Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor Read Online Free PDF Page A

washed away in one of the Gandaki’s frequent changes of course). His surviving papers show that at Singhiya the isolated Marshall began to study Hindu religion and philosophy, leading on to a wider enquiry into Indian astrology, medicine and science. This qualifies him as the first of that maligned species, the Orientalists.
    Some months after Marshall’s arrival at Singhiya he made an expedition into the hinterland, in response to a report of a curious standing pillar. His journal records that he set out northwards from Singhiya on 29 July and walked twelve miles to the village of Bannia, where he spent the night under a large tree. The next day he walked another six miles to reach his objective: a place known locally as Brinkalattee, which he understood to mean the ‘Staff of Brim’ – more accurately the giant Pandava Bhim. There Marshall was shown ‘a Piller of one stone as I conceive. On the top of this piller or Lattee is placed a Tyger ingraven, the neatliest that I have scene
[sic]
in India. His face looks North North East, ½ Easterly.’ He learned that the giant Bhim had long ago lived here and that ‘this pillar was his Stick to walk with, which is said to be twise
[sic]
as much under as above ground. Oft [when] man came into the world Brin did see them [as] so verylittle creatures and yet so cunning and so far exceeding him that hee was much troubled thereat, and went into the Tartarian Mountains and there betwixt two great mountains lay down and dyed and was covered with snow.’ 9

    The ‘Tyger ingraven’ capital and stone column seen by John Marshall in North Bihar, as drawn by an unidentified artist – probably Thomas Law – in about 1783. The column is today known as the Lauriya-Nandangarh pillar. (Royal Asiatic Society)
    Here was another of the great stone columns ascribed by Hindus to the giant Pandava Bhim. However, Marshall’s account of the giant Bhim going towards the Himalayas and dying between two mountains is a distant echo of the circumstancessurrounding the death of Sakyamuni Buddha who fell fatally ill as he made his way homewards towards Kapilavastu and died lying between two great sal trees.
    In November 1676 Marshall was moved to a more senior post in Balasore in Bengal, where he died eight months later of a raging distemper that killed most of his colleagues and many townspeople. In his will Marshall left his manuscripts concerning India to two friends at Christ’s College, Cambridge (now part of the Harleian Collection at the British Museum). These papers included the first English translation of the
Bhagavad Gita
and had Marshall or his friends gone into print the beginnings of Indian studies would have been advanced by the better part of a century.
    John Marshall’s brief sojourn in Bihar occured at a time when Emperor Jehangir’s puritanical grandson Aurangzeb was proving himself the most zealous of his line in the suppression of idolatry. As the centre of Shaivite Hinduism, the city of Varanasi was an obvious target for Aurangzeb’s iconoclasm. Already partially cleansed by Muslim rulers on four previous occasions, 10 Varanasi was now subjected to a fifth round of demolitions on Aurangzeb’s orders. Hundreds of shrines were demolished, a number of temples replaced by mosques and the city renamed Muhammadabad.
    One of these temples was the ancient shrine of Bhairava (‘The Terrible One’, a wrathful manifestation of Shiva, the presiding deity of Varanasi), sited on the northern outskirts of the city and perhaps the most revered Shaivite temple in the city on account of the mighty stone lingam in its courtyard, worshipped for centuries as the
Lath
Bhairava
, or ‘Staff of Shiva’. Aurangzeb had most of the temple demolished to make way for a mosque – and yet, unaccountably, left the great stone column standing, so prominently so that the new mosque became known as the
Lath Imambarah
, or ‘Mosque of the Staff’.
    When John Marshall’s contemporary, the Frenchman