Book description
India's lost emperor Ashoka Maurya has a special place in history. In
his quest to govern India by moral force alone Ashoka turned Buddhism
from a minor sect into a world religion and set up a new yardstick for
government which had huge implications for Asia. But his brave
experiment ended in tragedy and his name was cleansed from the record so
effectively that he was forgotten for almost two thousand years. But a
few mysterious stone monuments and inscriptions survived, and the story
of how these keystones to the past were discovered by British
Orientalists and their mysterious lettering deciphered is every bit as
remarkable as their author himself. Bit by bit, fragments of the Ashokan
story were found and in the process India's ancient history was itself
recovered. In a wide-ranging, multi-layered journey of discovery that is
as much about Britain's entanglement with India as it as about India's
distant past, Charles Allen tells the story of the man who was arguably
the greatest ruler India has ever known. Like an explorer in a jungle,
stripping away the foliage from a long-forgotten city, Charles Allen
brings to light the most extraordinary ruler in Indian history: an
emperor who devoted his reign to peace, animal rights, and the pursuit
of his subjects' happiness. -- Tom Holland 'A labour of love and notable
scholarship, Charles Allen's Ashoka is a fitting testament to a
forgotten epic of discovery. His own feats of research and synthesis
mirror exactly those of the great orientalists whose story he has so
ingeniously pieced together. All who relish India's antiquity should
read this book' -- John Keay 'Charles Allen has a written a thrilling
book which reads like a mystery novel. Ashoka, whose story had been
forgotten for a thousand years, was rediscovered by a fascinating
collection of intrepid amateurs, who combined their daily work with much
enterprise to dig, draw and decipher the hidden secrets of the when and
whereabouts of India's first great king, whose chakra now adorns the
Indian tricolour. Read this and you will see how absorbing history can
be' -- Lord Meghnad Desai, Author Of Rediscovery Of India. Charles
Allen is the author of a number of bestselling books about India and the
colonial experience elsewhere. A traveller, historian and master
storyteller he is one of the great chroniclers of India.
