The Story of India 4: Ages of Gold (5 of 18)

The Story of India

Nor does Fa-hsien mention the Guptas' technological achievements, the most mysterious a 35-foot iron pillar which stands in Delhi today.
And the inscription on it dates it to about 400 AD, centuries before the Chinese developed their iron technology, 1,500 years, nearly, before the Industrial Revolution.
If Chinese are considered to be the masters of ceramic, Indians were the masters of metal, there's no doubt about that.
And particularly, the metal they were masters in was iron.
It was done by a technique known as forge welding.
-WOOD: Forge welding? -Welding.
So what you do in this technique is you take lumps of iron, about 20 kilograms in weight, and then you place them on top of each other in a hot condition and you hit with a hammer.

Due to this forging action you have joined the material.
So you have constructed a pillar which is about 6,000 kilograms in weight.
So that is actually a very marvellous engineering feat.
So really speaking, this pillar should be actually considered as a metallurgical wonder of the world.
-Yes, yes, yeah.
-Not just India.
It belongs to humanity.
WOOD: Do we know who made it, who commissioned it?
Well, based upon inscription which you see on the pillar, we know that it was commissioned by one Chandra.
It doesn't tell anything more, it just talks about Chandra.
But we now know, based upon analysis of the Gupta gold coins, that this Chandra should be Chandragupta Vikramaditya II.
WOOD: ''Chandra, ''says the column, ''his face beautiful like the full moon ''who won the sovereignty of the earth and left the southern ocean ''perfumed by the breeze of his bravery.
'' What is it about them that makes them so creative?
Can you explain that for us? As a metallurgist, at least, I am quite aware that, you know, if you look at the kind of metallurgical objects which have come, iron, iron pillar, the gold coins, the variety of coins, and the beautiful bronze castings of Buddha from Mathura, it's very clear that the Gupta period, the people were focused on high quality.
And that was a time when Indian civilisation actually takes a next major leap.