THE LATER LEGACY OF ASHOKA

Before we begin with surveying Ashoka’s influence through time, let us answer a question that usually occurs to those who become acquainted with his story, and the extraordinary twists and turns therein: do we know what he looked like, or, alternatively, is there any physical representation of this highly remarkable character? This is, one must confess, a question that occurs to all of us when we read about any person in history who is not impossibly drab and colourless, and whose life was no run-of-the-mill one, by any means. Unfortunately, the further back in time you go, the less is the likelihood of you satisfying your curiosity with corroborative facts and discoveries of this sort.

However, the interesting point here is that Ashoka is not just a faceless voice—there is, for instance, a stone portrait of him that exists at Kanaganahalli near Sannati in the Gulbarga district of Karnataka, which was itself discovered in the most dramatic way. In 1993, some archaeologists were inspecting the area around Sannati to provide the mandatory environmental clearance for a dam to be built across the river Bhima. At Kanaganahalli, on the Bhima’s left bank, preliminary excavations revealed part of a large brick stupa, as also several carved limestone slabs, pillars, railings and sculptures, along with coins and other evidence pertaining to the Satavahana dynasty, which enabled the stupa to be dated to between the first and third centuries CE. Of pertinence to our story is the discovery of a broken relief sculpture depicting a king and queen—looking somewhat adoringly at each other—and their female attendants, two of whom are bearing a parasol and fly whisk—accepted symbols of sovereignty, as also a Brahmi inscription that reads Ranyo Ashoka (King Ashoka).

Now one may debate for hours on end on whether sculptural representations are accurate or not. And if we are, in addition, dealing with the complicated matter of fragmented evidence, how do we, then, automatically presume that a critical part of the depiction has not broken away and/ or quite simply vanished? In this case, though, it is fairly safe to believe that the inscription and depiction pertain to the Ashoka of our tale, reinforced, in no small measure, by subsequent discoveries of Buddhism-related material at the same site in further excavations.1 Now whether he did, in fact, have thick, protruding lips and huge ears, and shared a disconcerting similarity in the structure of his nose with his queen and the other attendants is a matter for conjecture.

Artistic license and fanciful imaginings have ever been the forte of creative people, and there is no reason to assume that this particular sculptor was immune to such quirks just because he belonged to a very ancient context. Whether Ashoka himself commissioned this portrait is not clear; it could, equally, have been made in connection with a royal visit. It might be pertinent to note here that a relief panel at Sanchi had earlier been identified as a representation of Ashoka but there is no convenient inscription to confirm it, which merely adds to the status and lustre of the Kanaganahalli find.

There are other sites that are equally memorable, in this regard. Although Ashoka does not appear in the Buddhist iconography at the site of Bharhut, for instance, historians have correlated some of the sculptural depictions at Sanchi as narrating his visits to Buddhist pilgrimage sites.2 And there is, in addition, the Ramagrama stupa in Nepal whose southern gateway/torana commemorates his visit, along with his royal entourage. He is shown with all his magnificent insignia while on a chariot and leading a procession, and being met by the guardian deities, the Naga kings. This ties in neatly with the Ashokavadana’s assertion that Ashoka had gone to Ramagrama to take possession of an original relic deposit of the Buddha. However, it is the western pillar that grabs our attention as it shows him in the throes of grief while visiting his beloved Bodhi tree, which, as we know, had been temporarily felled by Tishyarakshita’s machinations. He is supported by two queens (so we know that Tishyarakshita had more to contend with than just an alleged tree-rival, at the time, although this is hardly basis for exoneration!) and exudes misery.

Another panel above it depicts an adorned Bodhi tree, surrounded by a temple, which is probably the one Ashoka built. A similar representation is at Sanchi where one of the carvings again show Ashoka supported by two queens amongst his royal attendants. Interestingly, Tishyarakshita’s wickedness as an artistic theme seems to have been quite popular. Abanindranath Tagore, a nephew of the renowned poet, Rabindranath Tagore, and the pioneer of the Bengal school of art, painted her looking at the wilting Bodhi tree with, apparently, a mixture of triumph and regret—although the set of her eyebrows seems to indicate the former emotion more strongly. Other sculptural emblems associated strongly with Ashoka include wheel-bearing pillars, monoliths crowned with capitals of four lions and the vajrasana (throne) at Mahabodhi. These were all carved into the gateways of Sanchi, for instance.

Charles Allen also points to two stone sculptures from Langudi in Orissa, sporting Brahmi inscriptions and seeming to refer to Ashoka.3 One is the upper part of a man with long, piled-up hair and large earrings, apparently the portrait of a donor named ‘King Ashoka’. The other is of an enthroned male with a turban, earrings and bangles, and referring to Ashoka as a lay Buddhist. Allen’s ruminations on the subject, though, seem somewhat precipitate. He wonders, for instance, whether Ashoka suffered from epilepsy, the key to his fainting episodes captured in stone and perhaps the reason behind him being rejected as a potential heir to the throne, in the first place.4

Ashoka and his legacy came within the purview of the Chinese monks and travellers, Faxian and Xuanzang, as well. These two names are a staple of every history textbook (with varying spellings of their names through the ages!), and students are routinely required to trot out the details of their visits to India and the information they left behind—a chore that usually buries their significance in young minds committed to rote. The truth is that both these pilgrims were fascinating, intrepid personalities who undertook the arduous trek from China to India in search of Buddhist texts but, in the process, penned their observations and comments on almost everything they saw and all the interactions they underwent, resulting in a corpus of evidence that is, at once, memorable and immensely significant—and, we might add, considerably more accurate than that of Megasthenes, for one.

Here is a case in point: it is Xuanzang who provides the critical evidence for the role of Rajyashri, the sister of Harsha of Kanauj, whom we had alluded to earlier. While Harsha’s inscriptions maintain a complete silence on her, Xuanzang, while documenting his visit to the court of Kanauj in the seventh century, talks about this young, vibrant woman volubly participating in court debates on religion and accompanying Harsha on military campaigns. And thus, we can resurrect her from general oblivion and put her back at the centrestage of polity and society where she rightfully belongs. And this is just one of the many pointers to our past that Xuanzang—and, of course, Faxian—helpfully provide us with.5

Let us tackle them in chronological order. Faxian, in the fifth century CE, was one of the earliest Buddhist Chinese monks to travel to India. He came from Shensi, crossed central Asia, travelled extensively in India and then moved to Sri Lanka—all in pursuit of the correct rules and regulations of the Vinaya Pitaka texts of Buddhism, an entirely admirable bibliographic commitment. Among the numerous aspects of the landscape of colour and people and stories and festivals and languages and buildings that he plunged through was the fact that Ashoka lived on in collective memory across a wide geographical span from the hills of northwest India to the Gangetic plains in the east.

What he records of the long-dead emperor is a quaint mix of legends, local retellings and bits from the Ashokavadana that he would have already been conversant with. He mentions, for instance, Sankisa as the place where Ashoka planted a stone pillar thirty cubits high with the figure of a lion on top and Pataliputra as the city where he reigned (wherein the palace, ‘with its various halls, all built by spirits who piled up stones’, and with its elaborate designs ‘after no human fashion’, was apparently still in existence!).6 Interestingly, the knowledge of the Brahmi script seems to have faded away by this time and people interpreted the Ashokan stone missives in every which way to suit their fancies, another delightful proof of the human tendency to familiarise the essentially unfamiliar. ‘So what if we can’t read it,’ you can hear them say. ‘We understand what it says.’

Xuanzang, some two centuries later and cast in his illustrious predecessor’s mould as far as his travel diaries went, seemed to keep bumping into Ashokan pillars—at Shravasti, Varanasi and Lumbini, to name a few places. He provides solemn yet enchanting appraisals of some of them: the Lumbini pillar was broken in the middle because a dragon had caused it to fall whereas the one near Varanasi shone like a mirror, its surface smooth as ice. In addition, Xuanzang’s narrative bristles with stories concerning stupas built by ‘Ashoka Raja’, again in a wide sweep from Gandhara to the Gangetic plains.

While most of these stupas appear to mark events in the life of the Buddha, there are some that have a deep resonance with Ashoka’s personal history. The one outside Taxila, in Xuanzang’s view, marked the place where the unfortunate Kunala was blinded on Tishyarakshita’s orders, which apparently now possessed the power to restore sight to the devout sightless. It is unclear whether Ashoka commissioned the building of all these stupas that Xuanzang painstakingly recorded because some of them were made of stone whereas Ashokan stupas were usually of brick. However, they were all lumped together as being of Mauryan vintage, by this time.

Another way in which Ashoka has been frozen in time, as it were, is through an interesting inscription issued by a woman many centuries later—Kumaradevi, the queen of Govindachandra, the Gahadavala ruler of Kanauj (c.1109/1114–1154), who uses it to proclaim, among other things, the fact that she is a proud Buddhist in contrast to her husband who follows the Brahmanical religion. She also stresses the importance of her natal family, which takes precedence in the inscription over the family she is married into. But what is its relevance to Ashoka, you may ask. This Sarnath inscription, as it is called, records the construction of a vihara with the image of the Buddhist goddess, Arya-Vasudhara, by Kumaradevi. She is also stated to have restored the shri-dharma-chakra-jina image of the Buddha and placed it in this vihara or had another one constructed for the purpose. The epigraph contains the following important lines—‘This Lord of the turning of the Wheel was restored by her in accordance with the way in which he existed in the days of Dharmashoka…and even more wonderfully, and this vihara for that sthavira was elaborately erected by her.’7

The message is not as incomprehensible as it first appears for, after all, elaborate language is the basis of most royal inscriptions in the past. What it establishes beyond a doubt, though, is that the memory of Ashoka and the things he did to promote Buddhism was alive and well in the early twelfth century and an allusion to this was considered prestigious enough for an intelligent and confident queen to make use of in her own record. Ashoka’s life was dramatic enough but the manner in which he keeps jumping in and out of the shadows of memory and known history is equally striking, verging on the theatrical, at times. Going from a context where he was just about everywhere to one where his missives could not be read at all to being mentioned in this record is an eventful trajectory. It is a veritable ‘now you see me, now you don’t’ situation. You can’t help wonder whether the young, untamed Ashoka would have enjoyed startling people thus. He probably would!

A word about Kumaradevi—and Govindachandra. The largely ubiquitous presumption is that queens followed the faiths of their husbands, particularly in a royal scenario. Yet here is Kumaradevi not only openly announcing that she is a Buddhist but probably also influencing a very generous donation that Govindachandra later makes in a Buddhist cause. Shades of Rajyashri and Harsha here but as with the former, Kumaradevi and her role evokes very little interest among historians! Incidentally, Govindachandra himself made various donations along with his other queens—and so did his mother, Ralhadevi/Ralhanadevi. Ralhadevi seems to have been a forceful personality because her inscriptions indicate that she virtually ran the administration during the reign of her husband (and Govindachandra’s father), Madanapala, a highly ineffective character, along with another of his wives, Prithvi-Shrika—more instances of powerful, remarkable women who have been virtually removed from the historical narrative.

There is yet another wonderful story concealed here that is worth recalling even if it means we are moving off at a tangent once again. For this, we have to visit contemporary Bengal or Gauda, as it was known then (although it was also called Vanga and, just to complicate matters, both Gauda and Vanga were used interchangeably for Bengal, even though the specific Gauda territory could be distinguished from Pundra in the north and Vanga and Samatata in the south/southeast. Yes, this is exactly the sort of confusion that historians routinely deal with and hopefully, your respect for them would have risen exponentially by now).

Our tale is rooted in the Pala dynasty that ruled for around four hundred years from the eighth century CE, and controlled significant areas of Bengal and Bihar. There is a lot of epigraphic evidence available for the Palas, as well as a text named the Ramacharita, written by Sandhyakara Nandi, which provides their history from CE 1070 to 1121. All in all, a well-documented period but one that again reveals much gender bias in the handling. This tale begins with the three sons of the Pala ruler, Vigrahapala III (c. 1043–1070)—Mahipala II, Shurapala and Ramapala—and the rivalry between them. Mahipala, as the eldest son, succeeded Vigrahapala to the throne but turned out to be completely obnoxious. He not only imprisoned his other brothers in the belief that they were plotting for the throne but also had a great time oppressing his subjects, and generally being intolerant and unreasonable.

And so, in the time-honoured tradition of all tyrants, he was set aside by the Kaivarta Divya, whose family took over the Pala throne. Shurapala and Ramapala managed to get free in the ensuing confusion whereupon the former conveniently vanished into the shadows while Ramapala speedily became the hero of the Pala saga. So where does he go, all alone and friendless? He runs straight into the open arms of his maternal uncle, Mathana of Anga, who promptly and efficiently sets a damage control mechanism in operation.

But here we pause and ask—who was Mathana of Anga, to begin with? He is, of course, the brother of Ramapala’s mother but who this woman was and where she came from is a question that has been avoided by almost all historians except for a vague speculation that she was a Rashtrakuta princess, discerned from the fact that Vigrahapala’s other wife, Yauvanashri, is mentioned in the records as a Kalachuri. Other than this, there is lamentably little interest in her identity whereas the identities of several royal males in the Pala line, for instance, have been the focus of ferocious debate.

Back to the tale and we see Mathana, at this juncture, assuming centrestage by proferring mental, material and financial aid to his nephew. Ramapala is able to win over his feudatories through a bribe-and-coercion mixture, laced with extravagant promises of land and wealth, all backed by Mathana’s resources. Mathana later sends his sons to scout the usurped Pala land and then enables Ramapala to make a triumphant return from exile via a ‘bridge of boats’. The Kaivarta Bhima, now on the throne, is killed and Ramapala becomes the rightful Pala ruler, acknowledging that the throne has been regained and revitalised on the strength of this crucial maternal bond. The relationship between uncle and son endures: Mathana seemingly devotes his life to Ramapala’s prosperity and when he eventually dies, his ‘overwhelmed’ grief-stricken nephew drowns himself in the Ganga at Monghyr.

But what does any of this have to do with Kumaradevi and Govindachandra, you may ask. The answer is quite unexpected and also goes to show that the world is not only a very small place but is also full of surprising connections. During Ramapala’s painstaking feudatory-resumption period, Mathana managed to neutralise one of his nephew’s foremost foes, Devarakshita of Pithi, by a simple yet startlingly effective diplomatic manoeuvre: he married his daughter, Shankaradevi, to Devarakshita, thereby enlisting the latter in Ramapala’s camp. Mathana went one step further some years later—he kept the Gahadavala kingdom of Kanauj from turning covetous eyes on the Pala region by marrying his granddaughter, Kumaradevi (the daughter of Shankaradevi and Devarakshita), to Govindachandra, its ruler.

So our story has come full circle, ending where it began—as is the wont of most satisfying tales. A large part of Kumaradevi’s Sarnath inscription talks about Mathana and the marriage connections he engineered in Ramapala’s favour while delineating her natal ancestry. Unfortunately, though, historians haven’t actually spotted and acknowledged the import of these maternal links. This isn’t altogether surprising—women, their role and their probable influences (as repeatedly noted in this work), aren’t exactly the focus of mainstream historical narratives! Yet that the study of any historical personage (in this case, Ashoka) involves sourcing material from a wide range of time and evidence is underscored—and often this will involve women.

Ashoka was, indeed, memorialised in stone many times over, but his memorialisation in other ways and other times is, at the same time, an enigmatic yet vital point of research. The fact is that when you reflect on how strongly and fondly Ashoka is remembered today, and the liberal use of his name to resurrect anything from relative obscurity to instant greatness (awards, naval vessels and political jargon spring to mind), you are bound to wonder anew at his having been in the shadows of known history for so long. One of those quintessential hidden-in-plain-sight affairs! So what are the myriad ways in which we recall him and why is he so pivotal to our collective consciousness?

Perhaps we should begin by surveying the legacy of his material remains and then move on to the more profound realms of situating him vis-à-vis the national psyche. Let us start with his spokespeople, as it were—his pillars and rocks, and turn right away to the Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, written by Shams Siraj Afif in the fourteenth century, and intended to eulogise Firuz Shah Tughlaq, the ruler of the Delhi Sultanate who built the sixth of the many cities of Delhi, and whose insatiable curiosity and penchant for restoration made him otherwise quite remarkable.8

Incidentally, Firuz Shah was the successor to the unfortunate Muhammad bin Tughlaq, who had allegedly obtained the throne by upending a pavilion onto his father, Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq’s head, and then promptly turned contrary and weird, forcing his subjects to trail miserably up and down the country while he whimsically changed capitals, inaugurated currency reforms that confounded the economy, and swung from one policy to another like a seesaw gone rogue. And so, Firuz Shah’s accession was like a breath of fresh air—literally so with his other penchant for creating green spaces.

But we are veering off at a tangent here. The pertinent point in all this is that the Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi provides a very interesting account of two Ashokan pillars, the Delhi-Topra and the Delhi-Meerut, pertaining to areas in modern Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, respectively. It seems that Firuz Shah Tughlaq came upon them in the course of his military campaigns at Topra and Meerut, and was impressed enough to decide that they be immediately sent to Delhi. Such are the often-wild, impulsive urges of rulers and one can only feel for the hapless ministers who had to execute them.

As the tale goes, this was an enterprise of monumental proportions, involving the people in and around Topra being made to assemble at the pillar with reams of silk cotton, the pillar being carefully extricated from the soil and made to fall on its carefully-prepared silk cotton bed whereupon it was covered in reeds and hides and moved onto a special carriage of forty-two wheels, the carriage being dragged to the Yamuna where the Sultan arrived to cheerfully direct the proceedings, the pillar being transferred to a raft of boats and floated to Delhi, and it being hoisted to a position in the palace complex at Firuzabad (modern Firuz/Firoz Shah Kotla, the city named after its founder).

At this point, some brahmanas appeared on the scene to decipher the inscription, confidently—and conveniently—claiming that it contained a prophecy to the effect that no one would be able to remove the pillar from its original location until the time of a great king called Firuz Shah Tughlaq. Now Ashoka was a man of many talents but it is fairly safe to say that he was not a visionary or seer who peeped into the future and exclaimed, ‘Oh, look, there is Firuz Shah Tughlaq and I want only him to transport my pillar all over the place!’ Ashokan Brahmi had become a linguistic mystery all over again by this time but there was no one to challenge the brahmanas to an on-the-spot script-decipherment test. And so, the pillar proudly remained in its new home and came to be known as the Minar-i-Zarin or the Golden Column.

Incidentally, painted illustrations of the Topra pillar’s adventures are also available to prop up the tale. So is a poem attributed to Firuz Shah Tughlaq that celebrates his ‘column of gold’ wherein he also ponders over its meaning: ‘Is it the Tuba (the Lote-tree of Paradise) which the angels have planted on the earth, or is it the Sidya (the Plum-tree of Paradise) which men have taken to be a mountain?’9 Meanwhile, the Meerut pillar was installed in the Sultan’s hunting palace/ lodge, so he had both his finds safely within sight and could gloat over them whenever he chose.

There is an ironic postscript to this tale, though: chronicles about Firuz Shah Tughlaq do not mention the original creator of these itinerant pillars. Ashoka, therefore, had presumably passed from public memory by this time. Even more ironically, the pillar in Firuz Shah’s hunting lodge was blown into fragments sometime in the early 1700s due to the explosion of a powder magazine. It was later carefully reassembled a few centuries on and lodged in the British Museum in London, with, however, one piece still missing.10

Interestingly, several Ashokan pillars contain inscriptions pertaining to later periods. Apart from the names of people scratched into them at regular intervals, proving that the practice of graffiti in monuments is an ancient one that remained healthy and thriving down the ages (not that this is any kind of license to emulate our scribbling ancestors!), there are records of later rulers that thriftily made use of the same durable material to document important matters. Not that there was a paucity of similar substances but sharing space with an ancient record would automatically confer respectability and gravitas by association—an opinion presumably shared by later royal engravers who might not have understood the content of Ashoka’s missives but appreciated their intended import.

We have already alluded to the Girnar rock that bore inscriptions pertaining to Rudradaman, Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka. If we consider the Delhi-Topra pillar, its fame after Ashoka does not necessarily begin and end with Firuz Shah Tughlaq: it also bears three twelfth century inscriptions of Vigraharaja IV, the Chauhan king, that reiterate his victories and greatness. In a similar vein, the Delhi-Meerut pillar has three early medieval Sanskrit inscriptions. And the Lauriya-Nandangarh pillar inscription of Ashoka abuts a Persian inscription of the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb’s time, as also that of an English surveyor, Reuben Burrow (this epigraph is terse: ‘Reuben Burrow, 1792’).

However, if we are talking about famous inscriptions jostling for space, we must consider the Allahabad-Kosam pillar, which, like the Delhi-Topra—was an itinerant one as it refers to the mahamatas of Kaushambi, implying that it moved from Allahabad to Kaushambi, at some point. Apart from Ashoka’s renowned schism edict, it also bears the much-cited Allahabad prashasti (eulogy) of the Gupta emperor, Samudragupta, composed by his clearly-adoring court poet, Harishena, for whom he was the last word in rulership and military prowess and talent and culture. In addition, the pillar has an epigraph that provides the genealogy of Jahangir, the Mughal emperor, bringing the grand total of its emperor-usage to three—no mean feat this! And it does not end here—it also has names of random people scratched into it over different periods.

Other Ashokan pillars have been repurposed and reused over this huge span of time—a fate not uncommon to historical artefacts in general. Two fragments have been identified at Hissar and Fatehabad, both in Haryana—the former, a part of a composite pillar before a mosque built by Firuz Shah Tughlaq; the latter, also a part of a composite pillar, bearing information on the same ruler. However, there are some other, outrightly peculiar usages of Ashokan pillars. For instance, there are records of some of them and/or their fragments being worshipped as Shiva lingas. A similarly inexplicable use is of them being associated in local tradition with the Pandava brothers of the Mahabharata, especially the much-muscled Bhima, and are dubbed Bhim-ki-lat or Bhim-ka-danda (Bhima’s pillar or stick). The whys and wherefores of this particular trajectory are unclear but such is the history of the human race and its persistent desire to adopt the unfamiliar and give it a cosy status. One wonders whether Ashoka would have approved of this!

His deeds spawned several powerful admirers, though.11 In China, for instance, Emperor Lu of the Liang dynasty (CE 502–549) tried to imitate Ashoka by building stupas, and curtailing the consumption of meat and alcohol. We also have the Empress Wu Zetian (c. CE 623–705) who liked to portray herself as a chakravartin, an image of kingship synonymous with Ashoka. And, of course, as repeatedly noted, he has been immortalised in the Sanskrit Ashokavadana, and in the Sri Lankan Pali chronicles, the Dipavamsa and the Mahavamsa, that have, together, wrung every detail out of his remarkable life and captured them for posterity. You never know the ways in which influence works and the forms it can take. In fact, Romila Thapar speculates that Yudhisthira’s views against violence and the evils of war in that amazing tome, the Mahabharata, might reflect a debate among post-Ashokan polities that arose from the whole dhamma question and Ashoka’s lived experience of it, which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense.12

Ashoka was—and continues to be—the focus of narrative non-fiction and fiction, often used as an entry point to analyse Buddhism, and issues of religious tolerance and peace, among other things; alternatively, more often than not, as a riveting biographical subject.13 There was a frenzy of monograph-writing on Ashoka in the early twentieth century. Writing on him, says Thapar, was like ‘a rite of passage’ for ancient Indian historians.14 Accordingly, he swung from being an autocrat, monk, missionary and dreamer to someone who was respected for his ‘extraordinary vision’. Much has been said about Ashoka inspiring veteran political leaders, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.15

More recently, he is routinely invoked (for political or other reasons) in triumphant attestations of India’s non-violent heritage; in the context of unification, nation and democracy; and in assertions that India’s past also sports magnificent historical figures to run alongside similar characters in the world arena—or as H.G. Wells very generously puts it (albeit in the context of the 1920s) that more men ‘cherish his memory today than ever heard the names of Constantine or Charlemagne’.16 Ashoka would have definitely approved of this sentiment!

He is still in the public eye at the time of writing this. 2022 being the 2,327th birth anniversary of the emperor by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) reckoning seemed to be a fortuitous time to investigate his caste.17 With the caste cauldron of Uttar Pradesh roiling ahead of the Assembly polls, a battle for appropriation sprang up between rival parties in neighbouring Bihar, the state which has long claimed the king as its own. The BJP, according to an article, has always looked out for ‘icons covered in the cobwebs of history’ and was, therefore, one of the first entities to acknowledge his political value—and to gain mileage from this: in 2015, the BJP in Bihar commemorated his 2,320th birth anniversary with the party government at the centre issuing a postal stamp on him. However, others were equally quick to jump on to the bandwagon and claim Ashoka for themselves, especially the OBC (Other Reserved Caste) Kushwaha community and backward class leaders across parties, such as the BJP, JD(U) and the RJD. The emperor was even dubbed ‘a grand OBC face and voice of the subaltern’ by one among them. The operative part here, of course, is that the present-day Maurya community are Kushwahas; the latter forms eight percent of Bihar’s population and are an important part of the JD(U)’s OBC base with a fair sprinkling among the BJP and RJD, too.

The current appropriation embroilment began when Daya Prakash Sinha, a former government officer and BJP worker, as well as a Sahitya Akademi Award winner for his play, Samrat Ashoka, declared that his research led him to similarities between Ashoka and the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, in terms of their youthful excesses and subsequent ‘over-religiosity’ so as to divert the people’s attention from their sins. He also reiterated that several Buddhist works describe Ashoka as ‘very ugly’. This set the cat among the pigeons with three Kushwaha leaders from three different parties jumping to Ashoka’s defence, managing to rally other politicos behind them, in the process.

The BJP, in particular, hit back hard: they filed an FIR against Sinha ‘for hurting people’s sentiments’ and distanced themselves from him despite Sinha’s claim that he was the national convener of the BJP’s cultural cell. Meanwhile, demands from different political quarters that Sinha’s literary award be recalled grew shriller. One of the reasons attributed to this brouhaha was that the BJP, having lost some OBC leaders to the Samajwadi Party (SP), was loath to be party to any issue that might antagonise the OBCs further. The important point, for our purposes, is that Ashoka remains eminently relevant in the politico-social context even now.

He continues to cast a giant shadow today.