Reimagining Asoka: Memory and History.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.
• Position: Book review

Reimagining Asoka: Memory and History. Edited by PATRICK OLIVELLE, JANICE LEOSHKO, and HIMANSHU PRABHA RAY. Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012. Pp. xviii + 450. Rs. 1250.

This volume contains the proceedings of the conference "Asoka and the Making of Modern India," held in New Delhi in August 2009 under international auspices. To quote the editors (p. xv), "the conference had two major foci: the ongoing reassessment of evidence relating to Asoka and the consideration of his significance in historical memory" (p. xv). Nineteen articles are collected here, all but one (that of K. R. Norman) presented at the conference itself, divided into three parts, prefaced by an introduction by the editors and two "prolegomena." The prolegomena are by what one might term the complementary pair of doyens of Asokan studies, Romila Thapar for history ("Asoka: A Retrospective") and K. R. Norman for language ("The Languages of the Composition and Transmission of the Mokan Inscriptions") and give a helpful survey of the issues in Asokan studies today. Of the three parts that follow, the most substantial is the second, "Asoka and His Times," consisting of nine articles: it is preceded by "Emergence of Asokan Studies" (three articles) and followed by "Asoka Reimagined" (five articles).

What links these disparate studies is their shared attempt to contextualize the Asokan material, with the broadest reading of "context": not only that of history, but also of historical memory and appropriation: not only the texts as texts but also as physical artifacts in their archaeological assemblages and their geographical settings and "in conversation" with other physical objects (such as coins), and as documents in conversation with themselves and with other texts, contemporary or not. Needless to say, in a review of this length the articles cannot be discussed in detail. In what follows I will try to give a sense of the variety and range of the treatments and also to highlight a few of the more striking papers.

Although the title of the first large section, "Emergence of Asokan Studies," seems to promise a history of the field, only the last of its three articles, Virchand Dharamsey's "Bhagwanlal Indraji's Pioneering Contribution to Asokan Studies," fits squarely in this mold. The other two, Himanshu Prabha Ray's "Archaeology and Agoka: Defining the Empire" and Shalendra Bhandare's "From Kautilya to Kosambi and Beyond: The Quest for a 'Mauryan/Asokan' Coinage," instead...