KALINGA

Kalinga is so pivotal to Ashoka’s story that it warrants a chapter all to itself. It is, of course, also a key event in the larger Mauryan tale but what makes this entire episode stand out in terms of historical narratives is that it is the only instance when the victor laments his triumph; where instead of indulging in chest-thumping and bragging—completely justified under the circumstances—he mourns his deed and, furthermore, ensures that he records his ‘mistake’ for posterity in every which way, on durable materials that will survive to speak of it long after he is gone. There are no parallel precedents of this sort in Indian or world history, for that matter, which makes Ashoka’s behaviour in the aftermath of the Kalinga war pioneering in every sense of the term.

Rather, the opposite prevailed—one has only to take a look at the Allahabad pillar inscription of the Gupta ruler, Samudragupta, or the Aihole inscription of the Chalukyan ruler, Pulakesin II, to know what eulogies constructed around military victories are all about and why they were inextricably connected with any ruler’s glory. Ruing the bloodshed caused by battle is a popular poetic theme (although the glory associated with the latter is most-often highlighted) but Ashoka’s penitence and his desire to be remembered through the ages for this one ‘failure’ rather than his several other triumphs makes his personality even more intriguing than ever—a quixotic mix of humility and arrogance, of self-effacement and confidence, of acid honesty and candidness laced with boastfulness. What a challenging case study for a modern-day psychologist—and almost certainly an enigma for his peers!

But let us begin at the beginning. Ashoka’s desire to bring every bit of the land under the Mauryan yoke was completely understandable. Kalinga, on the eastern coast (in what is now part of modern Orissa and Andhra Pradesh), and lying strategically between the Mahanadi and the Godavari, was a key point in the sea traffic between Vanga (Bengal) and the south. Moreover, it was one among the recalcitrant, untidy parts of the country that still held out and by virtue of doing so, taunted him and his ambition of supreme control. In desiring Kalinga and complete power, Ashoka was adhering to the time-honoured dictates of rulership in the ancient world, memorably endorsed by great Greek writers like Herodotus and Homer, for instance: to go forth and conquer was the first and foremost rule for any ruler worth his salt, and if you were just going to loll about on your throne and stay content with the territories you already possessed, then you were a sad apology for a leader. All around him—if one can stretch the dates somewhat—great rulers were scrambling up and down their realms, positively aching to conquer new dominions and carve places of honour for themselves in the annals of history thereby. What was happening in Rome and Persia and Macedon were cases in point.

More importantly, this conquering lust was also perfectly in tune with what the Arthashastra prescribed. Kautilya’s world was one of constant challenges posed to and for thrones in an interminable wrangle for power. The idea was to keep expanding your realm through strategically-conquered territories and to continue doing so for you couldn’t ever rest on your laurels. The alternative was too horrific to contemplate: loss of dominion and inevitable enslavement. So war was welcome, even necessary. And, of course, let us not discount the ubiquitous, overweeningly male desire for acquisition—something that underlay the very definition of masculinity. You are a powerful king? Well, then, prove it. How much land and goods and women can you acquire? How else do you justify being on the throne?

Nayanjot Lahiri provides the perfectly apposite example of the Assyrian king, Ashurnasirpal II, in this regard. In around the ninth century BCE, one of his minor campaigns won him a booty that included forty chariots with men and horses, four hundred and sixty horses, a hundred and twenty pounds of silver, a hundred and twenty pounds of gold, six thousand pounds of lead, eighteen thousand pounds of iron, a thousand vessels of copper, two thousand heads of cattle, five thousand sheep, fifteen thousand slaves, and the defeated ruler’s sister. And if this was the result of one of his smaller campaigns, it boggles the mind to consider what he might have secured from one of his major ones.

Ashoka went about planning for the Kalingan campaign with the usual close attention to detail and logistics that such a military undertaking warranted. This involved a careful assessment of Kalinga’s forces, as also an understanding of its terrain. Winter, the optimal season for launching an attack, was when the Mauryan forces set out. Ashoka does not mention the size of his army in any of his inscriptions but we can muster a fair picture from what we know of his ancestors’ military campaigns. As with Chandragupta’s forces—and later, Bindusara’s—Ashoka’s army definitely had archers, foot-soldiers with spears, army commanders and horses and elephants, among other fighting units. As noted earlier, elephants were considered one of the most effective weapons of destruction in any fighting force in the ancient world not only on account of their size and fearsome build but also the simple fact of their ability to run amok on the battlefield, killing more enemy soldiers at one go than, say, an entire platoon of foot-soldiers could manage. Buttressing their destructive potential was the usual ammunition of maces, swords and massive stone catapults, among others.

In the six or so weeks that it would have taken this army to progress from Pataliputra to Kalinga, it would not be fair to assume that the Kalingan force sat quivering and quaking and waiting for doom to descend on its head courtesy the famed Mauryan force. The description of the numbers that eventually died, in Ashoka’s Rock Edict 13 (mentioned earlier), suggests that the Kalingan force was considerable in size. And although the resounding victory was Ashoka’s, ‘defeat’, as Lahiri eloquently phrases it, ‘is snatched from the jaws of victory’. All conventions of state propaganda are contravened and the triumph is recorded as a disaster, whereby ‘the emperor weeps when he ought to swagger’. This, in Lahiri’s view, is ‘a staggering reversal of the very conception of kingship’, associated, as mentioned earlier, with self-aggrandisement and boastful claims, with military triumph being seen as synonymous with manhood and masculinity, the underlying essence of a king.

While we are on the subject of gender identities, one is tempted to make a diversion here and note that there is a category of ‘warrior queens’ or virangana in history of which much is made because these women rulers fought battles like their male counterparts and thereby expedited their acceptance into society as honorary males. Therefore, they are viewed as largely non-threatening to the patriarchal order as opposed to, say, a ruling queen like Didda of Kashmir (CE 980/1-1003) who does not wage actual battles on account of her lameness but rules very well and capably in other ways. There is a whole lot of confused speculation on whether she was a woman or, in fact, a man on account of her ambition and general ruthlessness. So whether military triumph is essential to the identity of powerful women or not remains a contentious issue that most historians try to skirt around the edges of or conveniently ignore altogether.

Back to Ashoka and his astonishing volte-face. If one looks long and hard into the Indian past, there is a sort of lukewarm parallel that can be made with a traditionally chest-thumping context and its completely unexpected reversion thereof. This pertains to the Uttara-ramacharita, written by a poet, Bhavabhuti, in the eighth century CE in the court of Kanauj. Those familiar with the tale of the epic Ramayana will know that its writer, Valmiki, portrayed Rama as so ideal a king that he did not bat an eyelid when he exiled his pregnant wife, Sita, on the basis of some scurrilous rumours regarding her chastity. After all, his duty towards his subjects was paramount—indeed, the very essence of ideal kingship—and if he had to sacrifice his personal desire at the altar of kingly obligation, so be it.

Bhavabhuti turns the epic on its head in his magnificent reinterpretation: Rama wanders around in a frantic state, bitterly chastising himself and his precipitate decision, and calling himself a murderer for visiting such an awful fate upon his wife. He would do anything, he declares, to recall his decision and bring her back to court, and he laments the fit of madness that provoked it, in the first place. At one point, he even looks sarcastically at his arms and says they should be lopped off because they belong to a killer and were the architects of his order, so to speak. So here is a king who rues his royal order, is desperate to revoke it and has no qualms in critiquing his own actions. Admittedly, Bhavabhuti’s version has not gone down well with diehard Ramayana admirers who would rather stick to the original portrayal of the strict, austere king rather than one who, in fact, cares deeply about his woman, and would not mind angering and alienating his people if it meant he could have her back.

Incidentally, Bhavabhuti’s other path-breaking work, the Malati-madhava (again, a retelling thereof and a completely charming one besides), features a remarkable woman protagonist, the Buddhist nun, Kamandaki, who completely subverts all feminine stereotypes of helplessness and passivity by ruthlessly manipulating all the (largely male) characters and calmly achieving what she had set out to at the beginning. As you can imagine, Bhavabhuti and his works were not particularly successful—either during his time or later—and although much has been made of his beautiful prose and his excellent metaphors and so on, no one exactly points to him and says, ‘There is an example of a gender-sensitive writer, one much ahead of his times!’ Writers of his ilk have always enjoyed an odd sort of reputation where there is some amount of tentative, barely-there acknowledgement of what lies at the core of their texts but a sheepish and insistent focus on everything else besides. And Bhavabhuti, when it comes right down to it, has committed the worst of the cardinal sins—to tamper with sacrosanct material and provide his own slant to it, which will always (whether then or now!) have the orthodox up in arms and snarling in fury.

There is a sort of similarity that can be construed with the Ashokan context whereby you expect a certain amount of male bravado and vainglory in a particular situation but are stumped by the exact opposite—an outpouring of penitence and contrition, a regret so loud that it borders on the maudlin. Bloodshed in the context of battle, as noted earlier, was nothing unusual in the ancient world. Hordes were regularly decimated by one conqueror or the other in their attempts to enlarge the realms they ruled over. But picture for one instant, if you will, one of these very men standing on the battlefield, battered in body, perhaps, but the implications of his triumph just beginning to sink in. The pride is tangible; so is the reek of blood and fear and the stomach-churning sight of disembowelled bodies. Strong men have been felled by less. After all, who can possibly quantify the exact, defining moment when a person’s mind goes into complete reversal?

Literature is rife with examples of people pulling back from the brink of goodness or wickedness due to some trigger or the other. In Ashoka’s case (and if we go by the sense of his confession, the only surviving contemporary account of the calamity), the tramp of over 900 km from Pataliputra to Kalinga, which was meant to be a martial pilgrimage of sorts, suddenly turned into the worst sort of excess that he could perpetrate, the ultimate horror, the sublime defeat—and, thus, to the realisation that his remorse needed to take a much larger form than a mere sentiment.

This seismic shift within him caused him to take a second birth, as it were—as a caring, benevolent king for whom his subjects’ welfare and happiness was paramount. That he turned to the Buddhist principles in his hour of grief is not unusual or surprising—and in saying so, we are according more agency to his Buddhist wife, Devi, than otherwise acceded. It is well within the bounds of possibility that he had more than a nodding acquaintance with the religion’s tenets through her. One suspects, though, that even if this was expressly recorded, at the time, it would be brushed aside. A woman behind such an earth-shattering transformation? Perish the thought!

What, after all, explains Ashoka’s extreme reaction to the Kalinga war? Several explanations have been offered, in this regard, but they are all inadequate or incomplete in one way or the other. Attributing it to his active participation in the fighting does not hold muster because he was already inured to violence—that is, if we believe the stories regarding his early days on the throne. So there was clearly something unusual about the Kalinga war, something that removed it from the usual run-of-the-mill clashes and placed it in a separate bracket altogether.

Upinder Singh’s musings are very helpful, in this regard. She wonders whether there were changes in the nature of warfare, at the time, involving higher levels of military deployment, higher casualties and mass deportation of captives, perhaps even of non-combatant citizenry. By extension, she points to the ‘rhetorical numbers’ mentioned at the beginning of Rock Edict 13 (Ashoka’s ‘Kalingan edict’, if you will) as implying that it was one of the most massive and brutal campaigns in ancient Indian history, with its scale of devastation turning the king’s own stomach.

Alternatively, could Ashoka have lost someone dear to him in this war? The loss of a son or a close friend could have forced him to stop and consider what he had done. Or the wheels of change might already have been turning in his mind: he may have become more sensitive to violence the more he heard about the Buddha’s lessons, impelling him to make this powerful anti-war proclamation whereby in his future political philosophy, war and military victory had no place in the moral empire that he sought to build (although he would take action against rebellious forest people, for one, if they provoked him—which we will come to later. There is no mention of pain or suffering stemming from a possible conflict here!). These are not mere words or a fleeting, intangible feeling; Ashoka follows it up with highly concrete action.

In Singh’s interesting view, while Ashoka’s reaction to the Kalinga war is seen as remorse (anusochana/anutapa), the tone of Rock Edict 13 veers, instead, towards grief and a subsequent firm resolve. Also, despite his expressing his sorrow at the war’s aftermath, he does not seek forgiveness from anyone, although he is careful not to display his feelings in Kalinga itself (or at Sannati in Karnataka, another place that experienced his army’s impact), perhaps from a combination of empathy, shame and practicality. Therefore, in Jauguda and Dhauli (also in Odisha), the rock edicts bear instructions to the mahamatras to execute his instructions regarding the people’s spiritual welfare so that the denizens of Kalinga may live in mutual peace. Meanwhile, that he is like their father and cares for them like his children is the message (inscribed on Rock Edict 2 for people of ‘unconquered territories’) that Ashoka intended for those who lived south and east of Kalinga, whose lands he had yet to conquer. Although he had brutalised Kalinga itself, he wanted them to understand that he was a changed man with a different weapon of conquest.

Accordingly, Rock Edict 13 announces the deployment of the metaphor of victory for a new purpose—that of dhamma-vijaya or victory through dhamma. And success immediately follows: Ashoka claims to have won precisely such a victory in the realm of the Greek king, Antiyoka (Antiochus II Theos of Syria); in the kingdoms of Turamaya (Ptolemy II Philadelphos of Egypt), Antikini (Antigonus Gonatus of Macedonia), Maka (Magas of Cyrene in north Africa) and Alikasudara (either Alexander of Epirus or Alexander of Corinth); and in the dominion of the Cholas and Pandyas in the south, stretching all the way to Tamraparni (Sri Lanka).

Within his own realm, the same satisfying result was apparently seen among the Yavanas, Kambojas, Nabhakas, Nabhapanktis, Bhojas, Pitinikas, Andhras and Pulindas (the first two were in the northwest; the Bhojas, Andhras and Pulindas were in the trans-Vindhyan region; the rest are tough to identify). Irrespective of whether this was Ashoka patting himself on the back in a somewhat delusional manner, Singh notes that it refers to a highly unusual and unprecedented sort of interaction with other kingdoms. It overturns the conventional templates for warfare and diplomacy.

In her search for possible parallels, Singh draws an intriguing one between Ashoka (and his Rock Edict 13) and the Achaemenid ruler, Cyrus, whose inscription on what is called the Cyrus Cylinder describes his conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE. Cyrus claims Babylon with, it seems, a bloodless victory, declares himself a universal emperor and holds forth on the necessity of military campaigns, having established peace after a successful military career. The similarities are restricted to, broadly, the description of a notable huge military campaign and the idea of a universal empire.

Here are the dissimilarities: Cyrus describes a bloody war as a bloodless one while Ashoka talks of the death and suffering caused by his; Cyrus fights several battles and dubs himself a universal emperor while Ashoka fights one battle (as far as we know!) and adopts this very sobriquet on account of his propagation of virtue. Singh also points to a lukewarm similarity between Ashoka’s idea of righteous warfare and that of the Mohists in ancient China (between the fifth and third centuries BCE) who advocated disarmament. He was, quite obviously, therefore, in a league of his own!

The mainstream Buddhist textual tradition is very well-crafted with regard to Ashoka’s transformation because the juxtaposition of the pre-Kalinga Ashoka’s cruel and sadistic deeds with his drastic change in personality and motives post-Kalinga makes the event even more startling, dramatic and memorable. The violently ruthless emperor abruptly transitioning to a wisely compassionate ruler is a visceral moment; shocking, even, in its intensity. The stage is, therefore, carefully set for Ashoka to step forward and play his part as the ideal Buddhist ruler in the Ashokavadana (which, incidentally, does not hint at either pacifism or the renunciation of war while discussing his life!). A somewhat different picture of Ashoka’s change emerges in the Sri Lankan Buddhist texts, one in which his early regnal years saw a spiritual yearning in him. Here, the narrative is crafted with equal care to demonstrate the inherent superiority of his Buddhist spiritual preceptor—Ashoka’s eventual choice. This is why he turned to Buddhism in the first place, so the tradition implies. Otherwise, he might as well have opted for Jainism with its broadly similar precepts.

If we go by the Dipavamsa, then (whose version is told in relation to his son, Mahinda/Mahendra, who brought the Buddhist tenets to Sri Lanka), Ashoka, seized by an inner restlessness, began to scout about for a way to assuage it soon after he ascended the Mauryan throne. Mahinda was apparently ten years of age when his father killed his own brothers and presumably indulged in further bloodbaths for four years until he finally became the king. (The Mahavamsa, incidentally, makes only a coy reference to his initial cruelty but the writing on the wall, in this regard, is quite clear.) Thereafter—and clearly at a loose end—he honoured the Pasandas for three years, a term that covered a motley crew from different religious sects and ascetic persuasions. There was a catch, though—in return for the pampering, they needed to answer ‘an exceedingly difficult question’ that Ashoka posed to them. What this question was is, annoyingly, passed over by the text that, instead, confines itself to the inability of the examinees to answer it.

Enlightenment eventually came to the frustrated Ashoka in the form of a young Buddhist monk, Nigrodha (referred to earlier), whose very demeanour impressed the former. Drawn to this serene yet fearless man, Ashoka proceeded to lap up his sermon on earnestness (‘the way to immortality’, in his words, indifference being ‘the way to death’), and made him a donation on the spot of large quantities of silver and a daily rice ration. And so, Ashoka’s switch to Buddhism, when it happened, was as easy as that and did not involve battlefield repentances or gory scenes or anything larger-than-life—or so the text implies. It also helps that the first set of edicts issued by Ashoka gives us the gist of Nigrodha’s lecture and the importance of zeal, which the emperor is said to have realised in slow stages. Romila Thapar agrees: his was not a case of ‘a somewhat eccentric or overnight conversion’, she says.

Lahiri argues, however, that Ashoka’s transformation had very little to do with the spiritual realm. It was a common kingly pursuit that became the starting point of his metamorphosis: war and conquest, as noted above, were mandatory requirements for any successful ruler, involving, as they did, economic considerations. Thus, by undertaking them—and thereby adhering to the Arthashastra’s dictums for kingship—Ashoka would be able to promote his own undertakings ‘concerning forts, water-works, trade routes, settling on waste land, mines, material forests and elephant forests, and to injure these undertakings of the enemy.’ It was in this spirit and with these imperatives in mind that Ashoka planned and undertook the campaign to conquer Kalinga. His response, in its aftermath, was also part of the strategy of kingship except that he chose to reinvent it altogether: a compassionate and caring king emerges and proclaims this aloud for the world (or rather, his world) to hear for the first time. Also, his assertion is underlined with cold, hard evidence.

And in both these things, he had no parallel.