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.
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