Agra Fort

• 1. Introduction

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  Agra Fort sits 2.5 kilometres northwest of the Taj Mahal, and yet it is the older story. When Shah Jahan finally built his famous tomb across the river, he was already a prisoner in the fort that had housed Mughal emperors for more than a century. He spent his last eight years staring at the Taj Mahal from the Muthamman Burj, and he died there in 1666. His body was taken by boat to be buried beside his wife.

  This is not just a fortress. Historians describe it more accurately as a walled city, 380,000 square metres enclosed behind walls seventy feet high. Four hundred years of crownings, conquests, imprisonments, and explosions unfolded inside those walls. The questions worth asking are not just architectural. They are about power: how a single structure passed from Rajputs to Lodis to Mughals to Jats to Marathas to the British, and what each of them left behind.

• 2. Before the Mughals

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  In the 15th century, the Chauhan Rajputs held the fort. Their tenure was interrupted when Sikandar Khan Lodi, who ruled from 1487 to 1517, shifted his capital from Delhi to Agra and added buildings to the existing structure. When Sikandar died, his dynasty did not outlast him by long.

  After the first Battle of Panipat in 1526, Babur seized the fort and took up residence in the palace of Ibrahim Lodi, the man his forces had just defeated. Babur left one visible mark of his own: a baoli, a step well, built inside the fort. His successor Humayun was crowned there in 1530, but Humayun's hold on the empire was precarious. He was defeated at the Battle of Bilgram in 1540 by Sher Shah Suri, and the fort passed to the Suri dynasty until 1555, when Humayun returned to reclaim it. A year later, in 1556, a general named Hemu retook Agra on behalf of Adil Shah Suri and chased the Mughal governor all the way to Delhi, where the two sides met again at the Battle of Tughlaqabad.

• 3. Akbar's Red Sandstone City

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  Akbar arrived in Agra in 1558, two years after Hemu's push toward Delhi had been reversed. His historian Abul Fazl recorded that what Akbar found was a brick fort called Badalgarh, already in ruins. Akbar understood the site's strategic position at the centre of northern India and decided to rebuild it entirely.

  Red sandstone was quarried from the Barauli area of the Dhaulpur district in Rajasthan and hauled to the site. The construction method was layered: brick on the inside, sandstone on the exterior surfaces. Around 4,000 builders worked on the project every day for eight years, and the fort reached its completed form in 1573. Abul Fazl noted that 500 buildings in the styles of Bengal and Gujarat were constructed inside the walls during Akbar's reign.

  The Delhi Gate, built around 1568, was Akbar's formal entrance on the western side facing the city. Its designers made passage through it deliberately difficult. A wooden drawbridge crossed a moat to reach the outer gate. Inside, a second gateway called Hathi Pol, guarded by two life-sized stone elephants with their riders, blocked further entry. The slight incline and a ninety-degree turn between the outer and inner gates meant that attacking elephants could never build up enough speed to break through. The gate is inlaid with intricate white marble work and is still considered a masterpiece of Akbar's period.

• 4. Shah Jahan's Marble Interior

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  Where Akbar favoured red sandstone, his grandson Shah Jahan preferred white marble, and his alterations to the fort reflect that preference throughout. The Shahjahani Mahal, built between 1628 and 1635, sits between the older red stone Jahangiri Mahal and the white marble Khas Mahal. Shah Jahan had the brick and red stone skeleton of the building covered entirely in thick white stucco plaster and painted with floral designs. The whole palace once appeared white from the outside, like marble.

  The Shish Mahal, built between 1631 and 1640 as a summer palace, has a more unusual quality. Its walls and ceiling are covered in glass mosaic work, using glass imported from Haleb in Syria. In a semi-dark interior, the glass pieces produced a glittering, fragmented light that made the space unlike anything else in the fort. Shah Jahan built similar glass palaces at Lahore and Delhi.

  The Muthamman Burj, the octagonal tower on the riverside, was originally built by Akbar in red stone for the practice of jharokha darshan, a daily sunrise appearance before the public. Shah Jahan rebuilt it in white marble between 1632 and 1640. It connected directly to the Diwan-i-Khas and other palace chambers, and it was from this complex that the Mughal emperor governed the empire. When Aurangzeb won the war of succession and placed Shah Jahan under house arrest in 1658, this was the tower Shah Jahan could not leave.

• 5. Justice, Invasion, and Explosion

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  Around 1605, the Mughal emperor Jahangir established what he called the chain of justice, or Zanjir-i-Adl, on the south side of the Muthamman Burj. Jahangir recorded in his own memoir that the first order he gave after his accession was for this chain to be fastened up. Anyone with a grievance could come to the riverbank and shake it; the bells would ring and attract the emperor's attention. The chain was made of pure gold, 80 feet in length, with 60 bells, and weighed one quintal. One end was fixed to the Shah-Burj battlements and the other to a stone post on the river bank. The English traveller William Hawkins personally saw the chain, and a painting made in 1620 depicts it.

  After the Mughals, the fort changed hands repeatedly. The Jat rulers of Bharatpur held it for 13 years and built the Ratan Singh ki Haveli inside it. The Maratha Empire seized the fort in the early 18th century, lost it, recaptured it, and lost it again across multiple conflicts. After the Marathas' catastrophic defeat at the Third Battle of Panipat by Ahmad Shah Abdali in 1761, they were absent from the region for a decade. Mahadji Shinde retook the fort in 1785. The British took it from the Marathas during the Second Anglo-Maratha War in 1803.

  British occupation left its own mark. Between 1803 and 1862, troops of the East India Company demolished most of the Mughal buildings inside the fort to erect barracks. Of the 500 buildings Abul Fazl had recorded, barely thirty survived on the south-eastern riverside section. On the 30th of November 1871, thirty-six people died when a cartridge factory inside the fort exploded.

• 6. The Ghaznin Gate Controversy

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  Among the surviving structures is an object with a complicated history: a wooden gate stored in a room inside the fort. It is 16.5 feet high and 13.5 feet broad, weighing about half a ton, constructed from geometrical, hexagonal, and octagonal wooden panels fitted together without rivets.

  The gate originally belonged to the tomb of Mahmud Ghaznavi at Ghazni. The British brought it to Agra in 1842. Lord Ellenborough, the Governor General at the time, publicly declared that these were the famed sandalwood gates of the Somnath temple, which Mahmud had taken to Ghazni in 1025, and that Britain had now avenged a historical insult of 800 years. It was a claim designed to win the goodwill of Indian subjects. It was also false. The gate is made of local deodar wood from Ghazni, not sandalwood. Its decorative style bears no resemblance to ancient Gujarati woodwork. An Arabic inscription carved near the top names Mahmud with his titles. Sir John Marshall later placed a notice-board beside it explaining the full episode. The plan to restore the gate to Somnath was eventually abandoned, and the gate has remained in storage ever since.

• 7. Legacy and Recognition

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  In 1983, Agra Fort was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognised for its importance during Mughal rule. Two decades later, in 2004, it received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture; India Post issued a stamp to mark the occasion.

  The fort also has a literary presence. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle placed it at the centre of the Sherlock Holmes mystery The Sign of the Four. The Egyptian pop star Hisham Abbas featured it in the music video for his hit song Habibi Dah.

  One episode from 1666 connects the fort to its famous neighbour across the river. Shivaji came to Agra that year under the terms of the Treaty of Purandar, which had been concluded with Jai Singh I in 1665, to meet Aurangzeb in the Diwan-i-Khas. At the audience, Shivaji was deliberately placed behind men of lower rank. He stormed out of the imperial hall and was confined to Jai Singh's quarters on the 12th of May 1666. The northern section of the fort, where the Parachute Brigade of the Indian military is still stationed today, remains off limits to the public; tourists enter through the Amar Singh Gate, formerly known as the Akbar Darwazza before Shah Jahan renamed it.