Ashoka: The story of rediscovering the great king Dr R Balashankar Ashoka, Charles Allen, Little Brown, Pp 460 (HB),

Rs 750 $img_titleThe story of King Ashoka has been told and retold several times, fasci nated by his repentance at the moment of victory. He devoted much of his later l ife to the propagation of Buddhism not just in India, but farther into the south and south east Asia. Charles Allen s Ashoka traces the history of the rediscoverin g of the emperor by the British Indologists and historians. Allen sets off by blaming Hindus for the decline of Buddhism in India one of the most clichd arguments and connecting it inexplicably to the Babri Masjid demolit ion. But the story moves on. Grippingly Allen recounts the plunders carried out by various Muslim invaders, which wiped huge parts of the source material on the history of pre-Islamic India. Lost in these gruesome attacks were the enormous Buddhist sites and manuscripts. Hence the need to reconstruct Ashoka from fragme nts of information available. The narration includes the raids of Mohammad Bakhtiyar, a commander of Qutb-ud-d in Aybak, who set fire to Nalanda. The fate of the university was sealed with on e question from the marauder. Did it have Koran? When it was answered in the neg ative, he ordered it be torched and all inmates killed. The operation was chroni cled by his men: The greater number of inhabitants of that place were Brahmans .. . and they were all slain. The burning went on for months. Nalanda then had three multi-storied libraries named Ratnasagara, Ratnadadhi and Ratnaranjaka. Bhaktiy a s Nalanda raid came after his many successes in other Hindu cities. In Benares, where according to the chronicler he destroyed a thousand temples and converted them into mosques. Later he destroyed two other places of learning in Bengal, fl ourishing Buddhist monasteries at Somapura and Jagadalala. The stories of loot, plunder and destruction by Muslim invaders go on. The early British who came to India were traders and businessmen. But till almos t the time of Macaulay, several of them were India-lovers, who attempted to unde rstand India and its people. One such person was Sir William Jones. He wanted to write the history of India. But there was hardly any evidence of the pre-Islami c India, as a modern historian would understand. His quest to fix a date took him to the Greek history, Alexander, his invasion on the western borders of India. S ir Jones made several conjectures and guesses and fixed the date of Ashoka as a descendent of the Maurya empire. Charles Allen goes on to describe in detail sev eral of evidences collected, the interesting stories behind the emergence of the m and how a jigsaw puzzle was being fixed. Of course, now we know that Sir Jones erred in his estimation and confused Gupta Chandragupta with Maurya Chandragupt a. This mistake has been explained very well by Dr V Lakshmikantham and Dr J Vas undhara Devi in their book What India Should Know (Bharatiya Vidhya Bhawan, 2006 ). Jones worked on a backward logic. He zeroed in on the date of Alexander s India campaign and looked for the corresponding Indian name, mentioned by the Greek w riters. Sandrokoptas was a name in Greek accounts. If we can fix on an Indian princ e, contemporary with Seleucus, he declared, they would have that common fixed poin t of history. He fixed the Indian name as Chandragupta (Maurya), who lived at lea st 1500 years before the one identified by Jones. On with the story of Ashoka: The deciphering of the Brahmi script proved to be o f great help, in decoding the rock edicts of Ashoka. While enthusiastic work was going on in studying the Indian history, the year 1837 became memorable for goo d and bad reasons. The Orientalists received a setback because Anglicists and Ev angelists in Britain gained the upper hand in the form of Thomas Macaulay and Lo rd Bentinck. The British government decided that English would be the medium of dealing in India and government funding for printing of works in vernacular was withdrawn. Several accompanying decisions were taken. People being posted in se nior positions in India were being scrutinised and brainwashed about the suprema cy of the White skin and their agenda in India was being set out clearly so that they would not stray far. It worked. The British enthusiasm in Indian history wan ed, eventually, the Indians were being handed out tailor made versions of our hi

story, that suited the convenience of the alien rulers. The year 1837 also marked one of the fastest developments in Indological studies , with discoveries and deciphering of evidence coming at a very fast pace. For st udents of Indian studies the year 1837 will always be remembered as the annus mi rabilis of Indian historiography and philology; the year in which astonishing re velations came so thick and fast that there was no time to absorb the implicatio ns of one before the next had been announced. Allen s narration concludes with Ashoka in the Twentieth Century. The Ashoka story a nd his greatness caught the imagination of western intellectuals. H G Wells decl ared Ashoka shines and shines brightly like a bright star, even unto this day. Say s Allen Indian nationalists, looking for pre-colonial models of government, were quick to seize on this idea, among them Dr Radhakumud Mookerji, whose lectures o n early Indian history at Lucknow University in the early 1920s became the basis for the first truly scholarly account of Ashoka and his times. There is this last chapter on the decline of Ashok dharma and Buddhism. The redi scovering of Ashoka is a fascinating story and Charles Allen has rendered it in style. There is plenty of material in appendix and notes. Alllen is a traveller, historian and storyteller and has authored books about India. (Little Brown, 100 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y ODY, sold in India by Hachet te India). http://organiser.org//Encyc/2012/6/24/-b-Ashoka--The-story-of-rediscovering-thegreat-king--b-.aspx?NB=&lang=4&m1=m8&m2=m8.24&p1=&p2=&p3=&p4=