Читать книгу India Discovered: The Recovery of a Lost Civilization - John Keay - Страница 11

Having broken the Ashoka Brahmi code, Prinsep was now in full cry. If mind and body could stand it, he would round onto the cave temple inscriptions, try the coins again, and finally double back to the long rock inscriptions. Only then would it be possible to assess the full importance of his discovery and to set Ashoka in perspective. But even as he worked, more monolithic finds were accumulating.

Thanks largely to Hodgson’s discoveries along the Nepalese frontier, Prinsep knew of five Ashoka columns. As he deciphered their messages a sixth came to light in Delhi (the second to be found there). Broken into three pieces and buried in the ground, it was thought to have been the casualty of an explosion in a nearby gunpowder factory sometime in the seventeenth century. The inscription was badly worn, though evidently the same as that on the other pillars. In due course the whole pillar was offered to the Asiatic Society for their new museum. They accepted it but found the difficulties and cost of transporting it to Calcutta to be prohibitive; eventually they settled for just the bit with the inscription on it.

The question of how these pillars had originally been moved round India, and whether they were still in their ordained positions, was an intriguing subject in itself. It was now appreciated that they were all of the same stone, all polished by the same unexplained process, and therefore all from the same quarry. Prinsep thought this was somewhere in the Outer Himalayas, although we now know their source to have been Chunar on the Ganges near Benares. Either way, they had somehow been moved as much as 500 miles, no mean feat considering that the heaviest weighed over forty tons.

Presumably river transport was the answer. An interesting sidelight on this had just been shed by the study of the Mohammedan histories of India. These revealed that neither of the Delhi pillars had originally been erected in Delhi; they had evidently been moved there to adorn the capital of the early Mohammedan kings or Sultans. The first pillar was in the ruins of the palace of Feroz Shah, a Sultan of the fourteenth century. According to contemporary chronicles he had ordered the pillar to be brought there from a site up the Jumna river near Khizrabad.

When the Sultan visited that district and saw the column in the village of Tobra, he resolved to move it to Delhi, and there erect it as a memorial to future generations. After thinking over the best means of lowering the column, orders were issued commanding the attendance of all the people dwelling in the neighbourhood … and all soldiers, both horse and foot. They were ordered to bring all materials and implements suitable for the work. Directions were issued for bringing parcels of the cotton of the silk-cotton tree. Quantities of this silk cotton were placed round the column, and when the earth at its base was removed, it fell gently over on the bed prepared for it. The cotton was then removed by degrees, and after some days the pillar lay safe upon the ground. The pillar was then encased from top to bottom in reeds and ram skins so that no damage might accrue to it. A carriage with forty-two wheels was constructed, and ropes were attached to each wheel. Thousands of men hauled at every rope, and after great labour and difficulty the pillar was raised onto the carriage. A strong rope was fastened to each wheel and 200 men pulled at each of these ropes. By the simultaneous exertions of so many thousands of men, the carriage was moved and was brought to the banks of the Jumna. Here the Sultan came to meet it. A number of large boats had been collected, some of which could carry 5000 and 7000 maunds [ten tons] of grain. The column was very ingeniously transferred to these boats and was then conducted to Firozabad [Delhi] where it was landed and conveyed into the palace with infinite labour and skill.

Re-erection of the column was also a ticklish business, especially since Feroz Shah had ordained that it should stand on the roof, nine storeys up. After much more shunting about on beds of cotton, and an ingenious system of windlasses, ‘it was secured in an upright position, straight as an arrow, without the smallest deviation from the perpendicular’. Feroz Shah then proudly showed off his new acquisition and asked for an explanation of the strange inscriptions. ‘Many Brahmins and Hindu devotees were invited to translate them, but no one was able.’ Prinsep could feel justly proud.

The Feroz Shah column still stands in Delhi, and Hodgson’s at Lauriya Nandangarh, though not the most elegant, is the only one that still retains its original capital. Others have fared less well. Of the Bihar columns two appear to have been used for cannon target practice during the Moghul period. And in the 1840s the remains of at least two more pillars were dug up at Sanchi. Local tradition had it that they had been broken up by an Indian industrialist for use as rollers in a gigantic sugar cane press. Of one only the base remained; the other was found in three pieces with the chisel marks still visible where it had been intentionally broken.

For British antiquarians a potentially more embarrassing case of vandalism was the persistent rumour that the road roller being used by a zealous engineer at Allahabad was actually an Ashoka pillar. If there was any substance in this, it is to be hoped that it was just a broken fragment. The only pillar that was quite definitely thrown down by the British was the other, much studied one at Allahabad. It had evidently been in the way of a new embankment which was part of an eighteenth-century refortification programme. Filled with remorse, the Asiatic Society, and even the government, arranged for its re-erection. Captain Edward Smith, the man who had procured for Prinsep the vital facsimiles from Sanchi, designed a new pedestal for it, which came in for much praise. Unfortunately, he went further and also designed a new capital. It was meant to be a lion in the style of that of Lauriya Nandangarh; but it was not exactly the ‘neatliest engraven’. According to Alexander Cunningham ‘it resembles nothing so much as a stuffed poodle on top of an inverted flower pot’.

We now know of at least nine inscribed Ashoka columns, but these are considerably outnumbered by the Ashoka inscriptions carved on convenient rocks. The pillars naturally claimed attention first, but in fact the rock inscriptions proved more interesting both in content and location. The pillars were found only in the north of India (Sanchi was the most southerly), widely scattered round the Ganges basin. The rock inscriptions were found much further afield, from Mysore in the south to near Peshawar in the extreme north-west; and from near the coast of Orissa in the east to the coast of Saurashtra in the west. These last two, the first at Dhauli in Orissa, the second at Girnar in Gujerat, were the only ones known to Prinsep. Luckily they were two of the most informative.

The Orissa inscription had been discovered in early 1837. Lieutenant Markham Kittoe had been sent into the wilderness of Orissa to search for coalfields. Left much to his own devices he also searched for antiquities and soon stumbled on a whole network of ancient caves and sculptures. He described his find to the Asiatic Society:

I have further great pleasure in announcing the discovery of the most voluminous inscription in the column character that I have ever heard of… There is neither road nor path to this extraordinary piece of antiquity. After climbing the rock through thorns and thickets, I came of a sudden on a small terrace open on three sides with a perpendicular scarp on the fourth or west from the face of which projects the front half of an elephant of elegant workmanship, four feet high; the whole is cut out of the solid rock. On the northern face beneath the terrace, the rock is chiselled smooth for a space of near fourteen feet by ten feet and the inscription, neatly cut, covers the whole space.

He spent a day taking a facsimile and returned to the spot again in November of the same year to complete the job. In places the rock was badly worn but he found that the shadow thrown by the evening sun enabled him to pick out letters that were not otherwise apparent. In spite of several gaps, Prinsep immediately attempted a translation and made out a number of intriguing phrases. But he gave up the task in early 1838 when a copy of the much better preserved Girnar inscription came to hand.

This had first been noticed by Colonel James Tod, another legendary figure in this story, who had been on a tour of Gujerat in 1822.

The memorial in question, 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 the arc is nearly ninety feet; its surface is divided into compartments or parallelograms, within which are inscriptions in the usual character.

In Tod’s time the script was still, of course, a mystery. The Colonel was one of those who thought it might be Greek. But he was nearer the mark when he confidently predicted that, sooner rather than later, someone at the Asiatic Society would solve the problem. Meantime he had taken copies of only two short sections.

Fifteen years later, a Bombay antiquarian, hearing of Prinsep’s translation of the pillar inscriptions, quickly headed for Girnar. He wanted to see if the new code would work on Tod’s inscription. ‘To my great joy, and that of the Brahmins with me, I found myself able to make out several words.’ The engraving was still amazingly sharp; it was possible to make an impression, filling the letters with ink and pressing a cloth over them. From this he made a reduced copy – on the original each letter was nearly two feet high – and sent it off to Calcutta.

Prinsep, turning from the Orissa inscription to this new one, again experienced that shiver down the spine. Bar two extra paragraphs on the Orissa inscription, the two were identical. Ashoka was proclaiming his edicts from one corner of India to the other, across an empire far greater than that of British India and comparable only to that of the Moghuls. But still more surprising was a claim made in one of the edicts. If Prinsep’s reading was right, Ashoka had set up hospitals for men and animals throughout his kingdom, including the extreme south of the peninsula ‘and moreover within the dominions of Antiochus the Greek’. He also claimed that the gospel of non-violence and respect for all living creatures was being acknowledged even ‘by the kings of Egypt, Ptolemy and Antigonus and Magas’.

This said a great deal for Ashoka’s international standing. But, more important, here at last was another point of contact – the first since Jones’s identification of Sandracottus – between India’s ancient history and that of the West. As Prinsep leafed through the classics to discover which Ptolemy and which Antiochus these might be, he sent an urgent message to Kittoe who was still in Orissa. Would the coal prospector quickly go to Dhauli and recheck the edicts in which these names appeared? Kittoe reacted at once.

On my arrival at Cuttack I received a letter from my friend the Secretary of the Asiatic Society, informing me of his discovery of the name of Antiochus in the Girnar and Dhauli inscriptions, and requesting me to recompare my transcript and correct any errors. I instantly laid my dak [organized transport] and left at 6 p.m. for Dhauli, which curious place I reached before daybreak and had to wait till it was light; for the two bear cubs which escaped me there last year, when I killed the old bear, were now full grown and disputing the ground. At daybreak I climbed to the Aswastuma [the rock] and cutting two large forked boughs of a tree near the spot, placed them against the rock; on these I stood to effect my object. I had taken the precaution to make a bearer hold the wood steady, but being intent on my interesting task I forgot my ticklish footing; the bearer had also fallen asleep and let go his hold, so that having overbalanced myself the wood slipped and I was pitched head foremost down the rock, but fortunately fell on my hands and received no injury beyond a few bruises and a severe shock; I took a little rest and then completed the job.

Simultaneously Prinsep tried to get the Girnar inscription rechecked. The vital edict containing the mention of Ptolemy was badly damaged with many of the letters missing altogether. Tentatively he approached the government, an unthinkable idea only a few months previously. But by now the excitement caused by his revelations was considerable. The government agreed to help and, within a couple of weeks, a Lieutenant Postans was on his way to Girnar.

Mrs Postans went too, anxious like everyone else to be in on the elucidation of what she called ‘this black and time-stained rock’. Funded by the government, the operation was conducted with unheard-of thoroughness. The great rock was swathed in sturdy ladders and scaffolding; an awning was erected overhead to shade the workers from the sun; the whole inscription was then divided into numbered sections, and for three weeks Postans and his men crawled about on its vast surface taking impression after impression.

As my first plan, the letters were carefully filled with a red pigment (vermilion and oil), every attention being paid to the inflexions and other minute though important points. A thin and perfectly transparent cloth was then tightly glued over the whole of one division, and the letters as seen plainly through the cloth, traced upon it in black; in this way all the edicts were transcribed and the cloth being removed, the copy was carefully revised letter by letter with the original. The very smooth and convex surface of the rock on this side was highly favourable to this method, but it is tedious and occupied ten days of incessant labour.

I need not observe that it became a matter of primary interest to find some clue to the discovery of the missing portion of the rock on the eastern side, as the highly important eighteenth edict, containing the names of Ptolemy etc., had principally suffered from the mutilation. All our enquiries led to the conclusion that the rock had been blasted to furnish materials for the neighbouring causeway; to remove … this would have been attended with an expense which I did not feel myself authorized in incurring but the whole soil at the base of the rock was dug up to a considerable distance and as deep as could be gone.

In this way two or three inscribed fragments were found. But it was impossible to decide where they came from. Postans had to rest content with his vastly improved facsimiles of the rock itself and these were duly sent off to Calcutta. They arrived in early November 1838, just a day after a ship called the Hertfordshire had sailed away down the Hughli. On board was James Prinsep, demented and dying.

While wrestling with the first transcriptions from Dhauli and Girnar, he had fought off headaches and sickness. Rapidly the illness developed into ‘an affectation of the brain’. By the time he was bundled aboard the Hertfordshire, ‘his mind was addled’. He reached England but never recovered his sanity, dying a year later at the age of forty.

“That he was a great man, it would not perhaps be strictly correct to assert,’ wrote a friend and obituarist (he was probably thinking of Jones with whom Prinsep was so often compared). ‘But he was one of the most useful and talented men that England has yet given to India.’ His genius lay not so much in his scholarship as in his tenacity, ‘his burning, irrepressible enthusiasm’. Ultimately it proved his undoing, for his obsessive dedication to the Indian scripts had both unhinged his mind and wrecked his physique. But it had also gained for him, and for the study of India’s past, a new band of determined scholars. ‘We felt as if he observed and watched over us,’ wrote one. And, of course, it led him, perhaps drove him, to the solution of India’s greatest historical enigma.

One of his last achievements had been two carefully engraved plates showing the development of each letter of the modern Devanagari script from its origin in the Ashoka Brahmi. He illustrated nine distinct stages and gave a date to each. This was of immense value to philologists and constituted a worthy and succinct summary of his life’s work. Though since added to and qualified, it remains the basis for a study of India’s scripts. But, as Prinsep fully appreciated, it had a still more important aspect. ‘The table furnishes a curious species of palaeo-graphic chronometer by which any ancient inscription may be consigned with considerable accuracy to the period at which it was written, even though it possesses no actual date.’ It was, in effect, a ready reckoner not only for inscriptions but also for the monuments on which they were found. And since almost every building in India contains some inscription he had thus casually opened the way to a new and even more dramatic branch of Indology, the systematic study of Indian architecture.

But of more immediate significance was his unveiling of Ashoka. Hitherto all contact with ancient India had seemed impossibly vague. The great classical civilization hinted at by the glories of Sanskrit literature could be viewed only at about three removes – in translations of minor classical authors relaying information gleaned many centuries before by Megasthenes on his, probably brief, visit to north India. It was rather like trying to make out the history of the Plantagenets with nothing more to go on than a modern historical romance. Now, suddenly, it was like coming into possession of the text of the Magna Carta. In Ashoka here at last was a genuine historical figure, an emperor – apparently one of the most influential and powerful — whose very words expressing the rationale of his rule had been miraculously preserved.

From the mention of contemporary rulers like Ptolemy and Antiochus, his dates – about 269 to 232 BC – are more certain than those of any other Indian king before AD 1000. We know that his capital was Pataliputra (Patna) and that his empire stretched from Orissa to the Khyber Pass and from the Himalayas to at least as far south as Madras. Within this vast area there were independent tribes in the forests and hills as indeed remained the case until British times. They must have represented a real threat, since Ashoka seems to have adopted a firm if not repressive policy towards them. In other respects, his edicts favour tolerance and passivism. In the early years of his reign he had waged war in Orissa. The bloodshed and horrors of this campaign caused him to forswear further aggression. Whether he was actually a Buddhist monk or whether he even understood Buddhist theology is doubtful. But there is no question that the result of his conversion was an unwavering commitment to the ethics of that most humane and endearing religion.

“The greatest and noblest ruler India has known’, according to Professor Basham, he was ‘indeed one of the great kings of the world… Ashoka towers above the other kings of ancient India, if for no other reason than that he is the only one among them whose personality can be constructed with any degree of certainty.’ It is this personal dimension that makes Ashoka so intriguing. His disapproval of any non-religious jollifications, and the austerity and directness of his language, suggest a Cromwellian puritanism – and yet he seems so typically Indian; vegetarianism, non-violence, reverence for life in all forms, tolerance to men of other religions were as important to Ashoka as to Mahatma Gandhi. The building of rest houses and the planting of trees along the highways were measures which recommended themselves to many of India’s great rulers, including the Moghuls and the British. And then there was what, by western standards, can only be called the naivety of Ashoka. To Christians the idea of moral reform on a world scale is irrevocably tied up with the ideas of sacrifice, suffering and persecution. But for Ashoka, as for most Indian reformers, regeneration springs from within and can be spread by conviction, precept and example. Like the Buddha, Ashoka’s conversion stemmed from a renunciation; like the Mahatma, he directed his appeal at something deep within the Indian soul.