Book review: Ashoka in Ancient India

In putting together a biography of Ashoka, Nayanjot Lahiri falls back on literary sources to get riveting details which are not historically verifiable but also maintains a historian's purity by clarifying that they are inaccurate, says Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr

Author: Nayanjot Lahiri
Publisher: Permanent Black in association with Ashoka University
Pages: 385
Price: Rs 895

Harvard University Press' Sharmila Sen sent an email, narrates Nayanjot Lahiri, asking her to write a single-volume biography of Ashoka meant for the general intelligent reader without "sacrificing scholarship". With Ashoka in Ancient India, Lahiri succeeds in the task and she achieves this through an ingenuous method. She uses the edicts, the only hard evidence available about the Mauryan emperor, to capture the personal voice of Ashoka, a sleight of hand in a manner of speaking which is not strictly a historian's tool. It is more of a literary critical device.

Aware that not much personal information can be gleaned from the edicts, Lahiri falls back on literary sources, written a few centuries after Ashoka's time, to get riveting details which are not historically verifiable. While doing so, she maintains her historian's purity by making it clear that the literary accounts are inaccurate.

She titles the chapter dealing with the earlier period of Ashoka's life, the years before he became emperor, 'An Apocryphal Early Life'. It is based on Ashokavadana, a Buddhist work in Sanskrit, and the ancient Sri Lankan chronicles of Mahavamsa and Deepavamsa. Lahiri goes back to the unverifiable literary sources to write about the end-years of the emperor in the chapter interestingly titled 'Of Wifely Woes And the Emperor's Death'.

From the "historically unverifiable" literary sources, Lahiri pieces together the information that Ashoka's mother is a Brahmin girl from Champa, in the neighbourhood of Pataliputra, who enters the harem of Bindusara, the king-father of Ashoka. She does not hesitate to narrate the gossipy lore that the Brahmin girl is trained to be a "barber" by other queens in the harem. She tends to the king. And asks for sexual favours. The king gets to know that she is a Brahmin's daughter and the royal dilemma is resolved.

In the chapter 'Affairs Of The Heart And State', Lahiri again uses the literary sources to talk about Ashoka and the merchant's daughter, Devi of Vidisha, who bears him a son, Mahinda, and a daughter, Sanghamitta. They later go to Lanka taking a part of the Bodhi tree and Buddha's message to the southern neighbour.

"This story of Prince Ashoka and Devi is, like many other romantic liaisons of antiquity, an account of unsatisfactory brevity," the author notes, dealing with the issue of whether Devi was married to Ashoka by citing historian Romila Thapar's view based on Dipavamsa that she was "not legally married". Lahiri then goes on to argue the point that Devi was a Buddhist: "The places associated with her have strong Buddhist connections. Vidisha is universally recognised as the pivot of the monuments of Sanchi."

She uses the Ashokavadana to describe the last days of the emperor. Prevented by his grandson and heir apparent Sampadin from donating all that he had to the Sangha, Lahiri quotes the moving passage from the Ashokavadana: "A great donor, the lord of men/ the eminent Maurya Ashoka/ has gone from being lord of Jambudvipa/to being lord of half a myrobalan/Today this lord of the earth,/his sovereignty stolen by his servants/presents the gift of just a half myrobalan/as though reproving the common folk/whose hearts are puffed up/with a passion for enjoying great splendour."

The greater part of the book is devoted to deciphering the 'voice' in the edicts, but Lahiri seems to hesitate in speculating boldly and widely about it in the manner of an inventive literary critic or a literary/cultural psychoanalyst. She treads the historical ground, surveying the far-flung areas from Karnataka to Afghanistan where the edicts are inscribed. She also notes the language and scripts used in these edicts – Prakrit, Tamil, Aramaic, Greek languages and Brahmi and Kharoshti scripts; the zealous emperor eager to communicate with his people of the early edicts to the formal ways of the older Ashoka of the later days.

The author also traces the presence of Ashoka in the art and narratives of the following centuries, from the frieze on the southern gate of the Sanchi stupa to the reference in Kashmiri historian Kalhana's Rajatarangini, who refers to Ashoka as a Jina. And when Abul Fazl gets it translated into Persian Ashoka is referred to as a Jaina. Lahiri lets us know that the Mughal emperor Akbar gets to know about Mauryan Ashoka.