Ashoka

“In Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King, Mr. Olivelle has produced an outstanding monument of scholarship and sound judgment.”—Maxwell Carter, Wall Street Journal

“This incisive biography aims to separate the historical Ashoka . . . from the one of legend.”—New Yorker

“Olivelle has made a wonderful gift to the world: a brilliant, reliable, readable synthesis of what we know about one of history’s truly great emperors. This book should be in every learned person’s library.”—Richard W. Lariviere, president emeritus of the Field Museum, Chicago

“Ashoka is certainly one of the towering figures of world history. In this highly readable account, Patrick Olivelle has skillfully woven together more than a century of scholarship about this great king.”—Deven M. Patel, University of Pennsylvania

“Olivelle’s novel approach—to write a biography of Aśoka in Aśoka’s own words—that is, the words of his inscriptions—provides us with an entirely fresh and surprising portrait of the great Mauryan emperor, stripped of millennia of hagiography and religious piety and resituated in a conceptual landscape of Aśoka’s ‘civil religion.’”—Stephanie Jamison, University of California, Los Angeles

“In this wonderful book, subject and author are perfectly matched. Patrick Olivelle, arguably the greatest living scholar of ancient India, has given us a sensitive and authoritative biography of Ashoka, one of the most remarkable figures in world history and an emperor whose revolutionary moral philosophy has had an enduring legacy. With the rigour of its research, the subtlety of its judgments, and the elegance of its prose, Patrick Olivelle’s Ashoka sets new standards in biographical writing.”—Ramachandra Guha, author of Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World