Free India Discovered by John Keay

Feroz Shah, a Sultan of the fourteenth century. According to contemporary chronicles he had ordered the pillar to be brought there from a site up the Jumna river near Khizrabad.
When the Sultan visited that district and saw the column in the village of Tobra, he resolved to move it to Delhi, and there erect it as a memorial to future generations. After thinking over the best means of lowering the column, orders were issued commanding the attendance of all the people dwelling in the neighbourhood & and all soldiers, both horse and foot. They were ordered to bring all materials and implements suitable for the work. Directions were issued for bringing parcels of the cotton of the silk-cotton tree. Quantities of this silk cotton were placed round the column, and when the earth at its base was removed, it fell gently over 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 ram 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 every rope, and after great labour and difficulty the pillar was raised onto the carriage. A strong rope was fastened to each wheel and 200 men pulled at each of these ropes. By the simultaneous exertions of so many thousands of men, the carriage was moved and was brought to the banks of the Jumna. Here the Sultan came to meet it. A number of large boats had been collected, some of which could carry 5000 and 7000 maunds [ten tons] of grain. The column was very ingeniously transferred to these boats and was then conducted to Firozabad [Delhi] where it was landed and conveyed into the palace with infinite labour and skill.
    Re-erection of the column was also aticklish business, especially since Feroz Shah had ordained that it should stand on the roof, nine storeys up. After much more shunting about on beds of cotton, and an ingenious system of windlasses, ‘it was secured in an upright position, straight as an arrow, without the smallest deviation from the perpendicular’. Feroz Shah then proudly showed off his new acquisition and asked for an explanationof the strange inscriptions. ‘Many Brahmins and Hindu devotees were invited to translate them, but no one was able.’ Prinsep could feel justly proud.
    The Feroz Shah column still stands in Delhi, and Hodgson’s at Lauriya Nandangarh, though not the most elegant, is the only one that still retains its original capital. Others have fared less well. Of the Bihar columns two appear to have been usedfor cannon target practice during the Moghul period. And in the 1840s the remains of at least two more pillars were dug up at Sanchi. Local tradition had it that they had been broken up by an Indian industrialist for use as rollers in a gigantic sugar cane press. Of one only the base remained; the other was found in three pieces with the chisel marks still visible where it had been intentionallybroken.
    For British antiquarians a potentially more embarrassing case of vandalism was the persistent rumour that the road roller being used by a zealous engineer at Allahabad was actually an Ashoka pillar. If there was any substance in this, it is to be hoped that it was just a broken fragment. The only pillar that was quite definitely thrown down by the British was the other, much studied oneat Allahabad. It had evidently been in the way of a new embankment which was part of an eighteenth-century refortification programme. Filled with remorse, the Asiatic Society, and even the government, arranged for its re-erection. Captain Edward Smith, the man who had procured for Prinsep the vital facsimiles from Sanchi, designed a new pedestal for it, which came in for much praise. Unfortunately,he went further and also designed a new capital. It was meant to be a lion in the style of that of Lauriya Nandangarh; but it was not exactly the