The Bharhut Stupa Railing Alexander Cunningham Found in November 1873 Carries Brahmi Captions That Name Its Jataka Stories, the Builder of Its Gateway and Dozens of Donors

In the last days of November 1873, Alexander Cunningham, the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, stood on a flat-topped mound at Bharhut and saw three carved stone pillars of a Buddhist railing sticking out of the ground, with a connecting rail, a coping stone and a single gateway pillar. Three inscriptions were visible, on a gateway pillar, a railing pillar and the coping stone, all cut in Brahmi, the script of Ashoka’s edicts. The digs that followed turned up scenes of the Buddha’s earlier births, the names of the spirits who guard the gates, and the names of the people who paid for the pillars, nearly all of them captioned in the same script.

Cunningham published the find in 1879 as The Stupa of Bharhut. The railing and the one surviving gateway have been in the Indian Museum in Kolkata since 1875, according to the museum’s own record.

A mound in the state of Nagod

Cunningham places Bharhut in the small state of Nagod, about nine miles due south of a station on the Jabalpur railway line and 120 miles south-west of Allahabad. Today it is a village in Satna district of Madhya Pradesh, about 20 kilometres from Satna town, according to Prasanna Dash. In Cunningham’s account it stood on the ancient road from Ujjain and Vidisha to Pataliputra, where it turns north toward Kosambi and Shravasti. The villagers had been building with the stupa for a long time. He found carved stones from its railing in houses and temples in several villages around, and he describes the present village of about 200 houses as built entirely of its bricks.

His 1873 visit was short, because his camp was already on its way to Nagpur. He came back in February 1874, spent ten days uncovering one quarter of the circle of buried railing, and handed the work in March to his assistant Joseph Beglar, who found the Prasenajit pillar, the Jetavana scene and many coping stones before the season closed in early April. A second season ran from November to the end of December 1874, and Cunningham, with Beglar, searched every village within ten miles for missing pieces. Beglar photographed the sculptures as they came out of the ground, and in the second season they were photographed again systematically, bas-reliefs at one-sixth of their real size, for the book.

Cunningham records that the crowds who came to watch were more interested in the writing than the carving. Once they learned he could read the inscriptions, they asked what the writing said. He had to tell them it was gift records and the names of guardian Yakshas, Devatas and Nagas (nature spirits and serpent kings of Buddhist tradition), not directions to buried treasure. He doubted that many believed him.

What the railing looked like

By Cunningham’s measurements, the stone railing enclosed a circle 88 feet 4.5 inches across inside, and the brick stupa it surrounded had a base about 67 feet 8.5 inches wide. Each pillar stood 7 feet 1 inch high. The railing had four entrances at the points of the compass, and the coping, the continuous stone running along the top, was about 330 feet long.

He counted what survived. Of an original 80 pillars, 35 were on the site, six more turned up in the village of Batanmara and eight in Pathora, a total of 49. Of the 40 coping stones he found 15. From the fragments of the east gateway he drew a restoration, which the survey published as a plate. Separate inscriptions each mention a torana, the carved gateway of such a monument, so Cunningham counted three gateways and reasoned that a fourth must have stood at the fourth entrance.

The Indian Museum’s description of the assemblage says the pillars of the gateway carry bell-shaped lotus capitals topped by four animals, two lions and two bulls with human faces, seated back to back. It adds that the whole conception strongly suggests copying from wooden prototypes. The museum’s Google Arts and Culture entry gives the railing a height of 274 cm and the gateway 685 cm.

Pictures that carry their own captions

Cunningham found nine Jatakas, the stories of the Buddha’s earlier lives, on the inner face of the coping stones he recovered, each with its title cut above it. Counting pillars and rail-bars too, he lists 19 Jataka subjects, of which 18 had their names inscribed above or below them and three more were so clearly told that he could identify them without a label. The list includes the Deer Jataka, the Quail Jataka, the Goose Jataka, the Kinnara Jataka, the Rishi-deer Jataka and the story of the six-tusked Chhadanta elephant.

The captions settle questions that scholars would otherwise argue over. One pillar medallion shows a monastery garden, with a mango tree inside a railing and two small buildings, and a man emptying a cart of coins on the ground. The label reads, in Barua and Sinha’s transcript, Jetavana Anadhapediko deti kotisamthatena keta. Professor Childers in London, who corresponded with Cunningham about the inscriptions, rendered it as Anathapindika presenting Jetavana, having bought it for a layer of kotis (a koti is ten million). Childers then found the very phrase in Buddhaghosa’s introduction to the Jataka commentary, where the householder Anathapindika buys Prince Jeta’s garden for eighteen kotis of gold laid out as a layer. The Indian Museum’s online record for the same medallion, accession 156Bh-Arch, describes it as showing the purchase of Jetavana.

Other labels name the figures in historical scenes. One panel reads as King Ajatasatru worshipping the footprints of the Buddha. Another shows King Prasenajit in a four-horse chariot going to a shrine of the Wheel of the Law. Bodhi trees of earlier Buddhas are captioned with the Buddha’s name, and the guardian figures at the gates, Kubera king of the Yakshas among them, carry theirs.

Not every panel kept its caption. The Dasaratha Jataka scene lost its label to a break in the stone. Cunningham recognised it from the figures: Rama gives his straw shoes to his brother Bharata. He notes that the Buddhist telling of Dasaratha’s story, set in Varanasi, differs in several particulars from the Brahmanical version, and he translates the Jataka text in full.

The Chhadanta panel and the washerman’s plank

The Chhadanta Jataka shows how widely the carvings were scattered. According to Cunningham, the relief was broken in two at least 150 years before his visit, and the Jagirdar (the local landholder) had the lower half carried to Pathora with other sculptures. The upper half lay at Bharhut. Ten months after the upper half came to light, Babu Jamna Shankar found the lower half in Pathora, seven miles away, where a washerman used it to beat clothes on. The reunited panel shows the elephant with six tusks, which Cunningham took as evidence that the six-tusked form of the story was known as early as Ashoka’s time.

Who paid for it

The inscriptions are mostly gift records. The word danam, gift, recurs, and pillars are called thabho. The donors include ordinary monks, nuns and lay people, and many give their home towns. Cunningham, and Barua and Sinha after him, read gifts from people of Vedisa (Besnagar, near Bhilsa), Pataliputa (Patna), Kosambi, Karahakata, Purika and Moragiri. One records the first pillar given by Chapa Deva, wife of Revati Mitra of Vedisa. Another is the gift of a nun, Dharmma Rakshita of Venuvagama in Kosambi. After leaving Bharhut, Cunningham went to Kosam, the ancient Kosambi, and asked about the village of Venuvagama there. For another donor’s record from Vidisha, see the Heliodorus pillar at Besnagar.

The biggest single gift was the east gateway. Its inscription, on the left pillar according to the museum, names a king, Dhanabhuti, as the man who had the gateway made together with its stonework.

What “Suganam raje” means

The gateway inscription begins with the words Suganam raje. Then it names Dhanabhuti, the son of Agaraja and the grandson of Visadeva, and says he had the gateway made and the stone work given. The words are the centre of the dating argument, and scholars have read them two ways.

Cunningham, following Rajendra Lal Mitra, read Sugana as Srughna, a kingdom on the upper Yamuna, and took Dhanabhuti to be its ruler. From the style of the letters, which he judged to be the same as Ashoka’s, and from the family’s generations, he placed the railing and gateways between 250 and 200 BC. The record in Barua and Sinha’s 1926 edition shows that Georg Bühler, Eugen Hultzsch and Heinrich Lüders instead took the phrase to mean during the reign of the Sungas, the dynasty that followed the Mauryas. Barua and Sinha print their own text with that translation: “within the dominion of the Sungas”. Their note on the letter forms concludes that the Bharhut system is “post-Asokan, and definitely Mauryan and Sunga”.

Cunningham also found letters of the northwestern Kharoshthi script, which he called Arian, scratched on the bases of the gateway balusters and not on the railing. He took it as evidence that the king sent his own workmen for the gateways while local sculptors made the railing. Barua and Sinha, for their part, say the gateway’s inscription was cut by artists whose own script was Kharoshthi, not Brahmi.

How old is it

The sources give a range, not a date. The Indian Museum labels the assemblage Sunga, around the second century BCE. Kurush Dalal, writing for Live History India, says the core of the stupa is believed to date to the time of Ashoka, who reigned from about 269 to 232 BCE, and to have been enlarged in the late second century BCE. Cunningham wrote in the preface of 1879 that his age of 250 to 200 BC “has not been shaken by any subsequent discoveries”. The museum and Barua and Sinha both place the work after Ashoka, in the Sunga period, so the disagreement is over a few generations, about the same railing and the same captions.

From a village to Calcutta

Cunningham asked for the sculptures to be presented to the government, and the Raja of Nagod gave them. They travelled to Calcutta, a distance he puts at 600 miles. Professor Childers wrote in the Academy on 28 November 1874 that moving the pieces carried “a certain aroma of Vandalism”, and hoped the sculptures might go to the India Office in London. Cunningham answered in the book that he accepted the aroma, because every stone left behind that could be moved had since been carted off by villagers for building. He added that in the British Museum he had found seven Indian inscriptions lying unseen about ten years earlier, and that Calcutta, unlike London, had an Indian museum.

Not everything went to Calcutta. Prasanna Dash, writing in 2025, notes that Bharhut pieces are also in the Allahabad Museum, in the Tulsi Sangrahalaya at Ramvan near Satna and in villages of Satna district. The Indian Museum’s online catalogue gives each piece its own record, from railing pillars such as 142Bh-Arch to a coping stone carved with a lion, numbered 348Bh-Arch.

Related reading on the site: the Sanchi stupa’s 1822 breach and 1851 digs, the Bhattiprolu caskets and their southern Brahmi letters and the Great Stupa of Amaravati.