003, of betraying India.
There was a double irony here of which Thapar's accusers were probably
unaware, in that the emperor she wrote about was himself a victim of
Hindutvaism in one of its earliest historical manifestations. Fortunately, it
now appears that the tide has turned and that the voices of unreason are no
longer finding an audience,
Meanwhile the search for Ashoka continues. Almost every year some new
piece of the jigsaw comes to light. In 1982 it was the discovery by Dr P. K.
Mishra, superintending archaeologist of the Nagpur Circle of the ASI, of a
monastic complex at Deorkothar, close to the highway linking Allahabad
to Rewa, that pre-dates the Bharhut and Sanchi stupas. Dr Mishra's later
excavations in 1999 and 2000 revealed that two of the stupas had been
enclosed by a rudimentary stone railing with the simplest of ornamental
designs, perhaps marking the transition from working in wood to stone. In
Mishra's view, the outstanding discovery of the dig was the recovery of a
colossal polished pillar 'which alludes to the times of Asoka in the 3rd
century B.C. having Chakra on the abacus'.15 This pillar lay in more than
fifty pieces alongside the railings, which themselves had been broken into
smithereens. Everywhere there was evidence of 'systematic annihilation',
which Mishra ascribed to the first quarter of the second century BCE.
When pieced together, the pillar fragments were found to carry a six-line
inscription in Brahmi of what appears to be a dedication of the pillar to
Lord Buddha, placed there not by Ashoka Maurya but by the Buddhist
elder Upagupta of Mathura and his followers. If this reading is confirmed -
and doubts have been raised as to whether it really is Upagupta’s name on
the inscription-it would give credence to the Ashokavadand’s and
Xuanzang’s claims that it was Upagupta, patriarch of the Sarvastivada
school of Buddhism at the time of Ashoka, who converted the emperor to
Buddhism and guided his progress thereafter.
The violent destruction at Deorkothar also gives credence to the claim that
it was the Brahman general Pushyamitra Shunga who brought the
Mauryan dynasty to a violent end and then set about destroying Buddhist
sites - although it has always to be borne in mind that defaced sculptures
and smashed columns may equally be the victims of earthquakes and
accidental fires - just as Ashokan pillars serving as lingams, Buddhist
icons worshipped as Hindu deities, and Buddhist shrines converted into or
built over by Hindu temples may in many cases be nothing more than
examples of the human propensity to put what is found to best use.
Currently the most exciting work in the field of Ashokan archaeology is
coming from northern Orissa and the Langudi Hills, where the ruins of the
Great Monastery of Pushpagiri, where Xuanzang spent a year studying and
teaching, have been identified. They extend over three adjoining hills. On
one there stands a simple brick stupa dated to the third century BCE,

encircled by twenty-six railing pillars, plain and simple for the most part.
Nearby is a rock-cut elephant very similar in style and dating to that found
by Markham Kittoe guarding the Dhauli Rock Edict.
The Langudi rock-cut elephant, similar in design and dating to the Ashokan elephant guarding the
Dhauli Rock Edict. This was uncovered during excavations that in 2011 are still ongoing at the site of
the Great Monastery of Pushpagiri in ancient Kalinga, visited by die Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang in the
seventh century. (Courtesy of the American Committee of South Asian Arts)

In the Cold Weather of 2000-1 a team led by Dr D. R. Pradhan, curator of

Orissa State Archaeology, uncovered at Langudi two small stone
sculptures. What has so excited students of Indian history is that both of
these sculptures carry inscriptions in Brahmi lettering that appear to refer
to Ashoka by that name. The smaller of the two is the head and shoulders
of a man with long piled-up hair and large earrings. According to
Professor B. N. Mukherjee of Calcutta University, the accompanying
inscription reads: 'Chhi [shri, honoured] karena ranja ashokhena'. The
word karena can be read as 'bestowal', which suggests that the statue is a
portrait of a donor named 'King Ashoka'.

The second sculpture is slightly larger, some twenty inches across, and
shows a man seated on a throne flanked by two standing queens or female
attendants. He sits with his legs crossed and his hands on his knees, and
wears a turban and pendulous earrings, with numerous bangles from his
wrists up to his elbows. Here the inscription is a little longer:

ama upaska ashokasa samchiamana agra eka stupa.

This Professor Mukherjee has provisionally translated as:

A lay worshipper Ashoka with religious longing is associated in the
construction of a prominent stupa.17

The reference to Ashoka as a lay Buddhist would appear to date this image
to about 265-263- BCE-about the time of the conquest of Kalinga.

So the story of the Lost Emperor Continues to unfold.