Fortunately it was not the end of Sarnath’s riches either. Scarcely
any site in India has yielded so much in the way of archaeological data and sculpture. Cunningham himself made further finds, and excavations continued to be richly rewarded well into the twentieth century. In 1904 the remains of yet another Ashoka pillar were found, together with its miraculously preserved capital, the lion capital of Sarnath – the most celebrated piece of Indian sculpture and now
the symbol of the Republic of India.
But what was so special about Sarnath? Why had the Buddha’s followers lavished so much skill and money on the adornment of this particular spot just outside the Hindus’ most sacred city? Since the
stupa
contained neither relics nor ashes it was clearly not the burial place of some Buddhist saint. What then was it? Cunningham was at first mystified. But in
1836, the year he ended operations at Sarnath, two eye-witness accounts of Buddhist India were published. All was made clear.
Until this time the only first-hand account of ancient India was that of Megasthenes by way of later Greek and Latin authors. Unfortunately for students of Buddhist history, Megasthenes had stumbled onto the Indian scene in the reign of Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka’s grandfather;
he was thus just two generations too soon to witness the rise of Buddhism under royal patronage. Now, by an equally circuitous route, a Buddhist account of India at the beginning of the fifth century
AD
was brought to light; and it was soon followed by another from the mid-seventh century. These were the travelogues of Fa Hsien and Hsuan Tsang, Chinese Buddhists who journeyed through India in
search of sacred manuscripts and to visit the scenes of the Buddha’s life. The travelogues were acquired by French orientalists, translated in Paris and expounded by Prinsep’s old boss, Horace Hayman Wilson, who was now the first professor of Sanskrit at Oxford.
As befitted monks on pilgrimage, the two Chinese were reticent about temporal affairs. But it was significant that Fa Hsien’s visit
had coincided with the Gupta period to which so much in the way of sculpture and architecture (including Cunningham’s Dhamek
stupa)
was being ascribed. Evidently Buddhism was still very much in the ascendant under the Guptas, 700 years after Ashoka, although Hindu beliefs were also widespread. Most impressive, too, was the fact that the whole of north India was then at peace. Crime and repression
were equally unknown, and Fa Hsien could travel from one end of the country to the other without let or hindrance. Compared with the state of the Roman Empire at that time, it looked as if India under the Guptas was the most congenial place in the world.
By the time of Hsuan Tsang’s visit things had changed. In the seventh century Buddhism appeared to be on the retreat; many of the shrines were
in ruins and Buddhists were actually being persecuted in Kashmir and Bengal. The roads were no longer safe and though Hsuan Tsang had great respect for King Harsha, who was trying to restore some of the lost glory of the Guptas, there had clearly been a social and cultural decline.
All this was of the utmost interest to historians; but to Alexander Cunningham the main point was that Buddhist
India had been brought to life. ‘It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of these travels’; he wrote, ‘before, all attempts to fathom the mysteries of Buddhist antiquities were but mere conjecture.’ The purpose of the
stupas
was unknown, as was their significance, and even the names of the shrines and cities they had adorned. Now all was made clear. These eye-witness accounts explained
the nature of the sites and described their locations and lay-outs so clearly that they amounted to a map of Buddhist India and site plans of all the main shrines.
Sarnath, for instance, was indeed a notable spot. It was none other than the deer park where the Buddha had preached his first sermon. Fa Hsien found four
stupas
there and two monasteries. By Hsuan Tsang’s time it had grown considerably.
There was a vast monastery, 1500 monks, lakes and gardens and, amongst the
stupas,
one 300 feet high. Hsuan Tsang also noted the sculptures and recorded that the oldest
stupa
and the pillar had been set up by Ashoka.
Cunningham could only fantasize, but what might he have achieved if he had had all this information a couple of years earlier? More important, what of all the other Buddhist sites
mentioned by the Chinese travellers? ‘With what joy would not one trace Fa Hsien’s route from Mathura to his embarkation for Ceylon?’ There was now the possibility of identifying so many of the mounds and ruins that littered India. Indian archaeology had a chance to begin at the beginning, and the idea filled Cunningham with exhilaration.
Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the last British director of India’s Archaeological Department, singled out three men as pioneers in the study of India’s history and civilization – Jones, Prinsep and Cunningham. Of the three, Cunningham alone really knew India. Sir William Jones was the founding genius and figure-head, Mr Secretary Prinsep the organizer and scientist, and
Alexander Cunningham the explorer and field-worker. During more than fifty years in India he travelled from the steaming jungles of Burma to the arid hills bordering Afghanistan, and from the remotest tracts of Central India to the Tibetan lands beyond the Great Himalaya. He probably marched more miles on Indian soil than any of his contemporaries. Not only was he ‘the father of Indian archaeology’
but, for a quarter of a century, he
was
Indian archaeology. And all this at a time when the British seemed to have turned their backs on Indian civilization.
Cunningham had arrived, as a Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, in 1833. His father, the Scots poet Allan Cunningham, had enlisted the help of his old friend Sir Walter Scott in procuring commissions in India for both his boys. For a man
who wrote ‘It’s hame, and it’s hame, hame fain wad I be’, India was an odd choice for his sons. But the Cunninghams were not wealthy, and a career in India, if no longer a short cut to fortune and fame, offered many possibilities and had now become highly respectable.
After three years in Benares, and the excavation at Sarnath, Cunningham was called to Calcutta to serve as an ADC to Lord Auckland.
In the Governor-General’s party he made the annual pilgrimage up to Simla and paid his first visit to Ranjit Singh’s Punjab. Emily Eden, Auckland’s caustic sister, found the young ‘AC’ attentive and agreeable. With an eye for the picturesque, she sketched such antiquities as fell along their route; the studious ADC, meanwhile, ferreted about for coins and inscriptions and offered quaint explanations
of their history.
To Emily Eden this was just a mild eccentricity, although to others such behaviour now appeared distinctly unsound. A cold wind of intolerance and distaste for India and its civilization was sweeping through the British ranks. That deep sense of wonder experienced by Jones, shared by the men like Fell who first discovered India’s monuments, and still cherished by the likes of
Prinsep and Cunningham, was no longer in fashion. All that remained was the passing fancy for the picturesque shown by Emily Eden; and this was too insubstantial to conceal deeper feelings of outrage and disgust. The Orientalists, who not long before had been hailed as equals of the Renaissance humanists, were in disgrace. Warren Hastings’s ideal of a partially Indianized civil service had been
rejected and the Indian raj was slowly making way for the British Empire.
Three new influences were at work. On the one hand there were the Evangelicals, horrified by the idea that Christians could take the idolatry and improprieties of a pagan culture seriously, seeing in India an unlimited field for missionary activity, and insisting that it was part of a Christian government’s duty to promote
this. Then there were the Utilitarians, pouncing on India as prime territory for putting into effect their cherished reforms aimed at ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. This was what civilization was all about and, since progress and utility did not appear to feature in India’s so-called civilizations, they were hardly worthy of serious attention. James Mill, father of John Stuart, had
published his history of India in 1818. Though Mill spoke no Indian languages, indeed had never been to India, his damning indictment of Indian society and religion had become the standard work – required reading for all who would serve in India.
Finally, unifying these two opposing themes, there was the rising crescendo of national superiority. No longer did the British feel any sneaking sense
of surprise at their success in India. Clearly it was ordained, either by the Almighty as the Evangelicals would have it, or by history as the Utilitarians preferred. Even the Moghul emperor need no longer be treated with respect. He was a joke, and so too was Ranjit Singh. Fifty years before, Tipu Sultan had been accorded a certain respect, but Ranjit Singh, the only native prince who could still
deal the British a serious blow, was the subject of drawing room titters. Hadn’t he urinated in the presence of the Governor-General? The word nigger was slowly coming into fashion; ‘no – ten thousand pardons, not niggers, I mean natives – sons of the soil – Orientals – Asiatics’, wrote Atkinson in the 1850s. He was caricaturing an up-country judge whose interest in such people amounted to a weird
and old-fashioned eccentricity. British society was growing more exclusive; the
memsahibs
had arrived in force, the club was about to make its appearance. ‘Brahminized’ old-timers were just an embarrassment to the service.
The inevitable collision between the Orientalists and their new opponents was signalled in 1835. Thomas Babington Macaulay, during his brief spell in India, won the support
of Auckland’s predecessor for withholding government finance from all institutions that used languages other than English. In support of a move that amounted to outlawing all Sanskrit and vernacular studies, as well as imposing English as the only language of education, Macaulay delivered his celebrated Minute.
It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information that has been collected to form all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same &
The question before us is simply whether & we shall teach languages [Sanskrit and Arabic] in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own; whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, whenever they differ from those of Europe, differ for the worse; and whether, when we can patronize true philosophy and sound history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier – astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English public school – history, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long – and geography, made up of seas of treacle and butter.
Later, in the House of Commons, he directed his attack towards Hinduism.
In no part of the world has a religion ever existed more unfavourable to the moral and intellectual health of our race. The Brahminical mythology is so absurd that it necessarily debases every mind which receives it as truth; and with this absurd mythology is bound up an absurd system of physics, an absurd geography, an absurd astronomy & All is hideous and grotesque and ignoble. As this superstition is of all superstitions the most irrational, and of all superstitions the most inelegant, so it is of all superstitions the most immoral.
Macaulay chose his ground carefully. Moreover there can be no question that he had India’s best interests at heart. Indeed, many, even Indians, argue that he was right about insisting that the country’s development was only possible through the adoption of English. But, however noble his motives and sound his judgement, there
can be no forgiving the viciousness and insensitivity of his rhetoric. One flinches to read it, even now. The impression it must have made on Orientalists, let alone Indians, is horrifying. And, combined with the vaunting of British superiority in everything from morality to medicine, the airing of such views can have done the
Sahibs
themselves nothing but harm.
This was the background against
which Prinsep and Cunningham worked during the 1830s. No wonder that their discoveries made so little impact outside the world of scholarship; or that Prinsep was so apprehensive about asking Lord Auckland for help in getting a copy of the Girnar inscription.
No wonder, too, that Cunningham had to wait so long before pursuing Indian archaeology. In response to repeated representations from the
Asiatic Society, Markham Kittoe, the coal prospector, was given some limited archaeological responsibilities in the late 1840s. But the funds provided were inadequate. Kittoe could spare little time from other duties, and anyway he soon died. In the words of a later Governor-General, ‘the scheme appears to have been lost sight of within two or three years of its adoption’.
Meanwhile, Cunningham
continued to correspond with the Asiatic Society. In 1839 he was sent to survey the sources of the Ravi and Chenab rivers on the frontier of Kashmir; while there, he took the opportunity to collect inscriptions. In 1842 he was in central India but was recalled to the Punjab to serve in the First Sikh War. In 1847, now a Captain, he was sent to Ladakh, or Indian Tibet, to head a boundary commission.
He thus had a chance, like Hodgson and de Koros, to study Buddhism in operation. He also toured the antiquities of the Kashmir valley and returned with no boundary – the Tibetans had failed to appear – but with a camel-load of Buddhist statuary, three unknown Sanskrit dramas and ‘the oldest dated inscription hitherto found in India’. He was just in time to take part in the Second Sikh War, and
then served at Gwalior and at Multan.