Ashoka in Kashmir’s historical traditions

An emperor remembered in Kashmir

Ashoka occupies an important place in Kashmir’s accounts of its ancient past. Kalhana’s twelfth-century Rajatarangini remembers a ruler of that name as a patron of religious foundations and the builder of Srinagari. The account connects kingship with particular places in the Valley, including Buddhist establishments and shrines of Shiva. It is a record of historical memory written long after the period with which Ashoka is usually associated.

The Mauryan emperor Ashoka belongs to the third century BCE. His inscriptions provide contemporary evidence for his rule and public declarations. Kalhana’s account is a different kind of evidence: a later Kashmiri narrative drawing on earlier writings, local traditions and sacred geography. Reading the two together requires attention to what each can actually establish.

Where Kalhana obtained the name

In his critical introduction, M. A. Stein explains that Kalhana took Ashoka’s name and those of the next four rulers from an earlier author called Chavillakara. The earlier work itself is not available to us through the passage; Kalhana preserves information attributed to it. This chain of transmission is part of the evidence, because it separates the surviving chronicle from the events it describes.

Kalhana gives Ashoka a place in a local royal genealogy and calls him a great-grandson of Shakuni. Stein observes that this pedigree does not correspond to the emperor’s known historical setting. He nevertheless identifies the chronicle’s Buddhist patron with the Mauryan Ashoka. That identification does not make the surrounding genealogy or every story in the sequence independently reliable.

The chronological problem

Stein shows that the early king-list cannot be read as a continuous, accurately dated register. Kalhana places Ashoka before rulers whom his calculations put far earlier than the emperor’s securely established period. Accepting that scheme would move Ashoka more than a thousand years away from the third century BCE.

This is why the encyclopedia places the topic under an approximate third-century BCE heading. It does not assign a date to a documented visit, conquest or foundation in Kashmir. The sorting year is a guide to the historical identification being discussed, not a claim that an event occurred in that particular year. No month or day can be recovered from this evidence.

Buddhist foundations in the Valley

Book I, verses 102–103, credits Ashoka with numerous stupas at Shushkaletra and Vitastatra, and describes a great religious monument within the Dharmaranya monastery at Vitastatra. These are specific local associations, rather than a general statement that the king favoured Buddhism everywhere.

Stein attempted to connect the place-names with villages in Kashmir. His commentary associates Vitastatra with a locality near the Verinag area and discusses its position near a route across the Banihal Pass. But he reports that he could not trace the attributed monuments above ground. At the proposed Shushkaletra location, an investigation made on his behalf likewise failed to identify antiquarian remains.

Those observations describe nineteenth-century investigations. They neither prove that the foundations never existed nor establish that an identifiable surviving structure was built by Ashoka. A place-name tradition, a traveller’s observation and an excavated building are distinct forms of evidence.

Srinagari and the question of its location

Kalhana credits Ashoka with founding Srinagari and gives the city an enormous total of houses, equivalent to 9.6 million. That figure is part of the poem’s presentation of royal magnificence. It cannot be used as a measured population or housing count.

The identification of the ancient town requires similar care. Cunningham proposed Pandrethan, whose older name was understood as the ancient capital. Stein placed the relevant locality near present Srinagar but did not consider the available evidence sufficient to fix it at Pandrethan with absolute certainty. His discussion compares names, shrines and the geography described in the chronicle.

The name Srinagari was subsequently associated with the later capital connected with Pravarasena II. Treating all these references as the foundation of the present city on one exact date erases changes in settlement and naming. The surviving tradition is important, but it does not supply a surveyed street plan or a securely dated foundation deposit.

Patronage at Shiva shrines

The narrative also credits Ashoka with replacing the old stuccoed enclosure at Vijayeshvara with stone and erecting two temples called Ashokeshvara in or near the precinct. It therefore remembers him through more than Buddhist patronage alone. Stein saw these local associations as compatible with a ruler supporting religious establishments beyond his own principal affiliation.

Kalhana then describes the country as troubled by people he calls mlecchas and tells how Ashoka obtained a son through devotion to Shiva Bhutesha. The divine intervention belongs to the story’s religious framework. The term mleccha is a category used by the chronicler, not a precise modern nationality. It cannot by itself identify a particular invading force.

Jalauka and the limits of a succession story

The son in the narrative is Jalauka, who becomes the subject of accounts of warfare, administration and religious foundations. Stein treats much of that material as legendary and says that he could not trace the alleged son in the other sources available to him. The genealogical connection should consequently be presented as Kalhana’s account, not as a securely reconstructed Mauryan succession in Kashmir.

Jalauka deserves a separate topic because his stories carry their own political and religious meanings. Their appearance after Ashoka does not resolve the chronological problems that surround the early books of the Rajatarangini.

What the inscriptions add

The rock edicts at Shahbazgarhi, in the Peshawar region outside Kashmir, provide a useful comparison. Fourteen major edicts are inscribed on two boulders in Kharoshthi script and date to the middle of the third century BCE. They are material evidence for Ashoka’s declarations in the northwest.

They do not independently confirm the foundation of Srinagari or each monastery described by Kalhana. Their relevance here is to the historical emperor and his period. Extending their location into a detailed map of administration inside the Kashmir Valley would require additional evidence.

Why the tradition matters

The Ashoka passages show how Kashmir’s historical writing connected royal authority to towns, religious institutions and named landscapes. They preserve traditions that cannot be replaced by a bare list of imperial dates. At the same time, the chronicle’s distance from the events and its problematic genealogy limit what can be stated as fact.

An account centred on Kashmir can hold both points together: the Valley’s remembered past deserves close attention, and the people and places within it should not be absorbed into an apparently exact imperial history that the surviving evidence does not support.