Selling tolerance by the pound: On ideal types’ fragility,Aśoka’s edicts and the political theology of toleration in and beyond South Asia

Abstract

In recent times, scholars of precolonial South Asia have been solicited to take part in public debates regarding ‘ancient traditions of tolerance’. The general idea is to request them to collect and exhibit ‘evidence’ and exempla from classics and historical sources about political and practical form of tolerance, so to permit non-specialists to learn from the past and to derive behavioural patterns from ‘historical samples’. Nevertheless, although the patriarchal motto ‘historia magistra vitae’ is still widely believed, looking at the past is not that smooth and easy, as can be seen from the problematic history of the reception of the paradigmatic figure of Aśoka.