Journey
Monuments that were moved
Indian monuments move more than the phrase suggests. Sultans hauled Ashokan pillars across provinces on wheeled carriages, antiquarians cut edicts out of their rock and shipped them to Calcutta, a dam lifted a monastic valley onto a hilltop island, and an elephant was taken off the island it had given its name to.
Stops (8)
- Fīroz Shāh Kotla & the Topra pillar · Fīroz Shāh Kotla — the pillar that was hauled
Firoz Shah Tughlaq had an Ashokan pillar brought from Topra in the 1350s — wrapped in silk and reeds, carried on a forty-two-wheeled carriage and floated down the Yamuna — and set on a stone platform in his new citadel. His chronicler describes the operation step by step and records that nobody at court could read the inscription.
- Hauz Khās · Hauz Khās — the other Tughlaq collection
Firoz Shah's madrasa and tomb on the edge of Alauddin Khalji's tank, a few kilometres from the citadel where he put the pillar. He moved a second Ashokan column to the Delhi ridge in the same years, which makes him the most determined collector of other people's monuments in Indian history before the museums.
- Prayāga / Prayagraj/ Allahabad · Prayāga — the pillar that was moved twice
The Kaushambi pillar was carried to the fort at the confluence and then inscribed again — by Samudragupta, whose eulogy on it is the principal record of his conquests, and by Jahangir, who added his accession. Three empires wrote on one stone, each assuming its own words would be the last.
- Bairāt (Virāṭnagar) · Bairāt — the edict cut out of the rock
The Bhabru edict, in which Ashoka names the Buddhist texts he recommends to the order, was cut out of its boulder in the 1840s and taken to Calcutta, where it remains in the Asiatic Society. It is the one edict that tells us what the emperor was actually reading.
- Alexander Cunningham · Alexander Cunningham — the Survey and the shipping
He surveyed and identified Sanchi, Bharhut, Sarnath and Taxila, followed Xuanzang's route on the ground to find the Buddhist sites, and founded the Archaeological Survey in 1871. He is also part of why so much moved: his excavations sent the Bharhut railings to Calcutta and sculpture to London, by the methods of his generation.
- Amarāvatī Mahāstūpa · Amarāvatī — the marbles
The carved casing slabs of the great stupa were dug out through the nineteenth century, part sent to Madras and a large part to London, where they are in the British Museum. What stands on site is a low mound and a shed: the building is legible only from the sculpture, and the sculpture is elsewhere.
- Nāgārjunakonda · Nāgārjunakonda — the valley under the reservoir
The Ikshvaku monastic city on the Krishna was excavated ahead of the Nagarjuna Sagar dam in the 1950s and 60s, and nine of its monuments were dismantled and rebuilt on a hilltop that is now an island in the reservoir. The city is under the water and its buildings are above it, in the wrong relation to each other.
- Elephanta Caves · Elephanta — the elephant that named it
The basalt elephant the Portuguese named the island after stood there until 1864, when the British tried to move it, broke it, and eventually reassembled it in the Victoria Gardens in Bombay, where it is. The island keeps the name of an animal that is now nine kilometres away across the harbour.