The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c7.307

v1.c7.307

But is it a fact that there is no proof whatever, tangible or documentary, to show that the Indian Aryans knew and practised the art of building with stone long before the time of Aśoka? The very pillars of that sovereign, we believe, afford incontestable evidence to the contrary. Aśoka was born and bred a Hindu; he lived and moved amongst Hindus, and had never been beyond the boundary of Hindusthan. When he changed his religion, he only gave up one form of Indian worship for another. His new teachers were likewise Indians; and few of them had seen any place beyond the Indus; for as a race they were not much given to travelling, and the missionaries who did travel were hermits who issued forth from their country to disseminate the religion of Śākya, and not to bring home the arts of civilized life, and even if they did attempt it, as hermits, they could effect very little in that way. It was impossible for him, therefore, to bring with his new religion an art, which was, as is presumed, utterly unknown before his time and to attain in it so high a pitch of excellence as his pillars indicate. Those pillars are monolyths forty-two feet seven inches in length, with an average diameter of two feet seven inches; most carefully shaped and polished, rounded with great accuracy, tapering from base to top in a way which implies considerable taste in pillar-making, and surmounted by sculptured capitals of much elegance and beauty. Quarrying blocks nearly four feet square and forty three feet long is the most arduous occupation in which the Hindus can be employed in the present day, and, even under European superintendence, they have but rarely proved equal to it. Certain it is that not a single block of such dimensions has been chiselled within the last fifty years in the Bengal Presidency. How is it to be supposed, that two thousand years ago, they found themselves more proficient at the very first start, without any previous training? Turning, or cutting true, such ponderous blocks into round pillars was even a more arduous and difficult task; but they acquitted themselves in it with equal success. Then the carriage of such unwieldy masses to great distances (and some of the pillars were sent hundreds of miles away from the hill-sides where they had been quarried) and setting them up at diverse and very remote places, demanded an amount of mechanical appliance and ingenuity which could not have been imparted to the people all at once by solitary teachers. Again, the pillars were used as mere monuments erected singly in distant places to bear only inscriptions¹¹, and we are accordingly called upon to [16] accept as a fact that those who, until then, lived in thatched huts, and could not put even rubble stone together to make their dwellings, went against the natural order of things which require that houses should long precede monumental columns¹², to the trouble and expense of putting them up merely for purposes of display and ostentation. They presuppose an extent of knowledge and practical proficiency in quarrying, carving and ornamentation which cannot be acquired within the period of a single reign. It was, no doubt, possible for Aśoka to obtain written instructions and descriptions, or the aid of artists from beyond the Indus, but it would be too much to suppose that a man, who had never seen a stone house, and was ignorant of its use, would send to a distant country for quarriers, masons, and sculptors.