Ashoka: From Guilty to Great (269 BCE - 232 BCE)

Archaeologists surveying the site of a proposed dam in Karnataka’s Gulbarga district about 25 years ago made a discovery that left them flabbergasted. At the site of Kanaganahalli in Sannati archaeological complex, on the left bank of the Bhima River, they discovered the ruins of an ancient stupa and a broken relief sculpture of a king and a woman who was probably his queen, flanked by female attendants. The inscription on it read ‘Ranyo Ashoka’, or King Ashoka. It was the first time ever that anyone had seen an image of King Ashoka. It was a discovery like no other. Till then, despite the wealth of information about Ashoka – in literature and through his numerous pillars and edicts strewn across the country – there had been no clearly defined image of the emperor. This sculpture was the only ‘confirmed’ representation of Ashoka. It put a face to the name of a king so often talked about in the history of India. Ashoka has a place in world history too. He was the only king of a sizable empire, to openly declare an ‘official’ end to war and violence and propagate universal peace – something we take for granted today. After all one of the primary objectives of a government is to ensure peace, security and opportunity. Ashoka mandated it 2,300 years ago. The other monumental change he brought about was that, through his patronage, he transformed what was till then a local sect into a leading religion – Buddhism. Even so, the story of ‘Ashoka the Great’ was largely forgotten in public memory within just centuries of his death in the 3rd century BCE. He returned to public consciousness in the 19th century. Credit for this goes to British antiquarian James Prinsep, who famously deciphered the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts, and was thus able to read the numerous inscriptions carved into the pillars and edicts Ashoka left behind, across the subcontinent. How was the discovery made? For a long time, there had been sightings of interesting pillars and rocks with inscriptions across the Indian subcontinent. The pillars were intriguing because they were all made of sandstone and finely polished. They also looked similar, suggesting that they were all related in some way. But since the script of the inscriptions on the pillars was unfamiliar, nobody knew what these pillars meant, although they looked important enough. Here’s an interesting anecdote. In 1355-56, Sultan Firuz Shah Tughlaq spotted one such pillar while on a military campaign in the village of Topra Kalan, in present-day Haryana. Tughlaq believed it was the walking stick of the Pandava Bhima, and so he decided to install it on top of his palace in his new city, Firuzabad, now called Feroze Shah Kotla. The pillar’s journey from Topra Kalan to Delhi, narrated by Tughlaq’s court historian Shams Siraj Afifi in Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, makes for an interesting read. On the Sultan’s orders, the soldiers dug out the pillar and laid it on a bed of silk cotton specially prepared to encase it so that it would not get damaged during the journey. This was then encased in reeds and raw hides and transported in a carriage with 42 wheels. When the carriage arrived at the Yamuna River, the pillar was loaded onto a barge and taken to Delhi, where it was received by the Sultan himself. According to Alexander Cunningham, another such pillar, which stood at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, was broken down by a local zamindar to use as a sugarcane press! It was only in the 19th century, as British officers and administrators scoured the subcontinent, that they began to realize just how many of these pillars and rock edicts there were – from Girnar in Gujarat, to Kandahar in modern-day Afghanistan, Sopara in the Deccan and Mysore in the south. Scholars began to sit up and pay attention. Among those interested in studying them was James Prinsep, who became virtually obsessed with them. In 1833, he learnt that the remains of a pillar very similar to the one at Feroze Shah Kotla had been found in the Allahabad Fort. He began studying these pillars with the help of a Sanskrit scholar. Soon, Brian Hodgson, the British Resident in the Court of Nepal, sent him a copy of the inscription found on a similar pillar at Bettiah in North Bihar. Soon after, another British military engineer named Captain Edward Smith sent Prinsep an inscription inscribed into the stone railings around the Sanchi stupa. Looking at all the material before him, Prinsep immediately knew that the information on these stones was almost identical and that they had been written by the same person. He also took into account all the rocks which had this script. After four years of painstaking work, Prinsep managed to decipher the script that we today call Brahmi. As he decoded the inscriptions, Prinsep also realised that they had been written by someone who referred to himself as either ‘Devanampiya’ (beloved of the gods) or ‘Piyadasi’ (he who looks on auspiciousness), and was a propagator of Buddhism. News of Prinsep’s work spread and a historian studying Buddhist history in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) got in touch with him. He told Prinsep that ancient Ceylonese Buddhist literature mentioned a king named ‘Ashoka’, who had sent a religious mission to Ceylon. He too was referred to as Devanampiya or Piyadasi. This helped connect the dots and soon the world of the great Mauryan Emperor Ashoka opened up! Early Buddhist texts preserved in Sri Lanka have helped throw light on much of the subcontinent’s Buddhist history. India’s own records were mostly wiped out, as was Buddhism itself by the 12th-13th centuries CE. What we know of Ashoka’s early life The 30-odd Ashokan inscriptions, including those on edicts and pillars, across the subcontinent, only hint at the monarch’s life after he became a ruler. Also, most of them contain only commandments and advice to be followed by his subjects as they walked the path of Dhamma or Dharma, as put forth by Ashoka. Whatever we know about Ashoka comes from Buddhist narratives compiled several centuries later, like the Sanskrit Ashokavadana (c. 2nd CE) and the Pali epic from Sri Lanka called Mahavamsa (c. 5th CE). Ashokavadana, believed to have been composed by Buddhist monks from the Mathura region, mentions that Ashoka’s mother was Subhadrangi, daughter of a Brahmin from Champa, near present-day Bhagalpur in Bihar. According to this text, she was kept away from the king (her husband Bindusara) due to palace intrigue. It was only when she had a son that she gained access to her husband. She was so relieved when the boy was born that she is said to have declared, ‘I am (now) without sorrow.’ i.e. ‘A-shoka’. However, according to an old Buddhist legend, Bindusara disliked Ashoka because of his ‘rough’ looks. Before we get to that, we need to mention that despite his supposed dislike for Ashoka, Bindusara seems to have had great faith in his son and his leadership q ...