Review: Ashoka in Ancient India

Ashoka in Ancient India by Nayanjot Lahiri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is a voluminous body of scholarship that readers and students can turn to, to learn more about India’s experience under colonialism or its more recent history since the achievement of Independence. Unfortunately, if you have any interest in pre-modern or ancient Indian history, the primary source of such information are highly technical and specialist journals that are not aimed at wider, non-specialist audiences. While things are changing, it remains the fact that there are very few readable and accessible histories of ancient India that readers can turn to today. Seen in this light, N. Lahiri’s ‘Ashoka in Ancient India’ is a highly welcome addition to the scholarship on Ashoka and the Mauryan empire more generally. Lahiri’s study is highly readable and her scholarship is original and persuasive. Lahiri’s excellent account of Ashoka’s edicts and her attempt to understand the man ‘underneath the edicts’ distinguishes her biography from the few existing accounts of Ashoka that are available. There is a particularly insightful section of the book where Lahiri brings attention to what appears to be an increasingly authoritarian streak that emerges in Ashoka’s inscriptional presence. Her finely textured and intricate study of the edicts and the literary accounts of his life helps to bring Ashoka to life and gives readers a tangible sense of what king and kingdom must have been like.

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