Ashoka Put the Kalinga Toll in Stone, 150,000 Deported and 100,000 Killed, and for Centuries No One Could Read It Until a Calcutta Mint Official Did in 1837

In the reign of Sultan Firoz Shah of Delhi, who took the throne in 1351, a carriage with forty-two wheels hauled a stone shaft out of the hills near Topra. Shams-i Siraj Afif, who was twelve years old at the time and later wrote the sultan’s chronicle, described the job. In the translation in Elliot and Dowson’s History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, a rope was tied to each wheel and 200 men pulled on each rope. The shaft went down the Yamuna by boat to Firozabad, the sultan’s new city at Delhi, and was raised onto a base of stone and lime that grew in stages, the pillar lifted onto each stage as it was finished.

Afif noted that the foot of the pillar carried “several lines of writing in Hindi characters.” What happened next takes him one sentence: “Many Brahmans and Hindu devotees were invited to read them, but no one was able.”

The writing was Ashoka’s. The Delhi-Topra pillar carries seven of his pillar edicts, and the last and longest is cut on no other pillar. When E. Hultzsch published the standard edition of the inscriptions in 1925, the shaft still stood on the roof of Firoz Shah’s kotla, the citadel outside the Delhi Gate.

tuput already has a shorter piece on Ashoka that tells his life and the turn after Kalinga. This one stays with the stone: what the edicts say, how the Kalinga figures read in each surviving version, and how a mint official in Calcutta got the script read.

A portfolio in Calcutta that nobody could read

James Prinsep was Assay Master of the Calcutta Mint and secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. In July 1837 he told readers of its journal that the Society had held facsimiles of the Delhi inscription “since its very foundation, without any successful attempt having been made to decipher them.”

What unlocked the script was a set of facsimiles of the short inscriptions at the Buddhist monument at Sanchi, copied by Captain E. Smith of the Engineers. Prinsep was arranging the scraps for a plate when he saw that all of them ended in the same two letters. They were so brief and so isolated that they could not be pieces of a longer text, so he guessed they recorded offerings by worshippers, as the flagstaffs, images and small shrines crowded into Buddhist temples in Burma each carry the donor’s name. The letter before the last word matched a genitive ending he had learnt only a day or two earlier from coins of Saurashtra. “Of so and so the gift” must be the form of each line, he reasoned, and that gave him the word danam and the two letters that had beaten him in earlier attempts.

As he put it, “accident, rather than study, has had the merit of solving the enigma which has so long baffled the learned.” Work on other ancient alphabets since 1834, he added, let him name most of the remaining letters at once. He tested the result on the Delhi column.

He did not read it alone. Ratna Pala, a Pali scholar whom Prinsep “immediately invited to assist me in reading the inscription,” read the dating formula on the Delhi pillar at sight as the Pali for the twenty-seventh year of the anointing. The edicts repeat one opening formula, which Prinsep rendered in July as “Thus spake king Devanampiya Piyadasi.” Devanampiya means “beloved of the gods,” and either word, Prinsep noted, or both, might be the king’s name.

A king of Ceylon, then a letter from Colombo

Prinsep’s first answer was wrong, and he said so in print. He had given the pillars to a king of Ceylon “because his was the nearest or the only approach to the name recorded in the inscription.” By September 1837 he saw the difficulty: the inscription has its king “making roads, digging wells, and usurping other secular authority in a country over which he was not himself reigning.” Then he found an inscription in the caves near Gaya that gives the same title to a king Dasaratha, whom he took for Ashoka’s grandson, and an Indian author looked likelier.

The proof came by post from Colombo. George Turnour of the Ceylon Civil Service, whom Prinsep called the Society’s Pali annalist, wrote that he had been going through a copy of the Dipavamsa, an old Pali chronicle of the island. In its sixth section, on the Buddhist king Dhammasoka, he found a verse dating the anointing of Piyadassi to 218 years after the Buddha’s death, and a second verse describing the same prince as the son of Bindusara and grandson of Chandragupta, viceroy at Ujjain. “Here then we find that Asoka was surnamed Piyadassi,” Turnour wrote.

Prinsep printed the letter at once and called Ceylon “the very first meridian whence the true longitude of all ancient Indian history seems destined to be calculated.” The December journal carried more from Turnour, including a Pali prose work from his own shelves that more than once calls Dhammasoka by the name Piyadasa, and an outline of the king’s life as the chronicles tell it.

That outline has Ashoka killing all his brothers but one, Tissa, on his way to the throne. The edicts do not say so. Rock Edict 5 names “the women’s quarters belonging to my brothers and sisters” among the places where his officers work, and S. Dhammika, who translated the edicts, writes that there “seems to have been a two-year war of succession during which at least one of Asoka’s brothers was killed.”

The identification still rested on a Ceylonese chronicle. On 27 January 1915 C. Beadon, a gold-mining engineer, found an edict near Maski, in the Nizam’s dominions. Hultzsch noted that it calls the king Devanampriya Asoka, a personal name known until then only from Buddhist literature and the Puranas.

Rock Edict 13, version by version

Rock Edict 13 survives, among other places, at Girnar in Gujarat, at Kalsi in the hills of Dehradun, at Shahbazgarhi near Mardan and at Mansehra in Hazara. At Girnar the rock was damaged: Hultzsch records that workmen of a merchant who was building a causeway from Junagadh to the hill blasted parts of edicts 5 and 13 with gunpowder.

The Kalinga figures come in the first lines. Hultzsch’s translation of the Shahbazgarhi copy, which the Kalsi copy matches apart from the spelling Kalingyas, reads: “When king Devanampriya Priyadarsin had been anointed eight years, (the country of) the Kalingas was conquered by (him). One hundred and fifty thousand in number were the men who were deported thence, one hundred thousand in number were those who were slain there, and many times as many those who died.”

Dhammika renders the last clause “many more died (from other causes).” The Greek text found at Kandahar in 1963, which summarises Edicts 12 and 13, counts in myriads of ten thousand, fifteen deported and ten killed. In Francesco Maniscalco’s English it ends: “a hundred thousand more were crushed and almost as many died.” The first two figures agree in every version we checked. On the third they part: the Prakrit says many times as many as the hundred thousand, and the Greek says almost as many.

All of it is the king’s own count. We could not trace an independent record of the figures, and neither Hultzsch nor Dhammika offers one.

The edict then turns to the king’s feelings. In Hultzsch’s Kalsi translation: “This is the repentance of Devanampriya on account of his conquest of (the country of) the Kalingyas.” A few lines on: “even the hundredth part or the thousandth part of all those people who were slain, who died, and who were deported at that time when (the country of) the Kalingas was taken, (would) now be considered very deplorable by Devanampriya.”

The Kalinga rocks leave the confession out

Kalinga is now mostly Odisha, and it has two sites with Ashoka’s rock edicts: Dhauli, about seven miles south of Bhubaneswar, and Jaugada in Ganjam. Lieutenant Kittoe found the Dhauli rock in 1837. Prinsep, studying Kittoe’s lithograph, saw that Dhauli leaves out the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth of the fourteen rock edicts and has two separate edicts in their place, as Hultzsch later summarised it. Jaugada follows the same plan. Of the sites Hultzsch edited, these are the two in Kalinga, and neither has Edict 13.

The separate edicts speak in a different voice, to the king’s own officers. The first, to the judicial officers at Tosali, says in Dhammika’s translation: “All men are my children.” It goes on: “While being completely law-abiding, some people are imprisoned, treated harshly and even killed without cause so that many people suffer.” It tells the officers to rid themselves of “envy, anger, cruelty, hate, indifference, laziness or tiredness,” and promises inspectors every five years “who are not harsh or cruel.”

The second, in the Jaugada copy, is addressed to officers at Samapa and speaks about the unconquered peoples beyond the border: “My only intention is that they live without fear of me, that they may trust me and that I may give them happiness, not sorrow.” The king who regretted the conquest went on ruling Kalinga through officers.

What the king kept

Rock Edict 13 leaves room for force. Its closing request is that the king’s “sons and great-grandsons may not consider making new conquests, or that if military conquests are made, that they be done with forbearance and light punishment.” The forest peoples inside his borders are “told that despite his remorse Beloved-of-the-Gods has the power to punish them if necessary,” in Dhammika’s translation.

Rock Edict 1 counts the cost of the royal kitchen: “hundreds of thousands of animals were killed every day to make curry,” and now “only three creatures, two peacocks and a deer are killed, and the deer not always.” The death penalty stays. In Pillar Edict 4 the king grants “a three-day stay for those in prison who have been tried and sentenced to death,” so that relatives can appeal. Pillar Edict 5 records that in twenty-six years “prisoners have been given amnesty on twenty-five occasions.”

The edicts also date his faith. Minor Rock Edict 1 says: “It is now more than two and a half years since I became a lay-disciple, but until now I have not been very zealous.” Rock Edict 13 says the conquest left him with “a strong inclination towards the Dhamma.” Dhammika reads the two together as a nominal Buddhist before Kalinga and an active one after it.

Pillar Edict 7 reviews the whole programme and grades it. The banyan trees, mango groves, wells and rest-houses along the roads are “minor achievements,” the king says: “Such things to make the people happy have been done by former kings.” Of his own rules, such as the protected animals, he says: “Dhamma regulation is of little effect, while persuasion has much more effect.”

The numbered edicts, one by one

Dhammika’s translation lets the fourteen Major Rock Edicts be read in order. The first bans animal sacrifice and some festivals. The second provides medical treatment for people and animals, in his domain and among the Cholas, Pandyas and Keralaputras, as far as Tamraparni and where the Greek king Antiochos rules. Officers go on inspection tours every five years under Edict 3, and in Edict 4 “the sound of the drum has been replaced by the sound of the Dhamma.” Edict 5 appoints Dhamma Mahamatras, officers of morality, thirteen years after the coronation, to work among all faiths and for the release of prisoners with families to support.

In Edict 6 the king orders reporters to bring him the affairs of the people “whether I am eating, in the women’s quarters, the bed chamber, the chariot, the palanquin, in the park or wherever.” Hunting tours give way to Dhamma tours in Edict 8, the first to Sambodhi, which Dhammika notes is Bodh Gaya.

Edict 12 deals with other faiths: “Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought ‘Let me glorify my own religion,’ only harms his own religion. Therefore contact (between religions) is good.” Pillar Edict 7 backs that with orders. The king has Mahamatras attend to the affairs of the Sangha, the Brahmans, the Ajivikas and the Jains, and says he has ordered “that different Mahamatras be occupied with the particular affairs of all different religions.”

Pillar Edict 1 says “Happiness in this world and the next is difficult to obtain without much love for the Dhamma, much self-examination, much respect, much fear (of evil), and much enthusiasm.” Pillar Edict 2 says Dhamma includes “little evil, much good, kindness, generosity, truthfulness and purity.” Protected animals fill Pillar Edict 5, among them parrots, bats, queen ants, tortoises, porcupines, squirrels and deer. In Pillar Edict 6 the king says he honours “all religions with various honors” but thinks it best “to meet with people personally.”

Pillars, and who moved them

Dhammika’s introduction gives the physical facts. The pillars averaged “between forty and fifty feet in height” and weighed “up to fifty tons each,” and all of them were quarried at Chunar, just south of Varanasi, and “dragged, sometimes hundreds of miles, to where they were erected.” Only ten with inscriptions survive, and they have a mirror-like polish that has lasted through centuries in the open. The iron pillar at Mehrauli, forged centuries later, is a different object, covered in tuput’s piece on why it has not rusted.

Prinsep’s key worked on more than the Delhi shaft. The title of his July 1837 paper takes in the pillars at Allahabad, Radhia and Mattiah, whose inscriptions agree with the Delhi text. The Allahabad pillar also carries the eulogy of Samudragupta, which tuput’s piece on the Guptas describes.

At Lumbini, in Nepal, Dr Fuhrer found a pillar in December 1896. The Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsiang had written that Ashoka’s pillar in the Lumbini garden carried a horse on top and had been struck by lightning and broken in the middle, and the stump Fuhrer found had a split top. Hultzsch translates the inscription: “When king Devanampriya Priyadarsin had been anointed twenty years, he came himself and worshipped (this spot), because the Buddha Sakyamuni was born here.” The king made the village of Lummini “free of taxes, and paying (only) an eighth share (of the produce).” Hultzsch added a dry footnote: “In the case of the village of Lummini, bureaucracy prevailed against charity.”

Five Greek kings in an Indian edict

Edict 13 says Dhamma has been won “where the Greek king Antiochos rules, beyond there where the four kings named Ptolemy, Antigonos, Magas and Alexander rule.” Prinsep read the Greek names in 1838, Antiyoka in the second edict in February and the others in the thirteenth in March, and Hultzsch wrote that the five contemporaries confirm in a general way Prinsep’s identification of the king.

Dhammika’s notes give their reigns: Antiochos II of Syria (261 to 246 BCE), Ptolemy II of Egypt (285 to 247), Antigonos Gonatas of Macedonia (278 to 239), Magas of Cyrene (300 to 258) and Alexander of Epirus (272 to 258). On those dates all five ruled together only from 261 to 258 BCE. The edict adds that “even where Beloved-of-the-Gods’ envoys have not been” people have heard of the Dhamma and follow it. That is the king’s claim, and we found no Greek record of it.

The wheel in the Assembly

On 22 July 1947 Nehru moved a resolution in the Constituent Assembly that put a navy-blue wheel in the centre of the white band of the flag, in the design of the Chakra on the abacus of the Sarnath Lion Capital of Asoka. The schedule to the State Emblem of India (Prohibition of Improper Use) Act, 2005 describes the State Emblem as “an adaptation from the Sarnath Lion Capital of Asoka which is preserved in the Sarnath Museum.” Nehru told the Assembly: “For my part, I am exceedingly happy that in this sense indirectly we have associated with this Flag of ours not only this emblem but in a sense the name of Asoka, one of the most magnificent names not only in India’s history but in world history.”

Laxminarayan Sahu, a member for Orissa, spoke later that day. “Asoka from Magadha went over to Kalinga and fought a great battle,” he said. “After very heavy carnage, he was turned into a gentle being.” Then he added: “There are two places in Orissa even to day where the edicts of Asoka are standing, to tell the world that we must serve all countries and all humanity, irrespective of caste, creed, colour and so on.” The two Orissa sites with Ashoka’s rock edicts are Dhauli and Jaugada, and neither carries Rock Edict 13. The record of the vote reads: “The motion was adopted, the whole Assembly standing.”