The Iron Pillar of Dhar Was Forge-Welded to at Least 43 Feet 4 Inches, Nearly Twice the Height of Delhi's, and Its Three Pieces Still Lie Beside the Lat Masjid

Three pieces of forge-welded iron lie side by side on a platform at Dhar, a town near Indore in Madhya Pradesh, as Balasubramaniam described in 2002 and Live History India again in 2020. Henry Cousens of the Archaeological Survey of India measured them in February 1903 and found a combined length of 43 feet 4 inches (about 13.2 metres), with an average width of about 10 inches each way. The metallurgist R. Balasubramaniam of IIT Kanpur, who studied the pieces and published his results in 2002, says this is nearly twice the height of the iron pillar at Delhi. He adds that a top section is missing, so the pillar was taller still.

What the three pieces measure

Cousens’s figures, in the ASI Annual Report for 1902-03, give the longest piece as 24 feet 3 inches, square in section throughout. Next comes a piece 11 feet 7 inches long, 8 feet 6 inches of it square and 3 feet 1 inch octagonal, and a third of 7 feet 6 inches that is octagonal apart from a circular collar at one end.

An estimate by the researcher Klaus Roessler, reported by Balasubramaniam, worked from the measured dimensions and the density of iron. It gives 4.50 tons for the longest piece, 1.86 for the second and 0.94 for the third, a total of 7.3 tons. That is at least a ton more than the Delhi iron pillar, in Balasubramaniam’s words. Roessler also noted how true the forging is: the square section narrows by only 0.4 inch on each side over the 24 feet of the longest piece.

How it was made

In Balasubramaniam’s conclusion the shaft was forge-welded lying flat, the method he had worked out earlier for the main body of the Delhi pillar. Evidence is on the pieces themselves: the fracture face at the top of the longest piece matches the bottom of the second, which shows they were once welded together, and large weld joints recur along the longest piece at intervals of about 2 feet 4 inches to 2 feet 9 inches.

Small holes run along all four sides, between about 1.75 and 3 inches deep and about 1.25 inches across, in Balasubramaniam’s summary of Cousens. Cousens thought the holes held crowbars that workmen used to roll the heavy shaft as new metal was welded on, and he noted that a broken tool end was still stuck in one. Roessler proposed that pegs in the holes also carried cables to hold the pillar upright. A third account, by the metallurgist B. Prakash in 1989, has iron plates punched onto the joints. Ultrasound tests by Balasubramaniam and Roessler in 1996 did not settle that point, and Balasubramaniam asks for further study.

Unlike the one in Delhi, this pillar was not buried. Cousens describes three large stone boulders on a masonry basement, bound together with iron bands, with a socket 20 inches deep in the middle where the foot of the shaft was gripped. Holes in the pillar’s base and in the boulders suggest to Balasubramaniam that iron inserts and ropes held everything together.

Who raised it, and when

No inscription names a donor or a purpose, and the sources give three answers. Local tradition credits Raja Bhoja of the Paramara dynasty, who ruled Malwa from 1010 to 1053, according to Balasubramaniam. He supports that reading by pointing to Bhoja’s treatise Yuktikalpataru, which discusses the making of iron weapons, and to the building activity of his reign. Writing in 1898, the art historian Vincent Smith put it in the Gupta period, like Delhi’s. Cousens proposed that the Paramara king Arjunavarmadeva raised it in 1210, as a column of victory (jayastambha) before a temple.

Balasubramaniam’s 2000 paper on the Delhi pillar calls the Dhar pillar about 900 years old. He also argues that Dhar, Bhoja’s capital, was its original home, where Cousens had suggested Mandu. Tuput’s article on Bhojpur covers the king’s other building and writing.

From the Lat Masjid to the ASI platform

Lat means pillar, and the Lat Masjid takes its name from this one. Dilawar Khan built it in 1405, Balasubramaniam writes, from the remains of earlier Hindu and Jain temples. Jahangir’s memoirs, in the Rogers and Beveridge translation, say Dilawar Khan set up a quadrangular iron column opposite the mosque gate. The same passage says that when Sultan Bahadur of Gujarat took Malwa, he wanted to move the column to Gujarat, that it fell as the workmen lowered it, and that it broke in two. Balasubramaniam dates this to 1531.

Jahangir recorded that he ordered the larger piece taken to Agra, to stand in the courtyard of Akbar’s tomb with a lamp burning on top. In the translation the two pieces measure 7½ and 4½ gaz; the ASI report’s own summary renders them as 23 and 13 feet, and Balasubramaniam as 22 and 13. That plan was not carried out, and a footnote in the translation, citing Sayyid Ahmad, records that the pieces were still at Dhar.

Visitors left marks. A Persian inscription of Akbar, dated in the 44th year of his reign, records his halt at Dhar on his way to the Deccan, and Balasubramaniam adds that it notes a stay of seven days. From its position, Cousens argued that the pillar was lying down when it was cut. Devanagari names, among them visitors of the goldsmith caste, were cut with the pillar the right way up, which Cousens took as evidence they predate its final fall.

Later the pieces were moved repeatedly. In 1903 the longest lay tilted against the masonry basement outside the mosque, the second was in a museum at the Anand High School, and the shortest, which Cousens took to be the piece once lying at Mandu, was fixed in a masonry base in the Lal Bagh gardens. According to Balasubramaniam, the ASI moved them around 1980 onto a platform beside the mosque. Before that, children in the neighbourhood slid down the longest piece, which is why its top surface is polished smooth.

What the iron is

One bulk analysis is in print, Balasubramaniam found, and it gives 0.02 per cent carbon and 0.28 per cent phosphorus, a figure he traces to Tylecote quoting two early 20th century papers. His own analysis of a thin flake, about 0.1 inch thick, taken from the lower face of the second piece with ASI permission, varied from place to place. Microprobe readings at two spots were 0.69 and 0.85 per cent phosphorus. For the Delhi pillar, an average of about 0.25 per cent is cited in Balasubramaniam’s 2000 paper. He has put the figure for today’s iron at under 0.05 per cent. The flake held slag particles of fayalite, an iron silicate, and he calls its structure characteristic of ancient Indian iron. Cousens recorded a local belief that the pillar was an alloy of five or eight metals, and the microprobe found no meaningful silver at the spots tested.

In a borate buffer test, the Dhar iron passed less current than 0.05 per cent carbon mild steel and than iron from a sixth-century Gupta site at Eran, which means it corroded more slowly in that laboratory test. Its resistance to pitting was weaker than the mild steel’s, and Balasubramaniam attributes that to the junctions between slag and metal. X-ray, infrared and Mössbauer spectroscopy found magnetite, hematite, goethite, lepidocrocite and phosphate phases in the rust. In cross section the rust had a thin, dull inner layer and a thicker, brighter outer one, the same two-layer structure seen on modern weathering steels.

Phosphorus has a cost. The fracture surface of the flake showed brittle failure along grain boundaries, which Balasubramaniam links to phosphorus gathering there. Prakash blamed the pillar’s original fracture on imperfect welds and slag.

The missing top

When whole, the pillar was a little short of 50 feet, Cousens reasoned. Roessler inferred from the drill holes a missing fourth piece about 3 feet 3 inches long. A total of about 48 feet is Balasubramaniam’s proposal, which he reaches by reading the square, octagonal and circular sections as the three parts of a Shivalinga in Hindu iconography, with a trident about a foot high on top. Cousens had suggested a Garuda or a trident as the crowning figure; no capital has been found.

Balasubramaniam also suggests that the iron pillar in front of the Jami Masjid at Mandu, known as Alauddin’s spear, could be the reshaped fourth piece, and says the history of that pillar is not known. Cousens, who saw the Mandu flagstaff in 1903, recorded that it was only a few inches across and reportedly came from the courtyard of the Hindola Mahal. His rust analysis came from one location on one piece, and he asks for sampling across all three, which have been moved several times.