Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  It was at this point, with the upper Gangetic plains secured for Islam, that Muhammad Bakhtiyar was given permission to push on with his small band of mujahideen. Hardened by years of campaigning, inspired by the belief that they were engaged in jihad, he and they gave no thought to their own comfort. We may imagine them whipping their ponies on, intent on covering the 160 miles to their goal as fast as humanly possible. They carried little other than swords, spears and shields, knowing that God would provide.

  Their immediate goal was Bihar, which was both the name of the plains country they rode through and the seat of the last of the Pala dynasty of kings. The riders were probably unaware that the very name of Bihar was derived from the numerous Buddhist viharas, or monastic centres, scattered across the countryside. They may not even have known that an hour’s ride west of Bihar fort was a second seat of power; one without ramparts or garrison but presenting a direct challenge to their belief in the oneness of God. This was the Mahavihara, or ‘Great Monastery’, of Nalanda, known throughout the Buddhist world as the Dharmaganja, or ‘Treasury of the Moral Law’.

  For centuries Nalanda had been the most important seat of learning in Asia. It contained the most extensive repository of Buddhist knowledge in the world, housed in three multi-storeyed libraries: the Ratnasagara, or ‘Sea of Jewels’; the Ratnadadhi, or ‘Ocean of Jewels’; and the Ratnaranjaka, or ‘Jewels of Delight’. Generation upon generation of the Buddhist world’s most gifted scholars had come here to study and teach the sacred texts of the Buddhist canon.

  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.

  2

  The Golden Column of Firoz Shah

  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 mile
s 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.

  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 Brahma
ns 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.