The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History

by Sanjeev Sanyal

The influence of Indian civilization on South East Asia is obvious to anyone who has travelled around the region and it is increasingly well documented. The impact that South East Asia had on cultural and historical events in India is less appreciated. The evidence, however, suggests that the influence flowed both ways. There are many examples, including the famed university of Nalanda in Bihar, that attracted students from around the Indian Ocean rim as well as from China and Central Asia. Few people realize that the university was partly funded by the Sri Vijaya kings of Sumatra.

We can gauge this from how the Dutch considered it a victory when they forced the English in 1667 to hand over the tiny nutmeg-growing island of Run in the East Indies, now Indonesia, in exchange for a much larger island in North America’s eastern seaboard. That island was Manhattan.

As mentioned earlier, one thing that particularly struck me when researching for this book was the extent to which previous histories of the Indian Ocean or the maritime Spice Route were written almost exclusively from a Western point of view—a view that tends to focus largely on developments after Europeans entered the scene. Even when earlier history is mentioned, it is treated either as background material or in terms of the medieval European yearning for Asian spices, as if the people of the Indian Ocean were sitting around lazily growing spices for export until the Europeans turned up and made things exciting. By the same token, such histories end when the Europeans leave in the mid-twentieth century, as if history subsequently stopped for the locals.

Even when dealing with the colonial period, we find there is almost exclusive focus on what the colonial powers were doing. The locals are mentioned only when they threaten colonial expansion in any way. In reality, the people of the region were reacting to the evolving situation in multiple ways. There were individuals like the Parsi opium merchant Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy and the African slave trader Tippu Tip who became very wealthy by taking advantage of new opportunities. There were the large numbers of desperately poor Indian and Chinese labourers who used colonial-era networks and braved their way to far-off islands like Mauritius and Singapore. There were the Bugis pirates who became notorious in the waters of South East Asia. And then there was the heroic last stand of the Balinese against Dutch aggression in the early twentieth century.

Local texts, inscriptions and oral histories are routinely discounted as being somehow inferior sources than the testimonies of foreign visitors and travellers who are assumed to have greater credibility. I am not suggesting that we should not use the writings of foreign travellers—I have used them extensively in this book—but want to point out that such sources should not be blindly accepted as they too contain their own biases and prejudices. These not only pertain to colonial-era biases but are also evident in highly regarded precolonial sources. Take, for instance, Ibn Battuta, the famous fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller, who proudly recounts how he threw out an elderly Jewish physician from a dinner party hosted by the Sultan of Birgi for no apparent reason other than his religion. He had not behaved unusually badly and merely reflected a common prejudice of his times, but modern historians who use Ibn Battuta need to consciously adjust for this.6 We see a similar slant in the writings of Chinese pilgrim-scholars like Xuan Zang who viewed the world exclusively from a Buddhist perspective. Thus, we are told of an incident where Xuan Zang is robbed of all his belongings and is helped by a group of Brahmins in Kashmir who give him new clothes and provisions. Far from being grateful after accepting all the gifts, Xuan Zang proceeds to lecture them on their ‘erroneous doctrine’!

In later centuries, several European visitors would also leave us with narratives that are useful windows into their times. Again, we need to be careful when using their writings as they are, with a few notable exceptions, often systematically biased against the Hindu and Islamic cultures that they encounter. By the end of the eighteenth century, these narratives also contain an additional layer of racism. Thus, when European colonists came across the ruins of Great Zimbabwe in southern Africa in the nineteenth century, they simply assumed that the Africans were incapable of building it. The ruins, therefore, were interpreted as a sign that light-skinned colonists must have conquered southern Africa in ancient times, and there were even attempts to connect it to King Solomon and Queen Sheba. As historian John Reader puts it, ‘This view of African history compounded a prevailing belief that whatever was commendable in black Africa must have been introduced from somewhere else by lighter-skinned and (by implication) more intelligent people. . . . The idea was reinforced by colonial regimes and since independence the elites themselves have seized every opportunity to perpetuate it.’

The Indian reader will probably have recognized the parallels with the Aryan Invasion Theory pushed by colonial-era historians to suggest that Indian civilization was a gift from light-skinned outsiders. It is then a small step to paint British colonial rulers as latter-day Aryans with a (noble) mission to civilize the natives. What is extraordinary is that this story about invading Aryans continues to survive, especially among the elite, despite the lack of any textual or archaeological support, and a plethora of genetic and other evidence against it.

In other words, history is not a predetermined path but the outcome of complex interactions that, at every point in time, can lead down many paths. This does not mean that history is completely random. Some outcomes are more likely than others and some patterns do emerge even if the flow of history does not quite repeat itself. As Mark Twain is said to have remarked, ‘History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.’

For all the many twists and turns, there are several continuities in the long history of the Indian Ocean ranging from the constant migration of people to the stories people have been telling each other over hundreds of years. One such continuity is the presence of Indian soldiers and mercenaries serving in faraway lands since ancient times. The global importance of Indian soldiering is not widely explored by historians perhaps because Indian empires, with a few exceptions, have rarely carried out military operations outside the subcontinent. In contrast, Indian soldiers and mercenaries have often fought wars from Europe to China. Once one begins to notice them, they seem to pop up everywhere in the historical record. In ancient times, one finds them fighting for the Persians against the Greeks and a little later, driving war elephants for the Macedonian general Seleucus against his rivals in the Middle East. During the medieval period, one finds Indian mercenaries fighting for Sinhalese rulers in Sri Lanka, dying for the Shiite cause in Karbala and protecting commercial interests of Tamil corporatized guilds in South East Asia. Later still they would serve the British in the Opium Wars in China, the Boer Wars in South Africa and across the globe during the World Wars.

This tradition remains alive in the subcontinent. Gurkhas from Nepal are widely considered the world’s best infantry soldiers and continue to serve in the armies of many countries from Britain to Brunei. Similarly, India has been the single largest contributor to United Nations peacekeeping missions around the world since 1950.11 Other countries in the subcontinent too have made major contributions. This is just one of the many continuities of history that we will encounter through the book.

It appears that such tsunamis have taken place many times in the past and are remembered in the oral traditions of aboriginal tribes in the region. When rescue parties arrived to look for survivors among the Onge and Jarawa people of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, they found that the tribes had suffered almost no casualties despite being very close to the epicentre. Evidently, they had followed an old oral tradition that instructed them to move inland to higher ground whenever the ground shook.1 These tribes are said to have arrived on these islands more than 30,000 years ago as part of early human migrations and must have experienced such deadly tsunamis many times in their history.

It was on Pangea that the dinosaurs appeared around 230 million years ago. The supercontinent appears to have held together till around 175 million years ago when it began to split up due to a sequence of rifts. First, it broke up into two large land masses—the northern continent of Laurasia (which included North America, Europe and Asia) and the southern continent of Gondwana (which included South America, Africa, Australia, India and Antarctica). Incidentally, the name Gondwana is derived from the Gond tribe of central India.

Modern humans appeared in the East African Rift Valley about 200,000 years ago. Being an exceedingly modest lot, and despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, we would come to name ourselves Homo Sapien, that is, ‘wise man’.

there were several other hominids around at that time and it would not have been obvious at this stage that Homo sapiens would one day be the sole surviving human species. The Neanderthals were well established in Europe and the Middle East. The closely related Denisovans roamed across many parts of Asia. We have only discovered the existence of the Denisovans by chance in 2010 due to the genetic sequencing of an ancient finger bone.

There were also isolated remnants of earlier human groups. On the small island of Flores, Indonesia, one such group went through a process of dwarfing. It is unclear how archaic humans reached this island but it is likely that this happened at a time when sea levels were low and the island was easily accessible from the mainland. When sea levels rose, the group became trapped on an island with limited resources. In response to scarcity, the survivors reduced in size and evolved into a species named Homo floresiensis that reached a maximum height o...

So who were these early Homo sapiens? Genetic surveys suggest that the Khoi-San people of south-western Africa are the oldest surviving human population as they have the greatest genetic variation.6 Note that Khoi-San is a composite term derived from the hunter–gatherer San people, also known as Kalahari ‘bushmen’, and the closely related Khoi people who engage in herding. Right at the onset, let me clarify that the Khoi-San are not a relic population of ‘living fossils’. They are modern Homo sapiens who happen to carry the wider genetic mix from which the rest of us derive our ancestry.

Max Plank Institute, Liepzig, finally cracked the puzzle when they discovered that around 1–4 per cent of the DNA of all non-Africans is derived from Neanderthals. This interbreeding, moreover, appears to have happened soon after Homo sapiens arrived in the Middle East. Most of the offspring from such mating were probably infertile, like mules derived from the mating of horses and donkeys, but a small number were able to pass on their genes. This means that the Neanderthals did not entirely die out but live on within us. Of course, this finding merely confirms what has long been suspected by anyone who has attempted to drive on the roads of Delhi.

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Human entry into this ecosystem had a devastating effect. Within a few thousand years almost all of the mega-fauna vanished. Of twenty-four species weighing over 50 kgs, twenty-three became extinct. It is thought unlikely that natural cycles like climate change would have caused this mass extinction since these creatures had already survived several cycles.

Hunting for food was probably only one of the ways in which humans caused extinction. The ancestors of the Australian aborigines probably upset the overall ecological balance in several other ways. For instance, they may have used fire to clear and manage their landscape in order to benefit some species at the expense of others (contrary to popular perception, many hunter–gatherers actively managed their territories). The eucalyptus, which is rare in fossil records till 45,000 years ago, suddenly became very common at the expense of other plant species. In turn, this would have upset the whole food chain. This fits a pattern that we witness repeatedly through history whenever humans entered a virgin ecosystem like Madagascar or New Zealand.

Analysis of human remains from Neolithic farming sites repeatedly shows that farmers were less healthy and had much shorter lifespans than their hunter–gatherer ancestors. This may explain why the Nile oasis people went back to hunting in the Sahara grasslands as soon as climate permitted them.

China’s population today exceeds 1.3 billion but 40 per cent of its males derive their genes from just three Neolithic ‘super-grandfathers’.24

Most ancient civilizations have a myth about the Great Flood. There is the well-known biblical story of Noah and his Ark. The Sumerians mention the Great Flood in the epic of Gilgamesh. The Indians have the legend about Manu who was warned about the coming flood by the god Vishnu. So he built a large ship and filled it with wise sages, seeds and animals. Vishnu, in the form of a fish, then guided Manu’s ship to safety. The survivors are said to have re-established civilization at the foothills of the Himalayas. Notice the similarity with the story of Noah. Indeed, many cultures around the world have a story about the Great Flood and one wonders if it is a memory of this period of climate change and coastal flooding.

It is unclear why the Harappans invested in building so many cities along a dying river. If we do not manage today’s rivers sensibly, it is conceivable that future archaeologists will dig up the remains of twenty-first-century cities and wonder the same thing. Meanwhile, the urban cluster at Dholavira expanded significantly. The site had a fortified acropolis and a ‘lower town’. At some point the city was expanded to accommodate the growing population and the old lower town became the ‘middle town’ and the expanded area became the new lower town. A wooden signboard has been found near one of the gateways. We do not know what it says as the script has not been deciphered but my guess is that it’s something mundane like: ‘Keep Left for Bullock-Cart Parking’.

Lothal is one of the best known because of the discovery of a large dockyard which used sluice gates and a spill channel to regulate water levels. Next to the dockyard, there are remains of structures that may have been warehouses and a series of brick platforms where one can imagine stern customs officials inspecting the goods and unscrupulous merchants trying to bribe them. Lothal is several kilometres away from the sea now and modern-day visitors will be surprised to know that it was once possible to sail from Dholavira to Lothal. In fact, it is quite possible that Lothal was a customs checkpoint for shipping headed north for Dholavira through the Gulf of Khambhat. There may have been a similar checkpoint for ships coming in from the west, perhaps at Bet Dwarka, where a number of Harappan-era anchors have been found.

Archaeologists digging at Ras al-Junayz, on the eastern most tip of the Arabian peninsula, found that over 20 per cent of objects were of Harappan origin. There are a number of enigmatic beehive ‘tombs’ from this period scattered across Oman. Most of them are in areas that are too arid to sustain a population today but were much wetter in the Bronze Age. The builders of these structures would have almost certainly interacted with visiting Indian merchants.

Trade with India had a big influence on the Persian Gulf area. For instance, Harappan weights and measures became the standard across the region. The locals also copied the Harappan seals. This was the beginning of a long commercial and cultural relationship that, despite booms and busts, continues to this day. Till as recently as the 1960s, the Indian rupee was used as legal tender in Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE! For a while, the Reserve Bank of India even issued a special Gulf rupee for use in these countries. It was only when the Indian rupee sharply devalued in June 1966 that these countries began to issue their own currencies (Bahrain had already made the shift a few years earlier).

Today the most visible example of these links are the large numbers of Indians who live and work in the Gulf countries. This too has its origins in Harappan times. Mesopotamian inscriptions mention that the Meluhhans were numerous enough to have their own ‘villages’ or exclusive enclaves in and around Sumerian towns. We do not know for sure what these Indians were doing there— they could have been a mix of merchants, artisans and mercenaries—but they seem to have been an important part of the bustling economy of Bronze Age Mesopotamia. We also have a handful of references to individuals. For instance, there is a cylinder seal belonging to a Meluhhan interpreter called Su-ilisu (of course, he may just have known a Harappan language and may not have been an Indian). Amusingly, we also know about a rowdy Meluhhan who was made to pay ten silver coins to someone called Urur as compensation for breaking his tooth in a brawl!14

We have some idea of what the Harappans exported—carnelian beads, weights and measures, different types of wood, pots of ghee (clarified butter) and, most importantly, cotton textiles. The cotton plant was domesticated in India and cotton textiles would remain a major export throughout history. Oddly, we are not sure what the Harappans imported in exchange. Nothing of obvious Persian Gulf origin has ever been found in any Harappan site. Perhaps they imported perishables like dates and wine. Another possibility is that they imported copper from Oman as the remains of several ancient copper mines have been found there. The Harappans had their own copper sources such as Khetri near the Haryana–Rajasthan border, but the Gujarati Harappans may have preferred Omani copper.

Did the Harappans Compose the Vedas? Despite the abundance of archaeological remains, we know little about the Harappans themselves. We are not sure what languages they spoke, what gods they worshipped, and their script remains stubbornly undecipherable. We do not even know if it was a unified empire or a network of independent city states that shared a c...

Genetic markers also suggest that this mixing went on for more than two thousand years, so much so that there are no ‘pure’ ANI and ASI any more. As a recent study put it: ‘The most remarkable aspect of the ANI–ASI mixture is how pervasive it was, in the sense that it has left its mark in nearly every group in India. It has affected not just traditionally upper-caste groups, but also traditionally lower- caste and isolated tribes, all of whom are united in their history of mixture in the past few thousand years.’21 In other words, after all this blending, the majority of Indians are most closely related to each other irrespective of their ancient origins. Sorry if this scientific finding offends any ‘pure race’ advocates! Then, around AD 100 (a new study suggests AD 50022) the mixing abruptly stopped as different castes and tribes became strictly endogamous. The reasons for this are hazy, but castes do seem to be quite fluid in the oldest Indian texts and become much more rigid in later writings (although endogamous, the relative positions of most castes continued to be fluid into modern times). A fuller discussion on caste is beyond the scope of this book, but genetics has broadly confirmed the assertion by Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar that the Indian caste system was a case of ‘superimposition of endogamy on exogamy’.

The Persians were not the only people with Vedic links in the Middle East. A military elite called the Mitanni migrated from the east into northern Iraq in the middle of the second millennium BC and came to dominate the region. In 1380 BC they entered into a treaty with the Hittites. The agreement was solemnized in the name of Vedic gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra and Nasatya. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the arrival of the Mitanni in the region also witnessed the introduction of a technology of Indian origin—iron. It is noteworthy that this is five centuries after the earliest mass production of iron took place in southern India.

This sloshing may explain why the mixing of genes in India seems to happen in layers between the same groups.28 Note that such non-linear movements are echoed in the later oral histories of many communities. The Gouda Saraswat Brahmins, for instance, claim to have migrated from the banks of the Saraswati River to Bengal and then later to the western coast of India. Long dismissed as myths, one wonders if these oral histories contain a memory of real population movements.

Interestingly, the Vedic–Mitanni god Mitra would remain a popular deity in the Middle East and, centuries later, would witness a major revival in the Roman empire (where he would be known as the solar god Mithras). The cult of Mithras would become very widespread in the late Roman period and, for a while, would provide serious competition to early Christianity. The pagan Romans used to celebrate a big festival called Saturnalia that went on for a week from 17 December. At the end of the festival, on the 25 December, the Mithras cult would celebrate the feast of Sol Invictus or Unconquered Sun. Many scholars believe that when the Christians came to dominate the Roman empire, they simply took over the popular pagan festival (after all, the actual birth date of Jesus Christ is not known).

Thus, one of the unintended consequences of early Iron Age migrations seems to be that the world has come to celebrate the birthday of an ancient god from Haryana!

The collapse of the major Bronze Age cities around 2000 BC affected the thriving trade route between the Persian Gulf and India’s western coast. By chance, the personal correspondence of a merchant in Ur, now Iraq, has survived in the ruins of his house and provides a direct view of how business networks may have begun to break down. The merchant, a certain Ea-Nasir, seems to have imported copper ingots from Magan (i.e. Oman) via Dilmun (i.e. Bahrain) around 1900 BC. Angry letters from his customers and creditors make for amusing reading after four thousand years although those who wrote the letters were clearly not amused. Here is one example from a business associate called Nanni:31 Now when you had come, you spoke saying this, ‘I will give good ingots to Gimil-Sin.’ This you said to me when you had come. You have offered bad ingots to my messenger saying, ‘If you will take it take it, if you will not take it go away.’ Who am I that you are treating me in this manner, treating me with such contempt, and that between gentlemen such as we are.

We know this due to a most unusual artefact—the discovery of black peppercorns stuffed up the nostrils of the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II. While we do not know if this condemned the pharaoh to frequent sneezing in the afterlife, it shows that the Indian Ocean trade networks of the thirteenth century BC were capable of transporting pepper from its origin in south-western India to Egypt.

With all this migrating and churning going on in the western Indian Ocean rim, one adventurous band of Indians decided to be different and head east. They seem to have got into their boats somewhere on the country’s eastern shore and sailed along the coast, past Sumatra and Java and eventually ended up in Australia! Recent genetic studies show that a bit more than 4000 years ago, a band of Indians turned up in Australia and contributed their DNA to the aborigines. This finding confounds the earlier belief that there were no new arrivals to the island continent between the initial migration of Melanesians 45,000 years ago and the arrival of the Europeans. Moreover, the new immigrants brought along their pets, the ancestors of the dingo dog.34 This is possibly why the dingo looks suspiciously like the stray dogs one sees all over India.

It is fascinating that the Iron Age epic Mahabharata hints at the matrilineal streak in India’s north-east. It tells us how the exiled prince Arjun visited the kingdom of Manipur. There he met the warrior princess Chitrangada and married her. However, note that the marriage took place on the explicit condition that Chitrangada would not have to follow Arjun back home as she and her children were heirs to the throne. Again notice the easy acceptance of a male outsider combined with the rootedness of the local female. The story does not end here. Ulupi, the queen of a neighbouring Naga tribe,40 also falls in love with Arjun and kidnaps him. The epic then tells us of how Arjun is eventually restored to Chitrangada. We are not concerned here about the historical veracity of this story. What is interesting for our purposes is the portrayal of two strong female characters and a social context that is different from that of the Gangetic heartland. It appears that the Iron Age composers of the Mahabharata, based in the north-west of India, were aware that the status of women was different in the north-east. Manipur remains home to formidable women including Mary Kom, five-time world boxing champion. The daughters of Chitrangada are alive and well.

It is during the Iron Age that two major highways came to connect the subcontinent. The first is an east–west road called Uttara Path (i.e. Northern Road) that ran from eastern Afghanistan, across the Gangetic plains to the ports of Bengal. This road would be repaired and rebuilt throughout Indian history and survives today as National Highway 1 between Amritsar and Delhi and as National Highway 2 between Delhi and Kolkata.

The second was a north–south highway called the Dakshina Path (i.e. Southern Road). This was more like a tangled network that started around the Allahabad–Varanasi section of the Gangetic plains and made its way in a south-westerly direction to Ujjain. Here it split into two with one branch going to the ports of Gujarat and the other branch making its way further south via Pratishthana (Paithan) to Kishkindha in Karnataka and beyond.

In the sixth century BC, Gautam Buddha would preach his first sermon at Sarnath, the spot where the two ancient highways met. To this day, two of India’s most important highways (NH2 and NH7) meet here.

The Sinhalese link to eastern India matches genetic, linguistic and cultural evidence and survives in many little ways. For example, the lion is an important symbol of the Sinhalese people; they are literally the Lion People. One finds this echoed in Odisha which remains a major centre for the worship of Narasimha (the god Vishnu as half-lion and half-man). The town of Puri is famous for the temple of Jagannath, another form of Vishnu, but also has a very ancient temple to Narasimha and there are several rituals where the latter is given precedence to this day. Similarly, in Bengal, the goddess Durga is almost always depicted as riding a lion. In other words, the lion on the Sri Lankan flag and Durga’s lion share the same cultural origins.

The clinching evidence on the origins of the Sinhalese, however, comes from another custom. Robert Knox, an Englishman who spent many years in Sri Lanka in the seventeenth century, made the following observation: ‘In their infancy they have names whereby one may be called and distinguished from the other; but, when they come to years, it is an affront and shame to them, either men or women, to be called by those names.’6 Bengali and Odiya readers will know exactly what this means.

Herodotus recounts the method by which the Indians were believed to mine gold. There was said to be a sandy desert in India inhabited by giant ants ‘in size somewhat smaller than dogs, but bigger than foxes’. When these ants burrowed their nests into the ground, they dug out sand that was rich in gold. The Indians therefore made their way into the desert on camels to collect the sand in the mid day sun. However, the ants were dangerous and one had to collect the sand quickly and escape. We are categorically told that female camels were faster than the males, and should be preferred for the operation as there is a risk that the ants may come chasing after the gold diggers. Now, this is the kind of useful information one should always remember if one wants to avoid being eaten alive by rampaging giant ants.

If true, this expedition would suggest that the ancients had gone around the Cape of Good Hope a good two thousand years before Vasco Da Gama! Herodotus, however, did not believe the story because of a minor detail—the Phoenicians insisted that when they made the turn at the bottom of Africa, the sun was to their right. Herodotus thought that this claim was just too absurd but we know that this is exactly what one should expect south of the Tropic of Capricorn. In other words, the ancient explorers may have been telling the truth!

The victory at Gaugamela would have been enough to establish Alexander’s control over the Persian empire, but he dreamed of conquering the whole known world. Thus, in the winter of 327–326 BC, he led his army through Afghanistan towards India. Along the way he subdued several small kingdoms including Massaga, probably in what is now eastern Afghanistan or Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The Massagan army had 7000 Indian mercenaries who put up a fierce resistance but the royal family finally agreed to Alexander’s terms of surrender. The terms included a condition that the mercenaries would join the Macedonian invasion of India. Unfortunately, the Indians had not been consulted before the agreement and they refused to fight against their own countrymen. Alexander responded by massacring all of them.

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Alexander’s brief incursion into the Indian subcontinent had an unintended consequence. A scholar called Chanakya and his protégé Chandragupta Maurya took advantage of the political confusion caused by the invasion to carve out a power base in India’s north-west. After several attempts, they defeated the Nanda king of Magadh and created the foundations for the powerful Mauryan empire. In 305 BC, Chandragupta defeated Seleucus Nikator, the general who had taken over most of Alexander’s Asian possessions. The treaty between Seleucus and Chandragupta handed the Indians a large chunk of territory extending over Afghanistan and Baluchistan. One of Seleucus’s daughters was also given in marriage to a Mauryan prince, perhaps Chandragupta himself or his son Bindusara. Seleucus, in return, received a gift of 500 Indian war elephants and their mahouts.

In 274 BC, Bindusara suddenly fell ill and died. The crown prince Sushima was away fending off incursions on the north-western frontiers and rushed back to the imperial capital Pataliputra, present-day Patna. However, on arrival he found that Ashoka, one of his half-brothers, had taken control of the city with the help of Greek mercenaries.11 It appears that Ashoka had Sushima killed at the eastern gates. The crown prince may have been roasted alive in the moat! This was followed by four years of a bloody civil war in which Ashoka seems to have killed all male rivals in his family. Buddhist texts mention that he killed ninety-nine half-brothers and only spared his full brother Tissa. Hundreds of loyalist officials were also killed; Ashoka is said to have personally decapitated 500 of them.12 Having consolidated his power, he was finally crowned emperor in 270 BC. All accounts agree that Ashoka’s early rule was brutal and unpopular, and that he was known as ‘Chandashoka’ or Ashoka the Cruel. According to mainstream textbook narratives, however, Ashoka would invade Kalinga a few years later and, shocked by the death and destruction, would convert to Buddhism and become a pacifist. The reader will be surprised to discover that the popular narrative about this conversion is based on little evidence. Ashoka would invade Kalinga in 262 BC whereas we know from minor rock edicts that Ashoka had converted to Buddhism more than two years earlier.

The Mauryans were likely to have followed Vedic court rituals (certainly many of their top officials were Brahmins) but had eclectic religious affiliations in personal life. The founder of the line, Chandragupta, seems to have had links to the Jains in old age while his son Bindusara seems to have been partial to a heterodox sect called the Ajivikas. This is not an unusual arrangement in the Dharmic (i.e. Indic) family of religions. This eclectic approach remains alive to this day and lay followers of Dharmic religions think nothing of praying at each other’s shrines. You will find many Hindus at the Golden Temple in Amritsar just as the streets of Bangkok are full of shrines dedicated to the Hindu god Brahma. The coronation of the king of Thailand is still carried out by Brahmin priests.

According to the official storyline, Ashoka was horrified by his own brutality and became a Buddhist and a pacifist. But, as we have seen, he was already a practising Buddhist by then, and from what we know of his early rule, he was hardly a man to be easily shocked by the sight of blood. The main evidence of his repentance comes from his own inscriptions. It is very curious, however, that this ‘regret’ is mentioned only in locations far away from Odisha (such as in Shahbazgarhi in north-western Pakistan). None of the inscriptions in Odisha express any remorse; any hint of regret is deliberately left out. The Ashokan inscriptions at Dhauli are engraved on a rock at the base of a hill. Almost all tourists drive right past it to the white-coloured modern stupa at the top of the hill. So I found myself alone with the inscriptions and the translations put up by the Archaeological Survey of India. What will strike anyone reading them is how they specifically leave out any sign of regret. The silence is deafening.