This is a guest post by my friend Srikara. He explores history of places with a particular interest in Vijayanagara Empire. In this post, he speaks of his visit to Brahmagiri Hills near Bellary, Karnataka. From this visit he writes, “The sheer scale of devotion, prescience and benevolence that seemed to have gone into Ashoka’s vision of a just society over two millennia ago, when many other contemporary societies were busy tearing themselves apart with violence, amazed me.” I find this continuing amazement with accounts of the past and the contrast with the present, as a key driver for our interest in history.
It must have been just past eight in the morning. The bus destined for Bellary had dropped me off on the highway, at the juncture of the road leading to Siddapura. ‘There is no stop here, we will only slow down, and you can get off!’ the conductor had said. I was off and was walking towards the village of Siddapura, five kilometers away. The sun was already in action, filling the world with its yellow spread. It was a lonely road for the most part, through expansive paddy fields with imposing boulder strewn hills peppered across them. Some humongous giant must have crushed solitary rocks with his bare fist and sowed the pieces in these fields as piles of stone. The sun, the paddy, the hills, and the silence of being alone filled me with anticipation for the setting of my destination.
The road ended at the village that had been recently anointed Ashoka Siddapura. And all around, petty shopkeepers, skinny elders wearing shirts, towels, and panches that were once white, and other idlers greeted me with curious stares. I smiled and moved on through the village.
The heat was getting stronger as I continued to walk on a road lined by plots with mud houses with sloping red-tiled roofs. Typical of rural settings in India, chickens running across the road, dogs barking at my perceived trespass, famished oxen tied to their posts, ruminating solemnly, and women carrying cans of water, all met my eyes as I pushed myself through. Just as I stepped outside the village and away from the hum of its life, a large bare hill loomed ahead, to the right of the road. Walls of ruined fortifications straddled the sides of the hill. ‘Brahmagiri.’ I thought. I was near.
I passed by a stone temple in ruins and reached an unusual structure at the foot of the hill. ‘This is it.’ It was a rather horse-shoe shaped edifice built of stone blocks, the whitewash on whose walls had mostly faded. It served as a shelter to the upper surface of a large boulder and had a staircase leading up to it. I absorbed my surroundings for a minute. I was looking up at the shelter in the silent shadow of Brahmagiri. A necklace of ancient fortified walls stared at me from the heights. In front of the hill was a vast fallow land that was, again, lined by gigantic boulder hills afar. Taking a deep breath of the eerie stillness, I climbed up the steps.
Atop the boulder, a cage enclosed what I had come so far to see. As I peered through the steel bars, deeply engraved runes on the boulder made themselves visible over an area of a standard Persian Carpet. The script was vivid and each of its characters was inscribed with elegance. As I observed each line in awe, I tried to remember what it said from what I had read about it.
The Brahmagiri Inscription is the southern-most of all of Maurya Emperor Ashoka’s myriad Rock and Pillar Edicts proclaiming universal peace and an embrace of humanity. They were inscribed over two thousand years ago across the Subcontinent, from Kandahar to Siddapura, Gujarat to Bihar. They mark Ashoka’s righteous rule after his adoption of Buddhism.
The Brahmagiri inscription announces to the lost city of Ishila that once was in the vicinity, that ‘the men of Jambudvipa had (since Ashoka’s reign began) become mingled with the gods’ and urged its residents to embrace the Truth, treat their parents, elders, masters and relatives with respect and obedience, and be compassionate to animals.
Other edicts across the country are more radical in their call for humanity. They proclaimed religious equality and freedom to pursue one’s faith, right of prisoners to appeal against sentences that were ordered to be dispensed justly to begin with, protection of several animal species by royal decree, provisioning medication and treatment of illnesses, facilitating long-distance travelers with the planting of large banyan trees and digging wells, and much more.
I tried to fit the Brahmagiri edict into Ashoka’s vast philanthropic jigsaw puzzle, as I continued to observe the curvy letters. The sheer scale of devotion, prescience and benevolence that seemed to have gone into Ashoka’s vision of a just society over two millennia ago, when many other contemporary societies were busy tearing themselves apart with violence, amazed me. The presence of this gem of history in what was now a desolate place was mystifying.
Siddapura is like an all you can eat buffet for history-buffs. It has a preserved site of megaliths, written records on stone, forts atop hills, ancient temples in ruins, artfully carved veeragals, saffron-clad mendicants and, most importantly, a weight that keeps pressing on you, filling you with enigma and wonder, a weight of history, of the place having been there, and seen it, for thousands of years, a weight of ghosts that had dissolved in the air with time. I had only savored a starter, and was salivating for more. I walked down the stairs.
Contested Realities 