The Idea of Ancient India Read online

  The Idea of

  Ancient India

  The Idea of

  Ancient India

  Essays on Religion, Politics,

  and Archaeology

  UPINDER SINGH

  Copyright © Upinder Singh, 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First published in 2016 by

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  Names: Singh, Upinder.

  Title: The idea of ancient India : essays on religion, politics, and

  archaeology / Upinder Singh.

  Description: New Delhi : SAGE Publications, 2016. | Includes bibliographical

  references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015039148| ISBN 9789351506461 (hardback : alkaline paper)

  | ISBN 9789351506478 (ebook) | ISBN 9789351506454 (ePub)

  Subjects: LCSH: India--Antiquities. | Archaeology and religion--India. |

  Archaeology--Political aspects--India. | India--History--To 324

  B.C.--Sources. | India--History--324 B.C.-1000 A.D.--Sources. |

  Buddhism--India--History. | Excavations (Archaeology)--India. | Sacred

  space--India. | Inscriptions, Indic. | India--Intellectual life.

  Classification: LCC DS419 .S53 2016 | DDC 934--dc23 LC record available at

  http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039148

  ISBN: 978-93-515-0646-1 (HB)

  * * *

  The SAGE Team: N. Unni Nair, Sandhya Gola, and Ritu Chopra

  For

  Nayanjot Lahiri, Seema Alavi, and Parul Pandya Dhar

  —friends and fellow historians

  Contents

  List of Tables

  List of Figures

  Introduction

  I. Religion and Region

  1. Sanchi: The History of the Patronage of an

  Ancient Buddhist Establishment

  2. Nagarjunakonda: Buddhism in the ‘City of Victory’

  3. Cults and Shrines in Early Historical Mathura

  (c. 200 bc to ad 200)

  4. Early Medieval Orissa: The Data and the Debate

  II. Archaeologists and the Modern Histories of Ancient Sites

  5. Archaeologists and Architectural Scholars in

  19th Century India

  6. Amaravati: The Dismembering of the Mahācaitya

  (1797–1886)

  7. Buddhism, Archaeology, and the Nation:

  Nagarjunakonda (1926–2006)

  8. Exile and Return: The Reinvention of Buddhism and

  Buddhist Sites in Modern India

  III. The Intersection of Political Ideas and Practice

  9. Governing the State and the Self: Political Philosophy and

  Practice in the Edicts of Aśoka

  10. Politics, Violence, and War in Kāmandaka’s Nītisāra

  11. The Power of a Poet: Kingship, Empire, and War in

  Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṁśa

  IV. Looking beyond India to Asia

  12. Gifts from Other Lands: Southeast Asian Religious

  Endowments in India

  13. Politics, Piety, and Patronage: The Burmese

  Engagement with Bodhgayā

  About the Author

  Index

  List of Tables

  1.1 Gender break-up of donors (where identifiable)

  1.2 Gender break-up of givers of multiple donations

  1.3 Gender and types of kinship identification

  1.4 Occupations of male donors (where specified)

  1.5 Places where monks and nuns came from

  1.6 Native place of various occupational groups

  1.7 Number of references to various place names

  1.8 Donors of the gateway inscriptions

  1.9 Donors of the inscriptions of the Gupta period

  3.1 The Mathura cultural sequence

  3.2 The Sonkh cultural sequence

  3.3 Number of stone images and reliefs

  List of Figures

  2.1 The mahācaitya

  2.2 Stūpa with svastika inset

  2.3 Apsidal temple enshrining Buddha image (Site 4)

  2.4 Apsidal temple enshrining stone stūpa

  2.5 Ruins of a monastery (Site 43)

  2.6 View of Stūpa 9 during excavations

  2.7 Iron implements, including sickles

  2.8 Stūpa relief

  2.9 The birth of Siddhārtha

  2.10 The first sermon

  2.11 The casting of Siddhārtha’s horoscope

  2.12 Śuddhodana hearing of Siddhārtha’s departure

  2.13 Devotees offering food to the Buddha

  2.14 The gift of earth to the Buddha by Jaya (the emperor Aśoka in a previous life)(?)

  2.15 Mithuna couple

  3.1 Important sites in the Mathura area

  3.2 A Mathura ‘mother goddess’ found at NBP levels in the 1974–1975 excavations

  3.3 The Parkham yakṣa

  3.4 The Chhargaon Nāga

  3.5 Architectural fragment with relief carving of winged creatures worshipping a Śiva liṅga

  3.6 Lakṣmī (?) standing on lotus

  3.7 A reconstruction of what the Apsidal Nāga Temple at Sonkh might have looked like

  3.8 The modern Parkham yakṣa

  5.1 Alexander Cunningham

  5.2 Line drawing of Sanchi capitals

  5.3 Sketch of relief on left pillar of Eastern Gateway, Sanchi

  5.4 Weapons and other paraphernalia represented in reliefs at Sanchi and Udayagiri

  5.5 Reconstruction of what the Eastern Gateway of the Bharhut Stūpa may have looked like

  5.6 Ornaments represented in Bharhut reliefs

  5.7 Bharhut medallions

  5.8 J. D. M. Beglar

  5.9 Page from Beglar’s copy of Fergusson’s Archaeology in India

  6.1 Mackenzie’s ‘Sketch of Deepauldinna at Amrawutty’, 1816

  6.2 Mackenzie’s ‘Plan and Section of the Tope at Amravati’, 1817

  6.3 The site in April, 1877

  6.4 Sewell’s 1877 Excavations in the North-West Quadrant

  6.5 The Amaravati Stūpa in 1881

  7.1 View of the excavated Buddhist remains at Nagarjunakonda

  7.2 Site of the mahācaitya before excavation

  7.3 The mahācaitya, reconstructed on Nagarjunakonda hill

  7.4 Kuraishi’s letter announcing his discoveries and John Marshall’s note

  7.5 Reliquary and relics found in the mahācaitya

  7.6 Mulagandhakuti Vihara, Sarnath

  7.7 Statue of Anagarika Dharmapala outside Mulagandhakuti Vihara, Sarnath

  8.1 Modern stūpa marking the site of the Diksha Bhumi

/>   8.2 People meditating in the Holy Relics Gallery, State Museum of Archaeology, Hyderabad

  8.3 The Amaravati māhacaitya today

  8.4 Kālacakra celebrations at Amaravati, January 2006

  8.5 Ruins of the early historical mahācaitya, Nagarjunakonda

  8.6 The Nagarjunasagar dam

  8.7 Nāgārjuna portrait in the dam gallery

  8.8 Gilded Nāgārjuna image near dam gallery exit

  8.9 Railing of the Nagarjunasagar dam

  8.10 Prayer flags fluttering over reconstructed megalithic burial

  8.11 Pipal sapling planted by the Dalai Lama on Nagarjunakonda island

  8.12 The ‘Martyrs’ Memorial’

  8.13 Buddha bust outside Recreation Club

  8.14 Façade of Nagarjunasagar Power Station

  8.15 Chowk of Vijayapuri South

  13.1 Mahābodhi temple, Bodhgayā

  13.2 Mahābodhi Paya, Pagan

  13.3 Buddha images in bhūmisparśa mudrā, Mahazedi Paya, Bago

  13.4 19th century Sanskrit/Pali and Burmese inscription in Mahant’s maṭha

  13.5 The two Burmese pavilions in the Mahant’s vegetable garden

  13.6 Bilingual inscription inside one of the Burmese pavilions

  13.7 Burmese figures on pavement slabs

  13.8 Mahābodhi sealing

  13.9A Pavilion with Buddhapāda, Mahābodhi temple, Bodhgayā

  13.9B Close-up of Buddhapāda in pavilion

  13.10 Buddhapāda (BG 2), Indian Museum

  13.11 Buddhapādas near the bodhi tree, Mahābodhi temple

  13.12 Buddhapāda in the corridor of the Mahant’s maṭha

  13.13 Buddhapāda at Mātaṅgeśvara Mahādeva temple, Bodhgayā

  13.14 19th century Burmese Buddhapāda, Indian Museum

  Introduction

  Among historians, debates on the idea of antiquity and periodization have led to a sharp decline in the use of the adjective ‘ancient’ in favour of ‘early’. I prefer to talk about ‘ancient’ rather than ‘early’ India, mainly for aesthetic reasons. The adjective ‘early’ is bland, dull, nondescript; ‘ancient,’ on the other hand, has depth, mystery, resonance. Similarly, I use the singular ‘idea’ rather than ‘ideas’ in the title of this book because it seems to me to possess far greater weight. Moreover, it does not exclude plurality, which is an intrinsic aspect of the past as well as of all historical interpretation. ‘The idea of ancient India’ can, therefore, encompass infinite ways of understanding the ancient past of India, or rather, South Asia. This book reflects the ways in which my own thoughts on the subject have evolved and changed over the past two decades.

  My initial writing belongs to the long period of time I taught at St Stephen’s College. Although I wrote three books over those years, the combined pressure of undergraduate teaching and family responsibilities meant that time for research and writing was scarce; it had to be created with considerable difficulty and struggle. Moving to the History Department of the University of Delhi in 2004 was an exhilarating experience—for the first time, I had enough time to read, think, and write and also the opportunity to incorporate my research into teaching. Most of the chapters in this book were written after I joined the University Department.1

  Although these chapters cover many of my interests, some were left out, and at least two of them are important. The first is the village-to-village survey that I conducted in 1994–1995 along with my friend and colleague Nayanjot Lahiri (Tarika Oberoi joined us subsequently) in Faridabad district in Haryana. This project sensitized me to the importance of the materiality of India’s ancient past and how it lives on, incorporated but transformed in meaning, in contemporary villages.2 The second aspect missing here is my work on Delhi’s ancient history, published as a book titled Ancient Delhi.3 Writing that book presented two challenges—to construct a continuous narrative of Delhi’s ancient past on the basis of very meagre sources, and to write in a style accessible to the general reader. The second was much more difficult than the first. My work on Delhi was accompanied by a conviction that exposing students to local history was one of the best ways of generating an interest in the discipline of history in their minds. This led to the idea of introducing a series of courses on Delhi’s history in the undergraduate programme of the University of Delhi.

  Religion and Region

  The chapters in the first section of this book reflect my enduring interest in analyzing epigraphic data and situating inscriptions within their larger contexts. The approach is strongly empirical, not only because the minutiae of details have always attracted me but also because I think that historical hypotheses must be very thoroughly grounded in the empirical data and very carefully calibrated with regard to chronology.4 Many of the inscriptions I studied were associated with religious sites. My interest in religion was in large measure an instinctive one, but was also influenced by dissatisfaction with the manner in which Indian historians of the 1970s and early 1980s tended either to sideline this important aspect of history or to reduce it to legitimation strategy.

  ‘Sanchi: The History of the Patronage of an Ancient Buddhist Establishment’ (Chapter 1) was the first paper I wrote after completing my PhD. I visualized it as part of a larger project on the inscriptions of early Buddhist sites in India. The chapter offers a diachronic view of the patronage of Sanchi, bringing out the elements of continuity and change over five phases, beginning with Aśoka in the 3rd century bce and ending in the 12th century. The epigraphic data from this site was very amenable to statistical analysis, but I also thought it could be fruitfully juxtaposed with textual, sculptural, and archaeological evidence.

  Between the 2nd century bce and the 1st century ce, there was a massive upsurge of popular support for Buddhism all over the subcontinent, of a kind never seen before or since. At Sanchi, this period saw busy construction activity, especially the building of stūpas, and the engraving of over 800 donative inscriptions.5 The chapter discusses how the people who financed the Sanchi establishment identified themselves—for instance, through their names, kinship relations, occupations, native place, and their status as members of the monastic order or laity. Of course, we have to remember that these do not necessarily include all the bases of social identity prevalent at the time, but rather the elements that were considered most important for the purpose of pious donation, given the limited space that was available for inscribing the records. The notable aspects of the donations include the large number of gifts made by members of the monastic community, the prominence of women donors, and collective gifts made by the laity, monks, or nuns of certain villages and towns. The gifts by groups of nuns point towards the existence of nunneries. This is precious evidence, given the fact that after its inception, the history of the bhikkhunī saṅgha in India is shrouded in mystery. Apart from what the inscriptions say, equally important are their silences, especially the absence of references to varṇa or jāti. Clearly, the early history of these social institutions is much more complex than is often assumed.6

  The chapter begins with a cautious disclaimer, stating that it does not aim at adding to knowledge about the theoretical aspects of patronage. But in retrospect, I think that it does. It situates donative inscriptions and their empirical content within their larger archaeological and artistic contexts. It compares textual precepts with monastic and lay practice.7 It shows that the testimony of texts and inscriptions can be marked by similarity, asymmetry, as well as stark difference. It treats gender as part of a larger matrix of social participation in religious patronage. The chapter also argues that the relationship between royalty and the growth of religious establishments needs to be interrogated. Finally, I engage with the hypothesis of urban decline, pointing out that the abundant evidence of inscriptions and structural remains belonging to the Gupta and post-Gupta periods at Sanchi contradicts the hypothesis of urban decline in what is known, for the sake of convenience, as the early medieval per
iod.8

  The second chapter in this section, ‘Nagarjunakonda: Buddhism in the “City of Victory”’ (Chapter 2) transports us from central India to Andhra. I visualized it as part of a long-term continuous history of the site, from prehistory to the 21st century. The larger idea was that of biographies of sites and monuments that traced their lives across the centuries, unconstrained by the standard chronological divides of the ancient, medieval and modern. Nagarjunakonda is an incredibly complex and disconcerting site. For one thing, it no longer exists. It was drowned in the waters of the Krishna river when the Nagarjunasagar dam became functional. What is visible on the island in the middle of the river is a surreal recreation of some of its parts via a re-assemblage of a few selected structures, models, and replicas. Further, the various excavation reports do not easily dove-tail into one another. Nagarjunakonda is a puzzle whose pieces had not only got horribly jumbled up, many of them were also irretrievably lost. All this made it a challenging subject for research.

  The chapter on Nagarjunakonda, written over a decade after the one on Sanchi, marks a methodological advance. It interrogates the goals of archaeological investigation and the perspectives of archaeological reports. By now, I was also much more conscious of the need to understand the inscriptional discourse more carefully, to be attentive to its purpose, audience, and reception, and to look closely at the idiom of religious piety. As pointed out by Gregory Schopen, an analysis of such donative inscriptions has to begin with the question: Why were these inscriptions inscribed? Schopen’s answer to this question is that a magical efficacy was attached to the writing of names, and that the inscriptions gave the donors a permanent place in the shadow of the relics.9 I add to this the observation that the degree of proximity to the relics was also a factor, and that donors did not only seek proximity to the relics, but also to the monastic community. Schopen has also drawn attention to the great importance of the idea of the transfer of religious merit in Buddhist donative inscriptions. The chapter extends this by talking about the sharing of merit, and argues that the ‘circle of merit’ revealed in the epigraphs can be seen as an important part of religious practice in a society that was already stratified to some extent on the basis of class, but in which kinship still played a pivotal role. I also think that it is extremely important to underline the fact that the idea of the sharing of merit was not confined to Buddhism or to the subcontinent.