Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (4 page)

Sultan Firoz Shah’s golden column, from a unique illustrated copy of the
Sirat-i Firoz Shahi
. The stone column is loaded aboard a barge before being towed down the Yamuna River. (Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, Patna)

The sultan was at this time building his own capital with the help of an army of artisan slaves. This new Delhi he established north of the earlier cities raised by previous rulers and named Firozabad. Because its stones were subsequently cannibalised by Firoz Shah’s successors, few traces of Firozabad remain today other than the remains of Firoz Shah’s fort – and the golden column surmounting it at the centre. To raise that great pillar into position further engineering ingenuity had been required. According to a second biographical source, possibly dictated by Firoz Shah himself, this remarkable totem was then given a new religious purpose: ‘After it had remained an object of worship of the polytheists and infidels for so many thousands of years, through the efforts of Sultan Firoz Shah and by the grace of God, it became the
minar
[tower] of a place of worship for the Faithful.’
³

The second of the giant Bhim’s walking sticks secured by Firoz Shah underwent the same process. Men ferried it downriver and re-erected it to become the centrepiece of a hunting pavilion, sited on a low ridge some miles to the north of Firozabad (today known as Delhi Ridge, just beyond the city walls of Old Delhi). Both here and at Firoz Shah’s palace the stone column became the central feature, so that the top of each pillar could be seen from a distance rising above the building.

After visiting the remains of the hunting lodge in about 1610, the English traveller William Finch described it as ‘a auncient hunting house’ out of which rose ‘a stone pillar, which, passing through three stories
[sic]
, is higher than all twenty foure foot, having at the top a globe and a halfe moone over it. This stone, they say … hath inscriptions.’
⁴

In fact, both the Delhi columns bore inscriptions, which so excited Sultan Firoz Shah’s curiosity that he made extensive
enquiries about their origins and meaning, but without success: ‘Many Brahmans and Hindu devotees were invited to read them but no one was able.’ No one, it seems, had any idea what was written on the two pillars – or who had originally caused them to be raised.

What the sultan’s official biographer Shams-i Siraj ’Afif never understood – or was reluctant to state – was how large the column of gold and its less splendid twin loomed in the life and imagination of Firoz Shah. That only became apparent many centuries later when a previously unknown account of Firoz Shah’s life was found: a manuscript entitled
Sirat-i Firoz Shahi
, which may well have been written or dictated by the sultan himself. It sets out in great detail and with a series of remarkable accompanying illustrations, the engineering skills employed in removing the stone column from its original location, transporting it to the banks of the Jumna, floating it down to Delhi and re-erecting it within its own special building beside the mosque.

Even more remarkably, the same manuscript contains a poem written by Firoz Shah celebrating his column of gold. ‘No bird, neither eagle, nor crane, can fly up to its top,’ the sultan declares with characteristic Persian hyperbole. He goes on to wonder how it was built and erected, and how its makers were able ‘to paint it all over with gold so as to make the people think it to be the golden dawn?’ He ends by asking what precisely the column of gold is, without finding any answers: ‘Is it the
Tuba
[the Lote-tree of Paradise] which the angels have planted on the earth, or is it the
Sidya
[the Plum-tree of Paradise] which men have taken to be a mountain?’
⁵

Sultan Firoz Shah’s death in 1388 precipitated a decade of internecine warfare between his descendants. His eldest son
Fateh Khan briefly won the sultanate and celebrated by founding the city of Fatehabad, or ‘Victory city’, a short distance north-west of Hisar. He also removed the upper portion of the pillar at Hisar containing his father’s memorial to the Tughlaq dynasty and re-erected it at Fatehabad.

Fateh Khan’s death was soon followed by the eruption of the Turco-Mongols under the leadership of Amir Timur of Khorasan, also known as ‘Timur the Lame’ (Tamberlaine), great-grandson of Genghis Khan and founder of the Timurid dynasty, which gave rise to the Mughals. Timur the Lame swept through the Punjab looting and burning, pausing briefly at Hisar to destroy what was left of Firoz Shah’s pillar.
⁶
According to Shams-i Siraj ’Afif, Timur ordered every horseman in his army to gather two loads of firewood. This was heaped round the pillar and set on fire. The pillar still stands beside the mosque at Hisar, its lower section so badly fire-damaged that nothing remains of whatever pre-Muslim inscriptions it may once have carried.

Having slaughtered one hundred thousand infidel prisoners who were slowing him down, Timur proceeded to assault and sack Delhi, acquiring so many new prisoners in the process that each man in his army came away with fifty to a hundred of them; men, women and children. ‘The pen of destiny had written down this fate for the people of this city … for it was the will of God that this calamity should fall upon the city.’
⁷
These are the words of Timur himself, set down in his autobiography.

One of the few buildings to survive the sacking was Firoz Shah’s fort and mosque, where Timur came to give thanks to God and went away full of admiration for the column of gold and its twin, declaring that ‘in all the countries he had
traversed he had never seen any monument comparable to these’. After subduing Meerut and other centres of resistance, Timur ordered his army to begin the journey home ‘towards Samarkand, my capital and paradise’.

Two and a half centuries later the trader William Finch was among the first Englishmen to prostrate themselves before the ‘Great Mogul’, Emperor Jehangir. Like his predecessors, Jehangir was a restless ruler and his court essentially peripatetic, which meant that those who wished the light of the Emperor’s countenance to shine upon them had to follow in his train. In doing so Finch got the opportunity to visit the new Delhi being laid out just to the north of the ruins of Firozabad (a city completed by Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan and named Shahjehanabad, better known today as Old Delhi). Here Finch and his companions inspected the column of gold, by now known as Firoz Shah’s Lat or ‘staff’, and concluded that its unintelligible lettering was some form of Greek, most likely set there by Alexander the Great to mark his victory over the Indian ruler Poros.

When Emperor Jehangir and his court moved on downriver Finch followed, in due course arriving at the ancient town of Prayag, situated at the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna rivers. The emperor had renamed the town Allahabad and was in the process of converting into a fortress. Within its walls Finch was shown a pillar very similar in height, girth and appearance to Firoz Shah’s Lat in Delhi, which he ascribed to the same originator, describing it as ‘a piller
[sic]
of stone fiftie cubits above ground so deeply placed within the ground that no end can be found, which by circumstances of the Indians seemeth to have beene placed by Alexander or some other great conqueror’.
⁸

In 1670 it was the turn of another Englishman, twenty-six-year-old John Marshall, to record the existence of more monumental stone columns in the northern plains of India. Marshall had come out to India as a factor or trade agent in the employ of the still insignificant British mercantile concern known as the East India Company (EICo). In 1670 he was posted to one of the EICo’s more remote ‘factories’ or trading posts at Singhiya, set on the east bank of the River Gandaki, about fifteen miles upstream of the point where that river joined the Ganges above Patna (a settlement since washed away in one of the Gandaki’s frequent changes of course). His surviving papers show that at Singhiya the isolated Marshall began to study Hindu religion and philosophy, leading on to a wider enquiry into Indian astrology, medicine and science. This qualifies him as the first of that maligned species, the Orientalists.

Some months after Marshall’s arrival at Singhiya he made an expedition into the hinterland, in response to a report of a curious standing pillar. His journal records that he set out northwards from Singhiya on 29 July and walked twelve miles to the village of Bannia, where he spent the night under a large tree. The next day he walked another six miles to reach his objective: a place known locally as Brinkalattee, which he understood to mean the ‘Staff of Brim’ – more accurately the giant Pandava Bhim. There Marshall was shown ‘a Piller of one stone as I conceive. On the top of this piller or Lattee is placed a Tyger ingraven, the neatliest that I have scene
[sic]
in India. His face looks North North East, ½ Easterly.’ He learned that the giant Bhim had long ago lived here and that ‘this pillar was his Stick to walk with, which is said to be twise
[sic]
as much under as above ground. Oft [when] man came into the world Brin did see them [as] so very
little creatures and yet so cunning and so far exceeding him that hee was much troubled thereat, and went into the Tartarian Mountains and there betwixt two great mountains lay down and dyed and was covered with snow.’
⁹

The ‘Tyger ingraven’ capital and stone column seen by John Marshall in North Bihar, as drawn by an unidentified artist – probably Thomas Law – in about 1783. The column is today known as the Lauriya-Nandangarh pillar. (Royal Asiatic Society)

Here was another of the great stone columns ascribed by Hindus to the giant Pandava Bhim. However, Marshall’s account of the giant Bhim going towards the Himalayas and dying between two mountains is a distant echo of the circumstances
surrounding the death of Sakyamuni Buddha who fell fatally ill as he made his way homewards towards Kapilavastu and died lying between two great sal trees.

In November 1676 Marshall was moved to a more senior post in Balasore in Bengal, where he died eight months later of a raging distemper that killed most of his colleagues and many townspeople. In his will Marshall left his manuscripts concerning India to two friends at Christ’s College, Cambridge (now part of the Harleian Collection at the British Museum). These papers included the first English translation of the
Bhagavad Gita
and had Marshall or his friends gone into print the beginnings of Indian studies would have been advanced by the better part of a century.

John Marshall’s brief sojourn in Bihar occured at a time when Emperor Jehangir’s puritanical grandson Aurangzeb was proving himself the most zealous of his line in the suppression of idolatry. As the centre of Shaivite Hinduism, the city of Varanasi was an obvious target for Aurangzeb’s iconoclasm. Already partially cleansed by Muslim rulers on four previous occasions,
¹⁰
Varanasi was now subjected to a fifth round of demolitions on Aurangzeb’s orders. Hundreds of shrines were demolished, a number of temples replaced by mosques and the city renamed Muhammadabad.

One of these temples was the ancient shrine of Bhairava (‘The Terrible One’, a wrathful manifestation of Shiva, the presiding deity of Varanasi), sited on the northern outskirts of the city and perhaps the most revered Shaivite temple in the city on account of the mighty stone lingam in its courtyard, worshipped for centuries as the
Lath
Bhairava
, or ‘Staff of Shiva’. Aurangzeb had most of the temple demolished to make way for a mosque – and yet, unaccountably, left the great stone column standing, so prominently so that the new mosque became known as the
Lath Imambarah
, or ‘Mosque of the Staff’.

When John Marshall’s contemporary, the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Tavernier, visited Varanasi in the mid-1670s, he found the stone column set on a raised platform beside a new-built mosque. Since there were several Muslim tombs in the vicinity, Tavernier assumed the pillar to be some form of obelisk:

In the middle of this platform you see a column of 32 to 35 feet in height, all of a piece, and which three men could with difficulty embrace. It is of sandstone, so hard that I could not scratch it with my knife. All sides of this tomb are covered with figures of animals cut in relief on the stone, and it has been higher above the ground than now appears, several of the old men who guard these tombs having assured me that since fifty years it has subsided more than 30 feet. They add that it is the tomb of one of the kings of Bhutan, who was interred there after he had left his country to conquer this kingdom, from which he was subsequently driven by the descendants of Tamerlane.
¹¹