Ashoka Was Strong Enough to Say He Was Sorry About Things He’d Done

[In his new book ‘Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King’, Professor Patrick Olivelle talks about the life, moral philosophy and ideals of Mauryan emperor Ashoka. The book is the first in a new series edited by Ramachandra Guha, ‘Indian Lives’, which uses biographies to tell the story of India’s past.

Read the full transcript of the interview below.]

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Jahnavi Sen: Hello and welcome. We’re here today to discuss a very exciting new book on the Mauryan emperor Ashoka. It’s a biography that’s based mostly on his own writings and words. And I’m here with the author, Professor Patrick Olivelle, who is professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, and Ramachandra Guha, the eminent historian and writer who is the series editor of the series in which this is the first book, about ‘Indian Lives’. Thank you both so much for joining me and I’m really excited to delve into this.

Just to start, you mention in the book that Ashoka is a really unique figure – both in Indian history and from those times. One of the reasons you give for this is that he was never particularly keen on talking about his own conquests and achievements. What are the other things that set him apart?

Patrick Olivelle: The main thing is that he exposes himself, he opens himself out in his writing to his people, in a way that most kings or even politicians rarely do. He makes himself vulnerable, he is strong enough to say that he’s sorry about various things that he did in his life. Instead of boasting about his conquests, for example the parallels you find in Persia – the Persian kings who say how many lands they have conquered – the only time he talks about his conquest is where he talks about his conquest of Kalinga, which is todays Odisha area. He says that in a sense of regret rather than of boasting about it.

Interestingly, I was just thinking the other day that if he had not written about it, we as historians would have no idea that such a battle ever took place, because there is no other historical evidence for the Mauryans going and conquering this independent state of Kalinga. So in a sense, it is his own words that come and give us a sense of how he’s regretful because 150,000 people were killed, over that many were deported, and the same amount died in the aftermath of the war. So all of that, although we may want to as historians say that these numbers may be maybe fudged, maybe rounded out and all that, yet a large number died.

If we think of it in today’s terms, I’m not saying that this is true for the past, [but] if we think of today’s terms, that would qualify for genocide. You find the same thing with Alexander when he conquered, many of his conquests were genocide; [as was] the Carthage during the Roman times. Genocide was common, what we call genocide happened in the past. It was not a rare occasion.

But anyway, in this sense Ashoka, I think, is unique in world history, because not just in ancient history but even in modern history, rarely do we find politicians or people in power saying they’re sorry for things they have done in the past. Also there are his writings with regard to moral philosophy, how people should behave; there is nothing in Ashoka’s writings that deal with governance as such. He doesn’t talk about taxation, he doesn’t talk about how he gets his money, none of those is there. So that’s, in that sense, unique.

JS: Are these some of the reasons for why you chose this to be the first book in this series?

Ramachandra Guha: No, well I’ll come to that, but just listening to Patrick speak and on the question of kings being reflective about their style of rule, including the errors and mistakes and deficiencies in the style of rule – listening to Patrick I was thinking of say Jawaharlal Nehru, who greatly admired Ashoka and who was a wonderful stylist like Ashoka, though in the English language, and who wrote meditatively, reflectively, sometimes self-critically about himself, but only before he became prime minister. So his autobiography or The Discovery of India. But then from ’47 to ’64, even in his personal correspondence, it’s hard to find him saying ‘maybe I should have done this differently’. Right, so I think in that sense, listening to Patrick that strikes me. Or if you look at Churchill, who was again a wonderful stylist, he got the Nobel prize for literature, I think not unjustifiably. However, as prime minister when he wrote the history of his prime ministerial term, it was self justificatory. And he obviously played an important role as prime minister of Britain in defeating Hitler. But he exaggerated that role and maybe minimised the role of other people, other allies, the Soviets, the Americans, and so on. So I think that’s why listening to Patrick was fascinating to see what Ashoka special.

Now, I’m delighted that this is the first volume because it’s so beautifully crafted, it’s so sensitive to ruins, but that’s partly an accident. I mean the series was conceptualised, and the idea of the series was that the general reader likes to consume history in the form of biographies. But professional historians have a tendency to disparage biography – that we don’t want to spend so much time writing about one person. We’d rather write about politics and kingship in ancient India rather than one ruler. So I was very keen to bridge this.

Patrick and I were in correspondence about some other things and then I just asked Patrick, ‘Have you ever thought of writing on Ashoka? You’ve lived with that period, those sources all your life but you’ve written about law, you’ve written about religion, you’ve written about social structure, you’ve written textual studies, you’ve done translations.’ So the idea struck him and he produced his magnificent book. I’m really delighted that this is, I mean Patrick is Sri Lankan. So I told him that this is like a combination of, and we are both cricket fans, so I said this is kind of Jayasuriya opening the innings but there will be Ranatunga, Aravinda de Silva, and others to follow up. So there’ll be some very good historians’ writing on maybe modern subjects. So the second book which will appear in three months is by Chitralekha Zutshi, who’s the leading historian of modern Kashmir, on Sheikh Abdullah. The third book is on Kamala Devi Chattapadhyay by a very fine American historian Nico Slate.

I think this has set a very high bar and I’m sure that I mean Patrick is sui generis because of the range of his work, but also he has been a scholar for more than 50 years. So the second and the third volumes are written by people who are still maturing but have done the first stint. So I think Patrick’s book is just riveting, it’s so insightful, and I think to start this series with this book – I will encourage the writers to follow to fulfil these standards.

JS: Early on in the book you spend some time establishing that it’s likely that Ashoka grew up in a rather multicultural court and household. How rare was that at the time and what kind of impact do you think that had later when he became the ruler?

PO: Writing a biography of a person who lived 2,300 years or so ago, with so little to go… Ram had talked about his friend and mentor, Boyle. The three laws of Boyle, I violate all of them. Because, I mean, you work with what you have, rather than what you wish you had.

JS: What are the three laws? Can you quickly tell us what the three laws are?

RG: I will tell you what the three laws are, I’ll give a brief background. My first biography was of a man called Verrier Elwin, I came to Gandhi much later. And when I was writing it, I was lucky to be in the same institute in Berlin with the great biography of Goethe, Nicholas Boyle, Professor of Cambridge. He was sort of like a mentor to me, he really made my Elwin biography much better than it was. He didn’t call it three laws but his three laws were: One, first look for sources other than those emanating from your principal character. So Elwin wrote 40 books, 400 newspaper articles, 4,000 letters and likewise with Nehru, Gandhi or Ambedkar. You can write the whole book based on what they have said – so look for sources that come from a second party, a third party, a 10th party which may be a friend or admirer. That’s the first law.

The second law is that the relationship with secondary characters illuminates the principal character. So if you write about Ambedkar, there will be a light on Gandhi, right? If you look at their interaction or Nehru and the Hindu right, that is the second law. Pay adequate attention to the secondary characters, don’t just focus on the principal character.

The third law is always go chronologically. A life is lived forward but understood backwards, but he has lived from day to day. So for example, in the case of Elwin, he was a celibate because of Gandhi, but then he became flagrantly exalting sex. But let that slowly develop. Don’t say – because the reader is saying ‘what an idiot to follow Gandhi in brahmacharya’, and you as an admirer want to say, actually he later changed his mind, but don’t. Keep the reader in suspense. If you’re a sociologist or an economist, you tend to state your thesis quite early. This is a book about inequality, so the reader already knows the inequality is growing or something, right? Here the suspense because that’s how life is – unpredictable, unexpected. So these are the three laws which in retrospect I realise only apply to the biographer of a modern person where the sources are rich enough. So that’s what Patrick means when he says that he violates them.

PO: Anyway getting back to your original question about multiculturalism, this is where a biography like what I did has to have a certain amount of imagination and maybe even trying to imagine what would have been there, to draw out perhaps sometimes more than is permitted from the few sources we have.

So basically, Alexander’s conquest of the Middle East, West Asia, all the way into what is today Pakistan, was a major event. Not just that he came and conquered, but he left behind Greek culture and Greek kingdoms from Egypt to what is today Afghanistan. The Seleucid Empire was the one with which Chandragupta Maurya dealt with. There’s a wonderful book written about the Seleucid Empire recently and what this person talks about is the so-called Indus Treatise, the Treaty of the Indus between Chandragupta and the Seleucus First, which established boundaries of autonomous kingdoms which had never existed. If you look at our old great friend, Kautilya in his Arthashastra, he talks about the king as forever wishing to conquer. In Sanskrit he calls it ‘vijgishu’, one who wishes to conquer. That is the defining element of a king. This was contravened in this emergent concept of bounded kingdoms and this became part of the Mauryan Empire.

And after this treaty, in all likelihood there was the exchange of women, which was normally done. So Seleucid’s Prince from the family – may not be his own daughter but somebody – who came to Chandragupta’s. Clearly there’s a Greek influence there, right? Ashoka may have been a young boy then, maybe three, four or five, when Chandragupta died. So there was a Greek presence in the Chandragupta. Then his own father may have had Greek wives, if you may want to call it that. In my imagination at least, I think there is a multiculturalism, and in his own thinking when he got his inscriptions translated and inscribed in Greek and in Aramaic. Strangely enough, Aramaic was not really spoken by anybody. It was the Persian language of the Chancery, so only some people knew that but it became iconic. So two iconic languages – Greek, the great Alexander’s, and then Aramaic. I think that could have been done only by a person who had that larger vision that comes from being brought up in a multicultural, what we would call today, environment.

JS: You mentioned earlier about Kalinga and his expression of remorse because of the destruction that that caused. But then you also say that that shouldn’t mean that we call him a pacifist. So first how would you explain that, and also how much evidence is there for this common conception that it was that battle that then led him to embrace Buddhism?

PO: Yes, I talk about that a little bit in trying to draw a chronology. Again very speculative, I grant it. But all this happened I think within a period of about two years, even less. So there was a moment when he turned. He was, he himself says in his first minor inscription, that he was a Buddhist, you know? That he followed that. But he was a so-so Buddhist, right? He was from Magadha, after all; that was the place where Jainism and Buddhism were thriving. But then he says that he went to see the monks. Doesn’t say one monk or many, it says a sangh, right? So that monastic order after which he became, he says, zealous in this. And that was the time when he says he became an upasaka, which is a technical Buddhist term for a committed Buddhist.

But at the same time if you go with the chronology, you find that the Battle of Kalinga was probably done a year and a half or so before this time. So putting two and two together and arriving at five, one can maybe come up with a chronology that links, at least chronologically, the two events. Whether they are connected in his own mind, in his own life, that of course he doesn’t say anywhere.

JS: You also say that it’s more appropriate to refer to him as a king who was a Buddhist rather than a Buddhist King. So I’m asking where would you draw that balance, especially given the centrality of moral philosophy which was first based more on Buddhism and then later, on not referring to a particular religion but just dharma as a more inclusive idea. So given the centrality of that in his messaging where do you draw that line?

PO: Right so again, taking the few clues that we have, I try to say that if the king who wrote the first minor rock inscription which is the most widespread, especially in Karnataka, in the South. If that person was Ashoka throughout his life, he would have been a Buddhist king. But that didn’t happen. I tried to imagine what may have happened. After writing this, sometime in June of a year, I can’t tell you exactly what it was, then within a year or two he starts writing about dharma. So I sort of imagine that some intervention took place. He went home – he had been travelling for eight months during which time he was imitating the lifestyle of a monk on his travels – he came home. Maybe somebody got to him, saying, ‘Hey guy you can’t do this. You can’t be a Buddhist and rule over this immense kingdom. There’s something wrong here.’

Or he had second thoughts. Maybe he thought I want to do something larger than Buddhism, better than Buddhism, more important than Buddhism. There could have been many ways in which we can slice this, but ultimately he changed, he changed over a period, short again, two years at the most. When he then started writing about dharma and in all his major rock inscriptions, 14 of them, he never once mentioned Buddhism except in passing, to refer it to among others, Jains and Brahmins and other.

So he never once against brings Buddhism into the focus of his message, which tells me, from here to here was different, and this is what defined much of his kingdom, much of his rule. So in that sense I think he was a Buddhist. He remained a Buddhist because during this time he wrote two inscriptions that are specifically Buddhist. The Bairat inscription was written by this guy who was a king but he was a layman trying to tell Buddhist monks what to read. He was sending him them a reading list saying that, hey you want to read these, these are the important Buddhist. And then he intervenes in the schism edict about monks who are troublemakers, who cause dissension, and how they should be expelled. So yeah, he remained a Buddhist, and he tried to intervene in ways almost sort of high-handed for a king with regard to monks. But in his real inscriptions, his message to the people, Buddhism is in the background, not in the foreground.

JS: You use this categorisation of civil religion to talk about how he tried to bring this very large and very diverse population he was ruling over together, and through his morals philosophy as well. Could you talk a little bit about how he did that?

PO: Yes, I don’t know whether he did that.

JS: Sorry, how he attempted to do that.

PO: This is me trying to figure out, theorise how he may have done it and this is of course modern categories, right? From Russo to Bella, that we are dealing with, with this. But trying to find out, what he was trying to do by presenting this moral philosophy, this dharma philosophy. I was trying to see how he may have been trying to forge a certain identity for people who had no identity. This is a large country which had never been brought into a single unity; even under Ashoka there may have been large areas of India that were sort of left out on their own. So how did he do that? Why did he do that?

Two or three things happened he tried to bring… Ashoka was the first to write. As far as you know. So he brings the first public documents written, you can actually go and see there are talking stones, which had never existed before. What would that have done to people who encountered this? He wrote in a single language, he wrote in different scripts – script is not the same as language and often people confuse this, because today in India scripts are often connected to specific languages. But Sanskrit is written – when I did my edition of Manu, I was delving into nine scripts – the same text, same language, but in nine scripts.

So he used a language which we call Magadhi, which is the Prakrit that was probably the native tongue of people who lived in the Magada region. He writes that everywhere including Karnataka, Gujarat, Bengal, Nepal – so he’s bringing a certain uniformity. So you have a script, a language, and I think the third ingredient of this was a certain common identity of aspiration, life. What life means. How should we live our lives? What are our final goals as a human being? In Sanskrit we call it the artha. The goals we go on.

And I think we can at least theorise it using Rousseau’s word as a modern kind of civil religion. In other words you can be a Buddhist, you can be a Jain, you can be a Brahman but still connect at this upper level, almost an umbrella level of ideology which is dharma for him. People don’t realise that today, we think dharma is so important, so central for the whole of India, that it was there from the very beginning. It was not. All these words have histories and it’s important to understand the history of them. If you look at the early Vedic period, dharma starts with the Rigveda, 68 times there, but later on it becomes marginal. Then this marginality is ruptured with Buddhism and especially with Ashoka. In this small number of 3,000 odd words, he uses dharma over 100 times. So it’s a centrepiece of his thought. He’s not just repeating what everybody was saying. He was doing something new and that I think, at least we can think of as, he was trying to forge a common spiritual life of the country.

For the first time in world history I think that the political authority in the name of the king here was trying to have a mass education campaign, educating the people in moral philosophy. That’s the whole point of these letters that he wrote. They’re not edicts really. Everybody calls it an edict but these are letters. I often call them Ashoka’s writings rather than edicts, to make it a broader thing.

JS: You’ve said in your book that the corpus of his writings available to us today are about 4,614 words. Like you said these are words in which he’s asking the people to live in a certain way and also telling them about his philosophy and of course some are a little more administrative. You also said that some of these writings have literary merit and so we can call him a ‘writer’.

Today when we think of political leaders making speeches or writing in various forms, the assumption is that the ideology is theirs but the words are not theirs. There’s a speech writer or a publicist who is behind the precise words. What are the chances that these are in fact Ashoka’s words and should that impact how we’re reading them?

PO: Yes, there is no way to tell, of course. You can argue both ways but the arguments for one or the other are equally weak. If you go to the parallels in the Roman Empire at the time, there was an epistolographer I think it’s called, a ‘writer of epistles’. Epistles are the official writings. So there may have been writers in the chancery of Ashoka who were responsible for diplomatic communications, etc that had to be done. Were they the people who actually wrote these? Personally, I think not, but I can’t defend it. I don’t have real proof to defend it. But when you read these as I have done, like every word and you get a certain feel for the writer, right? I assume you could do today with a computer, you know AI could be able to see whether it was written by this same person, right? I don’t have the knowledge to do that but you get a certain feel for it.

I think there is Ashoka behind those words. Even if not every word of that may have been written by him. They were certainly not written because ones in Gujarat, for example, they were semi-translations. So the word for example for a daughter in Magadhi is one thing and these people translate it into a much more Sanskritic thing over here. There are many examples of that, so clearly they were not his words. Somebody is translating now. Then it was translated into Aramaic and Greek, clearly they were the work of translators, right? But there is a personality behind, that’s all we can say. In that sense, these are the words of Ashoka. Even today’s politicians, if they are good politicians, I think they would not parrot what somebody else has written but would want that person to say what he wants to say, perhaps in a better way, more eloquent way. Still they are his words. I think we can say these are Ashoka’s writings in that broad sense.

JS: Going back to his attempt to build this unifying moral philosophy, you refer to his usage of the term pasanda and then how that changed going, and later became more derogatory. So what was his meaning of it and what did it mean for him to call himself a patron of all pasandas? What was the impact of that?

PO: So there are four parts of my book, and I try to think that each of parts as four aspects of what Ashoka was, his defining characteristics, and the last one is that he’s an ecumenist. The word didn’t exist at the time, again we are imposing a category from here. It means that he wanted people following different ideologies and religions etc to connect with each other and, at a minimum, be civil to each other, and at the best, as the ultimate, to learn from each other. The word he uses, ‘samavay’ which comes from to come together in a gathering, meeting so that they can talk to each other and learn from each other. He says you cannot, he uses the word in Sanskrit shruta, hearing, right? It is found in Hindi and every modern Indian language, and bahushruta in Sanskrit means ‘much heard’, it means one who has heard a lot. In English we would have the word ‘read’, a well-read man. A well-read man cannot be well read unless he reads a lot. A much heard man cannot be much heard unless he listens to other people. That’s what he’s getting at, I think. This is where he’s much ahead of his time, I think. If you read around the writings of various religions, both Brahmanical and Buddhist and I give a couple of examples there, they’re calling each other names, right? Buddhists are comparing dogs favourably to Brahmins, right? Dogs are better than Brahmins, and the Brahmins likewise give back the same way, so yes I think he was trying to do something at which he probably failed. The failures we don’t understand, but clearly if there was religious harmony during his time, if he was able to bring them together, it did not last too long.

JS: Unfortunately we’re running out of time, but there’s a last question I’d like to pose to both of you. You say at some point in your book that the reimagination of the past to fit the needs of the present is inherently human. So what does that mean for how Ashoka is remembered and spoken of today?

PO: Okay, this is rather difficult for me to do because unlike Ram, I am so much in the past that I don’t do that much in the present. But I will give a talk at Ashoka University, their patron saint is Ashoka after all, to bring liberal arts education and Ashoka’s work with pasandas into dialogue, to say that liberal arts education, ultimately, is where you listen to others, you listen to a wide spectrum of intellectual pursuits, a wide spectrum of ideas, respecting everything but not accepting everything, right? But able, therefore, to interrogate this but become better persons, better scholars, better citizens who are able to go beyond themselves and their own little world. This little world is a pasanda, right? The larger world is the inter-pasanda under dialogue. And the little worlds we can think about, we come from our family, our group, our socio-economic group. In India it could be our caste, it could be many other small groups, but the ability to then transcend that, to penetrate those walls and see the others. I think that is a lasting legacy of Ashoka as we read his own writings.

RG: So I’d say that I always hesitate about what lessons one can draw from the past. Even though in my own work, I mean there are two sides – I write scholarly books about the past and I write polemical interventions of the present, and I’d like them to be separate.

But I think the great value of Patrick’s book is that it shows you another world and it brings you into the world of ancient India, their debates, their arguments, their lifestyles, their anxieties, through this very special figure. In that sense, history is a broader form of education without any immediate lessons on how to conduct your life today.

Now just listening to Patrick, I deviate very little because it is so fascinating listening to him. One thing that struck me while reading Patrick’s book is that Nehru actually references Ashoka and admired Ashoka, including in the symbol and all of that. But there’s no virtually reference in Gandhi’s writings. But when I read Patrick’s book and his analysis, when he says that Ashoka is the only king who said sorry – Gandhi may be the only politician who said I have made a Himalayan blunder. Or if you look at ecumenism and relations between your faith and other faith or if you look at Gandhi’s much more expansive view of dharma there is there in the narrow Brahmanical tradition, it’s intriguing. I just wonder, you know, that maybe Gandhi takes something from Ashoka without acknowledging it.

PO: Yes, did he read Ashoka during that time?

RG: Nehru did.

PO: Of course, but Gandhi didn’t didn’t tap on to that.

JS: Interesting. Thank you both so much for joining us today. This was great, thank you.

(Patrick Olivelle is Professor. Emeritus, University of Texas at. Austin, USA. Ramachandra Guha is an Indian historian and writer. Jahnavi Sen is deputy editor at The Wire, an independent news website based in India. Courtesy: The Wire.)