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First of all, James Prinsep was not a trained Sanskritist nor an epigraphist. He had no expertise in Prakrit either. He "worked" with local Indian scholars, for example Pandit Kamalakanta Vidyalankar, to decipher scripts. Ancient physical records of the Brahmi script remained widely visible and documented long before Prinsep. The Brahmi script is the parent writing system for nearly all modern Indian scripts. The Ashokan Brahmi evolved into Gupta Brahmi, Siddham, which then evolved into the Nagari scripts. What Prinsep actually achieved was deciphering an archaic Ashokan form of Brahmi, which had fallen out of use around the 5th century CE, by looking at the Indo-Greek coins that had both the Ashokan Brahmi and Greek. Naturally, after the Islamic invasion, Hindus' connection to the Greeks was severed, so the study of Ashokan Brahmi also became obsolete. This doesn't mean that India forgot Ashoka. Mauryan genealogies listing Ashoka (as Ashokavardhana) appear in multiple Puranas like the Vishnu, Matsya, and Vayu, showing the dynasty was documented in Indian textual traditions long before colonial scholars. This shows that British Indology did not "re-discover" Ashoka. Early Western scholars just treated the Puranic references as mythical. Do you know where this phenomenon of Europeans believing that Indians forgot their history comes from? It comes from their habit of applying the same framework they apply for the Middle East and parts of Europe to India. For example, the Iraqis forgot about Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, etc., the Egyptians forgot about Khufu, Hatshepsut, etc., the Greeks forgot their foundational civilisations like the Mycenaeans. The aforementioned were "re-discovered" by British and German archaeologists and epigraphers in the 18th-20th centuries. Therefore, Europeans have the tendency to think that Indians also must've forgotten rulers like Chandragupta, Ashoka, etc. prior to the arrival of Westerners.

This is not true at all. Westerners, or even Indian lay people, who've been taught Eurocentric history, underestimate the intellectual rigour of Indian scholars, and the continuity of India's indigenous traditions. Chandragupta (Sandracottus of the Greeks) was well known through texts and plays like Vishakhadatta's Mudrarakshasa, which were completely independent of Greco-Roman sources like Megasthenes. The names of Ashoka Maurya and his sons Dasharatha and Samprati are recorded in the Puranic vamshavalis and he is glorified in Buddhist sources such as the Divyavadana (which contains a section known as the Ashokavadana) and Srilankan chronicles like the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa. A manuscript of the Divyadana in Sanskrit was discovered in Nepal in 1824, so the text was continually being copied.

What about the Vedas? Did Indians forget them? For example, modern Persians had no knowledge of Old Persian for over 1,500 years, until the script was deciphered in the 19th century, and they had minimal knowledge of Avestan. Yet in the case of the Vedas, there is an unbroken chain of recitation reinforced by the shikshas, vyakarana, chhandas, niruktas, and pratishakhyas. This means that unlike texts that were written down and were susceptible to corruptions due to copying errors, the Vedas were passed down purely through structured, mouth-to-ear chanting. This chain, including the permutations, has survived intact for over 3,000 years. Moreover, Indian Hindu Pandits, such as Bhattabhaskara, Sayana, Venkatamadhava, Skandasvamin, Mahidhara to name a few, have been writing bhashyas on Vedas long before the Europeans set their feet on Indian soil. So, the formal study of Sanskrit (including "Vedic Sanskrit") never disappeared in India unlike what white supremacists try to claim. In fact, it was the bhashyas of Sayana (14th century CE), that served as the foundational guide for the likes of Max Müller.

The European racists often write things like "whole texts and traditions claimed to be known for thousands of years in India by the Indians are actually archaeological rediscoveries by the European scholars". This couldn't be farther from the truth. The Vedas and the Itihasa never required archaeological excavation to be known, because they were both in the daily life of Hindus, and recited across the Indian subcontinent. Whether a Pandit doing yajna or a rural housewife putting hands together praying for Agni before lighting up the oven to cook a pot of dal and bread. Moreover, many written texts were accessible and safely preserved in temples, granthagarams or bhandars (traditional library repositories) and royal courts across India. The East India Company systematically "collected" manuscripts during their military campaigns and "territorial annexations".

For example, Kamasutra was NOT "re-discovered" by the British. They got to know of it from native Indian scholars, got the desire to translate it, hence they looked throughout India for old texts. The original text by Vatsyayana is lost, but Indian scholars have been making copies of the text since beginning. These texts have been found in Jammu and Kashmir, Gujarat and Nepal.