A 'search' for Ashoka

Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King

Author: Patrick Olivelle

Publisher: HarperCollins

Price: Rs 799   

Pages: 400

There is an accepted convention of writing book reviews, especially if one thinks that the book is significant and good. The usual practice is to summarise the author’s arguments and their importance and then almost as an aside throw in a few points of criticism or bring to light some errors, if any. I am going to reverse this process because Olivelle is an outstanding scholar from whose works, especially his translations of Sanskrit texts, I have benefitted enormously. I thus began to read this book with great expectations.

The expectations took a nosedive when I read in the first paragraph of the first chapter the following: “Two momentous events occurred in the last quarter of the third century BCE, events that shaped the political landscape of South and West Asia….The first was the conquest of West Asia by Alexander of Macedonia, and the second was the seizure of the prosperous and powerful Magadha kingdom along the Ganges by Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka’s grandfather.” This chronological line seemed to run against all the accepted dates concerning Alexander’s invasion of the north-west of India, and the establishment of the Maurya Empire. My confusion was worse confounded when turning over the page I read: “His [Alexander’s] Indian campaign began in 327 BCE and ended two years later…’’ and on the next page “In the waning years of the fourth century BCE...Chandragupta came to rule over a large swathe of land in northern India…”.

What is going on here? Careless writing? Non-existent copyediting? My confusion continued. On one page, Chandragupta is said to have died “around 297 BCE”; three pages later, we read, “The year of Chandragupta’s death is uncertain, but 293 BCE has been suggested.” Obviously, he couldn’t have died “around” 297 BCE and in 293 BCE. Since a controversy exists on the exact year of his death (as Olivelle admits in a footnote), why can’t it be said he died circa 290 or 295 BCE and leave it at that? Olivelle himself and his publisher have done grave injustice to his scholarship.

Having got that off my chest, I can say this is an important book in a field that is increasingly becoming crowded. This is not a biography in the usual sense of the genre. Indeed, given the nature of the evidence, it is difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct a biography of Ashoka. The imponderables and the unknowns are too many. Olivelle aptly calls his book “a search”. The quest begins by segregating what Ashoka wrote about himself, his ideas and his work in his famous edicts and inscriptions from later Buddhist hagiographical accounts.

One of the first problems that any historian of Ashoka encounters concerns his name. In what Ashoka wrote about himself, he referred to himself as Ashoka in only four instances – twice in Minor Rock Edict I and twice in Minor Rock Edict II (both in present-day Karnataka). In all his other inscriptions, Ashoka called himself Piyadasi. The later Buddhist hagiographies initiated the tradition of calling him Ashoka and the name stuck. To now call him Emperor Piyadasi (since Piyadasi was probably his name) would be akin to a seismic shift even though  devanampiye piyadasi  (which is how Ashoka refers to himself in his edicts) has, as Olivelle notes, a nice alliterative ring to it.

Ashoka ruled over a far-flung empire. The extent of Ashoka’s empire engages Olivelle in a detailed, but not entirely novel, exercise in historical geography. The most convenient method of figuring out the extent of Ashoka’s empire is through locating his edicts. It is a reasonable assumption that because Ashoka ruled over or had influence in an area, he wanted to address the people of that area. He did this through his inscriptions.

A detailed study of Ashoka inscriptions enables Olivelle to write a section on Ashoka as a writer. Ashoka was, of course, a writer on stone and according to Olivelle, Ashoka enjoyed being a writer. India did not have a pre-Ashoka inscriptional tradition. Ashoka “wrote the first inscriptions of the Indian subcontinent, and there is a distinct possibility that he invented the script as well”. The script was Brahmi, which, like most later Indian scripts, read from left to right. Olivelle is on dodgy ground here because archaeological evidence suggests that the Brahmi script goes back to circa 6th century BCE and the first epigraphic evidence inscribed on pottery antedate Ashoka by many centuries.

For a biographer-historian the issue regarding “Ashoka as a writer” is problematic. There is no evidence that Ashoka was literate/educated. Moreover, as Olivelle notes, the inscriptions carry many suggestions that they went through stages of editorial interventions, recensions and anthologising. If Olivelle’s points are valid, then the bigger question is: Do these inscriptions represent authentic articulations of Ashoka? They do bear his imprimatur but is the evidence robust enough to describe Ashoka as a writer and as someone who enjoyed writing?

Authorship and the dubious claim that Ashoka was a writer are less relevant than the wider significance of the inscriptions. Through them, as already noted, Ashoka was marking his territory and spheres of influence. But he was also attempting to do something else. He was telling his people/subjects that he wanted to rule his kingdom differently from other monarchs, even his ancestors. The prevalent pre-Ashokan form of ruling had been physical power or force. Even Ashoka, till his conquest of Kalinga circa 260 BCE, had been an ardent practitioner of ruling through coercion. Post Kalinga, Ashoka makes the unprecedented attempt to abandon ruling by force and to rule through a clearly enunciated moral order.

This attempt was motivated by Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism post Kalinga. This is the generally accepted (hagiographic?) narrative. There could have been more pragmatic considerations. Ashoka’s huge empire – in Olivelle’s words “[Ashoka] ruled over a larger area of the Indian subcontinent than anyone else before British colonial rule” – was diverse in terms of demography, 
 

environment and culture. Would it be possible to rule such a variegated empire through force alone? It is reasonable to speculate that such a question could not have escaped Ashoka, the empire-builder. To raise such questions is not to underestimate Ashoka’s unique “experiment of governance anchored in a universalist moral philosophy and religious ecumenism’’ – the major theme of Olivelle’s book. Rather, it is to note the convergence of an empire-builder’s pragmatic concerns and his ideological and ethical commitments. Pragmatism and ethics are not necessarily watertight and contradictory compartments. Ashoka the  upasaka  and Ashoka the raja co-existed in the same individual. Olivelle tilts a little too much towards the former. In Olivelle’s words, “If there was a single attribute that defined Ashoka’s primary identity, it was his devotion to dharma.” Without going into the complex issue that philosophers have discussed of what constitutes “primary identity”, I would suggest that Ashoka was both, successful raja and devoted  upasaka, and this is what makes him an outstanding individual and monarch.

Romila Thapar pointed out more than two decades ago Ashoka’s embracing of Buddhism was not a moment of epiphany. Olivelle, while agreeing with this, enriches our understanding of the process by his deep reading of Minor Rock Edict I and his teasing out of the implications of the word “striving”, which occurs several times in the short edict. This edict – the earliest and geographically the most widespread – also conveys a message of equality since, according to Ashoka, striving is open to both eminent and lowly people. A moral code such as the one preached by the Buddha knows of no hierarchy. Yet Ashoka repeatedly referred to himself as  devanampiye — beloved of the gods. Given the obvious connotation of superiority embedded in the appellation, what does it say about the user of such a title as a ruler, as an upasaka and as a self-proclaimed follower of the Buddha? Olivelle prefers not to address this question.

Olivelle has written a thought-provoking book. He has scrupulously avoided the hagiographic sources about Ashoka because he feels they contain too many uncertainties. This, however, does not prevent him from entering speculative and uncertain terrain. Moreover, the spectre of hagiography lingers over Olivelle’s own account. Indian historical scholarship today is mature enough to be dispassionate about Ashoka and at least pose the question — was Piyadasi devanampiye ?

The reviewer is Chancellor and Professor of History, Ashoka University