The Mauryas 16

 WHAT THE MAURYAS BUILT

So much of what we know of a culture is based on its art and architecture—the buildings and sculptures that are meant to remain its permanent markers on the physical landscape and, often, when its other pertinent sources fade or disappear, stay on as its lone reference points, assuming greater and greater historical significance the further back in time they relate to. This particular aspect takes on an added meaning during Ashoka’s reign when he sought to unite the entire Mauryan realm through his mammoth creative endeavour.

But let us begin at the beginning and reiterate a crucial fact: the Mauryan period was remarkable for its monumental stone sculpture and architecture—a direct reflection of its imperial power and seen for the first time since the Harappan civilisation—as well as pivotal beginnings in rock-cut and stupa architecture. If you think this need not necessarily concern you as you engage with the larger Mauryan tale, consider the sheer volume of tourist traffic to Sanchi and Sarnath in today’s context, for instance, and, by extension, to Ajanta and Ellora.

The Mauryans who built, in the urban context, obviously had wealth in abundance but most of the structural remains of this empire can be directly linked to royal patronage, particularly of Ashoka. Artistic links are not very evident in the case of Chandragupta, who was obviously preoccupied with setting his newfound dynasty on an even keel, or Bindusara, who was busy trying to maintain the power he had inherited, on the one hand, and cold-shouldering his son, on the other. But it was not just the royals and the privileged court circles who built; there is evidence of what is termed ‘popular art’ in the form of terracotta figurines, sculptures, ring stones and the like, indicating that artistic activity was also within the purview of the non-royal strata of society. You may recall, in this regard, Chapada, the enterprising artist who left his signature on the rocks at Brahmagiri and Rameshvara.

When we talk of artistic activity in the Mauryan times, our attention springs foremost to Ashoka and his inscribed pillars.1 These, it has been discovered, are more or less similar to each other in form and size, indicating that a standard template for them was conceived and followed all through the realm. Here again, we run into an unresolved debate—some say the pillars are monoliths or carved out of single pieces of stone but Vidula Jayaswal, for instance, claims that some of them, such as the Lauriya-Nandangarh and Vaishali pillars, were made of several pieces of stone. The details of this impasse, though, are nowhere as important as her actual discovery: the Ashokan pillars were hewn out of stone that was quarried at Chunar in eastern Uttar Pradesh.

It seems Jayaswal was examining megalithic structures in nearby Baragaon when she and her team stumbled upon signs of ancient stone quarries, including large, cylindrical stone blocks, in the Chunar hills.2 The more they investigated, the more concrete was the evidence that the sandstone from here was used for sculptures and buildings from the third century BCE to the medieval period. She also discovered an interesting continuity of sorts: the modern inhabitants of Baragaon are mostly stone-cutters, although they do not extract stone from the old quarries any longer, which they refer to as mara patthar (dead stone) to distinguish it from the more recent, not-as-weathered ones, which they call zinda patthar (living stone).

This brings to mind a completely unrelated but equally fortuitous—and spectacular—discovery: the Indian archaeologist, V.S. Wakankar, stumbling upon the Bhimbetka rock shelters in Madhya Pradesh (following up on an oddity of terrain glimpsed from a train window, of all things!), thereby uncovering the oldest-known rock art—and the earliest traces of human life—in India; also, the oldest petroglyphs (a fancy word for prehistoric rock carvings) in the world. As oft-repeated, such thrilling, totally unexpected finds go on to patch up the historical narrative, and as more and more gaps are filled in, the more vibrant the field becomes. Historians exist for these intermittent bursts of joy—it makes the tedium of their research work worthwhile.3

Back to the Ashokan pillars, all of them being smooth, highly-polished creations, except, of course, for the Delhi-Meerut pillar, which was dragged around from place to place, and others with a similarly turbulent history. But what really concerns us—even the non-art-afficionados—are the motifs associated with the Ashokan pillars and their capitals (or the stones atop their shafts), which are carved in different shapes. Most of the former are derived from Indian religious mores, so apart from pretty run-of-the-mill designs of the floral sort, you also have the wheel, seen as representing the dharmachakra (the wheel of dharma) or the Buddha’s first sermon, or even more conveniently, sovereignty (which, eventually, makes its way into the Indian flag).4

And then we have the lotus, strongly associated with both Brahmanical and Buddhist traditions—the former with purity, the latter with adorning the baby Buddha’s first steps, among other things. The lion motif could be appropriated as a Brahmanical solar symbol but, then, the Buddha is also the Sakya-simha (lion of the Sakyas) in Buddhist lore. And, of course, the elephant is claimed by everyone—the Brahmanas, who associate it with Goddess Lakshmi; the Buddhists, for whom the white elephant is one of the Buddha’s forms; and the Jainas, for whom the white elephant (again!) heralded Mahavira’s birth in his mother, Trishala’s dreams.

There are several more animal motifs on the Ashokan pillars that straddle traditions but the most easily identifiable one is of the quadruple lions that appears on the Sanchi and Sarnath capitals. As the Sarnath capital has been adapted and adopted as the emblem of the Indian nation, it faithfully appears on Indian currency, passports, all government letterheads and visiting cards, and the President’s seal, among other things, and literally represents the ultimate stamp of official approval. The original was more elaborate: four lions standing back-to-back on an abacus with a frieze of a horse, elephant, bull and lion—all separated by wheels, with the dharma-chakra over it all as the crowning glory, as it were. The choice of motifs could hardly have been an arbitrary one, left to the artistic whimsies of the empire’s craftsmen. Given that Ashoka virtually poured his soul into his messages, he must have devoted as much attention to the motifs that would accompany them. Sagacious choices these—with a distinct Buddhist significance but equally resonant with the culture at large.

Here is another pillar-related debate. It has been suggested that Ashoka was influenced by the Persians (and even the Greeks), in this regard: the Achaemenids inscribed pillars, and there is some similarity between the wording of their epigraphs and the look of the end product. Admittedly, there were close links between the ancient Indians and Iranians but there are some distinct differences between the Mauryan and Persian pillars in terms of the shape and ornamentation.5 And, of course, there is simply no comparison between sporadic attempts at engraving proclamations and Ashoka’s astonishing feat of marking his presence through them virtually everywhere and imbuing them with a significance that went far beyond the mundane.

And again, artistic influence is as intangible and unquantifiable and non-specific now as it was then. Art does travel and there must have been a common pool of motifs and symbols for its practitioners to draw upon in the ancient world but that doesn’t mean that similar ideas couldn’t strike two artists situated in two different areas at the same time, so that one is tempted to draw an arrow between the two and label it as a direct influence of one upon the other (which a lot of scholars are wont to do). Today, this might even be seen as plunging into the murky waters of plagiarism and copyright! Suffice it to say that the Ashokan pillars might or might not be directly attributable to Persian influence but as everything comes from something, to begin with, there must have been an incipient carving-and-sculpting tradition that we are currently unaware of but which later blossomed into this high art.

Also, it is not as if Ashoka’s period was the sole repository of Mauryan art and architecture. He definitely had some precedents to work on, at least as far as Chandragupta went—and perhaps even further back than that. Take the archaeological excavations in and around the Mauryan capital of Pataliputra, for instance, that have revealed it to be a city of magnificent proportions. The Chinese pilgrim, Xuanzang, using a confused mix of observation and legend, claims that the city was created by Ashoka. Here is what he says: ‘… there was a king called Ashoka (O-shu-kia), who was the great-grandson of Bimbisara-raja. He changed his capital from Rajagriha to Patali(pura), and built an outside rampart to surround the old city.’ Xuanzang, though, could only see the old foundation walls that remained.6

Now Ashoka was clearly a revered name even in the seventh century, which was why he was invoked in hearsay and legend. However, he had absolutely nothing to do with making Pataliputra the Magadhan capital; the credit for that, if you remember, goes to Ajatashatru, the son of Bimbisara, in the sixth century BCE, neither of them having any connection whatsoever with Ashoka. So whether Bindusara’s name and memory were mangled by Xuanzang or his informants is unclear but here is additional proof of his being pushed into the shadows yet again—a tacit endeavour by all and sundry through the ages, it seems! One can’t really blame the pilgrim, though. To the untrained ear, and even to students today who wrestle with this part of history, Bindusara sounds exactly like Bimbisara, and only a history enthusiast would want to split hairs about the chronological differences thereof!

Ajatashatru, that wily fox of yore, wanted Pataliputra, situated in the Ganga plains on the right bank of the river, to be his new headquarters during his ambitious Lichchhavi campaign (which, as we know, he won hands down). He had it aggressively fortified so as to safeguard Magadha’s exposed riverside flank. Rajagriha was, otherwise, an ideal capital with natural hilly defences and fortresses whereas Pataliputra, more than a hundred kilometres away, was more like a swampy morass, so this might have seemed like a very odd choice unless you consider the fact that the states at the time were at each other’s throats and Magadha, which hoped to win, could not be governed in splendid isolation from a place that was in the interior, leaving a long swathe of territory unguarded along the river. And so, the pragmatic, far-seeing Ajatashatru switched base to Pataliputra, which, around fifty years later, during the reign of his successor, Udayin, was declared the Magadhan capital. And so it remained through to the Mauryan times and later.

Incidentally, this switch had already been anticipated by divine foresight without crediting its real executor. The Buddha apparently looked back at Magadha after a visit and told his disciple, Ananda, that ‘a hundred years hence there shall be a King Asoka; he shall build here his capital and establish his court…’7 The stone upon which he impressed his feet while making this prophecy was observed by Xuanzang who was suddenly seized by the desire to be very precise and factual. Accordingly, he notes the dimensions of the Buddha’s footprints on the stone (18 inches long, 6 inches broad), and the signs of divinity marking his feet and toes. He goes a step further: near the stone, he notes, there was a huge stone pillar bearing a damaged inscription to the effect that ‘Ashoka-raja with a firm principle of faith’ had bestowed the country as a religious offering to the Buddha and the faith no less than three times and had also redeemed it with his wealth (also thrice). No known Ashokan pillar says anything of the sort, so this was either a figment of Xuanzang’s imagination or the local interpretation of the inscription.

In fact, there are more divine prophecies surrounding Pataliputra and its future paramountcy in the Magadhan scheme of things. When it was little more than a village, the Buddha apparently saw magical creatures frolicking around it, which, to him, was a sign that a fortress was to be built there. He also predicted to Ananda (who was clearly more of a companion than a disciple and privy to all sorts of confidences!) that while Pataliputra (or Patali-puta, as he called it) would become an important commercial hub, three dangers, pretty much like Damocles’s sword, would hover over it—that of fire, water and dissension among friends.8 A word of caution here: the Buddhist literary tradition tends to invoke the Buddha’s name to sanction or legitimise most important occurrences, so whether he actually said this is a moot point. Nevertheless, the part about Pataliputra becoming a vital trade centre is true. It was also the heart and soul of the Magadhan empire, crisscrossed by vital political and economic bonds that extended over the entire realm.

Megasthenes’s Palimbothra (Pataliputra) was, to him, the greatest city in India. His description of its impressive fortifications and other striking features has been noted elsewhere but if we adhere to his calculations, it would have been a city of some 4,500 hectares.9 This does not exactly correspond to the archaeological excavations but the ruins indicate that it was, in fact, a very large city. According to F.R. Allchin, for instance, it would have been ‘far larger than any other South Asian city of its day’. Nayanjot Lahiri claims that even if Ashoka’s princely sojourns brought him to cities ‘with massive ramparts and overlooked rivers’, they would have appeared ‘Lilliputian’ to him as compared to the ‘enormous sprawl’ of Pataliputra.10

Weirdly enough, Megasthenes does not see fit to describe the palace, which must have been an impressive building in itself. Frustratingly, archaeological evidence for this royal residence is also minimal except for sundry, disconnected remains of structures that pop up during construction works. There are remains of the wooden palisade on the boundaries, though, and as Megasthenes is quite verbose about them, he clearly (at least in this instance!) set down exactly what he saw. There were two parallel rows of walls made of wood, paved and covered with it, creating a sort of tunnel-like passage, the kind that would have gladdened Kautilya’s heart.

The city’s drains were made of wood, too—and we know all this from excavations at Bulandibagh in Patna, conducted painstakingly by D.B. Spooner (this was from 1915–17; others took over later). Why wood, you may ask. Remember that Pataliputra was a swamp, more or less, and, therefore, prone to waterlogging, which was why wood was used for defences and drains—and this wasn’t just any old wood from trees that grew in the vicinity but the carefully-procured sal, hard and ideal for these conditions but, to complicate matters, not native to the area. So it was clearly carted here from some unknown place by someone with great engineering insight; Pataliputra became the first city in the Magadhan region to use this wood to build an entire urban metropolis. And it has survived to this day, over two thousand years later! Other things have come to light apart from the palisade and a large wooden drain; among them, a big spoked chariot wheel with an iron rim and the probable foundation of a wooden jetty.

Spooner, though, had made another spectacular discovery some years earlier: seventy-two pillars arranged in a chessboard pattern at Kumrahar in Patna. Eight more were later discovered by A.S. Altekar and V.K. Misra, so here were the remains of a massive pillared hall, which must have been used for some grand ceremonial and/or congregational purpose but we have no supporting evidence for this. All we can say is that these (Chunar) sandstone pillars were thinner and shorter than the Ashokan ones, and were originally fixed on square wooden bases.11 The hall seems to have been open on all sides—there are no traces of walls—but it (or, specifically, the floor and roof) seems to have been burnt, at some point: a large amount of ash and burnt wood discovered indicate this.

Incidentally, seven wooden platforms of the inimitable sal wood were excavated near the hall and perhaps these supported a (wooden) staircase leading to it. Some scholars have gone further and suggested that a canal might have connected this spot to the Son river. Spooner has drawn an exciting parallel between this splendid pillared hall at Kumrahar and the Hall of Public Audience of the Persian king, Darius, at Persepolis in Iran but the former is a more elaborate structure. We still do not know what it was used for.

This chapter is not a treatise on art and architecture, so we will cite just a few more examples in the Mauryan context that would interest even the aesthetically-challenged. We have, for instance, a hoard of Mauryan soapstone discs to consider that are beautifully-moulded and decorated with the usual suspects: lotuses, nude women, and several birds and animals. Workmanship under the Mauryas was clearly exemplary but what these delicately exquisite pieces were used for is not clear. Also, Megasthenes might have walked among display stalls in the market or even seen them used at court but he does not mention them at all. One suspects he did not particularly have an eye for art or subtleties thereof but, rather, for the visually obvious and/or the glaringly unfamiliar.

Then there is the Dhauli rock sculpture in Odisha of the front part of an elephant, which is so realistically carved with the right leg tilted and the left one bent that it seems as if it is walking out of the stone, a sight that is both spellbinding and slightly eerie, in turn. We also have a torso of a nude male—of Chunar sandstone, polished and rather graphically carved—recovered from Lohanipur in Patna, with the potential to offend the prudish. On the subject of nude art in the ancient context (whether in stone or terracotta), there is a ubiquitous tendency to label those of women as varying depictions of the mother goddess, the fertility goddess and/or goddesses in general. Nude male figures are not accorded this level of retrospective reverence—they are just seen as ordinary men, sometimes of society’s higher echelons (if richly-adorned). So women can’t be treated normally in art as well. The wheels of gender bias in perennial motion.

Rock-cut architecture also seems to have been a pioneering Mauryan offering to posterity. There are several caves in the Barabar and Nagarjuni hills near Bodhgaya, outwardly plain but with highly-polished interiors, that contain inscriptions of Ashoka and Dasharatha (noted earlier), and with some fancy sculptural ornamentation in the Lomasha Rishi cave, in particular. Ashoka also forged ahead—in a somewhat dramatic and frenzied manner—with building stupas, emblematic of the Buddha. It seems that he distributed the Buddha’s relics among pivotal towns and ordered the construction of stupas over them.12 There are remains of hundreds of Buddhist monastic settlements built around stupas all over India and extending into Afghanistan. Some were built from scratch, some merely enlarged but the place of honour goes to the stupa site at Sanchi in the Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh—a place on the outskirts of ancient Vidisha, which, as you may remember, had a personal importance for Ashoka, being Devi’s hometown.

Incidentally, Vidisha also contains a marvellous relic of religious import—the pillar of Heliodorus, the envoy of the Indo-Greek ruler, Antialcidas of Taxila, to King Bhagabhadra (his identity is hotly disputed), who inscribed on it—in the Prakrit language and Brahmi script—his devotion to Vasudeva, ‘the god of gods’ (another name for Krishna) in the second century BCE. Excavations have, in fact, revealed his pillar to have formed part of an ancient Vasudeva temple site. At the time of its discovery in 1877, it was covered with vermillion and dutifully worshipped by the locals who had given it the somewhat prosaic name of Khamba Baba.

The core of the largest stupa in Sanchi, rather unimaginatively dubbed the Great Stupa or Stupa no.1, was definitely built in Ashoka’s time as it shares the same level as his schism pillar edict. The site itself sports several stupas, shrines and monasteries—and sees an enormous amount of tourist traffic every year. (It helps that the Bhimbetka caves and the Heliodorus pillar are a stone’s throw away, so a ‘Sanchi trip’ covers a satisfying number of historical places.) There are other well-known stupa sites, too, that have Mauryan associations: the stupa-monastery complex at Amaravati, the Dharmarajika and Dhamekh stupas at Sarnath, and one at Rajgir, among them.13

Some of them were hidden in plain sight, apparently. Upinder Singh, for instance, recounts the story behind P.K. Mishra’s discovery of an Ashokan stupa at Deorkothar in the Rewa district of Madhya Pradesh.14 A brick mound there was explained away as the unfulfilled wish of an ancient king (again, unknown!) who wanted to build a palace but died, all of a sudden, before doing anything about his amassed brick piles. Further archaeological probing revealed all sorts of remains, including a stupa, which, for several sound reasons, has been connected to the Mauryan period and, specifically, Ashoka.

If you walk into the Mathura Museum today, among the staggering range of ancient antiquities on display is a grey sandstone figure, datable to the Mauryan period, that is likely to take your breath away. This is of the Parkham yaksha, whose sheer size (2.59 m high) and somewhat brooding presence (note the set of the mouth, for instance) borders on the intimidating, although his broken right arm was probably raised in the time-honoured protection-granting gesture (abhaya-mudra).15 Yakshas (and yakshis, their female counterparts), a vibrant part of popular religion, were otherwise generally friendly deities connected with water, fertility, trees and forests. The third century BCE inscription in Brahmi on this particular sculpture’s base indicates that it was an image of the yaksha Manibhadra, the deity of merchants and travellers, and a highly important figure in the commercial world, therefore.

And here is another interesting story of continuity. When the image of the yaksha Manibhadra was removed from Parkham village (where it was found, hence the name) to the Mathura Museum several years ago, he was replaced by a substitute to officiate, so to speak, in the annual Jakhaiya mela (yaksha fair) at Parkham. The latter is a complete parody of the original, though! He is small with an exaggerated grin (or grimace, depending on what you see) and his right arm is raised in a sort of cheerful wave—a far cry from the original colossal image that exudes sheer power and strength and dignity.

There is, as well, the Didarganj yakshi, magnificent in her adornments—but reassuringly real with two rolls of flesh on her stomach, crafted of the same sandstone as the Ashokan pillars and with the same lustrous polish, who was discovered, in 1917, sticking out of the mud beside the Ganga at Didarganj village in Patna. She has been dubbed the Venus de Milo of Indian art, a sobriquet which, Charles Allen, for one, complains, is inadequate as she has ‘far more allure’.16 In fact, Allen goes a step further and speculates that she was crafted ‘by the same genius’ who produced the spectacular Sarnath lion capital, the ‘Mauryan Michelangelo’, as it were.

And here is a very recent salute to what the Mauryans built and its enduring legacy: a motorcycle journey undertaken by a bike-and-history enthusiast who went visiting the edicts of Ashoka in Karnataka and discovered that this route formed a ‘perfect bike circuit’.17 Kiran Balakrishnan embarked on this ‘historical trip’ after much forethought and research; it took him four days to cover the 1,200 kms along the locations of the Ashokan edicts. And this was a strategic plan in more ways than one: pandemic times meant lesser crowds and a more enjoyable experience, by extension! Besides, most of the edict locations involved hiking uphill, apart from the motoring, which added to the fun of the whole thing.

Accordingly, setting forth from Bengaluru on his steed of choice, the Avenger, Balakrishnan first visited Brahmagiri, Ashoka Siddapura and Jatinga Rameshwara—all within a three-km radius—and then went on to Yadugiri, Nittur and Udegolam in the Bellary district; Maski in the Raichur district (which, incidentally, he was thrilled to see because it is supposed to be the first edict that mentions Ashoka by name); Sannati in Kalaburagi; and finally, Palkigundu and Gavimath in the Koppal district.

Balakrishnan joins the ranks of others who have pondered deeply over the choice of locations of these edicts (and sitting atop a hill beside an ancient relic in grand isolation, as it were, must have been conducive to profound thinking). He adds his two-bit: the nine edicts in Karnataka were in a better state of preservation than the two in Andhra Pradesh but the presence of active mining zones in close proximity to these epigraphs could, quite possibly, destroy them and the boulders they are inscribed on. Time, indeed, for historians and heritage conservationists to put their heads together while Balakrishnan plans his next journey of bike-discovery. Incidentally, this is not the first time that he has sallied forth in search of new frontiers—a few months prior to the Ashokan route, he had gone on a road trip to Assam and Nagaland, managing to cover Guwahati, Dimapur, Kohima, Imphal, Loktak and Moreh, in the process. Hats off to his indomitable spirit—and to his obviously sturdy back!

And, of course, to Ashoka who continues to reinvent himself, albeit unknowingly, in contemporary times.