Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor by Charles R. Allen Page A

lived and died in that same country of Magadha. And if these sources were correct,this Buddha’s death had occurred not in the eleventh century BCE , as Jones had suggested, but as late as the fifth century BCE . This new evidence also suggested that despite being ‘branded as atheists, and persecuted as heretics, by the Brahmans’, 20 and despite persecution by various Hindu rulers, the Buddhists had not only flourished in India for many centuries but had continued to survive in some parts of the subcontinent as late as the twelfth century. 21
    At this same time supporting evidence for Buddhism’s Indian roots began to emerge from the central Gangetic plain itself, beginning with an inscription found at a ruined temple known locally as Buddha-gaya just south of the town of Gaya in southern Bihar. It recorded a tenth-century donation made to the ‘house of Bood-dha’, honouring the ‘Supreme Being, Bood-dha’ who had ‘appeared here with a portion of his divine nature’. 22 In Varanasi, too, startling evidence emerged suggesting that this most orthodox of Hindu cities had at one time contended with a rival religion.
    Varanasi in the 1780s was in the process of being Anglicised into Benares under the new authority of the EICo. In 1788 the Company appointed as its Resident and superintendent in that city thirty-two-year-old Jonathan Duncan, part of a select band of administrators known as ‘Warren Hastings’s young men’ and one of that minority whose empathy for Indian culture was combined with intellectual curiosity – the twin attributes of the Orientalist. Duncan shared Hastings’s view that to interfere with India’s ancient laws or its religious views would be an ‘unwanted tyranny’, while at the same time regarding it as his duty to oppose abuses of what would today be called human rights. These included the custom of female infanticide widely practised by the Rajput class, the most powerful landowners inand around Benares. By demonstrating to the leading landowners that it contravened the Hindu scriptures, Duncan was able to convince them to stop the practice. However, the city’s more conservative Brahmin class had also to be won over, which Duncan achieved by lobbying for a Sanskrit College in Benares, ‘for the preservation and cultivation of the Laws, Literature and Religion of the Nation at the Centre of their Faith’. 23
    By such diplomacy Duncan won the support of all sections of the city. It meant that when in 1794 a green marble urn was unearthed from some ruins just north of Benares, it was brought to Duncan and his advice sought. The urn had come to light when a complex of ruins known as Sarnath was being excavated for building material. 24 It contained cremated bone fragments, which was against Hindu custom, leading Duncan to speculate that the remains must have belonged to ‘one of the worshippers of Buddha, a set of Indian heretics, who having no reverence for the Ganges, used to deposit their remains in the earth, instead of committing them to that river’.
    Duncan’s surmise was confirmed when in the same ruins ‘a statue or idol of Buddha’ was uncovered bearing an inscription which, when translated by his friends from the Sanskrit College, proved to be a record of an eleventh-century donation made by Basantapala, King of Gaur, who with his brother had come to worship there and had ‘ordered all those who did not follow the Buddhas, to embrace that sect’. Here was clear evidence that Buddhism had flourished under royal patronage in Upper Bengal well into the eleventh century.
    But what was now all too apparent to Sir William Jones and his fellow savants was that the recovery of India’s pre-Muslim past was being held up by the lack of what Jones called ‘thegrand desideratum in oriental literature, Chronology’; 25 specifically, some name or event which could be tied to European history – a methodology known today as synchronology. Perhaps sensing that he was getting