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

Jean Baptiste Tavernier, visited Varanasi in the mid-1670s, he found the stone column set on a raised platform beside a new-built mosque. Since there were several Muslim tombs in the vicinity, Tavernier assumed the pillar to be some form of obelisk:
In the middle of this platform you see a column of 32 to 35 feet in height, all of a piece, and which three men could with difficulty embrace. It is of sandstone, so hard that I could not scratch it with my knife. All sides of this tomb are covered with figures of animals cut in relief on the stone, and it has been higher above the ground than now appears, several of the old men who guard these tombs having assured me that since fifty years it has subsided more than 30 feet. They add that it is the tomb of one of the kings of Bhutan, who was interred there after he had left his country to conquer this kingdom, from which he was subsequently driven by the descendants of Tamerlane. 11
    The clue misunderstood by Tavernier lies in the word Bhutan, which contains the Sanskrit root word
budh
, meaning ‘awaken’, as in
Buddha
, the ‘Awaked One’.
    Emperor Aurangzeb died in 1707 unlamented by the bulk of his subjects, and with his death the authority of the Mughals began to crumble, a process assisted by the power struggles between his sons, grandsons and great-grandsons. At some point in the next two decades the explosion of a powder magazine blew the pillar at Firoz Shah’s hunting lodge north of Delhi into fragments (painstakingly reassembled two and a half centuries later, with one neat slice missing – now in the British Museum in London). As the Mughals declined, other powersmoved in to fill the political vacuum: most notably, the Sikhs from the Punjab, the Marathas from the Deccan and the EICo from Bengal.
    Under the patronage of the Maratha warlords and the saintly widow of one of their number, Rani Ahilya Bai Holkar of Indore, the city of Muhammadabad very soon reverted to Varanasi and underwent a spectacular rebirth. The colourful waterfront of temples and bathing ghats that tourists admire today owes its existence almost entirely to the plunder secured by the Maratha chiefs of the eighteenth century – and to their religiosity.
    It was at this time, as Varanasi’s Hindu majority set out to reclaim their city’s Shaivite identity, that the stone pillar seen by Jean Baptiste Tavernier in the courtyard of the Mosque of the Staff became the focus of an increasingly popular fertility cult and the scene of an annual festival known as the ‘marriage of Shiva’s lat’. It led, almost inevitably, to growing friction between the city’s Hindu and Muslim communities, which came to a head in the autumn of 1805 during the Muslim celebration of the Moharam festival. ‘It was under such a state of excited zeal’, wrote a local historian, ‘that a congregation at the
Lat’h Imambareh
, in 1805, was urged by some fanatic preacher to overthrow and defile the pillar and images of Hindu worship at the place.’ 12 The mob pulled the Staff of Shiva to the ground and broke it into several pieces.
    The enraged Hindus responded by setting fire to the great mosque erected by Aurangzeb beside the river, after which rioting engulfed much of the city. Varanasi’s young acting magistrate, William Bird, employed his police and two companies of sepoys as best he could but was unable to prevent mobs of Hindus from attacking the Muslim quarters of the town. In thewords of the
Benares Gazetteer
, ‘The whole of Benares was in the most terrible confusion, as several bazaars were in flames and all of the Julaha quarter was a scene of plunder and violence. Order was not restored by the troops until some fifty mosques had been destroyed and several hundred persons had lost their lives.’ 13
    When the Reverend Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta, visited Varanasi in 1823 he found the Staff of Shiva ‘defaced and prostrate’, 14 and guarded by Brahmin sepoys. At some time during the following