I recently started reading Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera, a sweeping study of how British imperialism has left its mark across the globe (some more on the book in the previous post). It opens with this African proverb:

Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Reading those words, I felt a jolt of recognition. The proverb arrived like an old companion, stirring a vivid memory from years ago, my entrance exam for the masters in history programme at JNU, New Delhi, where we had been asked to interpret it. It was one of those moments where you reach back into your memory instinctively for something you have read, not because it has been memorised, but because it has not left you. For me, that 'something' was Dhauli, the poem by Jayanta Mahapatra. While I was specialising in history at the undergraduate level, English literature had been one of my minors and the poem was part of the curriculum.

At first glance, this proverb offers a sharp critique of history as it has traditionally been written, by the victors. It implies that in the absence of a voice from the vanquished, history becomes a monologue of conquest, power and control. But what does it mean to listen to the lion's historian? What shape would such a counter-narrative take? That is where Dhauli steps in.

Jayanta Mahapatra's Dhauli speaks of the Kalinga war (present-day Odisha) fought around 261 BCE, which, as legend has it, left the river Daya running red with the blood of the slain soldiers and civilians. The aftermath of this violence transformed emperor Ashoka, who turned towards Buddhism and non-violence. Yet Mahapatra's poem does not glorify Ashoka's transformation. Instead, it lingers on the unsaid, the unmarked graves of those who did not live to see this imperial 'change of heart'. In the exam, I also remember arguing that Ashoka's turn towards Buddhism came at a convenient time, when his imperialist ambitions were more or less fulfilled. 

Dhauli was, thus, the lion's whisper. Not a roar, just a soft, persistent murmur from those who lived with the consequences of someone else's glory. It is a poem that lends the lion, the conquered and the erased, a voice, however fractured. Mahapatra's poem displaces the epic narrative of transformation with the intimate realities of pain.

Reflecting back, the entrance exam question did not just ask for interpretation; it invited a mediation on authorship, voice and erasure. Dhauli taught me that history is not just written in chronicles, and in this case, stone inscriptions, but also in the silences between them. And those silences can be immense, filled with lives unlived and names unrecorded. To give the lion its historian is not simply to write a counter-history; it is to ask who is allowed to remember and in what language that memory survives.

And now, years later, this question of power, silence and memory still shapes the way I approach research. I look for spaces where counter-narratives appear, not always loudly, not always safely, but they are there, sometimes ironically, theatrically, bitingly; often overlooked and underestimated. Looking back, I also realise that this moment marked something more than just a test, it felt like an initiation into literary history itself. It was the first time I truly experienced how literature and history could be brought into meaningful dialogue, each enriching the other; and I have been doing the same ever since.

Appendix

Dhauli by Jayanta Mahapatra

Afterwards when the wars of Kalinga were over,

the fallow fields of Dhauli

hid the blood-spilt butchered bodies.

As the earth

burrowed into their dead hunger

with its merciless worms,

guided the foxes to their limp genitals.

Years later, the evening wind,

trembling the glazed waters of the River Daya,

keens in the rock edicts the vain word,

like the voiceless cicadas of night:

the measure of Ashoka's suffering

does not appear enough.

The place of his pain peers lamentably

from among the pains of the dead.