Stones and Scrolls: The Argument from Inscriptions in Bhram Ka Pulinda

 

Stones and Scrolls: The Argument from Inscriptions in Bhram Ka Pulinda

The core claim

Rajiv Patel’s Bhram Ka Pulinda rests on one rule of evidence: what is real in ancient India is what survives in stone. Before roughly the 9th-10th century CE, he argues, rulers and scholars wrote on rock, pillars, copper plates and metal. They used Dhamma (Brahmi) script and Pali/Prakrit, and nothing else. The author builds his case from four observations.

1. Writing in the ancient period is epigraphic. Ashoka’s edicts, the Bharhut railings, Satavahana and Kushan records, Gupta coins and the Prayag pillar all sit in museums and fields, and anyone can read them.
2. The “classical” authors leave no such trace. No inscription of Panini, Chanakya, Valmiki, Vyasa, Kalidasa or Patanjali has been excavated. No Vedic hymn or Gita verse is found carved in the Mauryan or Gupta layers.
3. The surviving manuscripts are late in form. The texts exist on paper, in Nagari script, in Sanskrit. Paper reached India via China and the Arabs, and the author ties its spread to the Mughal era.
4. Foreign visitors do not describe this world. Faxian, Yijing and Xuanzang describe Buddhist universities and monasteries, but, he says, never mention Kalidasa or a Sanskrit literary court.

From this he concludes that the Vedic and epic literature was composed or edited later and then projected backward into deep antiquity. The author asks again and again for a television series, Abhilekh ki Khoj (“The Search for Inscriptions”), that would show the original stone record for each famous text.

Where the argument has real force

The author is pointing at something real. Epigraphy is the most secure kind of historical evidence because it is datable, in situ and hard to forge. Several of his observations hold up:

• Ashoka’s edicts really were unreadable to Indian scholars for centuries. Firoz Shah Tughlaq moved pillars to Delhi and could find no one to read them. James Prinsep deciphered Brahmi in the 1830s.
• Mauryan-era epigraphy is overwhelmingly in Prakrit, and the Buddhist material at Bharhut and Sanchi is rich and well documented. The Bharhut gateway inscription refers to Shunga rule.
• Many traditional claims about the Vedic and epic age rest on traditional chronology, such as the yuga-based dates, not on excavated evidence.
• The Indus script remains undeciphered, so claims that its imagery proves a particular religion are speculative.

Where the argument breaks down

Several of the central premises do not survive scrutiny.

Sanskrit inscriptions exist, and early ones. The Junagadh inscription of Rudradaman (c. 150 CE) is in Sanskrit, written in Brahmi. The Ayodhya inscription of Dhanadeva and the Ghosundi-Hathibada inscriptions (around the 1st century BCE-CE) are in Sanskrit and refer to Vedic-style sacrifices. The Nanaghat record of the Satavahana queen Naganika lists Vedic rituals. Gupta-era records, including Samudragupta’s Prayag praśasti, are in Sanskrit, and the Aihole inscription of 634 CE names Kalidasa and Bharavi as famous poets.

Brahmi could and did write Sanskrit. Ashoka’s Prakrit edicts lack ṛ, au, visarga and the sibilants ś and ṣ because Prakrit does not need them. Brahmi was an evolving script. Later forms added signs, and visarga and anusvara appear in inscriptions. The claim that “Brahmi cannot write Sanskrit” mistakes the limits of Ashoka’s language for the limits of the script.

Absence of stone is not absence of text. Most of what ancient India wrote down was on perishable material: birch bark, palm leaf and cloth. The earliest surviving Sanskrit manuscripts, such as the Gilgit birch-bark manuscripts (about the 5th-6th century), are on perishable material and are mostly Buddhist. Kautilya’s Arthashastra survives on palm leaf, discovered in 1905. Stone was reserved for edicts, donations and dedications, not for books.

The same test would erase Buddhism’s own canon. The Pali Tipitaka was transmitted orally and written down in Sri Lanka in the 1st century BCE, and the earliest complete manuscripts are far later. If “no contemporary stone, no text” were applied consistently, it would undermine the Buddhist scriptures the author relies on. Oral transmission is well attested in ancient India, and the Vedas in particular were preserved by elaborate memorization systems.

Foreign sources do mention Brahmins and ritual religion. Megasthenes (which the author himself cites) describes brahmanes. Epigraphic records such as the Heliodorus pillar at Besnagar (2nd century BCE, a Greek ambassador’s dedication to Vāsudeva) show devotional Vaishnavism existing during the period the author describes as purely Buddhist.

Late paper copies do not prove late composition. A manuscript’s age tells us when that copy was made, not when the text was composed. Linguistic dating, internal evidence, quotations in dated inscriptions and commentaries all indicate that the Vedic and epic corpus was growing long before paper.

The sociological assertion

The author also argues that the textual tradition was invented by a community seeking income, status and political advantage. That is an interpretive and polemical claim, not an archaeological one, and it relies on broad accusations against an entire community. Historians do discuss real processes of text revision, interpolation, patronage and the political uses of the past. Those debates are strongest when they rest on dated evidence rather than on assumptions about motive.

Conclusion

Bhram Ka Pulinda is useful as a reminder that epigraphy deserves more weight in popular history than it usually gets, and that traditional chronologies need testing. But its central syllogism, that nothing without a stone inscription before the 9th century is real, fails against the evidence it ignores: early Sanskrit inscriptions, perishable writing materials, and the oral transmission its own Buddhist sources depended on. A balanced reading uses stone and text together. Inscriptions fix dates and rulers, texts preserve ideas and ritual, and neither alone gives the whole picture.