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 a ticklish 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 explanation of 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 used for 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 intentionally broken.
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 one at 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 ‘neatliest engraven’. According to Alexander Cunningham ‘it resembles nothing so much as a stuffed poodle on top of an inverted flower pot’.
We now know of at least nine inscribed Ashoka columns, but these are considerably outnumbered by the Ashoka inscriptions carved on convenient rocks. The pillars naturally claimed attention first, but in fact the rock inscriptions proved more interesting both in content and location. The pillars were found only in the north of India (Sanchi was the most southerly), widely scattered round the Ganges basin. The rock inscriptions were found much further afield, from Mysore in the south to near Peshawar in the extreme north-west; and from near the coast of Orissa in the east to the coast of Saurashtra in the west. These last two, the first at Dhauli in Orissa, the second at Girnar in Gujerat, were the only ones known to Prinsep. Luckily they were two of the most informative.
The Orissa inscription had been discovered in early 1837. Lieutenant Markham Kittoe had been sent into the wilderness of Orissa to search for coalfields. Left much to his own devices he also searched for antiquities and soon stumbled on a whole network of ancient caves and sculptures. He described his find to the Asiatic Society:
I have further great pleasure in announcing the discovery of the most voluminous inscription in the column character that I have ever heard of… There is neither road nor path to this extraordinary piece of antiquity. After climbing the rock through thorns and thickets, I came of a sudden on a small terrace open on three sides with a perpendicular scarp on the fourth or west from the face of which projects the front half of an elephant of elegant workmanship, four feet high; the whole is cut out of the solid rock. On the northern face beneath the terrace, the rock is chiselled smooth for a space of near fourteen feet by ten feet and the inscription, neatly cut, covers the whole space.
He spent a day taking a facsimile and returned to the spot again in November of the same year to complete the job. In places the rock was badly worn but he found that the shadow thrown by the evening sun enabled him to pick out letters that were not otherwise apparent. In spite of several gaps, Prinsep immediately attempted a translation and made out a number of intriguing phrases. But he gave up the task in early 1838 when a copy of the much better preserved Girnar inscription came to hand.
This had first been noticed by Colonel James Tod, another legendary figure in this story, who had been on a tour of Gujerat in 1822.
The memorial in question, evidently of some great conqueror, is a huge hemispherical mass of dark granite, which, like a wart upon the body, has protruded through the crust of mother earth, without fissure or inequality, and which, by the aid of the ‘iron pen’, has been converted into a book. The measurement of the arc is nearly ninety feet; its surface is divided into compartments or parallelograms, within which are inscriptions in the usual character.
In Tod’s time the script was still, of course, a mystery. The Colonel was one of those who thought it might be Greek. But he was nearer the mark when he confidently predicted that, sooner rather than later, someone at the Asiatic Society would solve the problem. Meantime he had taken copies of only two short sections.
Fifteen years later, a Bombay antiquarian, hearing of Prinsep’s translation of the pillar inscriptions, quickly headed for Girnar. He wanted to see if the new code would work on Tod’s inscription. ‘To my great joy, and that of the Brahmins with me, I found myself able to make out several words.’ The engraving was still amazingly sharp; it was possible to make an impression, filling the letters with ink and pressing a cloth over them. From this he made a reduced copy – on the original each letter was nearly two feet high – and sent it off to Calcutta.
Prinsep, turning from the Orissa inscription to this new one, again experienced that shiver down the spine. Bar two extra paragraphs on the Orissa inscription, the two were identical. Ashoka was proclaiming his edicts from one corner of India to the other, across an empire far greater than that of British India and comparable only to that of the Moghuls. But still more surprising was a claim made in one of the edicts. If Prinsep’s reading was right, Ashoka had set up hospitals for men and animals throughout his kingdom, including the extreme south of the peninsula ‘and moreover within the dominions of Antiochus the Greek’. He also claimed that the gospel of non-violence and respect for all living creatures was being acknowledged even ‘by the kings of Egypt, Ptolemy and Antigonus and Magas’.
This said a great deal for Ashoka’s international standing. But, more important, here at last was another point of contact – the first since Jones’s identification of Sandracottus – between India’s ancient history and that of the West. As Prinsep leafed through the classics to discover which Ptolemy and which Antiochus these might be, he sent an urgent message to Kittoe who was still in Orissa. Would the coal prospector quickly go to Dhauli and recheck the edicts in which these names appeared? Kittoe reacted