Fatehpur Sikri

• 1. Introduction

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  Fatehpur Sikri stands 35.7 km from Agra, a city that was built, gloried in, and then simply walked away from. Emperor Akbar raised it from a rocky ridge in 1571, declared it the capital of the Mughal Empire, and abandoned it just fourteen years later. By 1610 it was completely empty. An English traveler named Ralph Fitch had described it as greater than London. A few years after Akbar died, another visitor, William Finch, wrote that it was "all ruinate" and lay "like a waste desert." How does a city of such ambition become a ruin so quickly? And what was here before Akbar ever arrived? Those are the questions Fatehpur Sikri quietly poses to anyone who walks its sandstone corridors today.

• 2. Before the Mughals

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  Excavations at the site called Birchhabili Tila, on the southeast bank of what was once a large lake, pushed the history of Fatehpur Sikri back to the 6th century CE. That oldest layer held brick walls, building foundations, one dressed sandstone pillar, and a man-made sandstone pit. A broken sculpture of the Jain goddess Ambika, dated by style to the 6th or 7th century, placed a Jain shrine on this ground well over a thousand years before Akbar arrived.

  By roughly the 9th to 11th centuries, a Jain temple built from locally quarried red sandstone stood at the site. The most significant find from this era is a sculpture of the Jain version of Sarasvati. Its pedestal carries an inscription recording installation at a place called Saikrikya in the year 1010 CE, during the reign of a king named Vajrama. Saikrikya is the earlier name for Sikri, and Vajrama may be the same ruler as the Kachchhapaghata king Vajradaman of Gwalior, which suggests Sikri once fell under that dynasty's influence.

  Mahmud of Ghazni raided this part of India in 1018-19, sacking temples in nearby cities such as Mathura, Bulandshahr, and Bayana. A devotional sculpture at Sikri dated to the year 1044 CE suggests he spared the shrines here. A later chapter of destruction is more likely attributed to Alauddin Khalji, around the year 1300; a mosque he built in Sikri still stands. Swarup Chandra Jain, a senior leader of the Jain community, described the finds from the Archaeological Survey of India excavations of 1999-2000 as yielding "hundreds" of Jain statues, including "the foundation stone of a temple with the date."

  Before all of this, the region had been settled by Sungas after their expansion and was then controlled by Sikarwar Rajputs from the 7th to the 16th century, until the Battle of Khanwa in 1527 ended that long tenure.

• 3. Babur's Garden City

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  Babur, Akbar's grandfather, loved the place so much he renamed it. He called it Shukri, meaning "Thanks," inspired by the large lake that Mughal armies used. Per his memoirs, recorded in the Baburnama, he built a garden here called the "Garden of Victory" after defeating Rana Sangha at the site's outskirts.

  Gulbadan Begum's Humayun-Nama records that inside this garden Babur constructed an octagonal pavilion he used for relaxation and writing. At the center of the nearby lake he built a large platform. Scholar Attilio Petruccioli, a professor of Landscape Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Bari, observed that Babur and his successors sought "to get away from the noise and confusion of Agra" by building gardens along the free left bank of the Yamuna, linked both by boat and by land. When such garden landscapes were imagined, Petruccioli notes, the monument becomes the organising element of the surrounding city, partly through its orientation and partly through its sheer size.

  Annette Beveridge, in her translation of the Baburnama, noted that Babur's text points "Sikri" to read "Shukri," preserving this personal renaming in the historical record. A baoli, a stepped well, exists at the base of a rock scarp about a kilometre from the later Hiran Minar, and was probably the site of an epigraph commemorating his victory.

• 4. Akbar Builds His Capital

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  Akbar remained without an heir until 1569, when his son was born in the village of Sikri to his favourite wife, Mariam-uz-Zamani. That son would become the Emperor Jahangir. The birth had been predicted by the Sufi saint Sheikh Salim Chishti, whose khanqah already stood at the site, and Akbar began building a religious compound there in the saint's honour that very year.

  Abul Fazl recorded Akbar's own reasoning in the Akbarnama: "In as much as his exalted sons had been born at Sikri, and the God-knowing spirit of Shaikh Salim had taken possession thereof, his holy heart desired to give outward splendour to this spot which possessed spiritual grandeur." After Jahangir's second birthday, construction of a walled city and imperial palace began. By anchoring his capital at the khanqah of Sheikh Salim, Akbar aligned himself with a widely respected Sufi order and drew religious legitimacy to his reign.

  The city was formally founded in 1571 and took its name from the original village of Sikri. The Buland Darwaza, a gateway towering 150 feet over the city, was added as a victory arch after Akbar's successful Gujarat campaign of 1573, at which point the city was renamed Fatehpur Sikri, meaning "City of Victory." The gate carries an inscription in its archway that reads: "Isa, Son of Mariam said: The world is a bridge, pass over it, but build no houses on it. He who hopes for an hour may hope for eternity."

  The reason for abandonment has never been fully settled. Akbar left in 1585 to fight a campaign in Punjab, and the city was completely empty by 1610. The failure of the water supply is the most commonly cited explanation, though Akbar's own loss of interest has also been suggested, given that the city was built on his personal initiative. He returned only once, in 1601. During the epidemic of bubonic plague from 1616 to 1624, Jahangir spent three months here in 1619.

• 5. Architecture of the Ridge

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  Fatehpur Sikri sits on a rocky ridge 3 km long and 1 km wide. A 6 km wall encloses three sides of the palace city; the fourth was bordered by a lake. The entire city falls roughly into the shape of a rhombus around the 40 m high ridge. Urban archaeologists reading the "continuous and compact pattern of gardens and services and facilities" conclude the city was built primarily to provide leisure and luxury to its residents.

  The dynastic architecture follows Timurid forms and styles, built largely in red sandstone with Gujarati influences visible in the decorative vocabulary of the palaces. The overall design blends Hindu and Muslim forms of domestic architecture current in India at the time. The Panch Mahal, a five-storied structure with tiers diminishing upward, is supported by 176 intricately carved columns across its levels. The Diwan-i-Khas, or Hall of Private Audience, is a plain square building famous for a central pillar with thirty-six serpentine brackets supporting a circular platform for Akbar, connected by four stone walkways to the building's corners; it was here that Akbar hosted representatives of different religions to discuss their faiths.

  The Tomb of Salim Chishti, housing the Sufi saint who lived from 1478 to 1572, is enclosed in white marble within the courtyard of the Jama Masjid. The grave rests under an ornate wooden canopy inlaid with mother-of-pearl mosaic. A red sandstone tomb immediately to the east belongs to Islam Khan I, son of Shaikh Badruddin Chishti and grandson of Shaikh Salim Chishti, who became a general in the Mughal army under Jahangir. The Ibadat Khana, or House of Worship, was built in 1575 as the meeting house where Akbar laid the foundations of his syncretic faith, Din-e-Ilahi.

  The Pachisi Court is a square marked out as a giant board game, precursor to modern Ludo, where people served as the playing pieces. The Buland Darwaza itself, at 54 m from the ground, carries a central portico of three arched entrances, with the largest known locally as the Horseshoe Gate after the custom of nailing horseshoes to its wooden doors for luck.

• 6. British Rule and After

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  In October 1803, General Gerard Lake left his most cumbersome baggage and siege guns in the town while chasing the battalions of Daulat Rao Sindhia. After the British occupied Agra that same year, they established an administrative centre at Fatehpur Sikri that continued until 1850. In 1815, the Marquess of Hastings ordered repairs to the monuments at Sikri and Sikandra.

  The town held a population of 7,147 in 1901. By the 2011 census, that number had grown to 32,905, of which 17,392 were male and 15,513 were female. Literacy stood at 62.1 percent for those aged seven and above, with male literacy at 71.6 percent and female literacy at 51.4 percent. The town served as a municipality from 1865 to 1904 before becoming a notified area.

  In 1986, Fatehpur Sikri was awarded UNESCO World Heritage Site status, recognising both its architectural quality and its history as the Mughal capital. Fatehpur Sikri also lends its name to a constituency of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, comprising five legislative assembly segments including Agra Rural, Fatehpur Sikri, Kheragarh, Fatehabad, and Bah.

• 7. In Literature and Film

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  Letitia Elizabeth Landon, in a 1833 poetical illustration accompanying an engraving of a painting by William Purser titled Futtypore Sicri, published in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, associated the city's abandonment by Akbar with "the revenge of the dead."

  Vita Sackville-West set a pivotal scene of her novel All Passion Spent at Fatehpur Sikri, placing the key meeting between her character Deborah, Lady Slane, and Mr FitzGeorge there. The passage she wrote captures the emotional texture of the ruins: "She stood again on the terrace of the deserted Indian city looking across the brown landscape where puffs of rising dust marked at intervals the road to Agra."

  Salman Rushdie's novel The Enchantress of Florence is partly set in the city during the 16th century. The 1997 Hindi film Pardes, featuring Shah Rukh Khan and Mahima Chaudhry, used the city as the backdrop for the hit song "Do Dil Mil Rahe Hain." Three centuries of writers and filmmakers have been drawn back to the same place Ralph Fitch once compared to London, a city that emptied so completely that William Finch could barely find words for it.