Emperor Ashoka still matters for two reasons that a 2022 conversation between historian Nayanjot Lahiri and vocalist TM Krishna returns to repeatedly. The first is that he spoke about his own rule in public inscriptions, and chose what to say about his past. The second is that later societies remembered him in very different ways. Scroll.in published an edited version of the conversation on September 7, 2022. Lahiri and Krishna connect these threads to governance, empathy and political memory, and Krishna adds a third route into the edicts: setting their words to music.
What drew the conversation to Ashoka
The discussion opens with a personal question: what drew the speakers to Ashoka. The conversation was part of the Edict Project, a collaboration between TM Krishna and Ashoka University. Lahiri approaches Ashoka as a historian of memory, asking how a ruler of the third century BCE is represented in his own words and in the traditions that followed him. Krishna approaches him as a performer who has had to learn the language of the edicts by ear before he could sing them.
How Ashoka described his own past
Lahiri’s central observation concerns what the edicts leave out. In the surviving edicts she describes, Ashoka does not dwell on his predecessors or on the circumstances that brought him to power. Instead, he sets the present reign against earlier practices and against his own earlier state of mind, which makes the present read as a turning point rather than a continuation.
Lahiri’s reading of the contrasts the edicts draw can be set out side by side:
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| Contrast in the edicts (as Lahiri reads them) | Earlier practice or state | Later framing |
|---|---|---|
| Travel | Pleasure tours | Dhamma journeys |
| Sound | The sounds of war | The “music of dhamma” |
Lahiri presents these pairs as her analysis of Ashoka’s self-presentation, not as a settled reading that every historian shares. She also describes Ashoka’s public communication through administrators as an unusual way of addressing people across his realm. That is her characterization in the conversation rather than a figure she quantifies.
How later traditions remembered him
The second half of Lahiri’s argument is that Ashoka’s legacy does not stay where he left it. Her point is that remembrance varies by place, and that it involves selective emphasis and forgetting. Asked to put the gap between the inscriptions and later accounts into a single line, she said:
“In practically every instance, memory was at variance with history.”
Sri Lankan traditions
Lahiri says that Sri Lankan traditions give prominence to Ashoka’s children, particularly Mahinda and Sanghamitta. The emphasis shifts from the emperor’s own voice to the family members who carried Buddhism onward.
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Southeast Asian traditions
According to Lahiri, some Southeast Asian traditions cast Ashoka as an exemplary Buddhist ruler, and do so in ways that differ from the historical record. She offers a medieval chronicle from south Thailand as an example, in which an Indian Ashoka seeks Buddha relics from a Thai Ashoka. Lahiri recounts this as an illustration of how memory reshapes the figure; the conversation does not establish the chronicle’s details independently, so it is best read as an example of her method rather than as a fixed historical event.
Ashoka in modern political memory
The conversation then moves to the present. Lahiri discusses Jawaharlal Nehru’s relationship to Ashoka’s legacy, and Krishna raises B.R. Ambedkar together with the ethical and material dimensions of social change. Both speakers treat Ashoka as a symbol that modern India has used, and they ask what that use has amounted to. These are interpretive questions, offered by the speakers and not settled consensus positions.
Krishna frames the stakes in terms of democratic life:
“I think in a democratic world we are asking these questions of ourselves: what does governance mean?”
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This is where the conversation’s interest in empathy and governance is most direct. The speakers do not claim that Ashoka offers a template for policy. They use his edicts as a reference point for asking what a state owes the people it addresses.
Setting the edicts to music
Krishna’s contribution is the most distinctive part of the conversation, and it is based on his own account of the work. He describes a process with three stages.
Learning the sounds of Ashokan Prakrit
Krishna says he had not previously heard Ashokan Prakrit, and that he first had to work with its sounds. He describes spending about a month and a half repeating and reading the words before he began to sing them. This is his recollection of his own preparation, not a measured timeline.
Checking pronunciation
He consulted Sanskrit professor Naresh Keerthi on pronunciation, which he treated as a necessary check before committing to a melody.
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Choosing melody and rhythm
Krishna then tried melodic and rhythmic approaches. He describes the process as intuitive rather than mechanical: he did not assign a raga by working out a word’s meaning and matching it to a fixed mode. The choices came from listening to how the words sounded and felt.
His central claim is that music changes what a listener can take from a text:
“What is said or heard has got to do with what you can draw from it, and I think music adds dimensions to what you can draw.”
In Krishna’s account, the aim is to carry the words beyond their semantic content and into an emotional register. Lahiri, for her part, characterizes his singing as a singular remembrance of Ashoka. Neither speaker presents the recordings as an independent evaluation, and this article does not assess the music.
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Reading the interpretations side by side
The conversation invites three comparisons, and each one should be read with its speaker in mind. The first sets Ashoka’s own presentation in the inscriptions against the later accounts that Lahiri describes. The second sets remembrance in India against remembrance in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, again as Lahiri describes it. The third sets the semantic content of the edicts against Krishna’s musical interpretation of the same words. None of these comparisons should be taken as representing every community or every listener. They show how the same figure can be read in different registers, and that is the conversation’s main contribution.
Further reading
Lahiri’s book Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand was announced in 2022 as forthcoming from Permanent Black. The announcement was the basis for this description, and the current edition and availability were not confirmed for this article. Check with the publisher or a current bookseller before ordering.
The Bottom Line
Ashoka matters as a contested memory as much as a fixed historical figure. The inscriptions show a ruler choosing what to say about himself, and the later traditions show how readily that self-portrait was reshaped. Krishna’s musical approach adds a third way in, one that asks listeners to hear the edicts rather than only read them.
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