Ashoka is one my favorite human beings; but little did I know that he was forgotten in India (surprise! surprise!) until William Jone's resurrected him back in late 1700.
Beautiful essay on Knowledge is power: The unintended outcomes of Orientalist William Jones’ study of Sanskrit texts
William Jones’s investigations of the past were hobbled by the imperative, commonly felt by European intellectuals of his era, to synchronise events with Biblical timelines. He did, however, make one crucial contribution to the study of Indian history by providing the first accurate dating for the reign of an Indian sovereign who had ruled before the common era. Greek chronicles mentioned that Seleucus Nicator, who succeeded to Alexander the Great’s eastern dominions, had sent his ambassador Megasthenes to the court of an emperor named Sandrocottus at Palibothra. Historians had speculated that Palibothra was the same as Pataliputra, the city known as Patna in modern times. However, that theory had a fatal flaw. Megasthenes described the capital of Sandrocottus as standing at the confluence of two rivers, the Ganges and the Erranaboas, but only the first of these flowed through Patna. Jones unearthed the fact that Patna used to be the site of the confluence of the Ganga and the Son, before the latter changed its course. He found, further, that another name for the Son was the Hiranyabahu, which matched the Erranaboas of Megasthenes’ account. Finally, he discovered a play which told of a usurper king called Chandragupta, who had a court at Pataliputra and had welcomed foreign ambassadors to it. Marshalling all this evidence, Jones could confidently state that Chandragupta was the same as Sandrocottus, whose reign had to have commenced between 325 BCE and 312 BCE.
Following Jones’s proof, the story of the dynasty Chandragupta founded, known as the Mauryas, was pieced together. The most important part of this history related to Chandragupta’s grandson, Ashoka Maurya. It was unravelled by James Prinsep, who came to Calcutta in 1819 as Assistant Assay-Master in the Mint and was later posted to Benares. Where the humanist Jones had delved into literary works, the scientifically-oriented Prinsep studied indecipherable inscriptions in two scripts, Brahmi and Kharoshti. Officials in far-flung areas of the burgeoning British empire in South Asia had come upon pillars and rocks bearing similar-looking messages in these scripts. After years of painstaking collation of data from edicts and coins, Prinsep succeeded in the late 1830s in decoding them.
It was revealed that the pillar and rock inscriptions had been commanded by a king referred to as Devanampiya Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods. They expounded the ethical principles on which his kingdom was run and were clearly Buddhist in inspiration. Prinsep was informed by a colleague posted in Ceylon that a great Indian king called Ashoka, also known as Piyadasi, had converted to Buddhism and sent a religious mission to Ceylon. The mystery of the inscriptions was thus resolved and Ashoka returned to his rightful place in Indian history alongside Chandragupta/Sandrocottus. The pillars on which Ashokan inscriptions were carved often had lion capitals atop them. A perfectly preserved specimen was excavated in Sarnath in 1904, and was adopted as one of India’s national symbols after independence. The chakra from Ashokan pillars was incorporated in the Indian flag. Thanks to the efforts of British Orientalists, two emperors who had been completely forgotten in India were established among the greatest rulers the subcontinent had seen. It was as if Dushanta’s lost memory had been returned to him.
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