Ashoka’s Rock Edict XIII names the orphaned child as the war’s primary victim.

Evidence

Aṭṭhavasābhisitassa devānaṃpiyassa Piyadasino lājino Kaliṅgā vijitā. Diyaḍḍha-mate pāṇa-sata-sahasse ye tato apavūḍhe sata-sahassa-mate tatra hate, bahu-tāvataka-mate vā mute. Tato pacchā adhunā ladhesu Kaliṅgesu tive dhaṃma-vāye dhammakāmatā ca dhammānusatthi devānaṃpiyassa. … The next sentences — and I am going to read them slowly, because they matter — describe what the king felt. He saw the killing, he says. He saw the deportation. He saw the suffering of those who had been at peace and were now at war, and especially the suffering of children. The Prakrit, here, uses a specific phrase — putta-dāra-cātubbhāgi-bhāgapaccupabhogāsamputattaṃ — which Olivelle translates roughly as “the destruction of the joy of sons, wives, and parents in their living together.” Ashoka, in this passage, is naming the family — children with parents, parents with children — as the moral subject of the war’s harm. The child orphaned by the Kalinga War is not, in Ashoka’s reflection, a marginal figure. The child orphaned is the war’s primary victim. — , The Rod and the Child, 837

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the Prakrit phrase putta-dāra-cātubbhāgi… as naming the family as the moral subject of war’s harm.