Professor, as the presentation given by you explaining the differences between Ashoka's 'Dhamma' and Kautilya's 'Dharma', somewhere or at some places it seems to me that Ashoka did not take into account some of the Kautilya's ideas imbibed in the Arthashastra while practicing his policies, and it was something else that motivated Ashoka as an individual, which made him different as a ruler also. Patrick Olivelle talks about the 'crisis of conscience' in one of his articles, where he writes that we can say with some confidence that without that crisis of conscience, there would have been no Ashoka as we know him, probably not even the production of his inscriptions. Professor, how much is the role of 'Crisis of Conscience' at a personal level that acts as a motivation in playing the role behind the development of the personality of figures like Ashoka, the corollary of which we see in the form of his policies? How do you see this?
I agree with what Prof. Olivelle proposes with regard to Ashoka. There was a crisis of conscience in which Ashoka had to choose between the demands of contemporary politics and his inner conscience, and at some places it appears that his choice of inner conscience supersedes other demands, and that made him different from other rulers in which the former gave so much emphasis upon such dilemmas. We have historical methods to extract information, but what we don't have are Ashoka's personal accounts.
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(A memory: Conversation with Professor Upinder Singh, 22.10.2024)
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"We need to be free of the shackles of political ideology if we want to be true to our DHARMA as a historian. The future really lies with you (young researchers), the historians of the future. Don't let your understanding of history or what you write about history be shackled by any kind of political ideology. That is where hope lies in the future."
- Prof. Upinder Singh
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