He was getting quite a feeling for ancient art
treasures. In Lord Valentia’s train he would move on to Egypt, stay on there as British consul, and become so successful at appropriating and selling the art treasures of the Pharaohs that he rivalled the great tomb-robber Belzoni.
Meanwhile in India more rock-cut temples had come to light. The free-standing Kailasa temple at Ellora, cut into the rock from above like a gigantic intaglio, was
discovered in the late eighteenth century. It was followed by the famous caves at Ajanta and Bagh. ‘Few remains of antiquity,’ wrote William Erskine in 1813, ‘have excited greater curiosity. History does not record any fact that can guide us in fixing the period of their execution, and many opposite opinions have been formed regarding the religion of the people by whom they were made.’ From the statuary
at Elephanta and Ellora, particularly the figures with several heads and many arms, it was clear that these at least were Hindu. But why were they in such remote locations and why had they been so long neglected? What, too, of the plainer caves like Kanheri and the largest of all, Karli in the Western Ghats? Lord Valentia was pretty sure that the sitting figure, surrounded by devotees, at Karli
was ‘the Boddh’; he had just come from Ceylon where Buddhism was still a living religion, though it appeared to be almost unknown in India.
Other critics who looked to the west for an explanation of anything they found admirable in Indian art, insisted that the excellence of the sculpture indicated the presence of a Greek, Phoenician or even Jewish colony in western India. Yet others looked to
Africa: who but the builders of the pyramids could have achieved such monolithic wonders? These theories were based on the idea that such monuments were exclusive to western India, which had a long history of maritime contacts with the West. They became less credible with the discovery of the so-called Seven Pagodas at Mahabalipuram near Madras. Here, a thousand miles away and on the other side
of the Indian peninsula, were a group of temples cut not out of solid rock, but sculpted out of boulders. At first glance they looked like true buildings, a little rounded like old stone cottages, but well proportioned – up to fifty-five feet long and thirty-five feet high – with porches, pillars and statuary. It was only on closer inspection that one realized that each was a single gigantic stone
sculpted into architecture. ‘Stupendous,’ declared William Chambers who twice visited the place in the 1770s (though his report had to wait for the Asiatic Society’s first publication in 1789), ‘of a style no longer in use, indeed closer to that of Egypt.’
Five years later, a further account of the boulder temples, or
raths,
was submitted by a man who had also seen Elephanta. To his mind there
was no question that in style and technique the two were closely related. Had he also seen the intaglio temple of Ellora he might have been tempted to postulate some theory of architectural development; first the cave temple, then the free-standing excavation, and finally the boulder style, freed at last from solid rock. It was as if India’s architecture had somehow evolved out of the earth’s crust.
Elsewhere, stone buildings have always evolved from wooden ones; but in India it was as if architecture was a development of sculpture. The distinctive characteristic of all truly Indian buildings is their sculptural quality. The great Hindu temples look like mountainous accumulations of figures and friezes; even the Taj Mahal, for all its purity of line, stays in the mind as a masterpiece of
sculpture rather than of construction.
There was yet one other type of ancient monument which had intrigued early visitors. Thomas Coryat, an English eccentric who turned up in Delhi in 1616, was probably the first to take notice of it. South of the Moghul city of Delhi (now Old Delhi) lay the abandoned tombs and forts of half a dozen earlier Delhis (now, confusingly, the site of New Delhi).
The ruins stretched for ten miles, overgrown, inhabited by bats and monkeys. But in the middle of this jungle of crumbling masonry Coryat saw something that made him stop; it did not belong. A plain circular pillar, forty feet high, stuck up through the remains of some dying palace and, in the evening light so proper to ruins, it shone. At a distance he took it for brass, closer up for marble; it
is in fact polished sandstone. Of a weight later estimated at twenty-seven tons, it is a single, finely tapered stone, another example of highly developed monolithic craftsmanship. But what intrigued Coryat was the discovery that it was inscribed. Of the two principal inscriptions one was in a script consisting of simple erect letters, a bit like pin-men, which Coryat was sure were Greek. The pillar
must then, he thought, have been erected by Alexander the Great, probably ‘in token of his victorie’ over the Indian king Porus in 326
BC.
Fifty years later another such pillar was discovered by John Marshall, an East India Company factor who has been called ‘the first Englishman who really studied Indian antiquities’. He was certainly less inclined to jump to wild conclusions. His pillar was
‘nine yards nine inches high’ and boasted a remarkable capital: ‘at the top of this pillar & is placed a tyger engraven, the neatliest that I have seene in India’. It was actually a lion. But perhaps the most interesting thing about this pillar was that it was in Bihar, a thousand miles from Delhi and many more from the rock-cut monuments around Bombay and Madras.
Writing similar to that found
on the Delhi pillar was also found on some of the cave temples; and at Karli there was actually a small pillar outside the cave. Clearly all these monuments were somehow connected. But it was doubtful whether Alexander had ever reached Delhi, let alone Bihar. The existence of a similar pillar there put paid to Coryat’s idea of their commemorating Alexander’s victories, although the possibility that
the letters were some corrupt form of Greek would linger on for many years.
With the foundation of the Asiatic Society there was at last a forum in which a concerted investigation into all these monuments could take place. Reports of more pillars and caves were soon trickling in. Jones himself was rightly convinced that the mystery of who created them, when and why, could be solved only if the
inscriptions could be translated. Some ancient civilization, some foreign conqueror perhaps, or some master craftsman, seemed to be crying out for recognition. Another breakthrough seemed imminent; and with it another chunk of India’s lost history might be restored.
Thanks to Charles Wilkins, the man who preceded Jones as a Sanskritist, progress was at first encouraging. At one of the earliest
meetings of the Society he reported on a new pillar, also in Bihar.
Sometime in the month of November in the year 1780 I discovered in the vicinity of the Town of Buddal, near which the Company has a factory, and which at that time was under my charge, a decapitated monumental pillar which at a little distance had very much the appearance of the trunk of a coconut tree broken off in the middle. It stands in a swamp overgrown with weeds near a small temple&. Upon my getting close enough to the monument to examine it, I took its dimensions and made a drawing of it&. At a few feet above the ground is an inscription, engrained in the stone, from which I took two reversed impressions with printer’s ink. I have lately been so fortunate as to decipher the character.
Though very different
from Devanagari, the modern script used for Sanskrit, it was clearly related to it and Wilkins was not surprised to discover that the language was in fact Sanskrit. To historians the translation was a disappointment; the Buddal pillar told them nothing of interest. But the deciphering was an important development. Nowadays it is recognized that the modern Devanagari script has passed through three
distinct stages; first the pin-men script that Coryat thought was Greek (Ashoka Brahmi); second a more ornate, chunky script (Gupta Brahmi); and third, a more curved and rounded script (Kutila) from which springs the washing-on-the-line script of Devanagari. The Buddal pillar was Kutila, and once Wilkins had established that it had some connection with Devanagari, the possibility of working backwards
to the earlier scripts was dimly perceived.
As if to illustrate this, Wilkins next surprised his colleagues by teasing some sense out of an inscription written in Gupta Brahmi. It came from a cave near Gaya which had been known for some time though never visited; a Mr Hodgekis, who tried, ‘was assassinated on his way to it’. Encouraged by Warren Hastings, John Harrington, the secretary of the
Asiatic Society, was more successful and found the cave hidden behind a tree near the top of a hill. The character of the inscription, according to Wilkins, was ‘undoubtedly the most ancient of any that have hitherto come under my inspection. But though the writing is not modern, the language is pure Sanskrit’. Wilkins, tantalizing as ever about how he made his breakthrough, apparently divined that
the inscription was in verse. It was the discovery of the metre that somehow helped him to the successful decipherment. But again, there was little in this new translation to satisfy the historian’s thirst for facts.
A far more promising approach to the problem, indeed a short cut, seemed to be heralded in a letter to Jones from Lieutenant Francis Wilford, a surveyor and an enthusiastic student
of all things oriental, who was based at Benares. Jones had been sent copies of inscriptions found at Ellora and written in Ashoka Brahmi, the still undeciphered pin-men. He had probably sent them to Wilford because Benares, the holy city of the Hindus, was the most likely place to find a Brahmin who might be able to read them. In 1793 Wilford announced that he had found just such a man.
I have the honour to return to you the facsimile of several inscriptions with an explanation of them. I despaired at first of ever being able to decipher them&. However, after many fruitless attempts on our part, we were so fortunate as to find at last an ancient sage, who gave us the key, and produced a book in Sanskrit, containing a great many ancient alphabets formerly in use in different parts of India. This was really a fortunate discovery, which hereafter may be of great service to us.
According to the ancient sage, most of Wilford’s inscriptions related to the wanderings of the five heroic Pandava brothers from the
Mahabharata.
At the unspecified time in question they were under an obligation not to converse with the rest of mankind; so their friends devised a method of communicating
with them by ‘writing short and obscure sentences on rocks and stones in the wilderness and in characters previously agreed upon betwixt them’. The sage happened to have the key to these characters in his code book; obligingly he transcribed them into Devanagari Sanskrit and then translated them.
To be fair to Wilford, he was a bit suspicious about this ingenious explanation of how the inscriptions
got there. But he had no doubts that the deciphering and translation were genuine. ‘Our having been able to decipher them is a great point in my opinion, as it may hereafter lead to further discoveries, that may ultimately crown our labours with success.’ Above all, he had now located the code book, ‘a most fortunate circumstance’.
Poor Wilford was the laughing stock of the Benares Brahmins for
a whole decade. They had already fobbed him off with Sanskrit texts, later proved spurious, on the source of the Nile and the origin of Mecca. After the code book there was a geographical treatise on
The Sacred Isles of the West,
which included early Hindu reference to the British Isles. The Brahmins, to whom Sanskrit had so long remained a sacred prerogative, were getting their own back. One
wonders how much Wilford paid his ‘ancient sage’.
Jones was already a little suspicious of Wilford’s sources, but on the code book, which was as much a fabrication as the translations supposedly based on it, he reserved judgement until he might see it. He never did. In fact it was never heard of again. But in spite of these disappointments Jones continued to believe that in time this oldest script
would be deciphered. He had been sent a copy of the writings on the Delhi pillar and told a correspondent that they ‘drive me to despair; you are right, I doubt not, in thinking them foreign; I believe them to be Ethiopian and to have been imported a thousand years before Christ’. It was not one of his more inspired guesses and at the time of his death the mystery of the inscriptions and of
the monoliths was as dark as ever.
And so it remained until the labours of James Prinsep. Jones had given oriental studies a strongly literary bias and his successors continued to concentrate on Sanskrit manuscripts. Archaeological studies were ignored in consequence, and so were inscriptions. Wilkins’s few translations had led nowhere and the most intriguing of the scripts remained undeciphered.
Indeed even the translation of the Gupta Brahmi script from the cave at Gaya was forgotten in the general waning of interest; it would have to be deciphered all over again.
During his first twelve years in India Prinsep confined his attention to scientific matters. He was sent to Benares to set up a second mint and while there redesigned the city’s sewers. He also contributed a few articles to
the Asiatic Society’s journal (‘Descriptions of a Pluviometer and Evaporameter’, ‘Note on the Magic Mirrors of Japan’, etc.).
But in 1830 he was recalled to Calcutta as assistant to the Assay-Master, Horace Hayman Wilson, who was also secretary of the Asiatic Society and an eminent Sanskrit scholar. At the time Wilson was puzzling over the significance of various ancient coins that had recently
been found in Rajasthan and the Punjab. Prinsep helped to catalogue and describe them, and it was in attempting to decipher their legends that his interest in the whole question of ancient inscriptions was aroused. Although his ignorance of Sanskrit was undoubtedly a handicap, here, in the deciphering of scripts, was a field in which his quite exceptional talent for minute and methodical study
could be deployed to brilliant advantage.