NAYANJOT LAHIRI - Upon This Rock: What the stone edicts of Ashoka tell us about India’s great Buddhist ruler
'Ashoka’s utter uniqueness is that in this, the one and only
record that he caused to be made of a successful war, 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 is now so well known that
we hardly see it any longer for what in essence it was, and remains: a
staggering overturning of the very conception of kingship.
The account graphically captures Ashoka’s pain and repentance in his hour of victory. Remarkably, it is also the only surviving contemporary description of the catastrophe.. in Ashoka’s edict, the compassionate and caring king is born, and proclaims himself, as the writer HG Wells recognised, for the first time in world history..'
The account graphically captures Ashoka’s pain and repentance in his hour of victory. Remarkably, it is also the only surviving contemporary description of the catastrophe.. in Ashoka’s edict, the compassionate and caring king is born, and proclaims himself, as the writer HG Wells recognised, for the first time in world history..'
The personal upheaval was, perhaps inadvertently, also a
powerful and new political idea: by replacing subjugation with compassion as
the 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 elites and royalty, were consequential. If one were, for a moment, to
visualise the scenario symbolically, it could take the shape of Ashoka calling
for a copy of the Arthashastra and setting it on fire in full public view...'
THERE IS NOTHING ESPECIALLY STRIKING about the cluster of rocks which crowns the edge of a low hilly ridge near the village of Erragudi in the Andhra region. From a distance, the cluster appears unremarkable, while the ridge on which it sits is somewhat bare, rising out of a patchwork of cultivated fields and sparsely dotted with vegetation. The rocks on it stand a mere 30 metres or so above the plains.
Cascading down the rocks is a dramatic waterfall of words.
More than a hundred lines in the ancient Brahmi script are imprinted across
several of the boulders. Large portions of this scrawl are exceedingly clear,
the characters boldly etched across the rock face. 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 can
diminish the overwhelming impression of messages from antiquity created by the
profusion of these ancient words. This copious transcription 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 ruler of a terrain that stretched, at one
point, from Taxila in the north-west to Kalinga in the east.
Some 2,200 years ago, Ashoka 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. They represented an extraordinary democratic
innovation—no ruler before him appears to have thought it necessary, or found
the technology, to speak directly to his or her subjects. In keeping with
Ashoka’s territorial ambitions, the scale of this project was truly imperial.
The edicts were inscribed and installed across his lands, often in more than
one language. A large and adept provincial administration helped carry his
voice out to his subjects. They may even have reached those on the borders of
the empire, an important consideration for a monarch who had undergone a
religious conversion—one of the most famous in world history—and wished to
reassure all people that the path of his dhamma was open to
anyone who wished to follow its precepts with the right morals and true zeal.
He transformed the way in which the state communicated with its people; in
doing so, he hoped to transform the state itself.
These inscriptions also represent a kind of historical
daybreak, ending a long phase of faceless rulers in the Indian subcontinent. 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 to the Godavari River on the Deccan Plateau. There were kings of
greater or lesser power, rulers who were aspirants to the appellation “chief
king of all kings,” and influential confederate clans.
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. From
Magadha, in the middle Gangetic plains of Bihar, a succession of kings ruled
over this empire, which straddled large parts of India. The first of these was
the imperial house of the Nandas; they were followed by the Mauryas. From the
fourth century BCE till the advent of Ashoka, circa 269 or 268 BCE, there were
said to have been 11 monarchs, nine in the Nanda dynasty followed by the two
Maurya kings who preceded Ashoka: Chandragupta, Ashoka’s grandfather, who
overthrew the Nandas and founded the new dynasty, followed by Bindusara,
Ashoka’s father.
But though king succeeded king and one century followed
another, the only evidence we have of those times are the versions of them
preserved in surviving accounts by others—some accurate, others fanciful, and
practically never contemporary to their lives. These remaining records are the
Puranas, certain Buddhist and Jaina texts, and histories of a sort by people
who are referred to as “classical authors,” mainly literate 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 those of their principalities, are
known: Janaka of Videha, Pasenadi of Kosala, the Magadha monarch Bimbisara,
Pradyota of Avanti. 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.
But in his stone messages, we encounter Ashoka himself
speaking about the several watersheds of his royal life, and we witness how he
recreated his own path while trying to remould the lives of people in his
empire, and beyond. Candour and emotion, death and decimation, honest
admissions and imperious orders—all of these are 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 an emperor of uncommon and evolving ambition.
Through these missives, Ashoka literally carved out a
presence for himself. We encounter him on rocks and pillars right across India,
Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He chose to ensure that his administration
sent out multiple copies of his messages. 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 the best
known, certainly during his own lifetime. There is no other 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 further afield, articulating the
shifting contours of his imperial aspirations.
IN HIS EARLY YEARS, it is a virtual certainty
that Ashoka was very much within the ideal mould of kingship enshrined in the
ancient text of the Arthashastra. This was grounded in military
success and the building of a vast empire. Because of his conquering ambitions,
and their consequences, Ashoka, who until this point seemed remote to the point
of invisibility, becomes historical and real. The first event of his reign that
Ashoka chose to mention in his edicts was a major military expedition he led.
This was the assault, in approximately 260 BCE, on Kalinga, a state on the
eastern seaboard of India, in what now forms part of modern Odisha and Andhra
Pradesh.
His ambitions were cultivated, and realised, in an age of
war and territorial aggrandisement. Take the specific time of Ashoka’s march:
it happened a little after Rome began its extended conflict against Carthage
with the first of the three Punic Wars, which, all told, lasted more than a
hundred years, between 264 and 146 BCE. Some 300 years before Ashoka, the army
of the Persian Empire, with its centre in what is now Iran, crossed into
Europe, and also stamped its authority across regions that stretched from
Turkey in the west to north-west India in the east. Persia was the first
superpower of its time, and, about two centuries later, its model inspired
Alexander’s successful emulation. Starting from his small kingdom of Macedon,
near Athens, he crushed revolts in several Greek cities before leading an
expeditionary force that annexed kingdoms in Africa and Asia, extending from
Egypt to Persia, and eventually defeated adversaries as far east as Punjab.
When Alexander died in his thirties, this vast empire,
difficult to hold effectively at the best of times, quickly broke up into
smaller realms. In Egypt, one of his generals became the satrap and founder of
a new dynasty. The fourteen 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 15 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, he presided over the unification of China around a
centralised bureaucratic monarchy.
Given all these conflicts and rivalries, it is hardly
surprising that a considerable part of the history of the ancient world is
written about war. Homer, in about the eighth century BCE, relating incidents
around the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans, and Herodutus, in the
fifth century BCE, writing of the expanding Achaemenid empire of Persia, are
probably the best-known chroniclers of ancient conquest—Homer more poetic and
Herodotus more gossipy and historical.
Why wars were thought necessary at all is a question which
strikes us immediately and forcefully, but we dismiss it out of hand as foolish
because of many of the precepts 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 worldview, 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 Chinese history, in the fifth
and fourth centuries BCE, we see that controlling territory became crucial to
the consolidation of political domination. Over much of ancient history,
territorial expansion also ensured enormous economic benefit. The acquisitions
of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, circa the ninth century BC, are an
example. Even among his smaller campaigns, the booty included 40 chariots with
men and horses, 460 horses, 120 pounds of silver, 120 pounds of gold, 6,000
pounds of lead, 18,000 pounds of iron, 1,000 vessels of copper, 2,000 heads of
cattle, 5,000 sheep, 15,000 slaves, and the defeated ruler’s sister.
How much of this Weltanschauung formed the
mental horizons of Ashoka cannot be specifically known, but conquerors and
kings from the West were very much part of political happenings in South Asia
at the time his grandfather captured power. So the possibility of this emperor
having been influenced by the world beyond South Asia is very far from remote.
Plutarch, in his biographical history of Alexander, writes that 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 present 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—a teacher in the classical Greek
tradition—to which Antiochus’s reply was that while figs and wine would be
sent, it was forbidden by law to sell a sophist.)
Ashoka’s expedition to Kalinga was preceded by massive and
careful arrangements, from ascertaining the strength of the enemy’s forces and
understanding the terrain through which the army would move to deciding on the
season best suited to the operation...
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