Book review: Herman Tieken,The Asoka Inscriptions: Analysing a Corpus

‘Another book on the inscriptions of Aśoka?’—this was my immediate reaction when I was told about this book. However, I was reassured when I actually got to lay my hands on it, finding that there is indeed scope for one, in fact a large one. I had known the somewhat unsettling work of Herman Tieken on old Tamil Sangam poetry, so I was prepared to get disturbed now too! Indeed, I was obliged by the very first words of the Introduction: ‘The so-called Aśoka inscriptions…’. Tieken believes that they ‘have been ascribed to (my italics) the Mauryan king Aśoka’, although the discussion that follows assumes that they are indeed of and related to Aśoka without any equivocation. The book raises many important questions, the answers to some of which may not be acceptable to all, but the very fact that the questions have been raised itself is important—more so because some of them are so original.

The book is divided into two major parts. There are seven chapters in Part I, dealing with the texts of the inscriptions in both form and content in great detail. They also trace their unmistakable interrelationship. Part II is more ambitious and investigates the possible developments through which the texts may have gone in the course of their distribution as well as the process of engraving. The book’s concerns are limited to the inscriptions in the Indic language(s). It is a pity that the Greek and Aramaic edicts of Aśoka do not get a similarly elaborate treatment, being taken up only indirectly ‘in the margins’, for want of ‘expertise’ as the author himself very modestly confesses.

Tieken does not treat the inscriptions as a random collection of documents composed at different points in time. He looks at them as a single corpus with its own well-defined structure and design. Earlier scholars who have worked on these records have not possibly shown any such understanding. The design he sees is that both the Rock Edicts (REs) and the Pillar Edicts (PEs) describe events that took place during the reign of the king, addressing different kinds of people. Even within them, he shows that the REs are concerned with those events in the biography of the king that are relevant to the people living at the edges of the realm (where these edicts are found), while the PEs have in mind people living in the centre of the realm (where they are found), and the events recorded in them are selected accordingly. A similar pattern is identified between the so-called Schism Edict (which Tieken calls the Sanghabheda Edict) and the Minor Rock Edicts (MREs), covering particular phases in the calendar of Buddhist monks—the former dealing with their sedentary life during the rainy season and the latter with their wandering in the drier periods of the year. Their provenance also suggests this.

An important idea that has held sway in Aśokan studies and that Tieken rejects is that the REs accumulated over time. Not only does the order of the edicts, which jump back and forth in time, give the lie to this, but the possible gaps between the composition, dissemination and actual engraving of the edicts also pose difficulties in accepting the received wisdom. He also demonstrates that RE 14 has the character of an epilogue, which closes the text, suggesting again that all the 14 edicts constitute a single, planned text. He also brings out the close organic relationship between the REs and the PEs. The differences are accounted for by the respective audiences—while the PEs, which contain detailed accounts of what the king did, address people of the Gangetic plains where he exercised direct control, the REs, containing general statements, are meant for people beyond his direct influence, living at the borders of the realm—a clear division of labour, as it were. Tieken also rejects the idea that the RE series is older than the PEs. ‘[T]he two series’, he is sure, ‘were composed simultaneously’.

Tieken clears many of the cobwebs that have accumulated about the 14 REs. He questions the assumption that the versions with all 14 edicts are the ‘complete’ ones and that those in Kalinga, with RE 11–13 omitted to spare people of the unhappy memories of conquest, are incomplete. The variations in the text of RE 9 on different sites help him to suggest that the ‘original’ version contained only 10 edicts (what is usually described as RE 14 being an epilogue). He suspects that RE 11–13 were meant to replace RE 9 and not to be inserted—quite arbitrarily and even erroneously—between what are now RE 10 and 14. The argument that the ‘replacement’ of RE 11–13 by the Separate Edicts in Kalingan sites is to pre-empt the people of Kalinga from remembering the recent depredations that they were subjected to does not hold much water. For that does not explain why RE 11 and 12, which have nothing to do with the conquest of Kalinga, are omitted there—even if it is accepted in the case of RE 13. So also, the presence of these two in Sannathi, along with the Separate Edicts, confounds the problem further. Tieken’s explanation, if not perfect, is far more satisfactory than the other available explanations. The existence of different versions of RE 9 helps in untangling the knotty problem of RE 10–13, the Separate Edicts and their strange behaviour in different places. What RE 9 contains is repeated, with elaboration, in RE 11 and 12.

He also shows, convincingly enough, that PE 7, occurring only in the Delhi-Topra Pillar, is a later addition. In fact, he devotes a whole chapter to this document/artefact (pp. 160–84). He even thinks that the date, the 27th regnal year of the king, is a year after his last known year! He rejects the widely accepted thesis that the REs were inscribed first and the PEs much later, a view of which Romila Thapar is an important proponent. Thapar has gone to the extent of saying that the king switched from inscriptions on rocks—‘on whatever surface’—to inscriptions on pillars, which, according to her, would have provided a ‘more appropriate form for the propagation of his ideas’. Tieken draws attention to the fallacy of assuming that the dates mentioned in the inscriptions are those of the inscriptions themselves and argues that they are, in reality, of the events mentioned in them. Thus, the chronological gap between the two types of inscriptions becomes more imagined than real. Tieken is firmly convinced that the whole set consists of a single corpus, with a clear purpose and agency of its own. He proposes that ‘composing texts of [the] so-called Aśoka inscriptions was continued in the following generation (or generations)’; however, this statement invalidates the thesis of their being a single corpus with its own well-defined structure and design. In fact, he sees a complementarity among the three, namely the REs, the PEs (which he takes to be a separate entity) and goes to the extent of saying that together they give us ‘a biography of the king’s career’.

His treatment of the Sanghabheda Edict, known to earlier scholarship as the Schism Edict, is refreshing. He dedicates a whole chapter (pp. 185–225) to it. He notes the considerable variations in the three versions from Sanchi, Sarnath and Allahabad. While the variations in the Sanchi and Allahabad versions are minor, the one from Sanchi has a full section, which is omitted in other versions. In this section, the king orders lay followers and civil authorities to ensure that the edict plays a role in the proceedings of the days of fasting. He takes up the details of the proceedings as given in the Pāli Vinaya texts, and establishes a nearly verbatim correspondence between these texts and the edict. This third section, which earlier authorities had relegated to the status of a mere ‘covering letter’, is shown as integral to the edict. He goes on to say further that the Sanghabheda Edict forms a pair with MRE 1, each addressing a different part of the Buddhist monks’ lives, the former being concerned with the sedentary phase and the latter with their peripatetic phase. It seems to have circulated as a letter from the king to the officials, when it sustained a number of additions and deletions, and finally found its way to a pillar after a long life as a letter. I should like to believe that this makes more sense in comparison with the rather confused understanding of its nature in existing scholarship on the inscriptions of Aśoka.

The author also discusses problems related to the MREs, which are worse confounded on account of the wide variations in their versions, of which there are 18. They are all found south of the Gangetic Plain, 12 versions being found in the Deccan. The pattern in the MRE is observed from MRE1, where the king praises the Buddhist monks for their mobility. Looking at the map of the distribution of the MREs, it is seen that it is also a map of the king’s attempt to open up and maintain trade routes and lines of communication, often through these monks. MRE 1 is accompanied by MRE 2 south of the Tungabhadra, and this encourages all kinds of people, not just Buddhists alone, to settle, probably for the exploitation of the local resources and the development of industries and commodity markets there—a detail that earlier scholars have not seen as far as my knowledge goes. In this context, Tieken’s discussion of the number of days that the king is said to have been on tour in MRE 1 is of importance because that enables him to go into the roots of Asoka’s philosophy beyond the Buddhist texts. So also, in translating sātirekāni/sādhikāni (‘including the excess’) as ‘exactly’, he shows awareness of the practice of Indian chronological scheme, where intercalary months and days are added to adjust the differences between the lunar and the solar calendars. The discussion of other edicts in the MRE series is equally inspiring. The question of the distribution of MRE 1 and MRE 2 is discussed equally engagingly. Records to the north and south of the River Tungabhadra are shown to behave in different ways in terms of the variations they show. Even within them, there are further variations: 7 versions in the southern group and 11 in the northern group. In terms of the linguistic features, too, these variations are relevant. It all suggests strongly against the ‘highly centralised’ character of the state machinery: a space for local initiative to suit local needs was provided.

A bolder attempt that Tieken makes is in relation to the developments that the texts of the inscriptions have undergone in the course of their distribution and engraving. Tieken argues that even if the RE series was meant as a single corpus, the text was still worked upon, enlarged and revised. He divides the various groups broadly into two branches: what he calls P1 being those found in Kalinga in the east and Girnar in the west, and what he calls P2 being those in Eṛṛagudi in the south, Kalsi in the north and Mansehra and Shahbazgarhi in the north-west, these being revisions of P1. Documents of the P1 series occupy the extreme ends on the east-west axis. In addition to the readings, each individual version shows peculiarities of its own in its vocabulary, grammar or orthography. A closer look at the division into two branches and at the relationship between the three versions within the P1 branch enables him to reach meaningful conclusions. In the matter of the P2 branch, situated on a (slanting) north-south axis, Eṛṛagudi and the incomplete Sannathi lie in the south, Kalsi in the north and Mansehra and Shahbazgarhi in the north-west. The latter three versions, Tieken shows, are based on two, possibly three, common texts.

On the basis of his analysis of the records, Tieken suggests that their transmission took place through written exemplars and that the texts are part of an epistolary tradition. Rather than assuming serial transmission of the texts from one centre to the next, he argues that each cluster received a new text directly from ‘the royal chancery’—a radial distribution rather than a relay run. He also takes up a meaningful discussion of the vexed question of the origin of Brahmi and argues that

the Aśoka inscriptions assume the existence of a cursive variant of Brahmi that was not cut into stone with a chisel but was written on or scratched into softer material with ink or a stylus.… [O]ne has therefore to reckon with the possibility of interaction between these two forms of Brahmi.

Finally, he traces the possible connection between the epistolary tradition, the Brahmanical groups, and the Sanskrit language on the one hand, and these inscriptions on the other. He almost believes that these inscriptions owe a heavy debt to the Sanskritic tradition of the Brahmins, where the Brahmins offered the author(s) a model in Prakrit avant la lèttre. He stops short of saying in so many words that these are Sanskrit inscriptions written in Prakrit!

One closes the book after realising that the cosy comfort in which we sit is the comfort of laziness, that there many things to be known about the supposedly well-known things and that raising questions about such ‘well-known’ things is itself a leap forward, even if the answers offered may not be readily accepted by all.