Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c10.11

c10.11

Indeed, in ‘Aryan’ India the term ‘architecture’ can first be applied unreservedly to the famous sandstone columns, once more than thirty in number, which Ashoka set up as memorials after his conversion to Buddhism, and on some of which he subsequently carved his pious injunctions to his subjects. It has long been recognized that these columns, without precedent in Indian architectural forms, represent in partibus the craftsmanship of Persia. Actually, the name ‘Persepolitan’ which is commonly given to them by writers on Indian architecture is not altogether happy, since the innumerable columns of Persepolis are invariably fluted, whereas those of Ashoka are unfluted,¹¹² as indeed was the normal Persian custom. But if for ‘Persepolitan’ we substitute ‘Persian’ or, better still, ‘Achaemenid’, there can be no dispute. The Chunār sandstone from which Ashoka’s columns are wrought is superbly carved and is finished with a lustrous polish of a kind which in India is characteristic of no other age. This is a Persian accomplishment; the masonry of the palaces of Darius and Xerxes ‘goes to the extreme of highly polished stones, looking, when well preserved, like mirrors of black marble’.¹¹³ Equally Persian are the famous lions which crowned the Ashokan column at Sārnāth, near Banaras, and have been assumed as the Republican badge of India. The setting-up of memorial or religious pillars (of wood) was indeed an Indian, not a Persian, habit,¹¹⁴ but the Ashokan form and craftsmanship are a completely alien rendering of this tradition. And, once established in India by the great Buddhist emperor, the Achaemenid column, with its bell-shaped lotus capital and with or without its animal impost, entered into the fabric of Indian architecture and was reproduced, in modified forms, by architects or rock-carvers, Buddhist and other, for several centuries after Ashoka.