India Discovered: The Recovery of a Lost Civilization

India Discovered: The Recovery of a Lost Civilization John Keay Two hundred years ago, India was seen as a place with little history and less culture.Today it is revered for a notable prehistory, a magnificent classical age and a cultural tradition unique in both character and continuity. How this extraordinary change in perception came about is the subject of this fascinating book.The story, here reconstructed for the first time, is one of painstaking scholarship primed by a succession of sensational discoveries. The excitement of unearthing a city twice as old as Rome, the realization that the Buddha was not a god but a historical figure, the glories of a literature as rich as anything known in Europe, the drama of encountering a veritable Sistine chapel deep in the jungle, and the sheer delight of categorizing ‘the most glorious galaxy of monuments in the world’ fell, for the most part, to men who were officials of the British Raj. Their response to the unfamiliar – the explicitly sexual statuary, the incomprehensible scripts, the enigmatic architecture – and the revelations which resulted, revolutionized ideas not just about India but about civilization as a white man’s prerogative.A companion volume by the author of the highly praised India: A History and The Great Arc. INDIA DISCOVERED The Recovery of a Lost Civilization JOHN KEAY Copyright (#ulink_9f581f75-7103-520b-84d8-36e3ca7aa605) HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain in 1981 First published in paperback by William Collins 1988 Copyright © John Keay 1981 The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. 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Source ISBN: 9780007123001 Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007399642 Version: 2015-06-17 Contents Cover (#u0c322784-e8d4-5e75-beda-14af7f1b862e) Title Page (#u519f3cc6-1e97-5757-864f-108eb6025953) Copyright (#u066dcf99-365c-58ec-bae9-bb748a111544) List of Illustrations (#u7f3b175f-d230-50de-8a1a-4a5c0a296f81) Introduction (#u639064cb-43c3-554a-a5b1-bbf346876532) CHAPTER ONE This Wonderful Country (#u66514f8b-250a-5748-ab39-b6df4c685c6a) CHAPTER TWO An Inquisitive Englishman (#u80dc90db-cae5-514e-b9ae-64339435c5a2) CHAPTER THREE Thus Spake Ashoka (#ud37d61f9-fc76-57ac-9c3d-f82c21f50aa4) CHAPTER FOUR Black and Time-Stained Rocks (#u3ed5ca19-1872-5451-b9ee-ef7466aba992) CHAPTER FIVE The Legacy of Pout (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER SIX The Old Campaigner (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER SEVEN Buddha in a Toga (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER EIGHT A Little Warmer than Necessary (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER NINE Wild in Human Faith and Warm in Human Feeling (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER TEN A Subject of Frequent Remark (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER ELEVEN Hiding Behind the Elgin Marbles (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER TWELVE Some Primitive Vigour (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER THIRTEEN New Observations and Discoveries (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER FOURTEEN An Idolatrous Affection (#litres_trial_promo) CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Stupendous Fabric of Nature (#litres_trial_promo) KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo) Author’s Note To Third Edition (#litres_trial_promo) Sources and Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Chronology 1765–1927 (#litres_trial_promo) The Great Arc (#litres_trial_promo) India: A History (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) List of Illustrations (#ulink_37635dc7-fa0a-5e8c-80cf-176055408db3) 1. Aurangzeb’s mosque above Panchganga. 2. James Prinsep with Hindu pandits, Sanskrit College, Benares. 3. The rock of Girnar. 4. The temples of Mahabalipuram. 5. Cave temples of western India. 6. The stupas of Sanchi. 7. The ruined temple of Boddh Gaya. 8. A Buddhist stupa railing at Mathura. 9. The Buddha. 10. A Boddhisattva. 11. The temple complex of Khajuraho. 12. Carving at Khajuraho. 13. The festival of Jagannath at Puri. 14. Colin Mackenzie at work. 15. Bishop Heber’s drawing of Amber palace. 16. Gwalior, the ‘Gibraltar of India’. 17. The Qutb mosque. 18. Shah Jehan’s Jama Masjid. 19. The tomb of Humayun in Delhi. 20. The Taj Mahal in Agra. 21. The Sanchi torso. 22. The wall paintings in the caves of Ajanta. 23. A scene depicting ‘The Temptation’ in Ajanta Cave. 24. Colonel James Tod. 25. Colonel Colin Mackenzie. 26. E. B. Havell. 27. Sir William Jones. 28. Lord Curzon. 29. B. H. Hodgson. 30. General Sir Alexander Cunningham. 31. Sir George Everest by William Tayler. 32. Mohenjo-daro Giri. 33. Seals from the Indus Valley civilization. The author and publisher are grateful to the following for their kind permission to reproduce the above illustrations: the India Office Library, British Museum for nos. 1–5, 7, 11, 13–16, 19, 22, 25–30; the Victoria … Albert Museum for nos. 6, 9, 17, 18, 23 and 24; the British Museum for nos. 10 and 33; the Werner Forman Archive, London for no. 12; the British Architectural Library, RIBA for no. 20; the National Portrait Gallery no. 31; and the National Museum, New Delhi for no. 32. Illustration no. 8 is reproduced from Archaeological Survey of India, Report of a Tour in the Central Provinces Lower Gangetic Doab 1880–81 by Alexander Cunningham, Vol. XVII, Plate xxi. Introduction (#ulink_a2248ec3-00c9-5c8f-ba6a-ff708f8bc9f8) Some day the whole story of British Indology will be told and that will assuredly make a glorious, fascinating and inspiring narrative. A. J. Arberry, British Orientalists (1943) Two hundred years ago India was the land of the fabulous and fantastic, the ‘Exotic East’. Travellers returned with tales of marble palaces with gilded domes, of kings who weighed themselves in gold, and of dusky maidens dripping with pearls and rubies. Before this sumptuous backdrop passed elephants, tigers and unicorns, snake charmers and sword swallowers, pedlars of reincarnation and magic, long-haired ascetics on beds of nails, widows leaping into the pyre. It was like some glorious and glittering circus – spectacular, exciting, but a little unreal. Now, in place of the circus, we have the museum. India is a supreme cultural experience. Instead of the rough and tumble of the big top, we have meditation and the subtle notes of the sitar. It is temples and tombs, erotic sculpture, forlorn palaces and miniature masterpieces. Hinduism is studied in deadly earnest; the ascetic no longer needs a bed of nails to ensure an audience. Even the elephants and tigers have become too important to be fun; they too must be carefully studied and preserved. This dramatic change in attitude was principally brought about by a painstaking investigation of all things Indian. No subject people, no conquered land, was ever as exhaustively studied as was India during the period of British rule. It is this aspect of the British affair in India which forms the subject of this book. The nineteenth century was the age of enquiry. It was perhaps inevitable that India should have its Darwin, its Livingstone and its Schliemann. There was also something in the paternalistic nature of British imperialism that attracted the scholar and the scientist. The men who discovered India came as amateurs; by profession they were soldiers and administrators. But they returned home as giants of scholarship. And then, above all, there was India itself, exercising its own irresistible fascination. The more it was probed the greater became its antiquity, the more inexhaustible its variety, and the more inconceivable its subtleties. The pioneers of Indian studies, described in this book, rose to the challenge. ‘Man and Nature; whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other’ would be the field of their enquiries. The results, even in an age of discoveries, were as sensational as the country and the scope of the undertaking. For a start, Indian history was pushed back two thousand years, roughly from the age of William the Conqueror to a millennium or so before that of Tutankhamun. In the process two great classical civilizations were discovered, and one of the richest literary traditions was revealed to the outside world. So were the origins of two of the world’s major religions. What Lord Curzon called ‘the greatest galaxy of monuments in the world’ was rescued from decay, classified and conserved. Ancient scripts were deciphered, dated and used to disentangle the history of kings and emperors. Coins and paintings by the hundred were discovered, and their significance charted. Western sensibilities struggled to come to terms with the discovery of erotic sculptures in places of worship. In the natural sciences one of the most exciting flora and fauna was studied and catalogued; so too was the incredibly rich human miscellany of racial, linguistic and religious groups. The entire sub-continent was surveyed and mapped; in the process the world’s highest mountains were measured. And so on. In short the modern image of India was pieced together. In tracing this process, I have tried to convey something of the wonder of each new discovery and the excitement of each new deduction. The men who stumbled upon sites like the temple complex of Khajuraho or the painted caves of Ajanta, felt as if they had suddenly come upon the Uffizi swathed in creepers, swarming with bats and unvisited for a thousand years. It is not hard to understand their astonishment. Parts of India are still littered with monuments and ruins that have never attracted the attention of conservationists. Herdsmen bivouac in royal palaces, mirror-work mosaics crunch underfoot, and bees’ nests hang from painted ceilings. It is one of India’s perhaps ironic glories that, in addition to the more popular and spectacular sites, she still has real ruins, untended, still crumbling, still succumbing to the rains and the vegetation. The discovery of these varied and magnificent monuments stimulated curiosity about India’s past. It is hard to appreciate now that as late as the end of the eighteenth century nothing whatsoever was known of Indian history prior to the Mohammedan invasions. ‘It is at this epoch [AD 1000]’, wrote Thomas Twining in 1790, ‘that we come to a line of shade beyond which no object is distinctly discernible. What treasures might not be discovered if the light of science should ever penetrate this darkness.’ To Twining, Indian history was like some deep Aladdin’s cave. The outer chambers were well lit thanks to recent Mohammedan chroniclers, but beyond them the cave was in darkness. How far back it went no one could tell. There was just one uncertain clue – the invasion of Alexander the Great in 326 BC. By exploring every possible source, and by combining guesswork with some brilliant deduction, the orientalists successfully penetrated this darkness. The excitement when, deep in the gloom, some new light was shed, was tremendous. But much remained in the gloom; whole centuries defied illumination. For all the excitement and the very considerable achievements, Indian history is still far from complete. There are almost no ancient historical works to provide a framework, no chronologies to provide the dates and, above all, no contemporary chronicles to provide the detail. It is devoid of almost everything that traditionally makes history palatable for the general reader. There are no anecdotes, no scandals, no well-documented campaigns and no personalities. A chronological approach soon becomes an incredibly confusing list of dynasties and kings, reigning in obscurity, to whom neither reliable dates nor defined kingdoms can be attributed. To some extent the same goes for Indian art and architecture. The artists, builders and sculptors are mostly anonymous and so, in many cases, are their patrons. We know little about how they worked and nothing of the problems they encountered. In Indian painting, for example, there is a near hiatus of some 1000 years which makes any discussion of the subject highly conjectural. In this book I have concentrated more on the historians than the history, more on the Indologists than India. The careers of men like Sir William Jones, James Prinsep, Sir Alexander Cunningham, James Fergusson – and many more – reveal almost as much about British India as about the centuries that preceded it. Moreover, the problems and prejudices they had to surmount in coming to terms with a very alien art and culture are the same as those that any non-Indian unfamiliar with the subject has still to face. The story of the pioneers makes an excellent guidebook to an understanding of India. To appreciate this story it is not necessary to be in sympathy with the British raj. The government’s role in it was the usual one of too little too late. It was a constant source of shame that, whereas other European governments generously supported research on Indian subjects, the British authorities displayed little interest. The field was left to individual initiative. The men who took up the challenge were no more enlightened or liberal in their attitudes than other British officials of the day. Some were deeply respectful of all things Indian. They criticized government policy and were themselves pilloried as ‘Brahminized’. Others, perhaps the majority, regarded contemporary Indians as quite unworthy of their glorious heritage. Either they attributed all that was finest in Indian culture to outside influences, or they portrayed Indian history as one of steady decline towards cultural bankruptcy and moral degeneracy. This story would not be complete without also including those servants of empire who, acting often out of the worthiest of motives, were nothing short of iconoclasts and vandals. The damage wrought on India’s fortresses by British cannon was surpassed by that caused by British officers in their search for suitable barracks. And there were engineers whose appetite for in-fill for their dams and railway embankments resulted in some of the most tragic archaeological depredations. Even the zoologists were sometimes sportsmen who could see no contradiction in studying India’s wildlife and contributing towards its gradual extinction. But none of this need detract from the achievement. (The vandals were eventually stopped; even the government was brought to some awareness of its responsibilities.) The products of British scholarship deserve to stand alongside those more commonly cited legacies of the raj – the railways, the judiciary and civil service, democracy. In any large library, India requires a quite disproportionate length of shelf space (in the London Library nearly five times that of China). To work, or just to walk, along those groaning shelves is a stimulating experience. Take away the travelogues and memoirs, the political commentaries and the official papers, and the shelves are still crammed – 200-odd volumes on archaeology, a similar number on the work of the surveyors, nearly fifty concerned purely with ancient inscriptions. Here surely is an aspect of the raj of which an Englishman can be proud without reservation, a unique salute by a conquering power to an older, nobler and more enduring civilization. CHAPTER ONE This Wonderful Country (#ulink_d5c50180-e52c-5005-8ba1-abdf378bc5c2) On 1 September 1783 the Crocodile, five months out of Portsmouth, struck sail and anchored off Madras. On board Sir William and Lady Jones eyed with concern the wall of spray where the rollers of the Indian Ocean crashed onto the offshore reefs. With the other passengers – the ladies in voluminous, rustling gowns and the men all cocked hats and swords, silk stockings and buckled shoes – they trooped into wooden cages and were lowered over the side. Below, an armada of canoes and catamarans manoeuvred for custom; duckings were commonplace, drownings not unusual. The first glimpse of India, in the shape of the boatmen, was also less than reassuring. They ‘wear no sort of covering but a small piece of rag, not entirely hiding their members’, wrote William Hickey, ‘a very awkward exhibition this for modest girls on their first arrival.’ The brown bodies glistened with the spray and rippled with each stroke of the paddle. And – an early lesson in the nature of British rule in India—these stalwarts had the fine ladies and gentlemen entirely in their power: safely through the foaming breakers, each passenger had to embrace one of those hard brown torsoes for a piggyback through the shallows. Arriving in Madras was not a dignified business. But on the beach, a parade of well-dressed gentlemen and handsome carriages awaited the new arrivals. Behind, the city shone in the sunshine, white and neoclassical amidst the waving palms, ‘rather resembling the images that float in the imagination after reading The Arabian Nights’. This at last was India, home for months or years to come, a place where a gentleman could live like a lord and simultaneously amass a fortune. Sir William Jones was no exception. His first priority was to attain financial independence, or to be precise, a clear ?30,000. On the strength of his appointment to the post of Supreme Court judge in Calcutta, he had been knighted and had married. His salary, he calculated, would enable him and Anna Maria to save the ?30,000 within six years. Then back to England, to his books and his friends. But he was already more predisposed towards the East than most new arrivals. His professional qualifications as a jurist were unique. Edward Gibbon, then writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, described Jones as ‘the only lawyer equally conversant with the year-books of Westminster, the commentaries of Ulpian, the Attic pleadings of Isaeus, and the sentences of Arabian and Persian cadhis [judges]’. On board the Crocodile, Jones had continued his studies in Persian law. He needed to make a small fortune, but he also expected to administer justice to the people of Bengal according to their own laws, and indeed, to study and clarify these. Elsewhere Gibbon described Jones as more than a lawyer; he was ‘a genius’. And it was for his other attainments, considerable by any standards, spectacular by those of British India, that he was already best known. The son of an eminent mathematician, he was a keen student of mathematics, astronomy and the sciences – and yet first achieved distinction as a classical scholar. Greek and Latin literature were his passions; he modelled his letters on Cicero, his speeches on Demosthenes, and spattered both with classical allusions. At Oxford he turned to modern languages and then Persian and Arabic. His first published works were typical: a Persian grammar and a translation from Persian into French. He was also a much acclaimed poet, was intensely interested in music, and had the bottomless memory so vital to any polymath; aged eleven, it is said, he amazed his schoolfellows by supplying them with the entire text of The Tempest out of his head. But oriental literature was now his leading interest. Whilst in India he intended to collect manuscripts; he was even prepared to invest some of the ?30,000 in them. As the Crocodile had sped across the Arabian Sea, with India ahead and Persia to port, he had been overcome with a flush of intense excitement. Culturally speaking, what a vast and unexplored field lay about him; what untold riches were hidden there; and what a glorious achievement if he could lead men in their systematic discovery. After a couple of days in Madras, the Joneses were back on board ‘the sweet little Crocodile’ and heading for Calcutta. Madras, once the pride of the British settlements in India, had already been eclipsed. Calcutta, founded less than 100 years before, was now the great attraction. Through Clive’s treaty with the Moghul emperor in 1765, the whole of Bengal, stretching from Benares to Burma, had been ceded to the East India Company. Commercial priorities were giving way to administrative and fiscal necessities. Casually, precariously, but inexorably, British dominion in India was being created. Jones himself described Bengal as ‘this wonderful country which fortune has thrown into Britain’s lap while she was asleep’. Administrative responsibility meant collecting revenue, developing communications, regulating trade and administering justice; hence the judiciary and the Supreme Court, not to mention the network of civil and military officials. From being a trading settlement for seventy years, Calcutta had suddenly become a colonial metropolis. It is hard now to imagine the city as the gay and elegant capital of the East. Few places can have gained quite such an opposite reputation in the space of a couple of centuries – like Regency Bath turning into the Bronx. Contemporary paintings by the likes of Thomas Daniell show spacious Palladian mansions, wide thoroughfares and stately gardens bordered by the blue waters of the Hughli river – no crowds, no dust; it even looks cooler. As the Crocodile sailed upriver the Joneses passed their future home on Garden Reach – a nine-mile stretch of ‘elegant mansions’. ‘They are all white, their roofs invariably flat and surrounded by colonnades, and their fronts relieved by lofty columns supporting deep verandahs.’ Each, according to a gossipy contemporary, ‘surrounded by groves and lawns, which descend to the water’s edge, and present a constant succession of whatever can delight the eye or bespeak wealth and elegance in the owners’. Then came the fort, also on the eastern bank and ‘so well kept and everything in such excellent order that it is quite a curiosity to see it – all the slopes, banks and ramparts are covered with the richest verdure, which completes the enchantment of the scene’. Finally, the city itself, flanking the fort with government offices and the homes of the military. ‘As you come up past Fort William and the Esplanade, it has a beautiful appearance. Esplanade Row, as it is called, seems to be composed of palaces.’ Indeed, Calcutta was known as ‘the City of Palaces’. It was also, in Clive’s view, ‘one of the most wicked places in the Universe … Rapacious and Luxurious beyond concepcion [sic]’. Fortunes, so easily made, were as easily lost at the whist table. The day was dominated by dinner at about 2 p.m. – ‘a soup, roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a forequarter of lamb, a rice pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, fine bread and excellent Madeira’, and that was assuming there were no guests. After dinner the gentleman of the house downed his three bottles of claret and retired to bed until it was time for the evening promenade, supper and a ball, or another round of drinking. Pert little Emma Wrangham and the ravishing Madame Grand provided the scandals; for those too sozzled or syphilitic to stand their pace, there were also legions of ‘sooty bibis’ (prostitutes). Factional quarrels were a way of life at every level. It was only three years since Warren Hastings, the Governor-General, had fought his famous duel with Sir Philip Francis, a senior member of the Governing Council. Yet it was all intensely exciting, like a combination of Paris in the naughty nineties and the Klondike. The other surprising thing about this city that was to be Jones’s home for the next eleven years was its insularity. Although it was the headquarters of a sizeable chunk of India, Calcutta was less Indian even than Madras or the struggling little colony at Bombay. Clive had foreseen the possibilities of an Indian empire and Warren Hastings was aware that with government there came profound responsibilities for the Indian people. Yet there was no general awareness of such things. More typical was the attitude of Sir Philip Francis who never stirred more than a mile or two outside the city. The only British empire known to most was the one in North America that had just been lost. In India the settlement mentality prevailed. What went on in the Mofussil outside Calcutta was a mystery; what went on amongst the country powers beyond was an irrelevance. Strictly speaking, the East India Company’s administration of Bengal was just another favour granted by the Moghul emperor in Delhi and not so very different from the commercial concessions won in the previous century. ‘Up-country disturbances’ were deplorable if they upset the flow of trade; but not for another twenty years would the British feel constrained to do anything about them. William Hodges, the artist, who was touring India when Jones arrived, thought it ‘a matter of surprise that of a country so closely allied to us so little should be known. Of the face of the country, of its arts and crafts, little has yet been said.’ After several unsuccessful attempts, Hodges managed to get as far inland as Agra and Gwalior, reminding his contemporaries of the glories of the Taj Majal and of Gwalior’s massive hill fortress, ‘the Gibraltar of the East’. They made little impression on the socialites of Calcutta. The price of indigo, Miss Wrangham’s engagement, and the shocking case of William Hunter and the three mutilated maidens were more to their taste. In this philistine and grasping society Sir William Jones could hardly be other than a conspicuous exception. In London he had been accused of showing an ill-tempered reticence in company, and though he quite reasonably objected, it was to the ill-temper rather than the reticence. As befitted a man of letters, he was reserved in the company of others unless they were his intellectual equals – and there would be precious few of these in Calcutta. Nor had he any time for factions and politics. An unhappy experience as prospective MP for Oxford, plus the drudgery of having had to promote his career by seeking favours, had embittered him. Finally, he was now married and very happily so. Anna Maria, beautiful, accomplished and devoted, was his great delight. Her health would be his only real anxiety in India, and her companionship was one of the major factors in the confidence with which he set about his work. In a society so rife with scandal, it was no small achievement to remain forever untouched by it. Only one other relationship in India could rival theirs – that between another Anna Maria and her husband, Warren Hastings. Whatever had been achieved in the way of Indian studies before Jones was due to Hastings. The first Governor-General of India (Clive had been Governor of Bengal only), he was also the greatest. Faced with the challenge of governing several million Indians, he conceived the novel and momentous idea of trying to do so with their approbation. Little was yet understood of their customs, whether Muslim or Hindu, and few thought much of their character. ‘As degenerate, crafty, wicked and superstitious a people as any race in the known world,’ thought a contemporary, adding ‘if not more so.’ Hastings differed. He spoke Urdu, Bengali and some Persian; he could understand them and in turn respected them. If British rule in India was to prosper and to last, British administrators must themselves become partly Indianized. They must learn the languages, study the customs. The government must work within existing institutions, not try to impose a whole new set of Western ones. There must be an intellectual exchange, not a walkover; and if there were flagrant abuses in Indian society they must be reformed from within, not proscribed from without. Hastings, according to an eminent historian, ‘loved the people of India and respected them to a degree no other British ruler has ever equalled’. If this ambitious scheme was to be realized, the first essential was that all would-be administrators should be able to speak the language. Persian was the language of diplomacy and was already widely used in government circles. Bengali, the local vernacular, was less known; but by the time Jones arrived, the first Bengali grammar, written by Nathaniel Halhed, an old Oxford friend of Jones, and printed by Charles Wilkins, was already in circulation. Bengali was thus the first of the Indian languages to be made available to scholars; and Wilkins, who cast the type with his own hand, was the first to print in the vernacular in India. The repercussions of this achievement would be enormous, not only for the British for whom the work was intended, but for Indian letters. One other work of importance had been completed and another was already in manuscript. To enable lawyers to conduct their cases in the native courts, Halhed had followed his grammar with a Code of Gentoo [i.e. Hindu] Laws. This was a digest assembled by Brahmins working under his supervision. Jones would find it inadequate as a legal code, but it was a step in the direction Hastings wanted the whole administration to take. The other work was potentially much more exciting. Wilkins, having established his Bengali press, won the confidence of the local Brahmins and, with their help, started to learn Sanskrit. Sanskrit is the sacred language of the Hindus. Its origins were then unknown and, as a spoken language, it was as dead as ancient Greek. But it was the medium in which the earliest religious compositions of the Aryan settlers in India had been expressed; and in the jealous possession of the priestly Brahmin caste, it had been preserved and augmented for centuries. It thus seemed to be the key to the discovery of ancient India: whatever there might be of literary, historical and scientific merit in the pre-Islamic culture of India was composed in Sanskrit or one of its later derivations. The first Europeans to gain any knowledge of the language were probably Portuguese priests in the sixteenth century. To strengthen their hand in religious disputations with the Brahmins, at least two of the fathers had penetrated its secrets, though without showing any appreciation of its literary wealth. The first Englishmen to show any interest in such matters were equally blind. ‘There is little learning among them [the Hindus],’ wrote a eighteenth-century traveller, ‘a reason whereof may be their penury of books which are but few and they manuscripts.’ He was right about the books. There were only manuscripts and they too were carefully guarded. But he overlooked the oral tradition. As every Sanskrit scholar would discover, finding the right pandit (teacher) to interpret them was every bit as important as possessing the manuscripts. All we know about Wilkins’s pioneering efforts in Sanskrit is that by the time Jones arrived on the scene he had almost completed the first translation of a Sanskrit work into English. He had chosen the Bhagavad Gita, a long extract from that longest of epics, the Mahabharata. The Gita was the best loved devotional work in India and its publication was to cause a sensation. But first Wilkins sent the work to his patron, Warren Hastings. Would the Governor-General recommend that the East India Company finance its publication? I hesitate not to pronounce the Gita a performance of great originality [wrote Hastings], of a sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst all the known religions of mankind, of a theology accurately corresponding with that of the Christian disposition, and most powerfully illustrating its fundamental Doctrines… I should not fear to place, in opposition to the best French versions of the most admired passages of the Iliad or Odyssey, or of the first and sixth books of our own Milton … the English translation of the Mahabharata. Hastings was overwhelmed. ‘Not very long since, the inhabitants of India were considered by many as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life.’ Now their civilization was being revealed in this masterpiece from an age ‘preceding even the first efforts of civilization in our own quarter of the globe’. For the benefit of the Company’s hard-headed directors, he pointed out that the publication could produce only gratitude from their Indian subjects and greater understanding from their officers. And he ended with a prophetic and resounding pronouncement on the whole body of Indian writings. ‘These will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.’ It was as if he was already aware that, however great and lasting the British raj, the discoveries of the orientalists would transcend it. Buried in antiquity there lay the structure of a remarkable civilization; unearthed and reconstructed, it could become the noblest of all monuments to the British period in India. For this task no man was better qualified than the new Supreme Court judge. Jones combined the broad, bold vision of Hastings with the incisive intellect of Wilkins. In addition, his personality and his enthusiasm for the task had a magnetic quality. Coming straight from England, he was above the pettiness and hedonism of Anglo-Indian life. His stature lent a new respectability to those who took Indian culture seriously. Hastings could encourage others, but Jones had the rare gift of inspiring them. Before he had even found a Calcutta home, he got in touch with Hastings’s prot?g?s. Wilkins and the rest had been working each in his own vacuum. They were flattered. On 15 January 1784, less than sixteen weeks after his arrival, Jones invited thirty kindred and influential spirits to the High Court jury room. The proceedings were opened by Sir William Jones who delivered a learned and very suggestive discourse on the Institution of a Society for enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia. The address was enthusiastically received, and a resolution was come to establishing the Society under the name of the Asiatic Society. Supposedly modelled on the Royal Society, the Asiatic Society owed everything to Jones and was really closer to Dr Johnson’s celebrated club, of which Jones had been a member. It was highly informal; there were no rules and the only qualification for membership was a voluntarily-expressed ‘love of knowledge’. After Jones, much of this informality would be changed; but his other stipulation remained. The field of enquiry was to be all-embracing. ‘You will investigate whatever is rare in the stupendous fabric of nature, will correct the geography of Asia, … will trace the annals and traditions of those nations who have peopled or desolated it; you will examine their methods in arithmetic and geometry, in trigonometry, mensuration, mechanics, optics, astronomy, and general physics; … in morality, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic; in medicine … anatomy and chemistry. To this you will add researches into their agriculture, manufacture and trade … music, architecture and poetry...If now it be asked what are the intended objects of our enquiries within these spacious limits, we answer Man and Nature; whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other.’ To draw up such a comprehensive scheme was an achievement in itself. But Jones was also the only man of his generation who could himself make a distinguished contribution in all these fields. During his ten years as president he stamped the Society with his own unique brand of universality. His contributions included papers on Indian music, on a cure for elephantiasis, on Chinese literature, on the scaly anteater, on the course of the Nile, on Indian chronology, on the Indian zodiac, on the Indian origin of chess, on a new species of haw-finch, on Indian botany, on spikenard, on mystical poetry and on the slow-paced lemur – and all this in addition to his more seminal studies of Hinduism, Indian history and the language and literature of Sanskrit which were embodied in his annual discourses to the Society. To the far-flung official with a cherished interest in crustaceans, meteorology or Arabic, it came as a revelation that here was a Society anxious to hear from him, and a man who knew enough about the subject to guide his studies and publish his findings. From Benares to Chittagong, and in far away Madras and Bombay, men sat up and took notice of their surroundings. Reports of manuscripts, monuments, inscriptions, old coins, strange customs, forgotten tribes and rare birds began to pour in. Through the Society, Jones was able not only to collate and pass on all this material but to publicize it. The first volume of Asiatick Researches, the Society’s journal, appeared in 1789. Four more followed during Jones’s decade as president and each caused a successively greater sensation in Europe. Previously the great bar to Indian studies among those who acknowledged that there might be something to study was the idea that they were somehow disreputable. What could one expect to learn from idolators who worshipped cows and monkeys, and who yet presumed to claim a history that out-distanced that of classical Greece, and a religious tradition that discredited the accepted chronology of Genesis? Why should one bother with sculpture that was invariably suggestive and often obscene, or with a religion that enjoined widows to burn themselves? The Hindus apparently condoned infanticide and, according to a seventeenth-century writer, considered the most disgusting eccentricities as evidence of sanctity. Some yogis go stark naked, several of which I have seen in India, and ‘tis reported that the Hindu women will go to them and kiss the yogi’s yard. Others lie something upon it when it stands, which the yogis take to buy victuals with; and several come to stroke it, thinking that there is a good deal of virtue in it, none having gone out of it, as they say, for they lie not with women nor use any other way to vent their seed. They can hold their breath and lie as if dead for some years, all of which time their bodies are kept warm with oils etc. They can fly and change souls, each with the other or into any beast. They can transform their bodies into what shape they please and make them so pliable that they can draw them through a little hole, and wind and turn them like soft wax. They are mighty temperate in diet, eating nothing but milk and a sort of grain they have. By the late eighteenth century it was not usual to be quite as candid as John Marshall had been. But reports like this were common knowledge. How could such people, ‘scarce elevated above the degree of savage life’, be worthy of serious study except by anthropologists? On the other hand, Hastings’s eulogy on the Gita suggested that, for all its modern absurdities, Hinduism was based on the loftiest of religious sentiments. It was also being said that the Hindus really only worshipped one god, though in many guises. This immediately made the subject more respectable. Jones, though, was more intrigued by the many guises. ‘I am in love with the gopis,’ he wrote to Wilkins in 1784, ‘charmed with Krishna, an enthusiastic admirer of Rama and a devout adorer of Brahma. Yudhisthir, Arjun, Bhima and other warriors of the Mahabharata appear greater in my eyes than Agamemnon, Ajax and Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad.’ As if to make the whole pantheon of Hindu gods more acceptable to Western tastes, one of his first papers was on The Gods of Greece, Italy and India. Deploying his immense classical learning, he identified many of the Indian gods with their classical counterparts and even suggested that the Greeks might have imported many of their deities from India. Zeus and company might not be entirely respectable, but their exploits had never been considered reason for ignoring classical studies. Likewise with the Hindu pantheon. Siva’s wife, Parbati, corresponded well with Venus; Jones could not resist reminding his audience that Venus was occasionally portrayed in the form of a ‘conical marble’ for which ‘the reason appears too clearly in the temples and paintings of India’. The lingam or phallus was indeed a formidable hurdle for any good Christian Englishman who might be mildly intrigued by Hinduism or Indian sculpture. But, as Jones observed, in Hinduism ‘it never seems to have entered the heads of the legislators or peoples that anything natural could be offensively obscene, a singularity that pervades all their writings and conversations, but is no proof of depravity in their morals’. This is an argument that the British were never able to swallow. Jones is almost unique in his acceptance of the erotic in Indian art and of its place in the Hindu religion. Having disposed of the obvious stumbling blocks, he was ready to launch into a sympathetic discovery of India’s past. CHAPTER TWO An Inquisitive Englishman (#ulink_05e3db45-e5b2-552d-a98e-048f7b4ec558) In the winter of 1784–5 the Joneses made a tour up the Ganges to Benares and back by way of the ancient cities of Gaya and Gaur. Sir William was getting a feel for ‘this wonderful country’, meeting the men who corresponded with him, and stalking the precious manuscripts. A copy of the legal code of Manu, the ancient law-giver whom he had previously compared with Moses, was his most prized acquisition. He planned to use it as the basis for a new compendium of Hindu law which would replace Halhed’s. He also considered how to outmanoeuvre the Brahmins on whom the courts had to rely for the interpretation – not always impartial – of Sanskrit laws. But he finally resolved to learn Sanskrit himself only when Wilkins announced his intention to leave India. Wilkins was still the only Englishman who had mastered the language. Jones would therefore be the second. In autumn 1785 the Joneses moved to Krishnagar, sixty miles upriver from Calcutta. There, beside the ancient seat of Bengali scholarship at Nadia, they rented a bungalow, built ‘entirely of vegetable materials’, and Jones approached the local Brahmins for instruction in Sanskrit. In spite of considerable cash inducements, they refused and eventually decamped for a religious festival. In their absence Jones found Ramlochand, a doctor who, though not a Brahmin, knew and had taught Sanskrit. With reservations he accepted the new pupil. For the next six years the Joneses returned to Krishnagar and Ramlochand every autumn. Nadia became Jones’s ‘third university’. He adopted the Indian dress of loose white cotton; their thatched bungalow became the scene of a pastoral idyll that was the antithesis of Calcutta life. Even Anna Maria, who though ‘not always ill, is never well’, seemed to revive there. The days passed in a routine of simple pleasures and hard study. Sanskrit proved an extremely difficult language even for a polyglot. But ‘I am learning it more grammatically and accurately than the indolence of childhood and the impatience of youth allowed me to learn any other.’ Perhaps it was this highly systematic approach which enabled him to make his first major discovery. For, within six months, he was experiencing a sense of d?j? vu; the grammar, the vocabulary even, seemed to bear some resemblance to Greek and Latin. The Sanskrit for mother was matr, mouse mus and so on. For someone with no Sanskrit-English dictionary, groping to catch the phrases and inflections of a glib pandit, it was not as obvious as it seems now. Nor were the implications clear. It could just be that there were a few borrowed words, either from Sanskrit to Greek or vice versa. Jones, though, guessed that he was on to something more important and in February 1786 he presented his theory to the Asiatic Society. The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than can possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists. There is similar reason though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick [i.e. Germanic] and Celtick, though blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. It was the genius of Sir William Jones that in the chance discovery of what would look to most like a minor coincidence, he could recognize and interpret a cardinal concept. He had not only discovered what later became known as the Indo-European family of languages and indicated that they had a common lost origin; he had in fact laid down the principles of comparative philology. If the study of languages could reveal something as shattering as the common Aryan origin of the ancient peoples of Europe and north India it could clearly be used as a method of historical research. Languages evidently evolved in much the same way as, say, architectural styles. The state of a language at any given period could be used as an indicator of the degree of civilization reached by those who used it. Equally, it could be a way of giving an approximate date to literary compositions of unknown antiquity. Philological studies have since helped to prise open the secrets of many ancient civilizations. India, with its wealth of ancient literature and inscriptions, has benefited more than most, and the dates now ascribed to its earliest literary compositions depend entirely on the evidence of philology. More immediately, Jones’s discovery clearly showed that the people of northern India, far from being savages, were actually of the same ethnic origin as their British rulers. Also, if Sanskrit was ‘more perfect’ etc. than Greek or Latin, then the record of civilization in India might be longer than in Europe. However sobering for the sahibs, it was a tremendous boost for oriental studies. The translation of Sanskrit literature suddenly became a matter of much wider interest. What might it not tell of the civilization of this ancient people, and perhaps of the common origins of all the Aryan peoples? And what about the chronology? Just how old were the various Sanskrit writings? In what leisure was left after a strenuous life in the courts, Jones forged ahead with his studies. ‘I hold every day lost in which I acquire no new knowledge of man or nature,’ he wrote in 1787. ‘It is my ambition to know India better than any other European ever knew it. I rise an hour before the sun and walk from my garden to the fort, about three miles; … by seven I am ready for my pandit with whom I read Sanskrit; at eight come a Persian or Arab alternately with whom I read till nine; at nine come the attorneys with affidavits; I am then robed and ready for court.’ Dinner was at 3 p.m. ‘When the sun is sunk in the Ganges we drive back to the Gardens either in our post-chaise or Anna’s phaeton drawn by a pair of beautiful Nepal horses. After tea time we read; and never sit up, if we can avoid it, after ten.’ He was teaching Anna Maria algebra, and together they were reading Dante, Ariosto and Tasso in the original. Life in Garden Reach had become as idyllic as at their bungalow in Krishnagar. Together they studied botany: Anna Maria drew and painted the plants; Sir William classified them according to the system of Linnaeus and wrote a Latin description of each. He drew the line at actually picking the flowers. Much as he loved the natural sciences, he had a very Buddhist aversion to destroying life in any form. His studies encouraged botany in India but temporarily stalled zoology. ‘I cannot reconcile to my notions of humanity the idea of making innocent beasts miserable and mangling harmless birds.’ The livestock that thronged their garden responded to this humane outlook. From the Joneses’ dairy came ‘the best butter in India’. Their sheep and goats, safe from the butcher’s knife, would feed from Anna Maria’s hand. It was all ‘like what the poets tell us of the golden ages; … you might see a kid and a tiger playing at Anna’s feet. The tiger is not as large as a full grown cat, though he will be as large as an ox: he is suckled by a she-goat and has all the gentleness of his foster-mother.’ Jones always insisted that even in England he had never been unhappy; ‘but I was never happy till I settled in India’. He was also in a state of intense excitement. ‘Sanskrit literature is indeed a new world; the language (which I begin to speak with ease) is the Latin of India and a sister of Latin and Greek. In Sanskrit are written half a million of stanzas on sacred history and literature, epic and lyric poems innumerable, and (what is wonderful) tragedies and comedies not to be counted, about 2000 years old, besides works on law (my great object), on medicine, on theology, on arithmetic, on ethics and so on to infinity.’ He felt like a man who had stumbled unawares on the whole corpus of classical literature. How could he convey this excitement? Suppose Greek literature to be known in modern Greece only, and there to be in the hands of priests and philosophers; and suppose them to be still worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo; suppose Greece to have been conquered successively by Goths, Huns, Vandals and Tartars, and lastly by the British; then suppose a court of judicature to be established by the British parliament, at Athens, and an inquisitive Englishman to be one of the judges; suppose him to learn Greek there, which none of his countrymen knew, and to read Homer, Pindar, Plato, which no other European had ever heard of. Such am I in this country; substituting Sanskrit for Greek, the Brahmins for the priests of Jupiter, and Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa for Homer, Plato and Pindar. Jones had no doubts that Sanskrit literature, like the language itself, was in every way the equal of Greek or Latin literature. He was now, in 1787, translating a drama by Kalidasa, ‘the Indian Shakespeare’. Completed in 1788 and published the following year, Sakuntala fully justified his expectations. It was the first Sanskrit work to be translated purely for its literary merit. Despite the omission of some passages too bold for contemporary tastes – like the one detailing the heroine’s swelling breasts – the comparison of Kalidasa with Shakespeare was not excessively partisan. Sakuntala was strongly reminiscent of The Tempest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream and was an instant success. The Calcutta edition was followed by two London editions within the space of three years. Jones was, however, wrong about one thing. Kalidasa was known to have lived in the age of a king called Vikramaditya, but Jones’s dating of ‘above 2000 years old’ was a few centuries out. Vikramaditya was the tide of several Indian sovereigns, and Kalidasa’s patron reigned about AD 400. He was thus a contemporary of St Augustine, not Homer. As the literary evidence of a great classical age in Indian history accumulated, the question of dates became more and more vexed. Sanskrit literature included some long lists of kings, but no chronicles – and nothing that could be regarded as historical writing. This was a bitter disappointment. Where was the Indian Tacitus? And, without him, how could this civilization be fitted into any kind of historical context? Jones heard tell of the Rajatarangini, a Kashmiri work of the twelfth century which we now know to be the only historical work relating to pre-Islamic India. But in time and place it is far removed from the classical age, and anyway, Jones was not able to get a copy. Failing that, there was just one date in the whole of ancient Indian history – 326 BC which, as every schoolboy was expected to know, was the year that Alexander the Great had invaded the Punjab. Strangely, this event, so significant to western historians, seemed to have entirely escaped the attention of Sanskrit authors. Nowhere did Jones find any mention of Greeks or any sign of Greek influence. Through the early 1790s he continued to broaden the scope of his Sanskrit reading. He had already discovered that chess and algebra were of Indian origin; to these, after studying a Sanskrit treatise on music, he added the heptatonic scale. He was also making progress with his legal code and creating something of a reputation in the courts. ‘I can now read both Sanskrit and Arabic with so much ease that the native lawyers can never impose upon the courts in which I sit.’ To the acclaim of scholars all over the world (Dr Johnson called him ‘one of the most enlightened of the sons of men’) was added the sincere regard and affection of Bengalis, whether petitioners or pandits. India was exercising its spell on him. His planned stay of six years was up; but he no longer yearned to return to England. He might make a visit to Europe, but he planned to be still in India at the turn of the century. Hinduism he found increasingly attractive and the doctrine of reincarnation seemed ‘incomparably more rational, more pious and more likely to deter men from vice than the horrid opinions inculcated by Christians of punishment without end’. But he was not tempted to forsake Christianity. Indeed there was no need; the Thirty-nine Articles, if written in Sanskrit, would pass for the work of a Brahmin and be quite acceptable to Hindus. By now the Joneses had become something of an institution. Young Thomas Twining, only seventeen and just arrived in India, was so honoured by an invitation to dine with them that he filled a whole page of his journal with an account of the visit. The party consisted of Sir William and Lady Jones, another gentleman and myself. Sir William was very cheerful and agreeable. He made some observations on the mysterious word om of the Hindoos, and other Indian subjects. While sitting after dinner he suddenly called out with a loud voice ‘Othello, Othello’. Waiting for a minute or two and Othello not coming, he repeated his summons, ‘Othello, Othello’. His particularly fine voice, his white Indian dress, surmounted by a small black wig, his cheerfulness and great celebrity, rendered this scene extremely interesting. I was surprised that no one, Muslim or Hindoo, answered his summons. At last I saw a black turtle of very large size, crawling slowly towards us from an adjoining room. It made its way to the side of Sir William’s chair, where it remained, he giving it something it seemed to like. Sir William observed that he was fond of birds, but had little pleasure seeing them or hearing them unless they were at liberty; and he no doubt would have liberated Othello if he had not considered that he was safer by the side of his table than he would be in the Ganges. I passed a most pleasant day in the company of this distinguished and able man. He was so good as to express some approbation of my Persian studies, and repeated to me two lines of a Persian couplet, and also his translations of them – Kill not that ant that steals a little grain; It lives with pleasure, and it dies with pain. Sitting in the shade on the banks of the Hughli, surrounded by venerable pandits and tame livestock, with Anna Maria sketching quietly in the background, he seemed the archetype of the Indian teacher – scholar and law-giver, patron to man and beast. It was the same at the Asiatic Society. He presided at almost every meeting, and at the beginning of each year delivered a challenging discourse on some different aspect of oriental studies. Right from the start there had been something Socratic in his manner – You will investigate this, enquire into that, etc., etc. – and in his last discourse he referred to the Society as a ‘symposiack assembly’. Revered and loved (though rarely seen) by Calcutta society, he was indeed the Indian Socrates. In 1793 he delivered his tenth discourse and celebrated the occasion by casually coming out with the long-awaited breakthrough on Indian chronology. ‘The jurisprudence of the Hindus and Arabs being the field I have chosen for my regular toil, you cannot expect that I should greatly enlarge your collection of historical knowledge; but I may be able to offer you some occasional tribute, and I cannot help mentioning a discovery which accident threw my way.’ He had already laid down the basis of literary and linguistic studies; now, at last, he had unearthed a foundation from which a start could be made with the reconstruction of India’s ancient history. The discovery may have been accidental, but it was his greatest; no one without his immense learning and his genius for spotting a relevant fact could have made it. 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 (#ulink_531642ff-3a7f-53a8-a855-dbb566bad736) 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 fa?ade 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. He was getting quite a feeling for ancient art treasures. In Lord Valentia’s train he would move on to Egypt, stay on there as British consul, and become so successful at appropriating and selling the art treasures of the Pharaohs that he rivalled the great tomb-robber Belzoni. Meanwhile in India more rock-cut temples had come to light. The free-standing Kailasa temple at Ellora, cut into the rock from above like a gigantic intaglio, was discovered in the late eighteenth century. It was followed by the famous caves at Ajanta and Bagh. ‘Few remains of antiquity,’ wrote William Erskine in 1813, ‘have excited greater curiosity. History does not record any fact that can guide us in fixing the period of their execution, and many opposite opinions have been formed regarding the religion of the people by whom they were made.’ From the statuary at Elephanta and Ellora, particularly the figures with several heads and many arms, it was clear that these at least were Hindu. But why were they in such remote locations and why had they been so long neglected? What, too, of the plainer caves like Kanheri and the largest of all, Karli in the Western Ghats? Lord Valentia was pretty sure that the sitting figure, surrounded by devotees, at Karli was ‘the Boddh’; he had just come from Ceylon where Buddhism was still a living religion, though it appeared to be almost unknown in India. Other critics who looked to the west for an explanation of anything they found admirable in Indian art, insisted that the excellence of the sculpture indicated the presence of a Greek, Phoenician or even Jewish colony in western India. Yet others looked to Africa: who but the builders of the pyramids could have achieved such monolithic wonders? These theories were based on the idea that such monuments were exclusive to western India, which had a long history of maritime contacts with the West. They became less credible with the discovery of the so-called Seven Pagodas at Mahabalipuram near Madras. Here, a thousand miles away and on the other side of the Indian peninsula, were a group of temples cut not out of solid rock, but sculpted out of boulders. At first glance they looked like true buildings, a little rounded like old stone cottages, but well proportioned – up to fifty-five feet long and thirty-five feet high – with porches, pillars and statuary. It was only on closer inspection that one realized that each was a single gigantic stone sculpted into architecture. ‘Stupendous,’ declared William Chambers who twice visited the place in the 1770s (though his report had to wait for the Asiatic Society’s first publication in 1789), ‘of a style no longer in use, indeed closer to that of Egypt.’ Five years later, a further account of the boulder temples, or raths, was submitted by a man who had also seen Elephanta. To his mind there was no question that in style and technique the two were closely related. Had he also seen the intaglio temple of Ellora he might have been tempted to postulate some theory of architectural development; first the cave temple, then the free-standing excavation, and finally the boulder style, freed at last from solid rock. It was as if India’s architecture had somehow evolved out of the earth’s crust. Elsewhere, stone buildings have always evolved from wooden ones; but in India it was as if architecture was a development of sculpture. The distinctive characteristic of all truly Indian buildings is their sculptural quality. The great Hindu temples look like mountainous accumulations of figures and friezes; even the Taj Mahal, for all its purity of line, stays in the mind as a masterpiece of sculpture rather than of construction. There was yet one other type of ancient monument which had intrigued early visitors. Thomas Coryat, an English eccentric who turned up in Delhi in 1616, was probably the first to take notice of it. South of the Moghul city of Delhi (now Old Delhi) lay the abandoned tombs and forts of half a dozen earlier Delhis (now, confusingly, the site of New Delhi). The ruins stretched for ten miles, overgrown, inhabited by bats and monkeys. But in the middle of this jungle of crumbling masonry Coryat saw something that made him stop; it did not belong. A plain circular pillar, forty feet high, stuck up through the remains of some dying palace and, in the evening light so proper to ruins, it shone. At a distance he took it for brass, closer up for marble; it is in fact polished sandstone. Of a weight later estimated at twenty-seven tons, it is a single, finely tapered stone, another example of highly developed monolithic craftsmanship. But what intrigued Coryat was the discovery that it was inscribed. Of the two principal inscriptions one was in a script consisting of simple erect letters, a bit like pin-men, which Coryat was sure were Greek. The pillar must then, he thought, have been erected by Alexander the Great, probably ‘in token of his victorie’ over the Indian king Porus in 326 BC. Fifty years later another such pillar was discovered by John Marshall, an East India Company factor who has been called ‘the first Englishman who really studied Indian antiquities’. He was certainly less inclined to jump to wild conclusions. His pillar was ‘nine yards nine inches high’ and boasted a remarkable capital: ‘at the top of this pillar … is placed a tyger engraven, the neatliest that I have seene in India’. It was actually a lion. But perhaps the most interesting thing about this pillar was that it was in Bihar, a thousand miles from Delhi and many more from the rock-cut monuments around Bombay and Madras. Writing similar to that found on the Delhi pillar was also found on some of the cave temples; and at Karli there was actually a small pillar outside the cave. Clearly all these monuments were somehow connected. But it was doubtful whether Alexander had ever reached Delhi, let alone Bihar. The existence of a similar pillar there put paid to Coryat’s idea of their commemorating Alexander’s victories, although the possibility that the letters were some corrupt form of Greek would linger on for many years. With the foundation of the Asiatic Society there was at last a forum in which a concerted investigation into all these monuments could take place. Reports of more pillars and caves were soon trickling in. Jones himself was rightly convinced that the mystery of who created them, when and why, could be solved only if the inscriptions could be translated. Some ancient civilization, some foreign conqueror perhaps, or some master craftsman, seemed to be crying out for recognition. Another breakthrough seemed imminent; and with it another chunk of India’s lost history might be restored. Thanks to Charles Wilkins, the man who preceded Jones as a Sanskritist, progress was at first encouraging. At one of the earliest meetings of the Society he reported on a new pillar, also in Bihar. Sometime in the month of November in the year 1780 I discovered in the vicinity of the Town of Buddal, near which the Company has a factory, and which at that time was under my charge, a decapitated monumental pillar which at a little distance had very much the appearance of the trunk of a coconut tree broken off in the middle. It stands in a swamp overgrown with weeds near a small temple… Upon my getting close enough to the monument to examine it, I took its dimensions and made a drawing of it… At a few feet above the ground is an inscription, engrained in the stone, from which I took two reversed impressions with printer’s ink. I have lately been so fortunate as to decipher the character. Though very different from Devanagari, the modern script used for Sanskrit, it was clearly related to it and Wilkins was not surprised to discover that the language was in fact Sanskrit. To historians the translation was a disappointment; the Buddal pillar told them nothing of interest. But the deciphering was an important development. Nowadays it is recognized that the modern Devanagari script has passed through three distinct stages; first the pin-men script that Coryat thought was Greek (Ashoka Brahmi); second a more ornate, chunky script (Gupta Brahmi); and third, a more curved and rounded script (Kutila) from which springs the washing-on-the-line script of Devanagari. The Buddal pillar was Kutila, and once Wilkins had established that it had some connection with Devanagari, the possibility of working backwards to the earlier scripts was dimly perceived. As if to illustrate this, Wilkins next surprised his colleagues by teasing some sense out of an inscription written in Gupta Brahmi. It came from a cave near Gaya which had been known for some time though never visited; a Mr Hodgekis, who tried, ‘was assassinated on his way to it’. Encouraged by Warren Hastings, John Harrington, the secretary of the Asiatic Society, was more successful and found the cave hidden behind a tree near the top of a hill. The character of the inscription, according to Wilkins, was ‘undoubtedly the most ancient of any that have hitherto come under my inspection. But though the writing is not modern, the language is pure Sanskrit’. Wilkins, tantalizing as ever about how he made his breakthrough, apparently divined that the inscription was in verse. It was the discovery of the metre that somehow helped him to the successful decipherment. But again, there was little in this new translation to satisfy the historian’s thirst for facts. A far more promising approach to the problem, indeed a short cut, seemed to be heralded in a letter to Jones from Lieutenant Francis Wilford, a surveyor and an enthusiastic student of all things oriental, who was based at Benares. Jones had been sent copies of inscriptions found at Ellora and written in Ashoka Brahmi, the still undeciphered pin-men. He had probably sent them to Wilford because Benares, the holy city of the Hindus, was the most likely place to find a Brahmin who might be able to read them. In 1793 Wilford announced that he had found just such a man. I have the honour to return to you the facsimile of several inscriptions with an explanation of them. I despaired at first of ever being able to decipher them… However, after many fruitless attempts on our part, we were so fortunate as to find at last an ancient sage, who gave us the key, and produced a book in Sanskrit, containing a great many ancient alphabets formerly in use in different parts of India. This was really a fortunate discovery, which hereafter may be of great service to us. According to the ancient sage, most of Wilford’s inscriptions related to the wanderings of the five heroic Pandava brothers from the Mahabharata. At the unspecified time in question they were under an obligation not to converse with the rest of mankind; so their friends devised a method of communicating with them by ‘writing short and obscure sentences on rocks and stones in the wilderness and in characters previously agreed upon betwixt them’. The sage happened to have the key to these characters in his code book; obligingly he transcribed them into Devanagari Sanskrit and then translated them. To be fair to Wilford, he was a bit suspicious about this ingenious explanation of how the inscriptions got there. But he had no doubts that the deciphering and translation were genuine. ‘Our having been able to decipher them is a great point in my opinion, as it may hereafter lead to further discoveries, that may ultimately crown our labours with success.’ Above all, he had now located the code book, ‘a most fortunate circumstance’. Poor Wilford was the laughing stock of the Benares Brahmins for a whole decade. They had already fobbed him off with Sanskrit texts, later proved spurious, on the source of the Nile and the origin of Mecca. After the code book there was a geographical treatise on The Sacred Isles of the West, which included early Hindu reference to the British Isles. The Brahmins, to whom Sanskrit had so long remained a sacred prerogative, were getting their own back. One wonders how much Wilford paid his ‘ancient sage’. Jones was already a little suspicious of Wilford’s sources, but on the code book, which was as much a fabrication as the translations supposedly based on it, he reserved judgement until he might see it. He never did. In fact it was never heard of again. But in spite of these disappointments Jones continued to believe that in time this oldest script would be deciphered. He had been sent a copy of the writings on the Delhi pillar and told a correspondent that they ‘drive me to despair; you are right, I doubt not, in thinking them foreign; I believe them to be Ethiopian and to have been imported a thousand years before Christ’. It was not one of his more inspired guesses and at the time of his death the mystery of the inscriptions and of the monoliths was as dark as ever. And so it remained until the labours of James Prinsep. Jones had given oriental studies a strongly literary bias and his successors continued to concentrate on Sanskrit manuscripts. Archaeological studies were ignored in consequence, and so were inscriptions. Wilkins’s few translations had led nowhere and the most intriguing of the scripts remained undeciphered. Indeed even the translation of the Gupta Brahmi script from the cave at Gaya was forgotten in the general waning of interest; it would have to be deciphered all over again. During his first twelve years in India Prinsep confined his attention to scientific matters. He was sent to Benares to set up a second mint and while there redesigned the city’s sewers. He also contributed a few articles to the Asiatic Society’s journal (‘Descriptions of a Pluviometer and Evaporameter’, ‘Note on the Magic Mirrors of Japan’, etc.). But in 1830 he was recalled to Calcutta as assistant to the Assay-Master, Horace Hayman Wilson, who was also secretary of the Asiatic Society and an eminent Sanskrit scholar. At the time Wilson was puzzling over the significance of various ancient coins that had recently been found in Rajasthan and the Punjab. Prinsep helped to catalogue and describe them, and it was in attempting to decipher their legends that his interest in the whole question of ancient inscriptions was aroused. Although his ignorance of Sanskrit was undoubtedly a handicap, here, in the deciphering of scripts, was a field in which his quite exceptional talent for minute and methodical study could be deployed to brilliant advantage. 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 prot?g? in Benares, he had already announced the discovery in a letter. 23 May 1837. My dear Cunningham, Hors de d?partement de mes ?tudes! [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. In the twenty-seventh year of my reign I have caused this edict to be written; so sayeth Devanampiya; ‘Let stone pillars be prepared and let this edict of religion be engraven thereon, that it may endure into the remotest ages.’ Something about both the language and the contents was immediately familiar: it was Old Testament. Even Prinsep could not resist the obvious analogy – ‘we might easily cite a more ancient and venerable example of thus fixing the law on tablets of stone’. Perhaps it was just out of reverence that he called them edicts rather than commandments. But the message was clear enough. Here was an Indian king uncannily imitating Moses, indeed going one better; as well as using tablets of stone, he had created these magnificent pillars to bear his message through the ages. But who was this king? ‘Devanampiya Piyadasi’ could be a proper name but it was not one that appeared in any of the Sanskrit king lists. Equally it could be a royal epithet, ‘Beloved of the Gods and of gracious mien’. At first Prinsep thought the former. In Ceylon a Mr George Tumour had been working on the Buddhist histories preserved there and had just sent in a translation that mentioned a king Piyadasi who was the first Ceylon king to adopt Buddhism. This fitted well; but what was a king of Ceylon doing scattering inscriptions all over northern India? One of the edicts actually claimed that the king had planted trees along the highways, dug wells, erected travellers’ rest houses etc. How could a Sinhalese king be planting trees along the Ganges? A few weeks later Tumour himself came up with the answer. Studying another Buddhist work he discovered that Piyadasi was also the normal epithet of a great Indian sovereign, a contemporary of the Ceylon Piyadasi, and that this king was otherwise known as Ashoka. It was further stated that Ashoka was the grandson of Chandragupta and that he was consecrated 218 years after the Buddha’s enlightenment. Suddenly it all began to make sense. Ashoka was already known from the Sanskrit king lists as a descendant of Chandragupta Maurya (Sandracottus) and, from Himalayan Buddhist sources, as a legendary patron of early Buddhism. Now his historicity was dramatically established. Thanks to the inscriptions, from being just a doubtful name, more was suddenly known about Ashoka than about any other Indian sovereign before AD 1100. As heir to Chandragupta it was not surprising that his pillars and inscriptions were so widely scattered. The Mauryan empire was clearly one of the greatest ever known in India, and here was its noblest scion speaking of his life and work through the mists of 2000 years. It was one of the most exciting moments in the whole story of archaeological discovery. CHAPTER FOUR Black and Time-Stained Rocks (#ulink_501cbf85-2349-5c2e-bbeb-d314a629a87a) Having broken the Ashoka Brahmi code, Prinsep was now in full cry. If mind and body could stand it, he would round onto the cave temple inscriptions, try the coins again, and finally double back to the long rock inscriptions. Only then would it be possible to assess the full importance of his discovery and to set Ashoka in perspective. But even as he worked, more monolithic finds were accumulating. Thanks largely to Hodgson’s discoveries along the Nepalese frontier, Prinsep knew of five Ashoka columns. As he deciphered their messages a sixth came to light in Delhi (the second to be found there). Broken into three pieces and buried in the ground, it was thought to have been the casualty of an explosion in a nearby gunpowder factory sometime in the seventeenth century. The inscription was badly worn, though evidently the same as that on the other pillars. In due course the whole pillar was offered to the Asiatic Society for their new museum. They accepted it but found the difficulties and cost of transporting it to Calcutta to be prohibitive; eventually they settled for just the bit with the inscription on it. The question of how these pillars had originally been moved round India, and whether they were still in their ordained positions, was an intriguing subject in itself. It was now appreciated that they were all of the same stone, all polished by the same unexplained process, and therefore all from the same quarry. Prinsep thought this was somewhere in the Outer Himalayas, although we now know their source to have been Chunar on the Ganges near Benares. Either way, they had somehow been moved as much as 500 miles, no mean feat considering that the heaviest weighed over forty tons. Presumably river transport was the answer. An interesting sidelight on this had just been shed by the study of the Mohammedan histories of India. These revealed that neither of the Delhi pillars had originally been erected in Delhi; they had evidently been moved there to adorn the capital of the early Mohammedan kings or Sultans. The first pillar was in the ruins of the palace of Feroz Shah, a Sultan of the fourteenth century. According to contemporary chronicles he had ordered the pillar to be brought there from a site up the Jumna river near Khizrabad. When the Sultan visited that district and saw the column in the village of Tobra, he resolved to move it to Delhi, and there erect it as a memorial to future generations. After thinking over the best means of lowering the column, orders were issued commanding the attendance of all the people dwelling in the neighbourhood … and all soldiers, both horse and foot. They were ordered to bring all materials and implements suitable for the work. Directions were issued for bringing parcels of the cotton of the silk-cotton tree. Quantities of this silk cotton were placed round the column, and when the earth at its base was removed, it fell gently over on the bed prepared for it. The cotton was then removed by degrees, and after some days the pillar lay safe upon the ground. The pillar was then encased from top to bottom in reeds and ram skins so that no damage might accrue to it. A carriage with forty-two wheels was constructed, and ropes were attached to each wheel. Thousands of men hauled at every rope, and after great labour and difficulty the pillar was raised onto the carriage. A strong rope was fastened to each wheel and 200 men pulled at each of these ropes. By the simultaneous exertions of so many thousands of men, the carriage was moved and was brought to the banks of the Jumna. Here the Sultan came to meet it. A number of large boats had been collected, some of which could carry 5000 and 7000 maunds [ten tons] of grain. The column was very ingeniously transferred to these boats and was then conducted to Firozabad [Delhi] where it was landed and conveyed into the palace with infinite labour and skill. Re-erection of the column was also a ticklish business, especially since Feroz Shah had ordained that it should stand on the roof, nine storeys up. After much more shunting about on beds of cotton, and an ingenious system of windlasses, ‘it was secured in an upright position, straight as an arrow, without the smallest deviation from the perpendicular’. Feroz Shah then proudly showed off his new acquisition and asked for an explanation of the strange inscriptions. ‘Many Brahmins and Hindu devotees were invited to translate them, but no one was able.’ Prinsep could feel justly proud. The Feroz Shah column still stands in Delhi, and Hodgson’s at Lauriya Nandangarh, though not the most elegant, is the only one that still retains its original capital. Others have fared less well. Of the Bihar columns two appear to have been used for cannon target practice during the Moghul period. And in the 1840s the remains of at least two more pillars were dug up at Sanchi. Local tradition had it that they had been broken up by an Indian industrialist for use as rollers in a gigantic sugar cane press. Of one only the base remained; the other was found in three pieces with the chisel marks still visible where it had been intentionally broken. For British antiquarians a potentially more embarrassing case of vandalism was the persistent rumour that the road roller being used by a zealous engineer at Allahabad was actually an Ashoka pillar. If there was any substance in this, it is to be hoped that it was just a broken fragment. The only pillar that was quite definitely thrown down by the British was the other, much studied one at Allahabad. It had evidently been in the way of a new embankment which was part of an eighteenth-century refortification programme. Filled with remorse, the Asiatic Society, and even the government, arranged for its re-erection. Captain Edward Smith, the man who had procured for Prinsep the vital facsimiles from Sanchi, designed a new pedestal for it, which came in for much praise. Unfortunately, he went further and also designed a new capital. It was meant to be a lion in the style of that of Lauriya Nandangarh; but it was not exactly the ‘neatliest engraven’. According to Alexander Cunningham ‘it resembles nothing so much as a stuffed poodle on top of an inverted flower pot’. We now know of at least nine inscribed Ashoka columns, but these are considerably outnumbered by the Ashoka inscriptions carved on convenient rocks. The pillars naturally claimed attention first, but in fact the rock inscriptions proved more interesting both in content and location. The pillars were found only in the north of India (Sanchi was the most southerly), widely scattered round the Ganges basin. The rock inscriptions were found much further afield, from Mysore in the south to near Peshawar in the extreme north-west; and from near the coast of Orissa in the east to the coast of Saurashtra in the west. These last two, the first at Dhauli in Orissa, the second at Girnar in Gujerat, were the only ones known to Prinsep. Luckily they were two of the most informative. The Orissa inscription had been discovered in early 1837. Lieutenant Markham Kittoe had been sent into the wilderness of Orissa to search for coalfields. Left much to his own devices he also searched for antiquities and soon stumbled on a whole network of ancient caves and sculptures. He described his find to the Asiatic Society: I have further great pleasure in announcing the discovery of the most voluminous inscription in the column character that I have ever heard of… There is neither road nor path to this extraordinary piece of antiquity. After climbing the rock through thorns and thickets, I came of a sudden on a small terrace open on three sides with a perpendicular scarp on the fourth or west from the face of which projects the front half of an elephant of elegant workmanship, four feet high; the whole is cut out of the solid rock. On the northern face beneath the terrace, the rock is chiselled smooth for a space of near fourteen feet by ten feet and the inscription, neatly cut, covers the whole space. He spent a day taking a facsimile and returned to the spot again in November of the same year to complete the job. In places the rock was badly worn but he found that the shadow thrown by the evening sun enabled him to pick out letters that were not otherwise apparent. In spite of several gaps, Prinsep immediately attempted a translation and made out a number of intriguing phrases. But he gave up the task in early 1838 when a copy of the much better preserved Girnar inscription came to hand. This had first been noticed by Colonel James Tod, another legendary figure in this story, who had been on a tour of Gujerat in 1822. The memorial in question, evidently of some great conqueror, is a huge hemispherical mass of dark granite, which, like a wart upon the body, has protruded through the crust of mother earth, without fissure or inequality, and which, by the aid of the ‘iron pen’, has been converted into a book. The measurement of the arc is nearly ninety feet; its surface is divided into compartments or parallelograms, within which are inscriptions in the usual character. In Tod’s time the script was still, of course, a mystery. The Colonel was one of those who thought it might be Greek. But he was nearer the mark when he confidently predicted that, sooner rather than later, someone at the Asiatic Society would solve the problem. Meantime he had taken copies of only two short sections. Fifteen years later, a Bombay antiquarian, hearing of Prinsep’s translation of the pillar inscriptions, quickly headed for Girnar. He wanted to see if the new code would work on Tod’s inscription. ‘To my great joy, and that of the Brahmins with me, I found myself able to make out several words.’ The engraving was still amazingly sharp; it was possible to make an impression, filling the letters with ink and pressing a cloth over them. From this he made a reduced copy – on the original each letter was nearly two feet high – and sent it off to Calcutta. Prinsep, turning from the Orissa inscription to this new one, again experienced that shiver down the spine. Bar two extra paragraphs on the Orissa inscription, the two were identical. Ashoka was proclaiming his edicts from one corner of India to the other, across an empire far greater than that of British India and comparable only to that of the Moghuls. But still more surprising was a claim made in one of the edicts. If Prinsep’s reading was right, Ashoka had set up hospitals for men and animals throughout his kingdom, including the extreme south of the peninsula ‘and moreover within the dominions of Antiochus the Greek’. He also claimed that the gospel of non-violence and respect for all living creatures was being acknowledged even ‘by the kings of Egypt, Ptolemy and Antigonus and Magas’. This said a great deal for Ashoka’s international standing. But, more important, here at last was another point of contact – the first since Jones’s identification of Sandracottus – between India’s ancient history and that of the West. As Prinsep leafed through the classics to discover which Ptolemy and which Antiochus these might be, he sent an urgent message to Kittoe who was still in Orissa. Would the coal prospector quickly go to Dhauli and recheck the edicts in which these names appeared? Kittoe reacted at once. On my arrival at Cuttack I received a letter from my friend the Secretary of the Asiatic Society, informing me of his discovery of the name of Antiochus in the Girnar and Dhauli inscriptions, and requesting me to recompare my transcript and correct any errors. I instantly laid my dak [organized transport] and left at 6 p.m. for Dhauli, which curious place I reached before daybreak and had to wait till it was light; for the two bear cubs which escaped me there last year, when I killed the old bear, were now full grown and disputing the ground. At daybreak I climbed to the Aswastuma [the rock] and cutting two large forked boughs of a tree near the spot, placed them against the rock; on these I stood to effect my object. I had taken the precaution to make a bearer hold the wood steady, but being intent on my interesting task I forgot my ticklish footing; the bearer had also fallen asleep and let go his hold, so that having overbalanced myself the wood slipped and I was pitched head foremost down the rock, but fortunately fell on my hands and received no injury beyond a few bruises and a severe shock; I took a little rest and then completed the job. 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. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/john-keay/india-discovered-the-recovery-of-a-lost-civilization/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.