The Buddha and the Sahibs

By Charles Allen

At the beginning of 18th century India, Buddha was a far less familiar figure in India. Ashoka, the great was an unknown figure. Only one of his famous pillar edicts was known, but nobody knew what the strange characters on the pillar meant.

Charles Allen’s The Buddha and the Sahibs reads like a detective story about people trying to reconstruct a civilization, the story of Buddha and Ashoka, from fragments scattered across forests, ruined stupas, broken pillars, monastery mounds, and half-forgotten texts.

What makes the book compelling is that Allen avoids turning the old British Orientalists into either pure heroes or cartoon villains. Some were deeply serious scholars who spent decades trying to understand India’s past. Others behaved like imperial scavengers, digging apart monuments and carrying artifacts away with astonishing carelessness. The books constantly move between intellectual brilliance and colonial

The book builds in episodes as several British officers solve puzzle after puzzle as different pieces across the subcontinent start coming together as the British expand their territory and find things.

One of the most fascinating figures in this whole story is Colin Mackenzie. Before Ashoka was even fully discovered from obscurity, Mackenzie was already traveling across South India collecting inscriptions, manuscripts, sketches, temple plans, oral traditions, and local histories on an enormous scale. He understood very early on that India’s history was still alive in village memory, temple records, and regional scholarship, even if Europeans could not yet read or organize it properly.

His work around Amaravati and Deepaladimma is especially striking. Deepaladimma, literally the “mound of lamps”, was the great Buddhist mound at Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh that local Vasireddy rulers and laborers had already begun quarrying for stone before anyone fully understood what it was. Mackenzie’s team copied sculptures and inscriptions from the site while much of the stupa was still being dismantled for lime and construction material. Ironically, some of the earliest surviving visual records of Amaravati exist because Mackenzie’s draftsmen documented them before large sections disappeared.

The emotional center of the book is still James Prinsep’s decipherment of Brahmi script. For years, the inscriptions on Ashoka pillars were unreadable mysteries. Prinsep painstakingly compared repeating symbols from Sanchi donations and gradually realized he was looking at records of gifts. From there he slowly unlocked individual sounds and letters.

The breakthrough came with the repeated phrase “Devanampiyapiyadasi”, “Beloved of the Gods.” Nobody initially knew who this ruler was. Then George Turnour, translating Sri Lankan Pali chronicles, connected the inscriptions to Ashoka Maurya. Suddenly these scattered pillars, cave inscriptions, and rock edicts across the country belonged to a real emperor whose memory had almost vanished from mainstream Indian consciousness.

One of the remarkable things in this story is how much Sri Lankan Buddhist scholarship helped reconstruct Indian history itself. Without the Mahavamsa and related chronicles, Ashoka might have remained anonymous far longer. History had survived in Lanka after fading in much of the land where Ashoka once ruled.

Allen is also very good at showing how archaeology itself evolved. Early excavation often looked more like treasure hunting. Objects were removed without context. Monuments were dismantled. Entire stupas were dug apart searching for relic chambers. Some discoveries were effectively destroyed by the people uncovering them.

Then gradually the field became more disciplined. Figures like John Marshall introduced more systematic archaeological methods, careful excavation, cataloging, and preservation. The transition mirrors a larger shift from conquest-era curiosity to something closer to historical science.

An unexpected figure who enters this broader story is Lord Curzon. Curzon is controversial for many reasons including partition of Bengal, but he played a major role in historic preservation across India. By the late nineteenth century, monuments like the Taj Mahal were in worrying condition. Parts of Mughal gardens had deteriorated, decorative elements were damaged or neglected, and several medieval monuments across India were effectively being cannibalized for building material. Curzon pushed major restoration and conservation efforts, strengthened the Archaeological Survey of India, and treated preservation as a state responsibility rather than a hobby for scattered enthusiasts.

The narrative then expands into a giant geographical treasure hunt through figures like Alexander Cunningham and later Dr. Waddell. Cunningham traveled across India carrying the accounts of Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang almost like field manuals. Their descriptions of distances, monasteries, rivers, stupas, and ruined cities became clues for reconstructing Buddhist India.

This eventually led to some of the most dramatic archaeological rediscoveries in South Asia.

One was the identification of Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha. Hidden in the Terai forests stood Ashoka’s pillar, still carrying an inscription stating that the emperor himself had visited the site because “the Buddha Shakyamuni was born here.” That moment feels almost surreal in the story, a direct physical bridge between Ashoka and the historical Buddha suddenly emerging out of jungle and neglect. For centuries the site had faded into obscurity, and then an inscription written more than two thousand years earlier suddenly anchored Buddhist history to a real location again.

Another powerful thread is the rediscovery of the places associated with the Buddha’s enlightenment, first sermon, and Mahaparinirvana, his final liberation. Sites like Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and especially Kushinagar gradually re-emerged through inscriptions, ruins, and pilgrim accounts. Kushinagar, where the Buddha attained Mahaparinirvana, had become little more than neglected mounds and scattered remains before archaeologists connected it to the descriptions left by Chinese pilgrims. There’s something deeply moving about the idea that one of Buddhism’s holiest places could disappear into the landscape for centuries and then slowly return into human memory.

The story of Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya is especially fascinating because it was not just about rediscovering a ruin. It became a battle over ownership, identity, and memory itself. By the nineteenth century, the temple marking the Buddha’s enlightenment was under the control of a Hindu mahant lineage. Buddhist pilgrims still came from Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, and elsewhere, but the site was functioning largely as a Shaivite temple complex. Many Buddhist visitors were shocked that the holiest site in Buddhism no longer really operated as a Buddhist institution.

This led to one of the most emotionally charged parts of the story: the long campaign to reclaim Bodh Gaya as a living Buddhist center again. Anagarika Dharmapala became one of the central figures in this struggle. He saw Bodh Gaya not merely as an archaeological monument but as the spiritual heart of Buddhism itself. The disputes between the Hindu mahants, British administrators, archaeologists, and international Buddhist groups dragged on for decades. Restoration projects under Cunningham and later John Marshall physically repaired the temple, but the larger question remained unresolved: who did the site belong to?

Eventually Bodh Gaya evolved back into an international Buddhist pilgrimage center, with monasteries from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet, Bhutan, Japan, Myanmar, and many other Buddhist traditions surrounding the temple complex. Today the Mahabodhi Temple feels unmistakably Buddhist again, but Allen’s narrative reminds you how close these places came to slipping entirely into historical fog or changing identity altogether.

What stayed with me most is the fragility of cultural memory. Ashoka, who today feels central to Indian identity, had almost disappeared for centuries. Buddhist India survived in fragments: inscriptions nobody could read, stupas mistaken for hills, sculptures buried in fields, stories preserved in Sri Lankan monasteries, and travel accounts written in Chinese.

And yet, piece by piece, all of it came back together through linguists, monks, surveyors, epigraphists, draftsmen, translators, local informants, and obsessive scholars arguing over scripts and ruins under brutal Indian summers.

Excellent read. Highly recommended.