India Discovered by John Keay

this method, but it is tedious and occupied ten days of incessant labour.
I need not observe that it became a matter of primary interest to find some clue to the discovery of the missing portion of the rock on the eastern side, as the highly important eighteenth edict, containing the names of Ptolemy etc., had principally suffered from the mutilation. All our enquiries led to the conclusion that the rock had been blasted to furnish materials for the neighbouring causeway; to remove & this would have been attended with an expense which I did not feel myself authorized in incurring but the whole soil at the base of the rock was dug up to a considerable distance and as deep as could be gone.
    In this way two or three inscribed fragments were found. But it was impossible to decide where they came from. Postans had to rest content with his vastly improved facsimiles of the rock itself and these were duly sent off to Calcutta. They arrived in early November 1838, just a day after a ship called the Hertfordshire had sailed away down the Hughli. On board was JamesPrinsep, demented and dying.
    While wrestling with the first transcriptions from Dhauli and Girnar, he had fought off headaches and sickness. Rapidly the illness developed into ‘an affectation of the brain’. By the time he was bundled aboard th e Hertfordshire, ‘his mind was addled’. He reached England but never recovered his sanity, dying a year later at the age of forty.
    “That he was a greatman, it would not perhaps be strictly correct to assert,’ wrote a friend and obituarist (he was probably thinking of Jones with whom Prinsep was so often compared). ‘But he was one of the most useful and talented men that England has yet given to India.’ His genius lay not so much in his scholarship as in his tenacity, ‘his burning, irrepressible enthusiasm’. Ultimately it proved his undoing, forhis obsessive dedication to the Indian scripts had both unhinged his mind and wrecked his physique. But it had also gained for him, and for the study of India’s past, a new band of determined scholars. ‘We felt as if he observed and watched over us,’ wrote one. And, of course, it led him, perhaps drove him, to the solution of India’s greatest historical enigma.
    One of his last achievements hadbeen two carefully engraved plates showing the development of each letter of the modern Devanagari script from its origin in the Ashoka Brahmi. He illustrated nine distinct stages and gave a date to each. This was of immense value to philologists and constituted a worthy and succinct summary of his life’s work. Though since added to and qualified, it remains the basis for a study of India’s scripts.But, as Prinsep fully appreciated, it had a still more important aspect. ‘The table furnishes a curious species of palaeo-graphic chronometer by which any ancient inscription may be consigned with considerable accuracy to the period at which it was written, even though it possesses no actual date.’ It was, in effect, a ready reckoner not only for inscriptions but also for the monuments on whichthey were found. And since almost every building in India contains some inscription he had thus casually opened the way to a new and even more dramatic branch of Indology, the systematic study of Indian architecture.
    But of more immediate significance was his unveiling of Ashoka. Hitherto all contact with ancient India had seemed impossibly vague. The great classical civilization hinted at bythe glories of Sanskrit literature could be viewed only at about three removes – in translations of minor classical authors relaying information gleaned many centuries before by Megasthenes on his, probably brief, visit to north India. It was rather like trying to make out the history of the Plantagenets with nothing more to go on than a modern historical romance. Now, suddenly, it was like cominginto possession of the text of the Magna Carta. In Ashoka here at last was a genuine historical