Chakarvartin Ashok Samrat versus Emperor Asoka

How Indian television turned an ancient king into a modern-day pseudo-nationalist

WrittenBy:Overrated Outcast
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A year and a half ago, when it was announced that Colors would present a show based on the life of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, sane historians all over the country cringed in anticipation. Indian television isn’t really known for its accurate depiction of historical events. Instead of using all the information we have to put together an approximation of what actually happened, we get a show that uses the usual teevee tropes using characters from our history.

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Most characters on Indian teevee fall into four categories.

The first is the Goody Two Shoes. This person, man or woman, is the show’s biggest sacrificial lamb. Their only purpose of existence is to constantly surrender their needs to fulfill those of other people. In the show Chakravartin Ashok Samrat, Ashok (distinct from Ashoka) is the Goody Two Shoes. All his actions are couched in nobility. Ashok isn’t just a simple, ambitious royal who wants to be king. No! He’s a virtuous man-boy who only lives to serve his motherland!

His opponents – this motley crew includes his two half-brothers and their mothers and grandparents – are the scheming and murdering Heels who deserve nothing but to be killed like the vermin they are. They’re not just evil, they’re * Balaji Telefilms evil *. They conspire. They plan. They practice black magic. They drink wine. Some of them might even think about sex. (Nahiiiiin!) They mostly try to look menacing while their trademark scary music plays in the background.

Ashok’s dad in the show, King Bindusara, is a Patsy. He is clueless about everything and is more impressionable than a five-year-old. He doesn’t have any opinions of his own and lets other people do his thinking for him.

And the rest of the King’s court are The Bystanders – the purpose of whose existence is to stand around and look shocked that events are unfolding. They never matter to the narrative and the only time they get more than one line in an episode is when they’re about to die.

In the show, Ashok’s character suffers from the Indian Strong Leader Syndrome. According to this theory, our best leaders are the Gulliver of solving problems. They don’t let anything stand in the way of their patriotic duty! Except those goddamn anti-national Lilliputians, who sneakily work in the dead of the night and tie our hero up in useless turf battles that keep them from achieving the greatness they was destined to achieve.

So, they pretend that Ashok isn’t guided by ambition and self-aggrandisement. No he’s goaded into war! It’s okay if he’s murdering people without judge or jury – because he’s doing it for patriotic reasons. Duh! If only all his brothers would have given up their claim to the throne voluntarily, he wouldn’t have had to kill all 100 of them. It’s obviously their fault that they’re standing as obstacles to his greatness.

According to teevee, Ashok must be a saint because he has been given the responsibility of accomplishing Chanakya’s dream of an Akhand Bharat. So what if there is no historical evidence suggesting Chanakya and Ashoka ever crossed paths? In fact, one of Ashoka’s backers in his father’s court was supposedly the grandson of Chanakya. But that’s just me being pedantic about historical accuracy. What a stupid expectation to make of a historical TV show.

Also, the phrase “Akhand Bharat” did not exist in Ashoka’s time. It came into the mainstream in 1949, about two millennia after the end of the Mauryan Empire. Akhand Bharat is basically a modern day right-wing meme which imagines that one day all the countries in the Indian sub-continent will unite again under the Indian flag (which will, in this dream, be a saffron banner).

Undeterred by this, in the teevee show, characters say “Akhand Bharat” literally every two minutes. Everything Ashok does in the show is to realise his dream. Eating, breathing, walking, every step he takes, ever move he makes, is towards achieving this ultimate goal. Even the woman he falls in love with is in some way going to help him in this project.

Another anomaly is that the real Ashoka didn’t look like a Gladrags model. The historical sources from that time don’t agree on many things, but one thing they all mention is how ugly the real Emperor Ashoka was. Which goes to show how shallow the human race has always been. You can be the ruler of one of the largest empires history has ever seen, be responsible for the biggest Indian export outside the Chai Tea Latte, influence an independence movement two thousand years after your demise, but people will still remember you for your “pumpkin-shaped face” and “rotund belly.”

Which brings us to the next major omission. Apparently, Ashoka had a skin condition, which made him look repulsive in the eyes of his fellow royals. Because of this reason his father hated him very much and never wanted to see him. In fact, the real Bindusara hated Ashoka so much, that when he was on his deathbed and Ashoka suggested that he be declared his father’s real heir, Bindusara died from shock.

However on the teevee show, Ashok (sans skin condition and avec abs) and his dad act like each other’s best friends. The father even conspires with him in an unsuccessful attempt to kill his other two sons.

Which also explains why Ashoka was such an overachiever. He set out to fill the hole in his heart where his father’s love should have been by conquering other territories. He tried to show up the man who never had a kind word to say to him, by trying to prove that he was a better, much fiercer king. But when he realised that he was feuding with a ghost who would never say anything back, he turned his attention to spirituality. And then he overdid that too. Now he tried to fill the hole with meditation and faux piousness.

Like many other megalomaniacs that walk this planet, he was born a broken man and he died a broken man. Nothing he did in his lifetime changed that.

Ashoka and his story had been lost for almost two thousand years. A few years after the end of the Mauryan Empire, the religious scholars tasked preserving our past had written him out of the history books because of his close association with the spread of Buddhism. Like their modern day counterparts, the thin-skinned high poobahs of other religions wanted to rewrite history because they couldn’t change it. In fact, they wiped out the existence of the entire dynasty. If it weren’t for the ruins of edicts that were still legible and the efforts of curious European amateur historians at the beginning of the 18th century, he’d still be a ghost to us.

Put that in your Akhand Bharat-shaped pipe and smoke it.

We can never properly grapple with our past if we insist on finding non-existent narratives that justify our opinions in the present. We too will lose our history if we continue to demand that it be rewritten to make us feel better.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @over_rated

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