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

three decades what was probably the largest surviving section of the broken column (or possibly its stump still
in situ)
, measuring some seven or eight feet in height, was encased in a copper sheath and placed under armed guard. So it remains to this day, still unexamined by scholars, for tensions between the two communities in Varanasi remain as bad as ever.
    In the year of Aurangzeb’s death, 1707, a Capuchin mission reached Lhasa on the Tibetan Plateau, despatched from Portuguese Goa in the belief that deviant Christians were to be found north of the Himalayas. Eight years later the disappointed Capuchins were ejected from Tibet and settled in Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, where they maintained a mission for over half a century until again expelled. This second expulsion came by order of the new ruler of Nepal, the Hindu Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha, who was not one for religious tolerance and initiated a programme of caste discrimination that saw his country’s non-Hindu communities reduced to the status of outcastes or slaves.
    The Capuchins and their few converts found refuge near the town of Bettiah in the plains of Bihar, about 150 miles north-eastof Varanasi. This now became the centre of the Tibet-Hindustan Mission of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith in Rome under the leadership of the scholarly Italian Father Marco della Tomba.
    In about 1769 Father della Tomba reported the existence of two stone columns in the vicinity, both carrying inscriptions and both topped by carved stone lions (one being the Tirhut ‘tyger’ seen by Marshall a century earlier):
They stand 27 cubits high up to the capital, on the top of which there is a lion, which looks very natural. The circumference of the column is 7 cubits, as I myself measured. The column seems to consist of a single stone. I struck it several times with a hatchet, and fired some bullets without being able to make out that it was otherwise. These two columns are as if covered with a certain writing, which I traced on paper and then sent to the Hindu Academy of Benares and to some Tibetan scholars; but not one of them could read or understand a word of them … These characters appear to be some ancient Greek. 15
    This same period saw the doughty Jesuit priest Joseph Tiefenthaler criss-crossing the Gangetic plains, nominally as a propagator of the Gospel but with scholarship as his prime motivation. After the Pope’s suppression of the Jesuit order in the mid-1750s, Tiefenthaler had stayed on in India to devote himself to the study of India’s languages, religions and natural sciences. He was most probably the first European to learn Sanskrit, the hermetic language in which all the sacred texts of the Hindus were written – hermetic in that it was considered the language of the gods and thus accessible only to Brahminsby virtue of their god-ordained status as intermediaries between the gods and men.
    In 1756 Tiefenthaler made the first known copy of what he believed to be the oldest inscription on Firoz Shah’s golden pillar, afterwards despatched with other papers to his fellow pioneer Indologist the Frenchman Abraham Anquetil du Perron. However, du Perron was then in the process of being expelled from India along with all his countrymen following the EICo’s capture of Pondicherry. As a result it was not until long after Tiefenthaler’s death that his scholarship became known through the publication of du Perron’s three-volume
Recherches historiques et géographie sur l’Inde
, published in 1786. 16
    Tiefenthaler and du Perron together brought the first seeds of the European Enlightenment to the shores of India. But with France’s imperial ambitions baulked by growing British naval superiority on the high seas, it fell to the latter power to continue that process – in the person of a Welsh polymath. It was William ‘Oriental’ Jones, jurist, scholar and philologist extraordinaire who now laid the ground for those same seeds to