Place · Tughlaq citadel & pillar · India
Fīroz Shāh Kotla & the Topra pillar
Also known as Fīroz Shāh Kotla
Firoz Shah Tughlaq's citadel of Firozabad on the Yamuna, built in the 1350s, on whose pyramidal stone platform he re-erected an Ashokan pillar hauled from Topra — wrapped in silk and reeds, carried on a forty-two-wheeled carriage and floated down the river, an operation his chronicler Shams-i Siraj Afif describes step by step.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Tradition
- Ashokan edicts (Brahmi, Kharosthi, Greek, Aramaic)
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.636, 77.244
Worth knowing
Nobody at his court could read the inscription and the scholars he assembled failed; it was deciphered by James Prinsep in 1837. The ruins are now a Thursday shrine where people leave written petitions for the djinns said to live in the cellars, and the letters are pushed into the walls beside the pillar.
Connections (8)
- Monument relocationPātaliputra
Firuz Shah Tughlaq had an Ashokan pillar hauled from Topra to Delhi in the 1350s, moved on a wheeled carriage and by river barge, and re-erected on the roof of his palace at Kotla. His chronicler records the effort in detail and the failure of anyone to read the inscription, which was only deciphered by James Prinsep in 1837. The pillars were raised from Pataliputra; the ones that moved did so because later rulers wanted the object.
- Ashokan stone from ChunarChunar
The Topra pillar that Firuz Shah moved to Delhi is Chunar sandstone, quarried on the Ganga near Varanasi and originally hauled to the Haryana plain — and then moved again, seventeen hundred years later, by a sultan with a fleet of barges. The same monolith has therefore been transported twice by two empires that had nothing in common except the wish to be associated with it.
- Site adjacencyIndraprastha / Purana Qila
Indraprastha and Ashoka are connected through Delhi’s broader Mauryan landscape. Ashoka’s reign transformed northern India through imperial administration and the dissemination of Buddhist teachings. The Delhi region preserves Ashokan remains, including the Ashokan Pillar now at Feroz Shah Kotla. These monuments place the landscape associated with ancient Indraprastha within the wider Mauryan world.
- Imperial administration ofQadam Sharif, Old Delhi
Firuz Shah Tughlaq built Qadam Sharīf around a stone said to bear the Prophet's footprint, which he had acquired and which he intended for his own grave, and then gave the tomb to his son Fath Khan, who died before him. The same sultan hauled two Ashokan pillars to Delhi and re-erected them. He was a collector of objects whose meaning had come loose from their origins, Buddhist and Islamic alike.
- Monument relocationBairāt (Virāṭnagar)
Ashokan material has been moved by two quite different kinds of people for two quite different reasons: Firoz Shah Tughlaq hauled pillars to Delhi in the 1350s as trophies of an unreadable antiquity he wanted associated with his city, and nineteenth-century antiquarians cut edicts out of rock and shipped them to Calcutta to be read. The sultan could not decipher what he moved; the antiquarians moved things in order to decipher them, and Prinsep did it in 1837.
- Monument relocationNew Delhi, Lutyens' plan
Firoz Shah moved an Ashokan pillar from Topra to his new capital in 1354; five and a half centuries later the British moved the capital itself to Delhi and built a new city around the same river plain. Both were deliberate claims on Delhi's accumulated authority, and Lutyens's planners surveyed and preserved the earlier cities' monuments as part of the plan.
- Monument relocationAshoka
Firoz Shah Tughlaq had an Ashokan pillar hauled from Topra in 1356, wrapped in silk and reeds, carried on a forty-two-wheeled cart and floated down the Yamuna on barges, and re-erected it on a pyramidal platform in his new citadel; a second came from Meerut. Nobody at his court could read the Brahmi, and the edict was deciphered by James Prinsep in 1837, four hundred and eighty years later.
- Site withinDelhi
Fīroz Shāh Kotla & the Topra pillar lies within Delhi — the two sites sit about 4 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Fīroz Shāh Kotla & the Topra pillar is one of the specific sites that give Delhi its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
On these journeys
Sources
Major Pillar Edicts — Delhi-Topra; Tughlaq relocation accounts
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