THE WOMEN IN ASHOKA’S LIFE
If your hair stood on end when you read about Ashoka burning the denizens of his harem during his early days as ruler, you must have already formed the impression that he was (at least, initially) cold and ruthless, a complete stranger to the gentler passions of romance, and probably entirely incapable of making a woman happy with protestations and attestations of love. The sources beg to differ, though. It appears that Ashoka was entirely capable of being smitten—and that, too, more than once. Let us begin with the oft-told tale of Devi, a brief but alluring one. The daughter of a prominent merchant in the city of Vidisha (modern Besnagar) in central India, Ashoka met her—and the complicated ramifications of love for the first time in his young life—when he was sent as Bindusara’s viceroy to Avanti in the Malwa region.
A reminder here—this is the same area that was ruled by Pradyota who had those strange skirmishes with Bimbisara, the Magadhan ruler, and his formidable son, Ajatashatru. In fact, Ajatashatru was inclined to be a bit nervous about Pradyota’s designs, which is why he apparently strengthened Rajagriha’s fortifications, in the first place. That anyone could get under the Machiavellian Ajatashatru’s skin to such an extent seems slightly farfetched, though!
Very little is known about Devi except that she caught Ashoka’s eye, presumably on account of her beauty, whereupon they married and moved on to Ujjayini, his base while administering Avanti. Unmoved by the exciting and clearly whirlwind nature of their courtship, however, the Buddhist literary sources stodgily mention her son, Mahinda (Mahendra) and daughter, Samghamita (Sanghamitra), that resulted from this union. Then they move on to the next item of interest in their narrative without any of the whys and wherefores thereof.
And so, we are left with disappointingly meagre information about this affair of the heart except that it probably happened around 282 BCE, a decade or so before Bindusara’s death. That the children were born two years apart in Ujjayini indicates that Ashoka stayed there for quite a while. Whether this was due to his fascination with Devi or with Avanti in general remains unclear. What we do know, though, is that both Mahendra and Sanghamitra subsequently played a pivotal role as Ashoka’s emissaries in spreading Buddhism to Sri Lanka—and so, Devi’s sole purpose, as far as the Buddhist tradition is concerned, is in providing him with offspring.
There is a bit of controversy regarding their marriage and Devi’s legal status, however.3 Some historians feel that as a specific marriage ceremony is not spoken of in the Dipavamsa and the fact that Devi did not become Ashoka’s chief queen makes one conclude they were living in sin and Devi’s tainted status thereby barred her from the exalted post. It is most unlikely, though, that the wilful Ashoka would have cowered behind some prescribed rule and so, he probably did marry Devi and give her children a measure of prominence but eventually preferred someone else by his side. After all, rulers are notoriously fickle with lamentably short attention spans. It could, equally, be that Devi tired of Ashoka’s weird, mercurial mood swings in time and preferred to stay as far away from him as she could. Such is, as poets will assure us, the path of most wild infatuations and passions—they eventually fizzle out.
Another question that arises here is whether Devi was a practising Buddhist and, by extension, whether she inspired Ashoka, in some intangible way, to adopt her religion at a point of personal crisis. Incidentally, most secondary historical narratives are acutely hysterical about women’s piety—or the lack of it—while describing royal personages down the ages. Let us take the case of Didda (mentioned earlier) who ruled Kashmir from CE 980/1–1003 and had been in charge behind the scenes, in any case, for a couple of decades before her formal ascension to the throne. She was a formidable ruler by any standards and administered Kashmir with an iron hand. This involved a fair amount of blood and gore, her viewing her own family members with a jaundiced eye when it came to their ability to rule, and finally sweeping them aside to mount the throne herself as being the best bet for the land. Thereafter, she is supposed to have given Kashmir a long period of stability and prosperity, and to have brooked no nonsense or dissension from any (male) quarter.
‘Yes, but did she visit temples?’ ‘Did she pray?’ ‘Was she a good person?’ Was she everything a woman ought to be?’—thus, unbelievingly, shriek the purveyors of Kashmir’s history from the earliest times to the present, desperately clinging to the hope that Didda was not really that despicable thing: a contravention of a feminine stereotype. When the evidence stares them in the face, though, they withdraw in a unanimous and coldly disapproving huddle. ‘She was not really a woman!’ they say, heaping her with other wonderful epithets: ‘notorious’ and ‘dissolute’ being prominent among them. Didda did not particularly help her case by building a series of religious and secular structures all over Kashmir, and then blithely naming them after herself so as to perpetuate her power and presence more firmly on the physical landscape. And this is just one of the numerous cases from our collective past.
Here is another. Kanauj, in the seventh century CE, was associated with the golden Harsha/Harshavardhana (CE 606–648) who apparently made it the most powerful kingdom in north India and, simultaneously, his contemporaries jealous and miserable. Much is made of his religious choices, of his supposed conversion from Shaivism to Buddhism, at some point, and there is a great deal of frenzied speculation on his motives thereof. Hardly any attention is paid to his younger sister, Rajyashri, who, incidentally, enabled him to get the throne of Kanauj, probably ruled it jointly with him for a period of time, was otherwise very vocal in court debates, accompanied Harsha on military campaigns—and who might very well have influenced her brother’s religious proclivities, in the first place, for she was a Buddhist herself and actively encouraged discussions on religion, notably with Xuanzang, the visiting Chinese pilgrim, who has recorded her interest in this regard. But, of course, such a vibrant woman figure must immediately be conventionalised and so, there is a rush to portray her as a weak, weeping creature who needed her magnificent older brother to prop her up and take decisions on her behalf, while all other evidence of her influence and presence, in the political and religious sphere, is routinely ignored.
So here we have two examples—of a queen who was not particularly moral or religious and of another who was vocal about her religious choices—but both have been invisibilised or trivialised. The writing on the wall is clear for women in history: be pious and/or dependent in your religious choices and we will include you in the narrative; challenge this stereotype and we will condemn you to the shadows. Back to Devi and the facts concerning her religion. The places associated with her bear strong Buddhist connections. Vidisha, for instance, has an intrinsic link to the Buddhist monuments of Sanchi. Furthermore, local traditions link the largest stupa at Ujjayini, the Kanipura, with Devi as having been built for her; it has been dubbed the Vaishya Tekri (Vaishya caste’s mound) in local parlance: Devi’s father was a merchant, a typically Vaishya occupation. In addition, the Buddhist Pali texts imply that she was following the doctrine of Buddhism much before her royal husband converted to it. The Mahavamsa talks of her taking her son Mahinda, by then a monk, uphill to the Vedisagiri vihara (Sanchi, in all probability), suggesting that she was a Buddhist and associated with it.
Devi might even have been a Buddhist when she first met Ashoka in Vidisha and Cupid struck. And, quite possibly therefore, she could have been the factor behind his turning to Buddhism, his spiritual metamorphosis, after the Kalinga massacre. And so, Devi’s sole purpose remains procreation and Ashoka is left to achieve enlightenment all on his own with, perhaps, some helpful nudges provided by men. Heaven forbid that we should actually show a woman influencing a man in a very decisive way! In any case, Devi’s little paradise was rudely interrupted ten years into Ashoka’s sojourn in Ujjayini when his father, Bindusara, fell ill and he promptly raced back to Pataliputra and the throne like a bloodhound on the trail.
Ashoka was not immune to the temptation of graffiti, though, while in the throes of love, according to Charles Allen. Panguraria, near Devi’s town of Vidisha, was apparently witness to the rambles of this besotted couple early in their courtship—and Ashoka clearly felt an irresistible urge to record this fact on his return to this place many years later, now in the throes of nostalgia. High up on the face of a rock shelter, carved casually—and, therefore, clumsily—with a chisel and stick in bold letters is the following legend: ‘The king, who (now, after consecration) is called Piyadassi, (once) came to this place on a pleasure tour while he was still a (ruling) prince, living together with his unwedded consort.’ And thus was an unguarded royal moment, when the cares of administration took a backseat to romantic remembrances and simpler days, captured for posterity!
And then, of course, there is Karuvaki, that powerful woman figure in his life, so earnestly depicted in celluloid by the green-eyed actress, Kareena Kapoor, and, therefore, an aspect of this period that the public at large is aware of, not least because Shahrukh Khan, the permanent Bollywood idol, essayed the role of the emperor. As noted earlier, movie versions of historical figures (and Asoka is no exception!) are apt to contain a whole lot of fiction and infinitesimal fact but the manner in which they are lapped up by eager viewers is, undoubtedly, heartening.
It also apparently makes some of them resident experts in the field, such that they will profess to know anything and everything about Ashoka’s life—and, by extension, the Mauryan period—on the strength of this three-hour tale alone, where, among other things, the emperor’s heart is shown to belong only to the feisty Karuvaki. (They might even extend their newly-acquired expertise to embrace all aspects of the ancient period in Indian history—and from there, it is a mere step to covering the entire past, which is why you have legions of people claiming to know this and that about history and ferociously challenging anyone, even academics, who would deem otherwise. But this is neither here nor there!)
So what does historical evidence say about Karuvaki? For a start, she was definitely powerful and had no qualms in stating so—this comes through very clearly in the inscription known as the Queen’s Edict on the Allahabad pillar (alluded to earlier), where she declares that whatever gifts have been made by her, ‘the second queen’, such as mango groves, gardens, alms-houses and the like, were to be registered in her name. It ends with a deceptively mild statement: ‘This (is) (the request) of the second queen, the mother of Tivala, the Karuvaki’, yet it is evident that she wants to be known—for the present and, presumably, posterity—as the donor of the gifts. This is definitely not the statement of a shy, shrinking personage who wants to avoid the limelight while donating for noble, pious reasons. No, this is someone who has a will of her own and wants a specific act of philanthropy to be regarded and recorded as hers alone.
And so, we come to the other powerful woman figure in Ashoka’s life, Tissarakkha or Tishyarakshita (depending on whether you go by Pali or Sanskrit accounts, respectively). This character possessed shades of the wily Ajatashatru but went several steps further in terms of vengefulness and scheming and general unpleasantness to justifiably earn the epithet of Lady Macbeth that Nayanjot Lahiri, for one, bestows on her. To understand her story, though, one has to first move off at a tangent and examine the tale of the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha is recorded as having achieved enlightenment and, consequently, of great significance to Ashoka.
The Mahavamsa talks of a sapling of this sacred tree having been brought to Sri Lanka in the eighteenth year of Ashoka’s reign by his daughter, Sanghamitra, who had carefully carried it all the way from the eastern Indian port of Tamralipti, vanquishing certain snakes or nagas enroute who wanted to lay their hands on it, so to speak. It was planted in the Maha-megha-vanarama and thrived, thereafter, for a long time. But what of the original, the one dear to Ashoka’s heart, and why and how is it connected with Tishyarakshita? Ah, there lies a twisted tale, indeed!
The sorry saga of Ashoka’s Bodhi tree seems to have started with the death of Asamdhimitta/Asandhimitra, his ‘dear consort’ and ardent devotee of the Buddha, in 241 BCE, a year after Ashoka issued his Seventh Pillar Edict, and the twenty-ninth year of his reign. We know very little about this chief queen, clearly a more suitable choice for the post than Devi and probably hailing, as Charles Allen speculates, from a small kingdom north of Delhi—Assandh boasts of the biggest Ashokan stupa in India. Ashoka seems to have been devastated by Asandhimitra’s passing away and his state of mourning lasted a fairly long while.
After around eight years, however, he began to revive a bit and take an interest in his surroundings, which is when his eye fell on the beautiful but vengeful Tishyarakshita who soon took the place of his beloved Asamdhimitta in his affections and at court. Thrilled at her newfound power and status, Tishyarakshita was enjoying life until she discovered that Ashoka always sent the most precious jewels to some Bodhi, not her. This appallingly ignorant woman promptly assumed that Bodhi was a rival and decided to tackle her accordingly.
The Ashokavadana reveals, in dark detail, Tishyarakshita’s dastardly scheme of paying a sorceress to destroy Bodhi. The latter, clearly not as clueless as her royal employer, tied a thread around the Bodhi tree and chanted a spell to hurry things along. And so, the tree began to droop and wither. This dismal turn of events had an equally dismal effect on Ashoka whereby he fainted and had to be strenuously revived only for him to announce that he would die if Bodhi perished. Tishyarakshita, still inexplicably clueless—and this really does not speak well for her general level of awareness!—consoled Ashoka with an enchanting prospect: Bodhi may die but she, on the other hand, would always remain with him and give him pleasure. An irresistible prospect, no doubt, but Tishyarakshita’s delusion hit Ashoka like a ton of bricks. One can picture him painstakingly explaining the truth to her (‘Bodhi is not a woman; it is a tree!’) and the light of knowledge finally dawning in her eye.
And so, Tishyarakshita instructed the sorceress to revive the tree and all was well. Or was it? While the Mahavamsa implies gloom and doom not just for the emperor but also for Buddhism in India (the story in question being highly metaphorical in content and intent), the Ashokavadana suggests that everything continued as before (in both spheres) after this unfortunate glitch. However, the writing on the wall was now clear: if Ashoka could not even protect his precious Bodhi tree, he was no longer in control of anything. Thus, Tishyarakshita becomes synonymous with his end—as in the time-honoured literary tradition of associating women with the downfall and destruction of men.
This, incidentally, is a trope that is faithfully echoed by an alarming number of historians, past and present. Is the end of a king and/or a dynasty near? Quick, look for a woman. It’s bound to be her fault! (It could also be the other way around. Is a woman anywhere on the scene? Oh, dear, the king and/or the dynasty is bound to fall!). There is another ludicrous speculation that Karuvaki’s edict indicates a weakening of Ashoka’s control as it was not engraved on his orders but seemingly issued by the queen herself. No speculation, for instance, that the queen in question had an independent and palpable presence in court, and could very well issue her own donative inscription, but much moaning, instead, about Ashoka’s implied decline!
There are two more related and hair-raising incidents involving Tishyarakshita that would make anyone’s blood run cold. The first of these pertained to Kunala, Ashoka’s son by a Queen Padmavati (another entity that we do not know much about). Born as Dharma-vivardhana, his eyes were apparently beautiful like that of the Himalayan bird kunala, which is why Ashoka promptly gave him the same name. Kunala, by all accounts, was a pleasant, sensible personality, inclined towards spirituality and, in fact, entirely suited to follow his father to the throne. Tishyarakshita, though, suddenly fell madly in love—or, rather, lust—with this hapless prince (actually, with his eyes, the Ashokavadana claims) and had no qualms in telling him so.
Aghast, Kunala explained that he regarded her as a mother and that this was not an appropriate move on her part. The spurned Tishyarakshita was neither embarrassed nor chastened; instead, she told the miserable Kunala that he was not destined to last much longer and began plotting his end with diabolic glee. However, much to her chagrin, no readymade opportunity presented itself, so she sat about biding her time. Kunala departed soon after to quell a rebellion in Taxila and that was that.
At this point, Ashoka was suddenly felled by a violent and gruesome sickness in that ‘excrement’ apparently started issuing from his mouth, while, at the same time, something undefinable began to ooze out of all his pores. The royal physicians were baffled and the emperor, inclined to gloomy thoughts in his old age, promptly decided that he was going to die, and asked for Kunala to be recalled from Taxila and ascend the throne as his successor. This turn of events would have dismayed anyone in Tishyarakshita’s place but she was made of sterner stuff. Coldly aware of what would happen to her if Kunala returned and told the truth, she set about tackling the problem with methodical ruthlessness. She first banned all Ashoka’s doctors from treating him (which probably made them relieved!) and then asked for anyone suffering from a similar problem to be brought to her.
Tishyarakshita’s orders were obeyed with alacrity and soon after, she was face-to-face with a man whose ailment mirrored Ashoka’s. Now any normal person would have quailed at the task that she set herself but, as we have observed, Tishyarakshita, although somewhat lacking in awareness and discernment, was neither squeamish nor cowardly. So she had the poor man killed and then split open his stomach, examining his entrails with frank (or should that be ghoulish?) interest. Looking at it dispassionately, the Mauryan period was rife with post-mortems of different kinds, if you strictly believe the written word, that is. We have Kautilya trying to extricate the unborn Bindusara from his mother’s womb and now we have Tishyarakshita crouching over her victim’s belly. Clearly, men and women of iron stomachs, these Mauryans!
What Tishyarakshita found in the man’s stomach was disgusting but revelatory: a massive worm that was causing all the flows and oozing with its movements. What she did next was a triumph of science and clinical experimentation: when peppers and ginger yielded no result, she gave onion to the worm, which promptly died and passed out of the body through the intestinal tract. And so, she presented Ashoka with an onion and told him to eat it, which he promptly did, its raw pungency being a clearly more savoury alternative to having an alien creature in his innards!
His miraculous recovery, thereafter, was lauded by all (incidentally, further cementing the onion’s reputation for being a wonder food, although it took a long, long while for certain categories of people to approach it without recoiling in distaste). The grateful emperor decided—in yet another time-honoured literary tradition (recall the Ramayana!)—to grant his wifely saviour a boon and we already know, therefore, that disaster hovered in the air. Tishyarakshita, determined to wring every last drop from this opportunity, asked to be made the ruler for a week, and a besotted and physically weak Ashoka agreed without pausing to reflect on the strangeness of her request.
Accordingly, an order was sent soon after to the people of Taxila in her name, instructing them to put out Kunala’s eyes. Initially baffled but later presuming that some obscure wisdom underlay it, the citizens obeyed the royal missive and blinded Kunala, whereupon he returned to Pataliputra to expose her villainy. Years of calming Buddhist thought had clearly not extinguished Ashoka’s natural inclination to rage, which now rose within him like a roused monster to turn its full power on the villainous Tishyarakshita. The texts tell us that he vowed to tear her eyes out, rip open her body with rakes, impale her on a spit, cut off her nose with a saw and her tongue with a razor, and kill her with poison—a distinct echo of the young Ashoka who had allegedly devised outrageous ways to torture his victims.
But this was a different time and a different place and Kunala, horrified at his father’s bloodthirsty designs that so militated against his spiritual coil, urged him to forgive Tishyarakshita. This generosity of spirit apparently—and miraculously—resulted in Kunala’s sight being restored but he was unable to protect his assaulter from his father’s wrath. She was burned to death and, to top it all, the confused citizens of Taxila were executed for their part in the deed.
All ends well—or, actually, not, in some ways. Kunala seems not to have recovered from this incident (whether physically or mentally is unclear) because he is now no longer Ashoka’s successor; his son, Sampadin, is declared the heir. Ashoka, now rid of murderous wives and their machinations, throws himself even more wholeheartedly into donations, sending gold all over the place to different monasteries, until Sampadin and the ministers step in to save the state treasury from this indiscriminate depletion. He manages to thwart them, though, by discovering another, clever way of donation: giving away his gold, silver and copper plates, in turn, until there is nothing left to serve his food on. Bitterly aware of the disapproval that surrounds him, in this regard, he likens his reduced state to a river that is repulsed when it strikes a mountain cliff.
Finally—and dramatically, he is left with nothing but half an amalaka/myrobalan—a cherry plum, in other words. One can picture him brooding over it (one presumes he was not in fact, eating it!) until the realisation of its being his very last possession strikes him, whereupon he orders that it be given to the monks at the Kukkutarama monastery. There is a rider, though—as this is his last offering to the Buddhist community, it should be savoured by everyone. And so, the half-fruit is put into a soup that the entire community consumes and enjoys.
It is even used as an instructive metaphor by the leader of the monastery to his monks thus: ‘A great donor, the lord of men, the eminent Maurya Asoka, has gone from being lord of Jambudvipa to being lord of half a myrobalan…’ This, in fact, forms a striking parallel with Harsha of Kanauj who, in true Ashoka-fashion and witnessed by Xuanzang many centuries later, gave away everything he possessed to his people and eventually had to borrow a cloth from his sister, Rajyashri, to cover himself!
There is one more grand donative gesture made by Ashoka just before he passes away. Conscious of his quickly-ebbing life, the emperor proceeds to donate the entire earth to the Buddhist sangha, excluding the treasury, and inscribes this record with his teeth. No, this was not the final act of a witless person; it was a very deliberate move to confer royal authority on the donation in a most definitive way. Incidentally, this act was mimicked—unknowingly or otherwise—many centuries later in an altogether different locale. Lahiri points out that William the Conqueror of England once donated lands and bit the wax on the document to seal his order in the most emphatic manner possible.
It might be pertinent to note that not all royal records through the ages received this treatment—presumably, wax was not a pleasant substance to sink one’s teeth into and there were, after all, other ways of ensuring that orders were enacted. Additionally, this final act was not made so that Ashoka could leave traces of his DNA behind but to obtain ‘sovereignty of the mind’. So a man who once sought kingship and visceral glory and power—and had no compunction in killing to achieve these—realises his true priorities, after all. Such are usually the nature of deathbed assertions and in Ashoka’s case, it becomes all the more poignant: the man who was hysterical about obtaining an empire gave it all away with his last breath.
Ashoka’s death soon after his donative act precipitated a bit of a crisis in that the ministers of the Mauryan court had to buy back the dominions that he had so magnanimously donated to the Buddhist sangha in order that a new king could take over the reins. This they did by ingeniously giving four kotis of gold pieces to the sangha to complete the shortfall—a gesture enabled by the sensible exclusion of the state treasury from the overall donation. Incidentally, the Tibetan lama, Taranatha, provides a postscript to Ashoka’s tale that is, in fact, quite in keeping with his capricious personality. A woman attendant who was fanning him during his dying moments fell asleep in the noon heat and dropped her yak-tail whisk on him, greatly annoying Ashoka thereby who mused that where he was once served so carefully even by great kings, he was now being insulted by the lowest of his minions. And so, as he died with anger in his mind, he had to be ‘reborn as a Naga (snake king) in a big lake of Pataliputra’.
The question of what really happened after this extraordinary emperor’s death is an unresolved one. His successors are not mentioned in the Pali chronicles of Sri Lanka, presumably because the emissaries he had sent there had already established firm roots for Buddhism and so, there was no real interest in the aftermath of his rule. To complicate matters, there are glaring discrepancies in the list of his successors in the texts of the northern Buddhist tradition and the Brahmanical Puranas. Together, they list between two and seven names who followed Ashoka on the Mauryan throne.
When you consider that the first three rulers of this powerful line accounted for some eighty-five years between themselves, then Ashoka’s successors must have ruled for only fifty-two years altogether because the dynasty itself was extinguished in around 180 BCE. Furthermore, we have very little information on them. For instance, there is no evidence as to whether they continued Ashoka’s policy of benevolent governance or dispensed with it entirely.
And then, of course, there is the usual intense squabbling between the Buddhist and Jaina literary traditions. Sample this: the Ashokavadana’s version of events is that Sampadin, who succeeded Ashoka on the throne (the Jaina texts insist that Sampadin or Samprati converted to the Jaina faith and did for it what Ashoka did for Buddhism), had a son named Brihaspati who was followed by Vrishasena, who was followed, in turn, by Pushyadharman who was followed by Pushyamitra, which, incidentally, is also the name of the person who killed the last Mauryan ruler and started the Shunga line. So were there two Pushyamitras, one who was the last Mauryan ruler and the other, his namesake who killed him? This sounds impossibly complicated and makes you wonder whether the one who was compiling details for the Ashokavadana actually bothered to check their facts!
According to the Puranas and Banabhatta’s Harshacharita—and this is yet another instance of the muddying of historical waters—the latter Pushyamitra was, in fact, a general in the army of the last Mauryan ruler, Brihadratha, from whom he usurped the throne in a parade-ground coup and founded the Shunga dynasty. The Ashokavadana regards him, though, as an anti-Buddhist Mauryan and, therefore, with grave suspicion, ascribing his dubious choices to a nasty brahman priest who urged him to destroy the religion by erasing its monks and monasteries. But—and here we need to furrow our brows in disbelief yet again—a yaksha (basically, a nature-spirit that could be nice or nasty) obligingly came along, at this juncture, and ensured Pushyamitra’s death (he flattened him under a mountain).
And this is, the text claims, how the Mauryan line ended. The account, as noted earlier, tests the limits of our credulity and it is well-nigh impossible to assess its historical veracity. However—and this is curious given that the dynasty is supposed to have ended in around 180 BCE—there are some references to later rulers who are related to the Mauryas. For instance, Xuanzang, the Chinese pilgrim, refers to Purnavarman, apparently the last of Ashoka’s race, who restored the Bodhi tree destroyed by Shashanka of Bengal and who ruled some time before his visit, which, being in the seventh century CE, renders one truly baffled, unless, of course, he was a minor king who was trying to legitimise his rule by claiming a connection with Ashoka.
Shashanka, incidentally (and here we go off on another historical tangent), was caught in an imbroglio with Harshavardhana of Kanauj: not only did he abet the kidnapping of Rajyashri, Harsha’s sister, but he was also implicated in the deaths of Rajyashri’s husband, Grihavarman, and brother, Rajyavardhana. This had Harsha screaming imprecations and baying for Shashanka’s blood, or so the Harshacharita claims, and setting out on a grand campaign of retribution, which must have ended in a sort of whimper, though—there is no clear evidence that Harsha ever defeated Shashanka but this uncomfortable fact is usually whipped out of sight in the largely eulogistic narratives of Harsha that exist.
Back to the knotty tale of the Mauryan succession and the significant fact here is that Ashoka did have an emulator among his descendants. Dasharatha, one of his grandsons who is mentioned in both the Puranic and Buddhist traditions, and can be pinpointed as someone who actually ruled because he features in a contemporary source, proclaimed his presence through engravings on rock in various structures commissioned by him. He clearly thought that he needed to be worthy of the giant shadow he had stepped into. Not only did he call himself devanampriya, a clear duplication of his grandfather’s title, but he also inscribed dedicatory inscriptions, mentioning himself and his donees, at caves similar to those at Barabar in the adjacent Nagarjuni hill, and which are associated with Ashoka.
The recipients of Dasharatha’s largesse were the Ajivikas (a sect mentioned earlier in connection with Bindusara, if you remember), the caves to be used as rainy season retreats. An interesting fact here: the word ajivikehi was later removed or scratched out from the Mauryan inscriptions in the Barabar and Nagarjuni caves, which meant that other religious groups took them over and decided to efface the proof of their earlier occupation. So the Ajivikas were, clearly, turfed out and left to fend for themselves, at some point. There is no other evidence of any ruler in the dynasties that followed the Mauryans having patronised them.
Yet why the Mauryan dynasty collapsed in the manner in which it did is the subject of another chapter altogether.
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