Ashoka in Ancient India.

• Author: Olivelle, Patrick
• Position: Book review

Ashoka in Ancient India. By NAYANJOT LAHIRI. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. Pp. xix + 385. S35.

Many biographies of Emperor Asoka (third c. B.C.E.) have been written over the past century or so, but Lahiri's is perhaps the most gripping. Written in elegant prose, it traces the life of Asoka from his birth and early life, through his glorious reign, until his death sometime after 232 B.C.E. The historically reliable data for Asoka, however, are meager, consisting of his artifacts and inscriptions, and it is difficult to write a full biography of the emperor based solely on them. Lahiri, therefore, uses two other sources imaginatively. First, there is the historical memory of Asoka preserved in texts, mainly Buddhist, composed several centuries later. This historical memory, moreover, was shaped by the religious and ideological imperatives of the authors and is historically less than reliable. Second, Lahiri uses the landscape in which Asokan artifacts and inscriptions are located to imaginatively recreate the land where Asoka lived, across which he traveled, and within which his inscriptions were read and understood, calling it "The Message in the Landscape" (ch. 9).

Lahiri is fully aware of the pitfalls in using material from later religious texts, and she alludes to them repeatedly. After listing the Buddhist literature featuring Asoka, she observes: "their reliability as sources of biographical information is uncorroborated by anything written during or even close to his own time" (p. 6). And further: "The desire to deploy remembrances and memorializations of this emperor is practically irresistible among Indians. A consequence of this has been that in reconstructions of the life and times of Ashoka the line which divides history from memory is frequently blurred. In attempting to recover the historical Ashoka I have tried to separate out these threads, highlighting in the early chapters the various possibilities and challenges of using later legends and chronicles which evoke him" (p. 289). She, nevertheless, makes full use of these later biographical details to fill in the gaping holes left by the Asokan artifacts and inscriptions. This makes for an enjoyable narrative, but raises questions from a purely historical point of view. Although Lahiri takes pains to alert the reader to the distinction between the two kinds of sources, inevitably the two frequently get blended and the boundaries get blurred. See, for...