Since Jones’s day another pillar like that at Delhi had been found at Allahabad; in addition to a Persian inscription of the Moghul period, it displayed a long inscription in each of the two older scripts (Ashoka Brahmi and Gupta Brahmi). A report had also been received of a rock in Orissa covered with the same two scripts. In 1833 Prinsep prevailed on
a Lieutenant Burt, one of several enthusiastic engineers and surveyors, to take an exact impression of the Allahabad pillar inscription.
The facsimiles reached Prinsep in early 1834. With an eminent Sanskritist, the Rev. W. H. Mill, he soon resolved the problem of the Gupta Brahmi. This was the script that Wilkins had deciphered nearly fifty years before, though his achievement had since been
forgotten. The same thing was not likely to happen again; for this time the inscription had something to tell. Evidently it had been engraved on the instructions of a king called Samudragupta. It recorded his extensive conquests and it mentioned that he was the son of Chandragupta, The temptation to assume that this Chandragupta was the same as Jones’s Chandragupta, the Sandracottus of the Greeks,
was almost irresistible. But not quite. For one thing Jones’s Chandragupta had not, according to the Sanskrit king lists, been succeeded by a Samudragupta; they did, however, mention several other Chandraguptas. But if Prinsep and Mill were disappointed at having to deny themselves the simplest and most satisfying of identifications, there would be compensation. They had raised the veil on a dynasty
now known as the Imperial Guptas. According to the Allahabad inscriptions Samudragupta had ‘violently uprooted’ nine kings and annexed their kingdoms. His rule stretched right across northern India and deep into the Deccan. Politically, here was an empire to rival that of Jones’s Chandragupta. But, more important, the Gupta period, about
AD 320–460,
would soon come to be recognized as the golden
age of classical Indian culture. To this period belong many of the frescoes of Ajanta, the finest of the Sarnath and Mathura sculptures, and the plays and poems of Kalidasa, ‘the Indian Shakespeare’.
But at the time Prinsep and Mill knew no more about these Guptas than what the pillar told them – and much of that they were inclined to regard as royal hyperbole and therefore unreliable. Prinsep,
anyway, was more interested in the scripts than in their historical interpretation. Unlike Jones, he did not indulge in grand theories. He was not a classical scholar, not even a Sanskritist, but a pragmatic, dedicated scientist.
In between experimenting with rust-proof treatments for the new steamboats to be employed on the Ganges, he wrestled next with the Ashoka Brahmi pin-men on the Allahabad
column. Coryat’s idea that it was some kind of Greek was back in fashion. One scholar claimed to have identified no less than seven letters of the Greek alphabet and another had actually read a Greek name written in this script on an ancient coin. Prinsep was sceptical. The Greek name was only Greek if read upside down. Turn it round and the pin-men letters were just like those on the pillars.
But as yet he had no solution of his own. ‘It would require an accurate acquaintance with many of the languages of the East, as well as perfect leisure and abstraction from other pursuits to engage upon the recovery of this lost language.’ He guessed that it must be Sanskrit and thought the script looked simpler than the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It was still beyond him, though, and he could only hope
that someone else in India would take up the challenge ‘before the indefatigable students of Bonn and Berlin’.
No one reacted directly to this appeal, but in far away Kathmandu the solitary British resident at the court of Nepal, Brian Houghton Hodgson, read his copy of the Society’s journal and immediately dashed off a pained note. No man made more contributions to the discovery of India than
Hodgson, or researched in so many different fields. From his outpost in the Himalayas he deluged the Asiatic Society with so many reports that it is hardly surprising some were mislaid. This was a case in point. ‘Eight or ten years ago’ (so some time in the mid 1820s), he had sent in details of two more inscribed pillars. Prinsep could not find them. But Hodgson also disclosed that he had now found
yet a third. It was at Bettiah (Lauriya Nandangarh) in northern Bihar and, like the others, very close to the Nepalese frontier. Could they then have been erected as boundary markers?
More intriguing was the facsimile of the inscription on this pillar which Hodgson thoughtfully enclosed. It was Ashoka Brahmi and Prinsep placed it alongside his copies of the Delhi and Allahabad inscriptions. Again
he started to look for clues, concentrating this time on separating the shapes of the individual consonants from the vowels which were in the form of little marks festooning them. Darting from one facsimile to the other to verify these, he suddenly experienced that shiver down the spine that comes with the unexpected revelation. ‘Upon carefully comparing them [the three inscriptions] with a view
to finding any other words that might be common to them & I was led to a most important discovery; namely that all three inscriptions were identically the same.’
Any surprise that he had not noticed this before must be tempered by the fact that the inscriptions, all of 2000 years old, were far from perfect. Many letters had been worn away and in one case much of the original inscription had been
obliterated by a later one written on top of it. The copies from which Prinsep worked also left much to be desired. Apart from the errors inevitable when someone tried to copy a considerable chunk of writing in totally unfamiliar characters, one copyist working his way round the pillar had managed to transpose the first and second halves of every line.
By correlating all three versions it was
now possible to obtain a near perfect fair copy. At the same time even the cautious Prinsep could not resist offering a few conjectures ‘on the origin and nature of these singular columns, erected at places so distant from each other and all bearing the same inscription’.
Whether they mark the conquests of some victorious raja; – whether they are, as it were, the boundary pillars of his dominions; – or whether they are of a religious nature & can only be satisfactorily solved by the discovery of the language.
Clearly this people, this kingdom, this religion, was of significance to the whole of north India. It was altogether too big a subject to be left to chance. Prinsep, well placed now as secretary of the Asiatic Society to assess the various materials (Wilson had retired to England),
resolved to undertake the translation himself. In 1834 he tried the obvious line of relating this script to that of the Gupta Brahmi which he had just deciphered. For each, he drew up a table showing the frequency with which individual letters occurred, the idea being that those which occurred approximately the same number of times in each script might be the same letters. It was worth a try,
but obviously would work only if both were in the same language and dealt with the same sort of subject. They did not, in fact they were not even in the same language, and Prinsep soon gave up this approach.
Next he tried relating the individual letters from each of the two scripts which had a similar conformation. This was more encouraging. He tentatively identified a handful of consonants and
heard from a correspondent in Bombay, who was working on the cave temple inscriptions, that he too had identified these and five others. Armed with these few identifications, he attempted a translation, hoping that the sense might reveal the rest. But some of his letters were wrongly identified, and anyway he was still barking up the wrong tree in imagining that the language was pure Sanskrit.
The attempt was a dismal failure. Discouraged, but far from defeated, Prinsep returned to the drawing board.
For the next four years he pushed himself physically and mentally towards the brink. Outside his office Calcutta was changing. The Governor-General had a new residence modelled on Kedleston Hall, but considerably grander: the dining-room could seat 200 and over 500 sometimes attended the
Government House balls. Society was less boorish than in Jones’s day. The hookah had gone out and so had most of the ‘sooty bibis’; the
memsahibs
were taking over. But the only innovation Prinsep would have been aware of was the flapping
punkah,
or fan, above his desk. Now the Assay-Master, he spent all day at the mint and all evening with his coins and inscriptions or conferring with his
pandits.
By seven in the morning he was back at his desk. There is no record, as with Jones, of an early morning walk or ride, no mention of leisure. Instead he lived vicariously, through the endeavours and successes of his correspondents.
Jones, as president and founder of the Asiatic Society, and the most respected scholar of his age, had both inspired and dominated his fellows. Prinsep was just the
opposite. He was the secretary of the Society, not the president, a plain Mr with few pretentions other than his total dedication. But this in itself was enough. His enthusiasm communicated itself to others and was irresistible. When he asked for coins and inscriptions they came flooding in from every corner of India. Painstakingly, he acknowledged, translated and commented upon them. By 1837 he
had an army of enthusiasts – officers, engineers, explorers, political agents and administrators – informally collecting for him. Colonel Stacy at Chitor, Udaipur and Delhi, Lieutenant A. Connolly at Jaipur, Captain Wade at Ludhiana, Captain Cautley at Saharanpur, Lieutenant Cunningham at Benares, Colonel Smith at Patna, Mr Tregear at Jaunpur, Dr Swiney in Upper India & the list was long.
It
was from one of these correspondents, Captain Edward Smith, an engineer at Allahabad, that in 1837 there came the vital clue to the mysterious script. On Prinsep’s suggestion, Smith had made the long journey into central India to visit an archaeological site of exceptional interest at Sanchi near Bhopal. Prinsep wanted accurate drawings of its sculptural wonders and facsimiles of an inscription in
Gupta Brahmi which had not yet been translated. Smith obliged with both of these and, noticing some further very short inscriptions on the stone railings round the main shrine, took copies of them just for good measure.
These apparently trivial fragments of rude writing [wrote Prinsep] have led to even more important results than the other inscriptions. They have instructed us in the alphabet and language of these ancient pillars and rock inscriptions which have been the wonder of the learned since the days of Sir William Jones, and I am already nearly prepared to render the Society an account of the writing on the
lat
[pillar] at Delhi, with no little satisfaction that, as I was the first to analyse these unknown symbols & so I should now be rewarded with the completion of a discovery I then despaired of accomplishing for want of a competent knowledge of the Sanskrit language.
Typically, Prinsep then launched into a long discussion of the sculpture and other inscriptions, keeping his audience and readers on tenterhooks for another ten pages. But to Lieutenant Alexander Cunningham, his protégé in Benares, he had already announced the discovery in a letter.
23 May 1837.
My dear Cunningham,
Hors de département de mes études!
[a reference to a Mohammedan coin that Cunningham had sent him]. No, but I can read the Delhi No. 1 which is of more importance; the Sanchi inscriptions have enlightened me. Each line is engraved on a separate pillar or railing. Then, thought I, they must be the gifts of private individuals where names will be recorded. All end in
danam
[in the original characters] – that must mean ‘gift’ or ‘given’. Let’s see &
He proved his point by immediately translating four such lines, and then turned to the first line of the famous pillar inscriptions:
Devam piya piyadasi raja hevam aha
, ‘the most-particularly-loved-of-the-gods raja declareth thus’. He was not quite right; the r should have been 1,
laja not raja.
But he was near enough.
Danam
giving him the d, the n and the m, all very common and hitherto unidentified, had been just enough to tip the balance.
With the help of a distinguished
pandit
he immediately set about the long pillar inscriptions. It was June, the most unbearable month of the Calcutta year; to concentrate the mind even for a minute is a major achievement. By now the Governor-General and the rest of Calcutta
society were in the habit of taking themselves off to the cool heights of Simla at such a time. Prinsep stayed at his desk. The deciphering was going well but he had at last acknowledged the unexpected difficulty of the language not being Sanskrit. As Hodgson had suggested, it was closer to Pali, the sacred language of Tibet, or in other words it was one of the Prakrit languages, vernacular derivations
of the classical Sanskrit. This made it difficult to pin down the precise meaning of many phrases. Prinsep also had, himself, to engrave all the plates for the script that would illustrate his account.
Nevertheless, in the incredibly short space of six weeks, his translation was ready and he announced it to the Society. As usual he treated them to a long preamble on the discoveries that had led
up to it and on the difficulties it still presented. But, unlike other inscriptions, these had one remarkable feature in their favour. There was an almost un-Indian frankness about the language, no exaggeration, no hyperbole, no long lists of royal qualities. Instead there was a bold and disarming directness:
Thus spake King Devanampiya Piyadasi. In the twenty-seventh year of my anointment I have caused this religious edict to be published in writing. I acknowledge and confess the faults that have been cherished in my heart &
The king had obviously undergone a religious conversion and, from the nature of the sentiments expressed, it was clearly Buddhism that he had adopted. The purpose of his edicts was to promote this new religion, to encourage right thinking and right behaviour,
to discourage killing, to protect animals and birds, and to ordain certain days as holy days and certain men as religious administrators. The inscriptions ended in the same style as they had begun.