Emperor Lost And Found

 

It is as if in another three or four hundred years from now the Americans had forgotten about George Washington, or the British no longer knew the name Winston Churchill. Asoka Mayura was not only India’s greatest  monarch he also ranks in the estimation of many as the greatest  statesman of all time. And yet until 150 years ago his name and his achievements were completely unknown in India. And this despite his edicts being scattered throughout the  sub-continent. Ashoka; The Search for the Lost Emperor by Charles Allen is not so much about the man himself but rather about how he became lost and how he was ‘re-discovered’. And it is a fascinating, even thrilling story. Over the last 20 years Allen has written widely about the British in India but as his  interest in Buddhism has grown  he has been able to combine the two interests, producing such books as  A Mountain in Tibet,  The Buddha and the Sahibs and The Buddha and Dr. Fuhrer.

There is little in Allen’s most recent offering that is new but most of it is tucked away in obscure scholarly journals and half-forgotten monographs not available to the average reader. He  has diligently dug out all the facts  and presented them to us in an interesting and readable way. The text is made more interesting by old drawings, lithographs and photos. It is fashionable nowadays, almost de rigueur, to denigrate everything the British did in India and cast aspersions even on the good they did. But as Allen shows, there were many who came to love India, its civilization and its achievements; Sir William Jones, Colin Mackenzie, Alexander Cunningham   and   the great James Prinsep who laboured to decipher Asoka’s inscriptions and ultimately succeeded. Just how Princep finally cracked the code is a great story but he could never have done it had not officers in the field sent him the coins they found and hand copies of inscriptions they came across while doing their duties. As a result Princep  and the others gave to India’s intellectuals, and eventually to its larger public the first realistic picture of their past, a past  they could be justly proud of and which eventually led to the arising of national  self-confidence and then calls for independence. And when independence came the Indians chose to put Asoka’s dharmacarka on their national flag and make his Sarnath lion capital their national emblem.

The only problem I have with Ashoka is that Allen seems to overemphasize the role of Brahman/Hindu hostility to Buddhism in the disappearance of Asoka from Indian consciousness for more than a thousand years. The sculpture of the lion subduing the elephant on pictured on page xiv is not a motif for Brahmanism’s victory over Buddhism.  However I am half way through Giovanni Verardi’s difficult-to-get and controversial Hardships and Downfall of Buddhism in India which, when I have finished it, might persuade me to change my opinion on this matter. But this is a small matter Ashoka; The Search for India’s Lost Emperor is a thoughly good read and should interest everyone interested in Buddhism and its history.