Send Benefactor Ordered with airSlate SignNow

Send benefactor ordered

three two one we are live on facebook uh good evening everyone and before starting today's session uh we would like to take a few moments to remember a teacher and a veteran historian who left us for heavenly award this morning professor sunil kumar professor kumar was an eminent historian and a leading authority on the daily cell thinner than medieval india who was also who also served as the head of the department of history at the university of delhi professor kumar studied the culture society and politics of the central islamic lands in afghanistan and north india specifically during the 12th and 16th centuries moving from his early work on the political culture and this social construction of authority and its diverse representation during the 13th and 14th century delhi sultanate he was working on the history of mughal urban center in north india he was the author of the emergence of the delhi sultanate and the present in delhi's past we at karwan on behalf of the students fraternity extend our most sincere condolences to his family and friends in this prime time may his soul rest in peace om shanti and moving ahead good good evening and welcome to today's karwan distinguished lecture titled ashok memory and memory and history and to deliver this lecture we have with us a renowned historian someone who has been an inspiration and icon to our generation of history students and i am already apologizing if i become a fan boy at any moment during this lecture professor nayanj lahiri professor lahiri taught at hindu college from 1982 to 1993 and thereafter in the department of history at delhi university till 2016 when he joined ashoka university as the professor of history she was educated at saint stephen's college delhi university and she earned her amphil and phd from the eu we where she also served as dean as college dean of colleges and dean of international affairs professor lahiri is the recipient of the prestigious 2013 infosys prize for humanities and archaeology her research interest includes ancient india indian archaeology and heritage studies he is the author of pre-a home assam the archaeology of indian trade routes finding forgotten cities how the indus civilization was discovered marshalling the past ancient india in its modern histories ashok in ancient india monuments matter india's archaeological heritage independence and time pieces a whistle stop tour of ancient india a book ashoka in ancient india was awarded the 2016 john f richards prize by the american historical association for the best work on south asian history we are deeply thankful to professor lahiri for accepting our invitation to deliver today's distinguished lecture without further ado i would formally invite professor lahiri to deliver the karwan distinguished lecture ma'am over to you thank you so much ishaan for your introduction and i want to add to what you said about sunil kumar sunil was my colleague at the university of delhi from 1993 to 2015. i co-taught in film courses with him and he was a wonderful colleague and it's really truly a shock that he left us in the way he did my lecture today is and i'm just going to share screen with you please let me know if this is uh visible so is this visible yes okay so my lecture today is on the interplay of history and memory in relation to emperor ashok uh arguably the most famous emperor of ancient india and it's centered around three sites in india sanchi madhya pradesh junagadh in gujarat and the barabara hills in the jahanabad area of bihar but what i want to point out is that the interplay that i'm going to talk about can be seen beyond india too especially across southeast asia and in acknowledging this um i'd like to begin by briefly taking you to a city in south thailand this is you can see it on the map here and it's you know it's in the peninsula of thailand it's an urban center with very provincial ambiance uh with nothing in its contemporary form that especially striking but if you go beyond the modern city center untroubled by new nikon is a charming historic hub where one can see a reflection of much that makes up its history the ambiance of the old center owes a great deal to its city walls to its most famous buddhist stoop that is part of what mahathat to the images of the buddha and bodhisattvas as also to hindu deities in relict temple ruins and gardens but above all there is the presence of medieval kings with names like see tama asok that is sri dhamma ashok or ashok tamarat that is ashok damaraj in the first half of the second millennium sea you can see here a modern statue of a medieval thai ashok many of the ashoks that you know people nakhon sitha also figured in a very remarkable way in the chronicles of the city what is most remarkable though of course is that our own ashok also figures there this is a translation of the various chronicles uh done by david wyatt and published many many years ago and if you look at the chronicles they tell a story about a letter that a messenger from sri dharma asok raja a ruler of the middle country of madhya desh which is part of ancient india carried to thailand the indian king is described as a man of immense merit who could translate from the pali text with the same expertise as monks he had built 84 000 holy reliquaries to house the relics of the buddha but he did not have any relics to enshrine there and so he was writing to the thai ashok with a request to send him some relics now it was no doubt very embarrassing that the spot in the city where these were buried was not known to the dhamma raja of nakhon but he eventually succeeded in getting it identified through the intervention of a couple of people who had knowledge of their location so this is how the thai ashok got buddhist relics in his own land recovered and he sent these to the indian ashok to fill the thousands of reliquaries that he had got constructed in madhya desh now if you just juxtapose this with what we know about the construction of supers and relics in india actually for nearly a millennium and a half old legends had grown around and new ones had got invented around ashok but by the time he was imagined in thailand in this part of thailand at least his persona had undergone a complete transformation the writings which were put together some centuries after ashok's death ranging from the sanskrit text to the you know to the sri lankan pali chronicles texts like the deepavamsa and the mahabharata these inevitably associated ashok with the construction of stoops where the relics of earlier stoops which he had got exhumed were buried so he was actually the one in these texts who was distributing relics all over the place but in this part of thailand that ancient king was dramatically transformed he was dramatically transformed into a supplicant seeking relics the proactive recoverer of the buddha's bones was now being very inventively portrayed as a petitioner petitioning for a portion of the relics so ashok as he appears in medieval nakhon si tamarat is entirely different from the kingly figure in ancient south asia now this phenomenon of making a historical figure visible while simultaneously reinventing him is one that has never ceased to amaze me across the many years that i've spent in emperor ashok's company so that's what i'm going to look at in relation to a few indian sites as in the case of thailand to me what appears most fascinating is not that ashok is remembered but how he is remembered and the gap between what he himself puts out in the public domain in those places and how he came to be remembered later and also what came to be forgotten and in one instance erased now one can see this very very dramatically in the case of sanchi in madhya pradesh the main terrace on which this super that you see was built in the reign of ashok the architects created a terrace on the top of the hill they did this by slicing away uneven segments and filling up the base with debris and on this terrace the great stupa was constructed alongside ashok also put up a pillar now only the stump of the pillar remains in situ it's now broken but the pillar can be seen on the site the balance pillar now while this pillar carried an edict of the emperor the super actually does not have any epigraph of ashok but we do know that it's of ashokan antiquity because the level of the floor on which the super stands is the same as that of the inscribed pillar the stoop itself the ashokan stoop which you can't see here was made of large burnt bricks and mud motor and it was topped by a stone umbrella one may well ask of course why did ashok choose to set up a stupa and a pillar in sanchi i'm saying this because many of the places where these were set up had to do with uh the life of the buddha so you find an ashokan imprint in a place like sarnath and and at lumbini but sanchi does not have those sorts of buddhist associations so the choice of the place has to be sought elsewhere and i think it may well have to do with his buddhist companion devi ashok's romance with devi began before he became emperor in the city of vidisha where her father was a prominent merchant soon enough according to uh the chronicles the sri lankan chronicles they became a couple and they moved to ujjaini where prince ashok was a viceroy of his emperor father bindusar devi soon became the mother of a boy called mahinda and a little later a daughter sangha mitha the sri lankans were actually especially interested in these siblings because their chronicles remembered these two as going to their land so mahinda is supposed to have introduced buddhism there and to have converted the king of sri lanka at that point while sangha mitta carried a branch of the bodhi tree to its shores and like her brother she made the island her home now at some point of time before leaving for sri lanka mahinda who had become a monk is supposed to have gone to meet his mother at a place called vedic because the name giri you know evokes a hill so the conjecture is that the monastery vedisha giri was near vidisha and it was likely to have been sanchi where the mother took her monk's son and his companions so possibly because had loved and lived with a buddhist woman from vidisha as an emperor he chose a hill uh not far from there to set up a relic bearing super now having said that the fact is that ashok had actually erected a pillar and a soup uh very close to where he may have met devi but devi doesn't actually figure in the messaging that is inscribed on the super so there's actually uh an edict of ashok and you can see the writing uh here devi is not mentioned here nor in any of his other epigraphs although she may well have been part of the buddhist community at sanchi to whom he addressed the message that you see the message was actually a very stern one where the ruler assuming the mantle of a spiritual regulator and a protector of buddhist unity expressed his disapproval of divisions or what is called sangha veda among monks and nuns the sangha actually was warned that they must eschew divisions and that any monk or none who would break up the sangha would actually be cast away and put in white robes and reside in what is called a non-residence so whichever way one looks at the royal program of building it's very much the authority of emperor ashok that is rich large over sanchi in the 3rd century bc the monks and the nuns who he's addressing here remain entirely invisible and one can actually imagine them quaking in their ropes at the tone of ashok's message now this changed in a hundred years or so when in the middle of the second century bce ashok underwent a complete transformation the rebuilding had become necessary because the stupa was deliberately damaged and when it was repaired and rebuilt it became something very different and something which i'm sure ashok himself had not envisioned uh the brick stupa now practically doubled in size and uh this massive in structure that you see here was encased and it's very visible with the veneer of stones covered with mud plaster of course the mud plaster has only survived in parts stairways and railings were also added and you know stone balustrades which consisted of pillars and crossbars so if you compare the massive structure of the stones clad stew with the more modest one that ashok had made it confirms at least to me a sense that the architect who designed or the architects who designed this expanded super ensured that not only was uh the damage which was done to the ashokan super invisibilized there was actually a grandstanding of the emperor's creation now who is likely to have paid for this construction and renovation actually it was members of the buddhist sangha the same ones who were invisible earlier they were proactive in making donations that helped to construct this entire building and all the embellishments here we know that there were a few hundred uh records of gifts which were made by buddhist uh nuns and monks and you can see uh their inscriptions recording their donations the dhan that is made on pillars on um you know coping stones on crossbars and even on the flagstones of the circumambulation parts so there are nuns there are monks that figure here but there are also a few hundred voices that are not monastic um people mention their names the places where they come from their kin affiliations whether they are donating this alone or it is with a group and so on and so forth so the whole point that i'm trying to make is that earlier where one only encountered the voice of ashok who was speaking very sternly to a faceless monastic community within a century after he passed away these people the sangha and also members beyond the sangha who i would call indians you know the earliest indians whose names we know the dins of their voices now decorate the lads too and they appear to drown the voice of the emperor it is their words that are all over and they made sure that by doing this they imprinted in an indelible and dramatic way their presence in this very holy place now sometime after this in the first century bc four gateways uh were carved in stone these gateways came to be erected at the entrances of the great stove they're actually breathtaking in their beauty and uh the stunning impact of these gateways is because they're absolutely massive you know they weigh tons in terms of uh you know their bulk but these enormous mass is actually offset by the very minutely carved stories on them and in turn if you look at these intricate carvings they stand out because of the contrast they present to the very plain stone dome of the super behind it's on one of these gateways that actually ashok appears as a flesh and blood figure i'm of course going to show you those representations but i do want to point out that the place of ashok is only one thread in this larger tapestry of buddhist stories and events that are recorded on these gateways but unlike the presence of the buddha or the donors who are actually all absent in the human form ashok appears as a living being on the gateways now there are no identifying epigraphs accompanying the depictions and this is true not just for the ashokan depictions but for all imagery here so when we say that well this is a depiction of the buddha or this is a depiction of emperor ashok we are actually doing it on the basis of um you know iconography that is we are taking buddhist stories and using them to understand the sculpture the monastic community memorialized ashok most vividly on the southern gateway you can just see the edge of the southern gateway here it fronts the southern entrance to the stoop and this is actually not a coincidence it's not a coincidence because the southern gateway happened to be the main entrance uh to the store it's actually in front of the steps which leads to the berm above and that is the reason why actually emperor ashok stone pillar was also put up you know it is in the vicinity of the southern entrance now this gateway and i'll show you the gateway uh you know in all its beauty very shortly uh it was sculpted by the ivory covers of vidisha vidisha is a city which had all kinds of connections with devi and ashok and that is possibly why the designers imaged ashok there so that those who lived in sanchi or in vidisha or others who came on a pilgrimage here would continue to remember that the southern segment of the great stu had multiple connections with ashok it's another matter of course that devi was not imaged here while another more colorful wife of ashok this rakshita finds a place in its iconography now there are two different representations of ashok on this gateway and both of them form part of the familiar stories which are mentioned in buddhist texts on the front the middle architrave which you see here shows ashok's visit to ramagram this is emperor ashok and you can see that he's on a chariot uh this is an event uh the visit of ashok to the ramagram stoop which is alluded to in many texts and he's supposed to have actually gone there uh in order to take possession of one of the original relic deposits of the buddha that was buried in the super so ashok is shown here on a chariot with a very impressive procession including the infantry the cavalry elephants and chariots and what have you this is what the ram grams stoop incidentally looks like it's in a part of south nepal and it's a stoop which actually ashok is supposed to have come to but he doesn't manage to get the super opened up unlike the other supers where he does successfully remove relic deposits from and that is because um now it's incidentally it's very interesting that the super that is shown as the ramagram soup here is actually shown very much like what the sanchi stoop looks like now coming back to the story ashok actually does not manage to get to the relic deposits because it's being guarded by the nagas and you can see many nagas here who did nagas worshipping it unlike ashok who's accompanied by arms bearing troops the nagas are shown with their families and in worship and the sculpted narrative they actually successfully stopped the emperor from opening it they managed to persuade him that he shouldn't do this and to me this sculpted narrative actually juxtaposes military power as represented by ashok with the power of pt as in the case of the nagas surely uh this representation would have reminded pilgrims in sanchi that the nags resisted ashok and very successfully circumvented his quest for elixir now this was this very familiar story and um obviously uh there are other stories uh there are stories which actually uh talk about how ashok did successfully remove relics from seven other relic bearing supers but the sanchi gateway actually deliberately chooses only to memorialize the ram gram fiasco where you have a tribe of nagas who offers very courteous but implacable resistance to the imperial visitors enterprise so uh they are they are recording and remembering what ashok did not succeed to do you know succeed in and not what he had actually managed to uh do vis-a-vis the other uh reliquaries stupas it's a similar feeling which comes to mind when you look at the other avatar of ashok on the gateway this is carved on the southern gateway's western pillar and this time it's emperor ashok uh on his visit to the birdhi tree uh the emperor looks positively weepy ready to faint and fall if it were not for the women including a queen that is queen this rakshita who is supporting him the sacred tree according to textual accounts was dying out because of the jealous ignorance of his queen tishrakshita and eventually of course it was saved through the intervention of the very sorceress whose handiwork had made it wither so ashok here again is clearly not shown as a powerful triumphant king leading a legal possession but a figure of sorrow somebody who evokes sympathy now being able to spot ashok on the embellishment around the stupas made a few centuries after his time uh is one thing but i think what is far more significant is that the events which actually elicited admiration for ashoka in ancient buddhist literature are not chosen for depiction here so for instance is supposed to have displayed great generosity to the buddhist sangha that does not figure here the buddha is also supposed to have prophesied in an earlier life of ashoka when he was a boy a little boy called jaya in rajagriha that he would be in the future and in his next life a great king but that is also something that you don't see uh in the depictions instead what the sanchi representation showcased was that the emperor's power was not enough to either prevent near disasters as in the case of the bodhi tree nor was it sufficient for him to get what he wanted all the time as in the case of the ramagram stoop whose buddhist relics eluded him so to me it seems that the you know the depictions are saying that a raja however devout could not be like the buddha who overcame all kinds of malevolent creatures and misfortunes and in choosing to depict these themes in relation to ashok it was a design on the part of those who got these gateways made to express their opinion about the limits of political power in general and ashok's power in particular if the historical emperor in other words had stamped himself very dramatically in the third century bc and had spoken to the sangha in a very forbidding tone the manner in which he was memorialized by the sangha and by others was actually very different from his own historical engagement here so sanchi is primarily uh when you look at history and memory you're really looking at the emperor's you know buddhist avatar that is what is visible excuse me now many of you of course are familiar that uh with the fact that ashok is also somebody who appears in another avatar in his own edicts he speaks at length about matters of the state about governance and many such related matters so i'm now going to take you to a place which actually has a set of his major rock edicts uh which speak about such matters and that is gujarat on whose suburbs are located the ginar rocky dicks the uh ishaan is this visible yes now okay so uh the rock that you see here is actually and you can make out as a huge mass of rocks if you look at both the slides at the base it's covered with the canopy which is meant to safeguard it but which of course obscures the majesty of uh the rocks but i imagine in its original open-air setting it must have made a spectacular impression uh it certainly did so even 200 years ago uh in one of the earliest accounts which uh records such an impression uh this is the response of james todd who visited uh you know girnar in 1822 and this is how he described it he said let me describe what to the antiquary will appear the noblest monument of saurashtra a monument speaking in an unknown tongue of other times the memorial in question and evidently of some great conqueror is a huge hemispherical mass of dark granite which like a wart upon the body has protruded the crust of mother earth without fissure on any quality and which by the aid of an iron pen has been converted into a book so this is the impression it made on james todd and i'm sure it must have made a great impression on um you know ancient uh residents as well of course as you can see there's a big difference in you know the height of where the rock is and the level of the ground below and and imagine that some specially designated official must have stood on a scaffolding near the rock and would have then uh you know uh given a sense of ashok's words that are recorded there so this is the rock itself and uh what is most unusual is what is mentioned in his edicts you have an emperor here commanding his subjects in gernar through his message to follow a very moral path the morality is defined very expensively it ranges from non-violence towards animals to proactive measures for providing nurture and medical care both for animals and for human beings the emperor also outlines the contours of what he believes should be the way of life of his subjects one which involves obedience to parents liberality to brahmanas and to shermans and also a middle part of moderation both in expenditure and in possession but even more dramatic was how ashok fleshed himself out as a very human persona uh revealing both his feelings and his flaws before his subjects so right at the outset even as he stated that no living beings should be killed for sacrifice he also very candidly admitted that two peacocks and a deer were still killed in the royal kitchen for another the very vivid way in which his words described the widespread slaughter the death and deportation uh during and as a consequence of his conquest of kalinga this must have shocked many because as ashok himself acknowledged brahmins and shramans and householders who had actually led very moral lives were victims in the kalinga carnage so by listening to this tale of bloody triumph and juxtaposing what ashok's message revealed about his repentance his subjects the emperor was trying to highlight ought to understand that uh the aggrandizement driven agenda by which kalinga was conquered he had given up and instead he was pushing welfare oriented measures instead now of course the edicts that you see on this rock are not place specific or they are not context specific what do i mean by this what i mean is that they are also found elsewhere so you will find the same message for example at khalsi in uttarakhand and again at yeragudi in andhra but interestingly if you look at this specific place which is junagar you know in gujarat junagad actually has a lineage of connections that go back to ashok's grandfather chandragupta and i'll speak about that in a minute but ashoka in these edicts neither mentioned chandragupta nor even spoke about what he himself had actually added to his grandfather's legacy in junagar we learn about this only some 300 years later in an epigraph of mahakshatra prudhradaman in 150 c recorded a cloud burst which led to an artificial lake being destroyed as a consequence of the swollen flood waters of the rivers here and that this is something that he got renovated but which had originally been built by chandragupta and added to by ashok now this is uh you know showing you where the uh embankment that is described in rudra daman's inscription is likely to have been uh you if you see uh you know across uh uh the nasi kita you can see the embankment not all of it has survived only two parts uh you know the black portions have actually survived and you can see them in junagar this is one part of the embankment the remnant of the embankment near the river and this is the other part on the other side uh interestingly mahakshatra prudhradaman put his words about this embankment and about the maurya rulers who had constructed this embankment on the very rock on which ashok's edicts were you know on this part of the rock and in his uh you know message there is one line line eight which says that which talks about the earlier history of uh the dam and says it was ordered to be made by the veishea gupta the provincial governor of the maurya king chandragupta adorned with conduits for ashok maurya by the yavana king to shasfa while governing and by the conduit order to be made of by him constructed in a manner worthy of a king now it's not a long description but the fact of the matter matter is that it was a public message that uh you know served the purpose of uh of actually uh making sure that the uh you know the people who heard uh this message actually were aware of uh who had actually constructed uh this particular you know uh damn now to me this is actually amazing because it shows that the two mauryan monarchs were part of the remembered landscape of junagadh in the early century sea c and i find this remembrance uh exceptional for two reasons i think this is perhaps the only instance where the memory of ashok is connected to constructing and adding on to an edifice that was not a religious structure surely he like his grandfather must have made many other such interventions but they are entirely forgotten and when i saw this and remember thinking that the ashokan connection with this dam and the lake and the connection of chandragupta with it was not one that ashok himself was remotely interested in because if he was he would have actually carved this in stone and this brings me to the other reason why i find this invocation very very uncommon it's very rare for rulers of later dynasties to draw attention to the work or that previous dynasties had undertaken so instead usually it is rulers who are crowing about their own successful interventions but the composer of ruda daman's epigraph while of course he talks at length about his own patron rudra daman and the restoration of the lake he also provides a very straightforward recording of its previous history and it's this historical recording that provides a date to the building of the lake and gives us an insight into the ways in which ashok was remembered in junagadh a few hundred years after his time the question of course is why was ashok silent about it i think in trying to understand the emperor's silence my sense is that emperor ashok only got recorded what was of central importance to him and what ashok chose to do was very similar to what is the practice of rulers even after his time to just give you one example of a modern ruler uh somebody connected with sanchi this is sultan jahan begum who was the ruler of bhopal in the early part of the 20th century and we as archaeologists and scholars of the past know that she was the main benefactor who made the restoration of the sanchi stupas possible but if you read sultan memoir she does not think it necessary at all to mention her work at sanji instead she talks about her contribution to education and women's emancipation so ashok's interest in outlining his life in a particular way is a practice that one encounters all the time uh where only those deeds are mentioned that the ruler protagonists want remembered about themselves so again the historical ashok speaks in a particular way about matters of the state here he ignores in this the particularities of his own work in the provincial capital of his empire in junagar but in the remembrance of a ruler many centuries later what ashok ignored finds a special mention now from western india let's move on to the east to jahanabad and its hills in south bihar the jahanabad region for ancient india is specially important especially these hills because uh a very powerful sect the ajivika sect once lived here the hills in fact were made famous by ashok in the third century bc when he got tons of granite gouged out of its rock faces for making caves dedicated to the sect so there are at least three caves in this large outcrop that you see here and i'll take you a little later inside uh the cave to see you to show you what ashok had done uh the ajimicas actually uh believed in they were very ascetic they believed in this overwhelmingly fatalistic doctrine of predestination a doctrine which had no space for human will but they enjoyed much patronage in the court of magadh from the 6th century bc onwards as did other faiths like those around the buddha and mahavir but whereas we know about uh buddhism and jainism uh we know very little about the ajivikas because that religion has no modern adherence it completely vanished and that's what makes the creation of these elaborate caves by ashok extremely uh enigmatic they were fashioned on the orders of an emperor in whose courts obviously the ajivikas enjoyed much power and patronage which explains why such a substantial outlay of money was made for getting the caves created the ajidikas of course themselves performed great penances of the most rigorous nature uh lying on beds of thorns to deliberately expose themselves to bitter winds at night and so on and so forth and that's such a group of self mortifying men came to be provided as you will see with absolutely stunning habitations is something that i had heard of and i was very keen to see because it seemed so strangely at variance with the worldliness that they were meant to eschew but of course when i went to uh the barabara hills i did not first go to the caves i instead went to the top of the hill and you know where the caves are lower down and as i went up the hill what i encountered were actually rocks marked by lines of shiva lingas carved into niches the path was also strewn with wonderful stone images of hindu gods and goddesses you know ganesh images images of shiva and parvati looking absolutely lovely as they sit side by side and a very athletic looking varaha avatar these are all carvings that are crafted uh you know between the fifth and seventh centuries sea but if you look at them and at the fresh vermilion painted foreheads of the stone deities and the red cloth around it's a reminder that this is a path that modern pilgrims continue to take and this is a path they take because it takes you to the siddeshwara temple which is on top of the hill the temple crowns one of the highest peaks on the range the structure of course is modern it has of course many old images but it's built on the remnants of the older shrine so you can see the remnants of the older shrine here at the bottom but more than the siddeshwanath temple it's the view at this point from the top where the temple is perched that was absolutely stunning the hills that stretched out below uh you know were clothed in a gorgeous green foliage as you can see followed obviously by months of monsoonal rain and looking out one could see the very large outcrop this is the outcrop where my cursor is which had seen strenuous activity on behalf of emperor ashok in the third century bc and looking at a distance the preeminence actually looked like a gigantic creature one that is described in literature as being whale shaped this rocky mass is curvy linear in shape and it looks like a very massive humpback whale on a bed of sea green when you look at the outcrop at close quarters of course it looks very different there are four caves that a show got built here three in this whale shaped rock and one in an outcrop at some distance from it two of these caves are double chambered uh this the sudama cave has a smaller chamber as you can see which is deliberately fashioned like a hut it's been carved into rock in order to imitate a form that you often see in wood and bamboo the modern name in fact for one of the caves is vishwa jhopri which means a universal hut but it's another matter that the kind of money which would have been required for these caves was enormous certainly not something that people who lived in hearts could ever afford much was also spent incidentally on the carving of the lomash rishi cave entrance which is adjacent to the sudama cave unlike other caves it does not carry an ashokan epigraph but the polish inside and the architecture is manifestly ashokan the design as you can see is of elephants moving towards a stupa and there's a lattice screen behind a lattice screen made of intersecting circles which is very similar to what is there on the vajrasana which is also a piece of maurya's sculpture at mahapati and which emperor ashoka is supposed to have given in honor of the place where the buddha attained enlightenment the last of the emperor's dedications is the karna chopard cave in this outcrop and it's polished to a very high luster its inscription here does not mention the ajivikas but it does remember that the emperor dedicated it for shelter for mendicants in the rainy season now these epigraphs are very short and their brevity is actually in sharp variance with very magnificently elaborate caves in terms of their conception so just look at this cave it has a voltage roof inclining walls uh the proportions are highly you know uh sort of sensitively chosen to give an aesthetic appearance and this aesthetic appearance is enhanced by polish there's actually something unusually stuck about the fact that you have this rough granite outcrop outside which you saw and these very smooth glittering walls inside the fact that you have bright green hills outside and a very dark inky interior you have chirping birds and chatting human beings outside compare this to the perfect silence that was desired inside the caves because the caves actually enhance and echo every little sound that you make it's quite eerie and it was this uh you know proclivity to echo which became central to ian foster's uh novel the famous novel a passage to india where one character mrs moore dies with the echo of the caves in her head while another adila quested is missile by the echo into believing that she has been molested inside the cave now of course religious awards of various types have been made across thousands of years but these are actually staggeringly singular now over time these very extravagant endowments that emperor ashok made to the ajivikas underwent substantial change the most stark alteration was in the form of a deliberate erasure so this is the ashokan message in the sudama cave which alluded to his donation to the ajivikas but at some point in time the name of the ascetics was intentionally removed those who came to occupy this cave obviously belonged to another faith and they may have feared that some ajivika would turn up and claim it as their own so they removed the name of the sect from the rocks now there are no uh ajivikas after the sixth century bc none at least that pop up in inscriptions and so this um eurasia is likely to have been uh before the sixth century sea interestingly of course there was no such apprehension vis-a-vis ashok who was dead and gone so the allusion to king pia the sin which is how the morya emperor described himself remained unharmed there are also other later inscriptions in the caves uh inscriptions by sundry travellers and mendicants who wondered here uh there are some which you know show how these caves were actually perceived by those who came to the caves you know their response to the atmospherics of uh the barabar caves so for example this which reads clay shakantar kleshakanthar means a forest of pain was inscribed in the fourth fifth century sea both in the lomas rishi cave and in the sudama cave and it's possible it's an allusion to the you know very ascetic life of the ajivikas the people who used to dwell here earlier there are also visitors who came and put their names here so for example one of them is has a name called bodhi muller he puts his name on the door frame of the loma shrishi cave and in the sudama and his name bodhi muller according to many historians suggests that he was a buddhist now beyond this kind of stray graffiti and the deletion that i drew your attention to some 800 years after a shock in the sixth century see a ruler came to inscribe a very expensive message here he was a mukhari called anantavarman and the long epigraph that you can see on top is actually just below the loma shrishi cave arch epigraph tells us that ananta varman was born in the line of the family of mukharis and if you look at the words they highlight the military prowess of his family and if you know i'm not going into the entire inscription but the number of lines that are devoted to the military prowess of the line you know the lineage would make it seem as if what is being remembered here is an act or acts of aggrandizement but in fact this inscription related to a religious endowment for anantavarman putting down his words in this cave was actually uh you know integral to his program of hinduising the landscape the lines that he got inscribed mention that he had granted this cave to image worshippers uh it was the message was outside the cave and it announced to all those who came there that anantavarman had got a krishna image installed here now the krishna image has not been found but the fact that it was consecrated by royal would have ensured that the cave now became a vaishnav shrine ananta varman did not stop in changing with the character of the lomashreshi cave the act of converting caves which had been originally given to ascetics into shrines of hindu worship was extended by him into the neighboring nagarjuna hills in the nagarjuni hills ashok's own grandson dasharath had created caves similar to those made by his grandfather and these two were made for the ajivikas anantavarman's intent to change this so this is basharat's inscription but beyond this you have anantavarman's inscription which is engraved in the entrance areas and one cave he dedicated to an image of shiva in the form of bhutapati and his wife parvati described here as devi and in another cave in the nagarjuni hills anantavarman announced that he had granted a village to the goddess bhavani presumably the cave two now became her abode now in the years that i have visited the hills and the caves i thought many times about barabba as they appeared and the hills that appeared you know to us visitors in the form of contemporary times there are two kinds of visitors actually who come to barabar there are those like me who come here because of what they've heard about the caves especially through works of scholarship and about the creator king ashok mentioned in those works of history but there are also western visitors who come here who are actually fixated with foster and a passage to india and if you look at the visitors book you will find british and australian visitors talking about how exciting and moving it is to be in the caves that iam foster wrote about uh the only visitor and that is a visitor from india who i found had mentioned both ashok what ashok had created actually and e.m foster was an mukherjee so this is from uh you know the visitors book and anuk mukuji had served as the chief secretary of bihar and in his retirement he came driving his own car without any you know official bureaucrats in and around him and this is what he wrote he said very impressive and to think that these rock cut caves were carved into solid granite rock around 253 bc without any modern implements it fills one with wonder and pride and then he added no wonder em foster was inspired and saw in this the crux of the dilemma of the empire and her subjects also stunning are the patterns on the rock face now i must of course say that the visitors who come there visitors like mukherjee the foreign visitors scholars like me and who put their names down in the visitors book are actually a minority a minority in relation to the religious traffic there more common are traveller pilgrims and their point of reference is the pinnacle peak that you can see here where the siddeshwar nut temple stands before the caves came to be protected by the archaeological survey during the annual fair large numbers of such pilgrims used to use the level ground in front of that whale shaped rock that you saw that has the ashokan caves for cooking and living when alexander cunningham surveyed this area in 1861 he noted that the ground was actually strewn with burnt and broken bricks and fragments of pottery and he mentioned that rubbish had accumulated to a height of three feet above the floor of the caves mercifully the caves and the ground around the caves today are no longer a rubbish dump but looking back at the long history of the hills it's evident that it's not ashok's legacy which has lived on but what anantavarman had inaugurated the ajivikas as a sect faded away but hindu worship has only expanded and flourished at the same time unlike what a king had wanted what ananta maraman would have wanted such worship and worshippers abandoned the caves and preferred a perch above and beyond the caves it is there that throngs of pilgrims still go so is it possible that like em foster they too had found the dark echoing interiors of ashok's caves forbidding and strange what the emperor and his grandson had created for the ajivikas was certainly impressive impressive enough for a later ruler to appropriate for the hindu faith but it was a summit above and beyond the caves that religious people later thought was a better place for worshipping their gods after all imperial constructions that conjure great architectural merit but have very dark interiors that echo are not always the most comfortable and easy spaces to inhabit so i'll stop here i've given you a flavor of some of the conceptualizations of the emperor after his time these are conceptualizations that i myself have encountered as i have traveled in search of the emperor and of course beyond satisfying my own sense of curiosity about the memory of ashok from south asia to southeast asia setting out on such a trail has also clarified the workings of historical memory to me about how an emperor was remembered at a particular point in time at particular places remembered in a way that he himself had not chosen to remember in one case and also what came to be forgotten there thank you thank you so much ma'am for delivering this lecture it was truly truly an honor to listen to you finally after a very long time so we have some questions from the audience and i hope i am audible to you yes the first question is from elim heffus priya and his his question is dear professor many ideas used to compare ashok with jalaluddin akbar in fact even like aurangzeb ashok also done the same act of religious activities only after war and killings and thus after establishing their empire can you comment on this so i entirely agree with you uh you know emperor ashok is not a saint and uh you know there is no doubt that you know he killed people of his own family he killed as he himself has hundreds and thousands of people in the context of kalinga and he must have killed many others who are not recorded so uh you know but that's what history is uh about history is not meant to be you know it's it's not meant to be a story about saints and uh people who uh you know exist outside uh you know uh such uh frameworks and whether it is an akbar or an aurangzeb or an ashok there is violence but there are other things as well so the next question is from her question is she wants to know about the ashok of kashmir and ashok of india as to say makat so is there only one ashok or can you can you define these two ashokas so the thing is as far as kashmir goes we haven't found anything in terms of something which bears the stamp of ashok in kashmir so for example if you're looking at let's say sanchi or junagad or barabar that i talked about you have epigraphs of emperor you don't find them that doesn't mean that they may not be found there uh you know uh ashok gets discovered all the time and that happened from the 19th century onwards ashok in the case of kashmir is mentioned in the rajita rangini and later he is also mentioned in the ayanak parade you know as a ruler of kashmir but he ruled kashmir along with a much larger empire so to that extent uh he's not seen only as a ruler of kashmir what is different of course is that unlike an ashok who does not talk about let's say creating a cities or temples in kalhan's rajit rangini there is mention that sri nagari was actually built by ashok so that's srinagar and that he also set up a sheikh temple and so on and so forth so there are differences and you know you have to keep in mind that the remembrance of ashok in kashmir we don't have anything in terms of the history of ashok of his contemporary times in kashmir that is the problem but the remembrance itself is very interesting so the next question is from a young archaeologist arshali and his question is that we do we find reference to the ashokan palace standing in partly putra in the writings of the chinese travel party when he visited this place so the thing is there is much that is described by farhan in partly putra including uh you know the pillars of ashok and the messages there and so on and so forth but uh you know the pillars actually haven't been found but the palace has and it's not i'm not sure it's a palace uh it's actually a large hall which was found in uh kum raha but if you look at the character of the polish on the pillars and so on and so forth it definitely seems to be of moria types my own senses when you look at the writings of chinese travelers you have to see it with a large you know pinch of salt because if you look at the messages that they talk about on the whether it's fahiyan or schweinstein on the ashokan pillar it's the kind of message which is not there on any ashokan pillar but it's a message about a show giving up jambudweed for instance uh for uh you know the buddhist uh faith and so on and so forth which comes from the ashokawa so my sense is there is a translation of the ashok that is there in china and you know that is something that they have internalized and then they are taken and they obviously can't read the script and as they are taken around by antiquarian uh you know uh sort of escorts from uh the partly putra area there is much embellishment that does go on because the you know the prison uh that ashok is supposed to have set up those are also described and so on and so forth now of course having uh said that i'd like to point out ishaan that and this is for us that the core of uh ancient partly putra still lies untouched so you know that is we only know what is on the peripheries ancient partly putra is buried under modern patna the high mount that you see along the ganga is ancient partly putra and because it is buried we know so little about it yes so this brings me to a very interesting question by harvard and ellurian's question is the recent excavations that sannathi in karnataka brought to light a very huge super where ashok is depicted in sculpture along with his queens does this imply his visit to this site or his contribution in construction of it pending further investigation he presumes harsher eludi presumes that this site can be ashoka's burial so can you throw some light on this yeah so actually you know in what i talked about is from my uh from the book that i'm in the sort of process of finishing and there's a whole chapter on i'm so glad that this question was asked because it gives me a chance to talk about uh you know kangana hali and samathi so first about the ashokan connection with both uh sannathi and kangana he put up a series of major rocky dicks in which of course the uh you know there are some the kalinga edict is missing so you have a very strong ashokan uh connection epigraphic connection with the place uh in the super the remnants of which you can see at kangana very close to uh sanate you an nbp shirt was found and the chances are that definitely the core of the super goes back to maurya times and was probably built by ashok but ashok as he's imaged at kangana uh is there among a series of other rulers mainly satavahana rulers rulers of satwan times and i think there's a way in which uh the sativanas are connecting themselves with ashoka who has a connection with kanganali and sanati but who is also seen to be the archetypal buddhist emperor so if they are patronizing buddhism here and they themselves are not buddhists there's a way in which those depictions are seen to be part of a large kingly pantheon so i don't know and i don't think ashok was actually buried there but ashok has a very very strong and a very different there also it's a buddhist avatar that you see in the memorialization but it's a very different buddhist avatar from the one that you see at sanchi yeah so hopefully that book is going to be i think one of the best sellers because of the interesting pretext of it and we look forward to the book this question is from saknik and his question is how do we evaluate the creditability of the story of the killing of ajivikas by ashok in ashokawadina and how do we reconcile the inherent dichotomy of a book like ashok wadana aimed at extolling the virtues of ashok mentioning an aberrant dark deed so let me say that in the there are many dark deeds of ashok that are mentioned killing his brothers uh you know extreme anger doing all kinds of things to kisha rakshita to various other people all of this figure and you know if in fact if you look at the references it's not as if there is a terrible ashok and then this wonderful man uh you know even the later ashok has all these elements uh you know woven into uh his character now on the question of the aji because there's a real problem there because from his own words and from what he had where his words were put up that is in the caves that he got created for them it would seem that he was a big patron of the ajivikas again in the ashokawa dhana itself uh it is mentioned that his birth was actually prophesied of course by the buddha but also by an ajivika so the and the figure not just here but in this form as being very important in the morya court in later texts like the sri lankan pali chronicles so i think here there's a real problem because there's one there are two kinds of sources the sri lankan chronicles and which don't actually talk of the ajivikas in this way uh and ashok so need it not edicts but ashok's own inscriptions and what he put up which show great patronage to them but uh you know there is this reference in uh uh you know the uh ashoka vadana and uh you know who knows but as things stand at the moment if you look at the weight of the evidence i think equally you have to uh you have to appreciate what was invested by ashok in providing the ajivikas those sorts of dwellings that you see in the barabar hills that's cool so lauren michael asked that did ashok and his father serve as governors of takshila now the point is that ashok was sent when he was a prince by his father to try and quell a rebellion and this is according to the texts you know this is according to the ashoka vadan uh to quell a rebellion at taxilla but of course once he reached there um you know he was told that look we don't have anything against you but it was the officials and so on and so forth so uh the point is taxilla was a very important maurya center right and it was bound to have been the provincial capital so if uh bindusar and later ashok went there as governors it should not be surprising at all that ashok went as a governor to ujjaini is definitely mentioned in the sri lankan chronicles so we'll take uh three or four more questions because i think there are more than 20 questions uh and they keep coming so this question is from sternel ammon and his question is do you think that an attempt was made to destroy buddhist culture by other sect and religion at that time you know i mentioned that the sanchi stoop was you know attempted to be destroyed the super that uh actually ashok put up right so there's there's deliberate evidence of the desecration of that stupa and also adiokotar you know in you know beyond sanchi but very much in uh you know what is central india you have this kind of evidence of some kind of you know i would say a kind of religious conflict but more than that for me what is interesting is that if this happened into sanchi it must have happened in the time of the shungas so most scholars will tell you at least this is what john marshall who excavated and renovated sanchi said that it was probably pusha mitra s responsible for uh you know for the kind of damage that was inflicted on sanchi you know that's one part but on the other hand it was in shunga times that the whole stupa was then expanded and it got a stone veneer and there were all these you know pilgrims and worshippers who came and contributed who made their donations that made that super what it is uh today so i think buddhism continue to flourish in spite of rulers yeah so the next question is from meetha lallan and her question is what do you think of the controversy in the sadhana super not being ashokas the lion pillar relates more to jainism than buddhism so can you talk about the iconography of the same the point is the sarnath pillar has uh you know the words of ashok so you know there's no way in which you can say that that is not uh you know ashokan it's as simple as that now on the question the iconography of the animals that are there and so on and so forth are clearly across religions and that includes uh you know the hindu faith whether we are talking about the dharma chakra or you are talking about other symbols these are all common religious symbols but the point is that when emperor ashok uses them on something which is overtly buddhist and in the context of a buddhist site you then have to see them as buddhist you know so sarnath as the place where he gave his first in buddha gave his first sermon um and uh that ashoka actually commemorates this and then he puts up you know uh his words there which also uh relate to the buddhist sangha uh you know that that then the symbols have to be seen in terms of the buddhist faith and what sense it made to the buddhists yeah but themselves are actually much broader and have been used by faiths across you know in ancient india india so uh this question is from chandrasekhar if i'm pronouncing the name correctly his first question is i think he have two questions so the first question is uh even though ashok started following dharma but he didn't let loose of his iron hand on administrative principles so how much is it true that ashoka's peace path is also a reason for demise of ashoka for the mauryan empire and the second question is on what degree are the faiths affected by ashoka's buddhist ideology second question can you repeat it so on what on what degree other faiths affected by ashoka's buddhist ideology what is the second word you're using a degree on what degree degree is what i think he wants to ask that how much it affected other other ideologies of that time what ashok did yeah yeah okay so let me um you know on the question of how ashoka influenced contemporary faiths uh one can't say but uh many have said that uh you know the idea of dharma that is there in the mahabharata is a kind of uh you know response to um you know the ashokan idea of dhamma it's the you know response of uh you know through uh the epics but you know we really don't know a lot will depend on how you date the epics and so on i would not uh date you know the core of the epics to such a late uh period the first question what did it relate to a son what was the first question i read that out again uh it is about that ashok started following dhammapath but he didn't let loose of his iron hand on administration so how much is it true that ashoka's peace path is also a reason for the demise of the modern empire no i i don't think at all ashok's you know interventions led to the downfall of the mauryas please remember also the 50 years that intervene between the passing of ashok and the end of the maurya dynasty so you know i mean if you're talking about let's say the creation of independent india in 1947 i don't think you will consider what happened in 1883 uh to be uh you know central to uh the story so i don't see that now on the question of i i completely agree with you that a show continued to be a ruler i mean but the point is he had very different ideas of governance and it is those ideas of governance that he's putting out so it's a unique intervention in terms of governance strategies in terms of notions of rulership and so on and so forth so uh we'll take one last question for the evening and this question is from george thundertill and his question is the caves are intimidating the cave says intimidating is a very interesting observation uh does it in a way refer to the kind of buddhist meditative technique requiring such secular environs and over and above the monastic environs which were more sociable spaces yes but the caves are primarily not exclusively for the ajivikas that is what and many people have said that the ajivikas actually may have come to die in these uh caves they were supposed to actually starve themselves and take their lives but uh i i just find it amazing that such case should have been made because it must have been made on the uh you know the form must have been the way in which the aji because wanted it now the you know ashok was a great patron of the buddhist but no buddhists wanted caves like this that to me is clear so this is something that must have been conveyed to the emperor and his architects by the ajibicas or a very powerful sect at that point in time that's why they're made like this but you don't have anything made of a similar order for the buddhists by ashok thank you so much professor lahiri for taking out time to deliver today's distinguished lecture it was truly an honor to host you and to be in a virtual conversation with you this evening for me it is a dream come true because as i said i'm i'm i'm feeling like a fanboy at the moment to interact with an icon like you and thank you for answering so many questions from the audience and if we have more questions i i can mail you that and you can reply to the email after after the lecture thank you and thank you for inviting me and thank you to the audience for all the very interesting comments and questions bye thank you so much ma'am have a great evening you too