The Tapasvin of Copper and Stone: D. R. Bhandarkar and the Reclaiming of India’s Ancient Past

D. R. Bhandarkar

Rarely have a father and son been pioneers in reshaping a discipline as exacting as classical Indology and the reconstruction of India’s ancient past. Sir Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar (1837-1925) was among the earliest Indians to apply Western critical methods to Sanskrit and antiquities, creating what admirers would later call a rare synthesis of what the finest of the Oriental and Occidental worlds had to offer.

The very existence of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune (BORI, established 1917) - still one of the world’s great archives of Sanskrit and Prakrit learning - stands as a living monument to the trail blazed by R.G. Bhandarkar.

It would be up to his third son (and the only one to survive him) - Devadatta Ramakrishna Bhandarkar – to carry that inheritance into the terrain of archaeology, epigraphy and numismatics and help professionalise the study of India’s ancient past.

Born into an atmosphere heavy with scholarship, the younger Bhandarkar might easily have followed a relatively easier path. After graduating from Deccan College, Poona, in 1896, he even began studying law. But destiny intervened in the form of an academic advertisement: the Bhagwanlal Indraji Gold Medal and Prize (named in honour of the pioneering archaeologist).

Acting in near secrecy and without daring to inform his formidable father, the 21-year-old Devadatta produced in barely three months an ambitious and exhaustive thesis on the ancient towns and cities of Maharashtra before 1000 AD.

The thesis won the younger Bhandarkar instant recognition of his prodigious talents in Indology. When Sir Ramakrishna finally learnt of the episode, he was reportedly both angry and pleased - angry at the youthful audacity yet pleased at the unmistakable signs of a promising Indologist in the making.

After switching careers, Bhandarkar’s first official foothold came as Honorary Assistant Superintendent of the Ethnological Survey of Bombay, where he worked under R. E. Enthoven. His early studies of the Ahirs, along with papers on the Gurjaras and Guhilots, quickly established him as a major force to reckon with.

What distinguished D.R. Bhandarkar was not only his command over sources but his willingness to challenge European authorities on their own terms. He demonstrated that several Gurjara copper-plate inscriptions, earlier read by venerable scholars like Lorenz Franz Kielhorn and J.F. Fleet as dating from the Harsha era, had been misinterpreted. The dates, he argued, belonged instead to the Vikrama era, shifting chronologies by well over a century. The implications sent ripples across studies in early medieval Indian history.

What followed next is a testament to an older, patrician idea of scholarly humility. Following Bhandarkar’s correction, Kielhorn’s response was a model of contrition. He swiftly published a correction in a German periodical in 1905 and sent Bhandarkar a copy with a handwritten admission - “To show at once that I have been wrong” – on the title page!

Can we even imagine such gestures in our time, where the space for historical discussion is ruled by the noise of Lilliputian ‘celebrity historians,’ whose shallow learning is exceeded only by their boundless talent for self-promotion.

In 1904, he was appointed Pandit Bhagwanlal Indraji Lecturer at Bombay University. A particular lecture given here titled ‘Foreign Elements in the Hindu Population,’ has since become a classic.

Bhandarkar was offered two starkly different futures in 1904. The first was a comfortable, upwardly mobile post in the Revenue Department and the second was a precarious appointment in the Archaeological Survey, where promotion was doubtful and a nomadic life almost guaranteed.

Bhandarkar chose archaeology, joining as Assistant Archaeological Surveyor, Western Circle in 1904 to the disbelief of many European officers who doubted whether an Indian could advance the discipline in any substantial way.

Bhandarkar soon silenced all doubt; Between 1905 and 1910 he carried out extensive tours across Rajputana, compiling systematic lists of ancient monuments. His work was repeatedly praised for its sobriety, precision and interpretive discipline. His discoveries unsettled long-held assumptions.

And yet, despite of his brilliance, there was no advancement for Bhandarkar, He was not even made permanent as Assistant Superintendent. The motive was clear soon enough: he was not to stand in the way of any European officer being promoted to the post of Superintendent.

When Henry Cousens retired, Bhandarkar’s claim was bypassed in favour of A. H. Longhurst who became Superintendent in 1910.  Only when Longhurst was transferred to Madras in 1911 did corrective justice finally arrive and D.R. Bhandarkar became Superintendent of the Western Circle - the first Indian ever to hold that post.

As Superintendent, Bhandarkar’s excavations at Besnagar (in Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh) near the Heliodorus pillar raised by the Greek envoy Heliodorus - a devotee of Vasudeva and ambassador of King Antialcidas of Taxila to the court of the Vidisa ruler Bhagabhadra - produced a series of startling finds. North of the shrine, Bhandarkar he uncovered a solid stone railing of a previously unknown design. More striking still, when a wedge from the structure was analysed in Sheffield, it proved to be genuine steel. The implication that steel was in use in India in pre-Muhammadan times was sensational, prompting Sir Robert Hadfield to flag the discovery before the Faraday Society in 1914.

Bhandarkar also identified lime-mortar in a Sunga-period structure rivalling Roman techniques, and fire-bricks from second-century BC sacrificial pits. India’s ancient material science, long underestimated, was suddenly forced into a new reckoning.

A decisive institutional shift in Bhandarkar’s career came Sir Asutosh Mukherji, the formidable builder of modern Calcutta University, regarded Bhandarkar as the ideal choice for the newly created Carmichael Professorship of Ancient Indian History and Culture. He virtually snatched him from the Archaeological Survey over stiff bureaucratic resistance.

A glorious two-decade stint at Calcutta University followed, where Bhandarkar, from 1917 to 1936, trained a generation of historians, epigraphists and numismatists, founding a veritable school of historical method. His wondrous lectures reflected his range. In 1918 he spoke on Ancient Indian History from 650 BC to 325 BC; in 1921, on Ancient Indian Numismatics, and in 1923, on Asoka.

A century since his lectures on Asoka, Bhandarkar’s take on the Buddhist Emperor is an erudite and fascinating one, contrasting the loud ideological trench warfare that rages in social media gladiatorial arenas today.

Today’s nationalists accuse postcolonial Marxist historians (who have dominated the historiographical since Independence) and their latter-day epigones of appropriating Asoka to stage a civilisational inversion - by exalting Buddhism as a moral corrective to Hinduism in what they see as a sustained attempt by the former to denude Hindu civilisation of historical confidence.

Bhandarkar belonged to neither camp. His Asoka was not a political mascot but a moral provocation.

Asoka’s reputation was an open question even in Bhandarkar’s own era, albeit in a much more rarefied intellectual climate. Rakhaldas Banerjee, celebrated for discovering Mohenjo-daro, called Asoka a bigoted Buddhist, likening his religious outlook to that of Aurangzeb.

Likewise, H. C. Raychaudhuri, the most cold-eyed historian of his generation, was unsparing. With Yavana threats on the north-western frontier, Raychaudhuri wrote, India needed rulers in the mould of Puru and Chandragupta but “got a dreamer” in the person of Asoka. After Kalinga, Magadha squandered its energy in a moral revolution, as Egypt once had under Akhenaten. The result, Raychaudhuri argued, was politically disastrous, likening Asoka’s attempt to end war meeting the same fate as Woodrow Wilson’s idealism.

Bhandarkar did not deny the strategic costs of Asoka’s moral turn. For him, Asoka was both a political ruler as well as a global moral agent, whose policies anticipated universalist ideals centuries before their European counterparts.

He placed Asoka on a higher plane than Constantine, the Roman emperor who legalised Christianity and Marcus Aurelius.

Constantine’s toleration of Christianity, according to Bhandarkar, was underwritten by political calculation and his faith was a jumble at best.  Asoka, by contrast, put himself at the head of a fragile, minority religion that had made little headway. Constantine veered back towards paganism but Asoka never wavered from dhamma. The former leaned towards toleration for power while Asoka, Bhandarkar insisted, practised it as moral principle.

Bhandarkar conceded that Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, probably surpassed Asoka in private virtue and mental discipline. But the Roman’s commitment to imperial destiny never weakened. His systematic persecution of Christians, justified by the needs of Roman prosperity, marked the limits of Stoic universalism. Asoka, Bhandarkar argued, crossed that threshold. Compassion for him was not merely personal restraint but became public policy.

The only ruler whom Bhandarkar thought worthy of being named beside Asoka was Akbar. Both pursued religious toleration as state doctrine. Yet, for Bhandarkar, Akbar was, “before all things, a politician,” unwilling to endanger sovereignty for spiritual truth.

From Alexander to Caesar to Napoleon, Bhandarkar dismissed the cult of conquest as insufficient proof of greatness. Was Asoka a world-historical experiment in compassion, or a ruler who broke the strategic spine of the Mauryan empire? Did moral universalism strengthen India’s civilisational legacy even as it weakened its frontiers? Bhandarkar did not resolve these contradictions but merely framed them in an erudite manner.

Like his father before him, D.R. Bhandarkar straddled two worlds - the positivist rigour of Western method and the cultural intimacy of an Indian scholar working upon his own civilisational past. If Sir Ramakrishna created the bridge, Devadatta strengthened it with stone and steel.