Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (3 page)

Nalanda’s glory days had long gone but the great library still drew students from a dozen countries – none of whom could have been unaware that a new and terrifying military power
had descended on the Indian plains from the north, had scattered to the winds every army sent against it and was even now working its way down the Ganges crushing all before it.

Surprise and terror were the twin pillars of Muhammad Bakhtiyar’s success as a military commander. He took the fortress of Bihar before most of its occupants even knew they were under attack. He then turned his attentions on Nalanda – but not before sending a messenger to enquire if its libraries contained a copy of the
Quran
. On learning that they did not, he ordered the destruction of the Great Monastery and all it contained.

What followed was chronicled by Minhaj-ud-din, a judge of Ghor who had accompanied Muhammad of Ghor’s invading army into India:

The greater number of the inhabitants of that place were Brahmans … and they were all slain. There were a great number of books there; and when all these books came under the observation of the Musalmans they summoned a number of Hindus that they might give them information respecting the import of these books; but the whole of the Hindus had been killed … When that victory was effected, Muhammad-i-Bakhtyar returned with great booty, and came to the presence of the beneficent Sultan Kutb-ud-Din Ibak, and received great honour and distinction.
²

But Minhaj-ud-din was wrong in thinking that Nalanda’s inhabitants were Hindus. They were, of course, Buddhist monks, whose numbers included many Indians of the Brahman caste. Nor did Minhaj-ud-din trouble to mention that the raiders put the entire site, extending over many acres, to the
torch or that the task of burning the library took them several months, during which time ‘smoke from burning manuscripts hung for days like a dark pall over the low hills’.
³

There were at this time three major centres of Buddhist learning in Bihar and two more in Bengal. Nalanda was the first to go up in flames, quickly followed by the nearby monastery of Odantapuri, then the larger site at Vikramashila, on the north bank of the Ganges. A decade later Muhammad Bakhtiyar completed the work begun in Bihar by staging another of his lightning strikes on the capital of the Sena kings of Bengal at Nuddia. Here, too, he applied fire and sword to the last two remaining Buddhist Great Monasteries at Somapura and Jagadalala on the banks of the lower Ganges, and to as many lesser monastic sites as he could find.
⁴

Muhammad Bakhtiyar was afterwards assassinated in his bed, but he lived to see Muslim dominion extended over Bihar and Bengal. The destruction he wrought at Nalanda and the other great Buddhist libraries has a superficial parallel in the burning of the great royal library at Alexandria – but there is a crucial difference in that what was lost at Alexandria occurred by stages over many centuries.
⁵
What Muhammad Bakhtiyar did at Nalanda and the other Great Monasteries in Bihar and Bengal was once and for all. For Buddhism in northern India it was the final
coup de grâce
and its consequences were catastrophic: the virtual obliteration of every page of a thousand years of Buddhist history on the subcontinent. Thus India’s Buddhist past was all but lost – and very soon forgotten.

The ruins of Sultan Firoz Shah’s
kotla
, drawn by a Delhi artist in about 1820. It shows admirers standing on the upper floor of the ruins of the palace to examine the golden pillar that its builder had made the central feature: Firoz Shah’s Lat. The mosque on the right still stands but much of the original fortress was subsequently demolished to make room for the cricket stadium. (Metcalfe Album, APAC, British Library)

In India today the IPL Twenty20 Cricket League is the hottest thing there is; a brash, brazen affair in which eight teams composed of the best that money can buy meet in eight cities to slog it out over a series of twenty-over matches played under floodlights. Each team has its own home base and in Delhi that means the Delhi Daredevils occupying the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium. The word
kotla
means ‘fort’ but the walls of that fortress are long gone. Cricket has been played here since 1883 and for most Indians Firoz Shah Kotla means one thing: cricket – and nothing else. Few associate the name with Delhi’s Muslim past and fewer still are aware that the huddle of ruins in the shadow of the stadium from which it takes its name contains one of India’s most ancient and most extraordinary relics.

Sultan Firoz Shah was the builder of the sixth of the many cities of Delhi. The first is the most doubtful: Indraprastha, celebrated in the
Mahabharata
epic of ancient India as the capital of the five battling brothers known as the Pandavas. Its supposed remains are said to underpin the
Purana Qila
, or ‘Ancient Fort’, next to Delhi Zoo. However, the less imposing jumble of ruins to the south and west known as the
Lal Kot
, or the ‘Red Fort’, has a more credible claim for it was here that Qutb-ud-din Aybak – that same ferocious slave-general who had overseen his slave Muhammad Bakhtiyar’s conquest of Bihar and Bengal – chose to establish the seat of the first Muslim Sultanate of Delhi.

To celebrate his victory over the massed armies of the Hindus in 1193 Qutb-ud-din built a mosque he named the ‘Might of Islam’, constructed by slave-artisans from the stones of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples. Beside the mosque he added a victory tower in the form of the truly monumental Qutb al-minar: a vast, tapering minaret of red sandstone with a
base diameter approaching fifty feet. He intended it to be the largest and highest tower in the Islamic world, but by the time Qutb-ud-din met his death under the hooves of a polo pony, only the first of five planned storeys, ninety feet high, had been completed.

A century later a third Delhi rose at Siri, north-west of the Red Fort. This was the work of Sultan Ala-ud-din Khalji and it was largely financed by his plunder of the Deccan memorialised in Arab legend as Ala-ud-din’s Cave. He, too, began to build a victory tower, intended to be twice as big as the minar begun by Qutb-ud-din. But again death intervened, in the form of poison administered by one of his generals, so only the first stage of the tower was raised.

Two decades later a fourth Delhi rose nearby: the fortress of Tughluqabad built by Ghias-ud-din Tughlaq. His celebrated end – smothered to death under a welcoming pavilion erected by his son Muhammad bin Tughluq – brought his son to the throne of Delhi in 1325. This highly eccentric patricide styled himself ‘The Warrior in the Cause of God’ but was better known to his subjects as
al-Khuni
, ‘the Blood-Soaked’, chiefly on account of his disastrous decision to move his capital and its entire population seven hundred miles south to Daulatabad in the Deccan – and then back again two years later. On his return to Delhi he founded but then abandoned a fifth Delhi:
Jahanpanah
, or ‘Refuge of the World’.

In the spring of 1351 Muhammad the Blood-Soaked caught fever by the banks of the Indus and died. It was four days before his cousin Firoz Shah Tughluq could be persuaded to face his destiny. The mild-mannered Firoz Shah was not cut out to be a despot. Born of a Hindu mother and raised by her in isolation after the early death of his father, Firoz Shah must have
seemed easy prey to those who raised him to the Sultanate of Delhi. Without friends or funds he had little option but to buy his way out of trouble, using an ‘infidel tax’ as his chief method of fund-raising. He also had to placate the many religious puritans at court by periodically cracking down on idolators.

It follows that the sultan’s record is far from spotless. He was responsible for a notorious assault made on the famous Jagannath temple on the coast of Kalinga (now Orissa) in 1360, leading to a popular uprising, brutally suppressed. This episode allowed his biographers to present Sultan Firoz Shah as a pillar of the faith. Thanks to a central workforce of slave labour said to number one hundred and eighty thousand, Firoz Shah was able to construct madrassas, hospitals, bridges, canals, reservoirs and public buildings up and down the land, none of more far-reaching benefit than the 150-mile West Jumna Canal, which transformed a vast tract of arid land into the granary of Hindustan.

But Firoz Shah was equally keen on restoration – and it was here that he was able, very discreetly, to give expression to another side of his character by displaying a degree of religious tolerance that bordered on the heretical. In 1326 a lightning strike had brought down the two upper storeys of Qutb-ud-din’s victory tower, which gave the sultan the excuse to make his own mark on what was already a major religious complex. He restored the great tower – but he may also have added a unique trophy of his own: a twenty-four-foot high pillar of solid iron that had once stood in the forecourt of a Hindu temple.

Hundreds of such pillars, usually made of stone and surmounted by a bronze image of a Garuda sun-bird (vehicle of the god Vishnu), had once stood in temple forecourts across northern India. Many had been overthrown in the preceding centuries and their attendant Garuda images melted down for
the value of their metal. Where this particular pillar came from is not recorded, but it was unmistakably a Hindu totem.
¹
And yet the sultan may well have caused this infidel pillar to be erected at the centre of the public praying area of the Might of Islam mosque, directly in front of the screen and the niche indicating the direction of Mecca – a blatant act of sacrilege that probably explains why the mosque was abandoned as a place of Friday prayer at about this same time.

But then Sultan Firoz Shah clearly had a fascination for infidel pillars, for one of his first acts on securing the Sultanate of Delhi was to erect his own more modest version of a victory tower at the scene of that triumph: Hisar, about a hundred miles north-west of Delhi. By happy chance a ready-made tower was available close at hand: a handsome stone column approximately thirty feet high, hewn from a single block of stone. This he caused to be re-erected in the prayer court of his new mosque with the addition of an inscription in Persian setting out the history of his dynasty up to Sultan Firoz Shah’s glorious accession.

Soon afterwards, while out hunting near the village of Topra further to the east, in the upper region of the Doab (the lands between the Jumna and Ganges rivers), the sultan came upon another standing stone pillar. This also had been cut from a single block of stone but was far grander than the first, being forty-two feet in length and weighing more than twenty-five tons. It was also in much finer condition, with a lustrous, polished or glazed red surface that caused it to shine like gold. Furthermore, it was but one of two columns – the other located to the east of Delhi at Meerut. ‘These columns’, noted a contemporary, ‘had stood in those places from the days of the Pandavas, but had never attracted the attention of any of the
kings who sat upon the throne of Delhi, till Sultan Firoz noticed them.’
²

In fact, other stone columns
had
attracted the attention of earlier Muslim conquerors, but Firoz Shah was the first who thought to preserve rather than destroy them. He also wanted to understand their significance. He made exhaustive enquiries among the Brahman
pandits
(literally, one who has memorised the ancient texts known as the
Vedas
but used more generally to describe a learned Brahman) and discovered that according to local legend, the two columns at Topra and Meerut were ‘the walking sticks of the accursed Bhim [one of the five Pandava brothers, a giant of massive strength], a man of great stature and size … When Bhim died these two columns were left standing as memorials to him.’ Filled with admiration, Firoz Shah decided to remove them with great care as trophies to Delhi.

The contemporary who witnessed these events and afterwards wrote about them was twelve-year-old Shams-i Siraj ‘Afif, who grew up to serve Sultan Firoz Shah and chronicle his life. Shams-i Siraj observed the feat of engineering, apparently supervised by the sultan himself, by which the two columns were transported to Delhi and then re-erected. The first was the column from Topra, which Firoz Shah named the
minara-i zarin
, or ‘column of gold’, on account of its wonderful sheen:

Directions were issued for bringing parcels of the cotton of the Sembal [cotton wood tree]. Quantities of this cotton were placed round the column, and when the earth at its base was removed, it fell gently on the bed prepared for it. The cotton was then removed by degrees, and after some days the pillar lay safe upon the ground … The pillar was then encased from top to bottom in reeds and raw skins, so that no damage
might accrue to it. A carriage, with forty-two wheels, was constructed, and ropes were attached to each wheel. Thousands of men hauled at each rope, and after great labour and difficulty the pillar was raised on to the carriage.

The column of gold was dragged down to the banks of the Jumna, where it was loaded aboard a number of large boats lashed together before being floated downriver to Delhi.