How Buddhist Records Helped Recreate The History of India
Jawhar Sircar
Thimphu, Bhutan, 20th
November, 2017
Distinguished Visitors Programme of the India Bhutan
Foundation
I thank the India Bhutan Foundation
for having invited me to deliver a talk on a subject that is so close to my
heart. For the last two decades I chose a rather unusual combination of
subjects for my research, namely, History and Religion, and it feels satisfying
to see some positive results emanating out of this combination. This is not the
first occasion when I have expressed India’s indebtedness to Buddhist records
for reconstructing Indian history in the last two centuries. Those who are
familiar with this issue would be aware of the basic problem of deciphering
history as an empirical discipline from materials that were never meant to
serve as historical records or documents. I refer to Indian texts, more
specifically the genre of sacred texts. We must remember that in ancient India
which covers the period from 3500 BC to 1200 AD, i.e, more than four-fifth of
India’s recorded history, the chronicling of events was primarily the task of
what we call the Brahmanical intelligentsia that was also the keeper of
religious traditions.
For various reasons, history was
not their focus and though we get large volumes of literature, primarily
sacred, from the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Sutras, the Puranas and numerous
commentaries thereof, we hardly get any historical narratives. The Puranas do
recite genealogies and some parts are substantiated by facts, but they mix up a
lot of fiction and religion and cannot, therefore, qualify as historical texts.
They have, of course, been treated as source materials of history, but with a
lot of caution and very selectively. Where India’s secular side is concerned,
India was not known to have produced histories except rare ones like Kalhana’s
Rajatangini in the 12th century that chronicles the dynasties of
Kashmir and some others. With the arrival of Muslim rulers, the emphasis
changed and political records were kept quite rigorously and it is needless to
say that during the colonial period, this was obsessive but one needs to be
extremely careful about imperial bias and other failings.
While it is not difficult to
produce the history of India from the 12th century onwards, there
were considerable problems in delineating a linear history of India from the
earliest historical period. India had completely forgotten even the grandeur of
Harappan civilisation and its large cities on the Indus and its tributaries and
distributaries like Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, Lothal that were built as early as
3500 BC and flourished for almost two millennia. The Vedic period has left
behind almost no such direct material civilisation but archeology has been able
to retrieve remains of pottery, metals, small towns and other evidence. The
next major phase, that is personified by the great Gangetic kingdoms, the
Mahajanapadas and the Mauryas have considerable material artefacts and architecture
but much of the Buddhist glory was sadly forgotten in the land of its birth. In
fact, the first two major discoveries of British archeology, i.e, the Amravati
stupa, that Col. Colin Mackenzie had stumbled upon first in 1798, and the
Ajanta caves that were discovered accidentally by a team of soldiers in 1819
are two of the grandest evidence of the efflorescence of Buddhist art and
culture that had lapsed from human memory. Mackenzie returned to Amravati in
1816 as the Surveyor General of India as he knew that his earlier visit was
quite superficial and spent four years in documenting the find and sketching
the ruins. He made a presentation on Amravati before the Asiatic Society in
Kolkata in 1819 with 85 illustrations, but he made the mistake of mistaking the
site to be one of Deccan Jainism rather than of Buddhism. Ever after it was
discovered, it took both the British and Indians several decades to understand
the uniqueness of the art of Ajanta and hence, it was not incorporated into
India’s historical timeline till the end of the 19th century. That
journey is another interesting story in itself.
Both Ajanta’s discovery and Amaravati’s
presentation were in the year 1819. This means that even two hundred years ago,
1817, there was no proper linearity in Indian history and there was, for
instance, no idea of the glory of the Mauryas, the greatness of Ashoka and the
magnificence of the Buddhist phase. Almost all the architectural grandeur of
pre-Islamic India is represented by the mighty stupas at Sarnath and Sanchi and
the ancient universities of Taxila and Nalanda. In 1817, their existence was
not known or visible as they had been lying in ruins from centuries of neglect.
They had become highly avoidable ruins that were dreaded because of snakes and
ghosts. Buddhism had survived and prospered outside its homeland, but in its
cradle and nursery its existence was forgotten. Today, we shall briefly touch
upon the fascinating process though which India rediscovered her past in the
next hundred years, bit by bit, and how Buddhist memory helped the process.
Let
us quickly recapitulate some of the other major Buddhist monuments that were
discovered during this exciting phase. The next significant discovery after
Amaravati and Ajanta was in 1830, General Ventura uncovered the Manikyala Stupa
at Taxila. This very ancient city, was said to be the capital of Parikshit, the
grand-son of Arjuna of Mahabharata, and it had been an important Buddhist
centre that the Jataka tales describe in great details. Taxila had seen Darius of Persia and Alexander
the Great. Taxila carried valuable evidence of several periods, pre-Mauryan,
Indo-Greek and Kushan. This ancient centre of India’s first university had been
destroyed by the Huns in the 5th century AD and it lay in ruins for
1400 years. But how did the British find out what Indians had forgotten? One
was their boundless curiosity and the other was their scorn for Indian concepts
of ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’, as well as for ghosts and evil spirits that
prohibited Indians from venturing into ruins. Cobras, and other dangerous
creatures that inhabited these ruins did not deter them either.
More interesting is the fact that British
scholars and archaeologists utilised Indian or Chinese texts, mainly Buddhist, to provide them
with valuable clues to many historical sites. After all, James Rennell had used
the writings of foreigners, i.e, classical European geographers like Pliny and
Ptolemy to identify Pataliputra with modern Patna in his 1783 Memoir of a Map
of Hindoostan. But, Alexander Cunningham, who later became the first
Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India depended a lot on the
testimony of Chinese pilgrims and their travel accounts of the Buddhist sacred
places in India. By using the bearings and distances mentioned by travellers
like Fa Xian and Xuan Zang, Cunningham succeeded in fixing the locations of
many of the famous sites mentioned in ancient Indian texts and thus
rediscovering them. These records, of course, had their own limitations which
resulted in all kinds of controversies as, for instance, the identification of
Kapilavastu. Here, for instance, the field of speculation was very wide because
the bearings in the accounts of Chinese pilgrims were not consistent. While
Nepal has claimed Tilaurakot as ancient Kapilavastu, we in India have
identified it with Piprahwa-Ganwaria in Uttar Pradesh. And while it is true
that freely occurring monastic seals of the first-second centuries CE which
mention the Kapilavastu Sangha have been found at Piprahwah-Ganwaria, at
Tailaurakot too, a terracotta sealing with 'Sa-ka-na-sya' ('of the Sakyas') in
the Brahmi script has been reported. So, where exactly was Kapilavastu located
is a question that neither archaeology nor literature can still answer to everyone’s
satisfaction.
Cunningham
unravelled the mighty Dhameka Stupa at Sarnath in 1835, which was cylindrical
and quite unlike other hemi-spherical stupas. It marked the spot of the ‘Deer
Park’, where Buddha gave his first sermon after attaining his enlightenment.
The holiest of Buddhist sacred texts like the Vinaya Sutras and the
Dhamma-Chakka-Pavattana Sutta contain the Lord’s message of the four noble
truths that were delivered at this very spot. But it was James Prinsep’s
remarkable decipherment of the Brahmi script two years later in 1837 that
really shook history. The earliest messages of the Buddha and Buddhism were
transmitted orally but when they were first recorded the script used to convey
the Pali language was ancient or archaic Brahmi that was completely forgotten.
For centuries, Indians had come across strange epigraphs or carvings on rocks
and metal that none understood. What is more regrettable is that even the
Maurya, the first emperors of India and Ashoka the great were almost gone and
existed more in fables and legends rather that in written texts.
The mystery was unraveled by epigraphist and
scholar of numismatics, James Prinsep of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in
Kolkata. As editor of the Society’s
journal, he received all types of coins and copies of inscriptions from all
over India for decipherment, translation and publication. He was intrigued by
the strange unknown alphabets on the rock engravings of Allahabad and Delhi
that lay in front of him. From the middle of the 1830s, he embarked on a
serious mission to make sense of them. With extreme patience and his
extraordinary command over other foreign scripts, he managed finally to
decipher the words ‘Devanampiya Piyadasi’. This was the term by which Ashoka
was addressed in the sacred texts and translated as “Beloved of the Gods of
Gracious Mein”. Prinsep managed thereafter to decipher the Brahmi script in
which most Ashokan rock edicts were inscribed and he produced the most solid
form of historical evidence to establish that emperor Ashoka was truly a
historical character. He had been mentioned in the Buddhist chronicles of Sri
Lanka by the same epithet, but he could now be fixed with historical accuracy:
after a few hiccups. Prinsep assumed first that this Ashoka was a Sri Lankan
king who used the same epithet. It was only when George Turnour, who had
considerable knowledge of Lankan Buddhism, sent him correct evidence from Pali
sacred literature did Prinsep rectify
his error and declare this monarch as Ashoka the great of Indian legends.
After
so many years of speculation, Ashoka Maurya was finally demystified and firmly
established on the throne of Buddhism and India. This helped in joining the
dots of the missing grandeur of India’s real heritage, for none personifies the
plural soul of India more than him. If the Buddhist texts had not been there as
a back up there are grave doubts as to how well we would have succeeded in
establishing a credible history of ancient India. Cunningham’s subsequent
discovery of Sanchi Stupa in 1851 that had been lost in our memory was the most
educative of all our stupa sites. The restored stupa brings out the characters
from the Jataka Tales that embellish the gateways. In 1854, Cunningham
published the Bhilsa Topes which attempted to establish the history of Buddhism
based on whatever architecture and archaeology evidence was available. Himanshu
Prabha Ray mentions Sanchi with special emphasis in her significant work ‘The
Return of the Buddha: Ancient Symbols for a New Nation’.
Cunningham’s
doggedness led him to rediscover and re-excavate Bodh Gaya in 1861 that
Hamilton Buchanan had reported half a century ago as a place covered by a thick
forest.Cunningham’s further discoveries in 1862-63 were as important in the
treatment of historical amnesia. He, identified Ramnagar as the ancient ‘Ahich-chatra’;
Kosam as the great ‘Kausambi’ and Sahet Mahet as the historic ‘Sravasti’. British archaeologists could retrieve these
jewels from our past mainly on the basis of Buddhist textual evidence. The indefatigable Cunningham then moved to the
Bharhut Stupa and physically uprooted large number of stone carvings from this
site, in true imperial style, and transported them to Calcutta’s Indian Museum.
They served there as a ‘classroom’ and exhibition of the excellence of Buddhist
art and architecture. Succeeding generations of art historians, archaeologists,
museologists and connoisseurs derived their education from these eloquent
stones in Kolkata. Thus, within just eight decades, Buddhist architecture was
suddenly brought back into our memory and served to stoke a strong sense of
pride among Indians who were throughly demoralised by the systematic campaign
of British rulers to belittle their past. These structures and sculptures of
Buddhism compensated somewhat for the apparent lack of outstanding tangible
cultural heritage that stared at us
where ancient Indian history was concerned, except the few temples like those
of the Pallavas and Cholas, Vijayanagar and Jagannath.
Before
concluding, we need also to appreciate that though Buddhism disappeared from
large parts of India by the middle of the first millennium, the Buddhist Pala dynasty of Bengal
established their kingdom as late as the 8th century and ruled till
the 11th century. It created the ‘Pala School of Sculptural Art’ and
constructed massive architectural structures at Vikramshila Odantapuri and
elsewhere. In fact, the Buddhist Vihara of Somapura in Paharpur, Bangladesh,
that the Palas erected is considered to be the largest such structure in the
Indian sub-continent and is now a “World Heritage Site”. What is interesting is
that once Buddhism was rediscovered, however, several Indians of all religions
came forward to celebrate its glory. In fact, Buddhism was proudly declared as
an inseparable part of India and the Hindu cultural sphere, forgetting the
centuries of persecution that Brahmanism had unleashed upon that religion — that
managed to wipe off its grandeur and memory so effectively that they had to be
rediscovered with tremendous effort.
The
revival of Buddhism in the 20th century was also due to great social
reformers like Jyotiba Phule and Babasaheb Ambedkar. Even Rabindranath Tagore’s
creative genius drew inspiration from Buddha’s teachings on social equality and
to him Buddha was the greatest human being. The poet laureate chose to
prostrate himself before the image of the Buddha at Bodh Gaya which is the only
time in his life that he ever did so. Tagore made a profound observation on the
8th May, 1935, the Buddha Purnima Day: “Materials of different
shades of Indian thought and culture are confined in Buddhist literature and
due to the lack of intimacy with them, the entire history of India remains
unfulfilled. Being convinced of it, cannot a few youths of our country dedicate
themselves for the restoration of the Buddhist heritage and make it a mission
in life?” Since then, a lot of research into the greatness of Indian Buddhism
has been undertaken and the departments of Archelology, Numismatics, Ancient
Indian History, Pali, Buddhist Studies and the like of many universities and
both the central and state governments have re-discovered a lot. But we are yet
to come up and declare in broad terms the debt that the discipline of Ancient
Indian history and India as a nation owes to Buddhism in enriching our legacy
with magnificent architecture, especially when Hinduism has so little of it
between the third century BCE and the twelfth century in the Current Era. One
cannot imagine India without Ashoka and had it not been for Buddhist records,
he would have remained lost for ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment