(The article appeared in Scroll on July 2, 2022)
- n the 14th century, Sultan Feroze Shah Tughlaq was so inspired by Emperor Ashoka’s edict-inscribed pillars at Topra and Meerut that he undertook the daunting task of shifting them to Delhi. Historian DR Bhandarkar drew on an account by Tughlaq’s chronicler Shams-i-Siraj, who wrote Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi, to provide a vivid description of the transportation process in his 1925 book Asoka…