First there was the Greek background. Following the invasion by Alexander the Great, Seleucus Nicator, his successor
in Asia, had sent an ambassador named Megasthenes to India. This man’s report had subsequently been raided by numerous classical writers for their descriptions of India and so, though the original was lost, it could be largely reconstructed. It appeared that Megasthenes had found the Indian court at a place named Palibothra, at the junction of the Ganges and the Erranaboas. He had given a long and
interesting account of the court and its ruler, Sandracottus; but where Palibothra was, which river the Erranaboas was supposed to be, and who Sandracottus was, all remained mysterious. One geographer had maintained that the Erranaboas must be the Jumna and that therefore Palibothra must be the modern Allahabad at the junction of the Ganges and the Jumna. There were several other claimants including
Kanauj and Rajmahal, but the most promising was Patna, the ancient name for which was known to have been Pataliputra. This sounded very close to the Greek; but there was a problem. No river joins the Ganges at Patna. In the 1770s the great geographer James Rennell revealed that once upon a time the Son river might have joined the Ganges at Patna, though it had since taken up a course much further
east. But how could the Son river be the Erranaboas, especially when Megasthenes had mentioned the Son as a quite separate river?
This conundrum must have been on Jones’s mind as he waded through the Sanskrit literature. The first connection came when he stumbled upon a reference to the Son as the
Hiratiyabahu,
or golden-armed. Immediately he realized that Erranaboas could be a Greek attempt
at
Hiranyababu;
in which case Erranaboas was the Son after all and Megasthenes was wrong when he thought them two separate rivers. And if the Erranaboas was the Son then Palibothra must indeed be Pataliputra, the modern Patna. That left just Sandracottus, the Indian ruler whom Megasthenes had so much admired. He was evidently an adventurer and usurper but a man of considerable ability and the
creator of a vast empire. Yet no such name appeared in any of the Sanskrit king lists.
Jones went on reading. In an obscure political tragedy he found what purported to be the story of Chandragupta; he was described as a usurper who chose Pataliputra as his capital and received foreign ambassadors there. This proved the point; Chandragupta must be Sandracottus. The later discovery of an alternative
spelling for Sandracottus as Sandraguptos clinched it. Going back to classical sources, it was also known that, before sending Megasthenes, Seleucus Nicator had himself visited, or rather invaded, India. He had been beaten back but his adversary, even then, had been Sandracottus, whose dominion was already established right across northern India. Seleucus returned west and was known to have
reached Babylon in
312 BC. SO
Sandracottus must have ascended the throne before this date, but after Alexander’s visit – somewhere between, say,
325 BC
and
313 BC.
Thus, to within a decade, one event in India’s ancient history had been given a date. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this discovery. Fortuitously Alexander, Seleucus and Megasthenes had blundered into Indian history
at a crucial moment. Chandragupta would soon be revealed as a sort of Indian Julius Caesar, the creator of an empire and the founder of a dynasty unique in Indian history. The date of his ascent to the throne was thus a crucial one. Working backwards from it to the birth of Buddha, and forwards using the Sanskrit king lists, the whole chronology of Indian history could be, and was, based upon it.
Six months after announcing his discovery, Jones wrote to a close friend in England. ‘This day ten years ago & we landed at Calcutta; and if it had not been for the incessant ill-health of my beloved Anna, they would have been the happiest years of a life always happy &’ But now Anna Maria must go home; to stay longer would endanger her life. Jones himself would follow ‘as soon as I can, consistent
with my own plans & but having nothing to fear from India, and much to enjoy in it, I shall make a great sacrifice whenever I leave it’.
In fact I shall leave a country where we have no Royal Court, no House of Lords, no clergy with wealth or power, no taxes, no fear of robbers or fire, no snow and hard frosts followed by comfortless thaws, and no ice except what is made by art to supply our deserts; add to this, that I have twice as much money as I want, and am conscious of doing very great and extensive good to many millions of native Indians, who look to me, not as their judge, but as their legislator. Nevertheless a man who has nearly closed the forty-seventh year of his age, and who sees younger men dying around him constantly, has a right to think of retirement in this life, and ought to think chiefly of preparing himself for another &
Already his eyesight was deteriorating, and in November he collapsed with a fever. He recovered, but rheumatism and a tumour continued to give him great pain. Anna Maria sailed for home. Jones immersed himself ever deeper in his studies. Seven volumes of the digest of Hindu law were now complete. A year more of intensive study, and the
remaining two volumes should be ready. He officially requested permission to resign his judgeship and return to England in 1795. A month after making the request he collapsed. Doctors linked the tumour to an inflammation of the liver. Again he seemed to recover. On 26 April 1794, the doctors thought him well enough to face an immediate voyage to England. The next day, as if shattered by the thought
of such an abrupt departure, ‘the father of oriental studies’ died.
Jones’s discoveries – of the Indo-European family of languages, of the riches of Sanskrit literature, and of the first date in ancient Indian history – were all milestones. But in retrospect, his most important achievement was the founding of the Asiatic Society. Had he left no such institution, his death might well have created
an unbridgeable void in the ranks of the orientalists; the reconstruction of India’s ancient history might have been delayed by decades. As it was, there was no hiatus. Henry Thomas Colebrooke, another brilliant scholar, who had read his first paper to the society just before Jones’s death, completed the digest of Hindu laws. He also assumed the mantle of Jones as the champion of Hindu civilization
and the exponent of Sanskrit literature; indeed, Professor Max Muller, the great German orientalist, considered Colebrooke the finer scholar.
Many other notable figures assisted in the exploration of Sanskrit and in the study of how India’s vernacular languages had developed from it. Indirectly, they also contributed to the reconstruction of Indian history and the appreciation of Indian art and
architecture. But the more sensational discoveries would be made elsewhere. Sanskrit literature proved too unreliable on facts and dates, too hard to authenticate and too diffuse to assimilate; sometimes it was positively misleading.
But if Jones had concentrated on literature, he had also provided for and encouraged the widest possible use of research: ‘Man and Nature – whatever is performed
by the one or produced by the other.’ Every branch of Indian studies owed something to his inspiration and, without this, no true picture of India would ever have emerged.
He had also succeeded in making Indian studies respectable. In England, Calcutta was now compared to Florence; there was talk of an Indian-based renaissance; and Jones and his successors were compared to the great Italian humanists.
The ‘Exotic East’ had taken on a new meaning. It was no longer possible to view India as an extravagant and titillating circus. For scholars it was a challenge, for administrators a responsibility. Various reforms were making India less attractive to the adventurer and speculator. Jones’s fame ensured that their place would be taken by the soldier-scholars and collector-scientists who became
the true glory of the raj.
CHAPTER THREE
Thus Spake Ashoka
The trappings of government set up in Calcutta to cope with the sudden acquisition of Bengal included not only a judiciary but also a mint. It was as Assistant Assay-Master at this mint that James Prinsep arrived in India in 1819. The post was an undistinguished one; Prinsep, far from being a celebrity like Jones, could expect nothing better. He was barely twenty
and, according to his obituarist, ‘wanting, perhaps, in the finish of classical scholarship which is conferred at the public schools and universities of England’. As a child, the last in a family of seven sons, his passion had been constructing highly intricate working models; ‘habits of exactness and minute attention to detail’ would remain his outstanding traits. He studied architecture under
Pugin, transferred to the Royal Mint when his eyesight became strained, and thence to Calcutta. ‘Well grounded in chemistry, mechanics and the useful sciences’, he was not an obvious candidate for the mantle of Jones and the distinction of being India’s most successful scholar.
In the quarter century between Jones’s death and Prinsep’s arrival the British position in India had changed radically.
The defeats of Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, of the Marathas, and of the Gurkhas had left the British undisputed masters of as much of India as they cared to digest. Indeed the British raj had begun. The sovereignty of the East India Company was almost as much a political fiction as that of their nominal but now helpless overlord, the Moghul emperor. Both, though they lingered on for another thirty
years, had become anachronisms.
From Calcutta a long arm of British territory now reached up the Ganges and the Jumna to Agra, Delhi and beyond. A thumb prodded the Himalayas between Nepal and Kashmir, while several stubby fingers probed into Punjab, Rajasthan and central India. In the west, Bombay had been expanding into the Maratha homeland; Broach and Baroda were under British control, and
Poona, a centre of Hindu orthodoxy and the Maratha capital, was being transformed into the legendary watering place for Anglo-Indian bores. In the south, all that was not British territory was held by friendly feudatories; the French had been obliterated, Mysore settled, and the limits of territorial expansion already reached.
Visitors in search of the real India no longer had to hop around the
coastline; they could now march boldly, and safely, across the middle. Bishop Heber of Calcutta (the appointment itself was a sign of the times; in Jones’s day there had not been even a church in Calcutta) toured his diocese in the 1820s. The diocese was a big one – the whole of India – and ‘Reginald Calcutta’, as he signed himself, travelled the length of the Ganges to Dehra Dun in the Himalayas,
then down through Delhi and Agra into Rajasthan, still largely independent, and came out at Poona and thence down to Bombay.
The acquisition of all this new territory brought the British into contact with the country’s architectural heritage. Two centuries earlier Elizabethan envoys had marvelled at the cities of Moghul India ‘of which the like is not to be found in all Christendom’. The famous
buildings of Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Delhi, ‘either of them much greater than London and more populous’, they had described in detail. When, therefore, the first generation of British administrators arrived in upper India they showed genuine reverence for the architectural relics of Moghul power. Instead of the landscapes of Hodges and the Daniells, their souvenirs of India would be detailed drawings
of the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort. Their curiosity also extended to buildings sacred to the non-Mohammedan population; Khajuraho, Abu and many other sites were discovered between 1810 and 1830. The raw materials for a new investigation of India’s past were accumulating. But it was another class of monuments, predating the Mohammedan invasions and with unmistakable signs of extreme antiquity,
which would become Prinsep’s speciality.
The first of these monuments – one could scarcely call them buildings – to attract European attention were the cave temples in the vicinity of Bombay. The island of Elephanta in Bombay harbour had been known to the Portuguese and became the subject of one of the earliest archaeological reports received by Jones’s new Asiatic Society.
The cave is about three-quarters of a mile from the beach; the path leading to it lies through a valley; the hills on either side beautifully clothed and, except when interrupted by the dove calling to her absent mate, a solemn stillness prevails; the mind is fitted for contemplating the approaching scene.
The approaching scene was not of some natural cave with a few prehistoric scratchings, but of a spacious
pillared hall, with delicate sculptural details and colossal stone figures – an architectural creation in all but name; for the whole thing was hacked, hewn, carved and sculpted out of solid rock.
North of Bombay, the island of Salsette boasted more groups of such caves. In 1806 Lord Valentia, a young Englishman whose greatest claim to fame must be the sheer weight of his travelogue (four quarto
volumes of just on half a hundredweight), set out to explore them. He took with him Henry Salt, his companion and artist, to help clear a path through the jungle that surrounded the caves. Outside the Jogeshwar caves they hesitated before the fresh pug marks of a tiger; according to the villagers, tigers actually lived in the caves for part of the year.
Salt found that the other Salsette caves
at Kanheri and Montpezir had also been recently occupied. To the Portuguese, the pillared nave and the transepts had spelt basilica; there was even a hole in the façade for a rose window. They had just smothered the fine, but pagan, carving in stucco and consecrated the place. Salt chipped away at the stucco and observed how well it had preserved the sculpture.
Though these figures are by no means well proportioned, yet their air, size and general management give an expression of grandeur that the best sculptors have often failed in attaining; the laziness of attitude, the simplicity of drapery, the suitableness of their situation and the plainness of style in which they are executed & all contribute towards producing this effect.