Purana Qila

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Purana Qila, the Old Fort of Delhi, holds a secret beneath its feet: evidence of continuous human habitation stretching back to around 1000 BC. On the 24th of January 1556, the Mughal emperor Humayun slipped while descending a staircase inside the fort and died of his injuries two days later. The man who built this place, and who recovered it after years of exile, died on its grounds. That story is only one thread in a fabric that stretches from the Painted Grey Ware era through partition, internment, and theatre. What kind of place accumulates so many layers of history in a single set of walls? Who built Purana Qila, and who were the thousands of people who sheltered, prayed, and suffered there long after its builders were gone?

• 2. Buried Millennia

  ›

  B. B. Lal, then director of the Archaeological Survey of India, led the first two rounds of excavations at Purana Qila in 1954-55 and 1969-72. What he found beneath the fort's surface pushed its story far earlier than any Mughal or Sultanate record: traces of the Painted Grey Ware culture, dating to around 1000 BC. Later excavations in 2013-14 and 2017-18, led by Vasant Kumar Swarnkar, deepened the picture. The objects and pottery recovered show unbroken occupation from the Mauryan period through the Shunga, Kushana, Gupta, Rajput, Delhi Sultanate, and Mughal eras. Homes from the Rajput era were built with bricks salvaged from earlier structures and with mud bricks. A fortification wall about 30 metres long was uncovered as well. During the Delhi Sultanate, builders again pulled bricks from the ruins of previous structures to raise new ones. The Mughal presence left a distinctive signature: a deep pit dug into the layers of preceding eras, with three structural phases involving re-used bricks, rubble, and lakhori bricks. All of these finds are now exhibited at the Archaeological Museum inside Purana Qila. The historian Alexander Cunningham identified the fort's site with the ancient city of Indraprastha, and well into the early twentieth century the fort was still being called Pandavon Ka Qila, or the Fort of the Pandavas, by local people.

• 3. Two Builders, One Fort

  ›

  Muhammad Khwandamir recorded that Humayun laid the foundation of his new city on a mound near the Yamuna river. That city was Dinpanah, and Purana Qila stands where its inner citadel once rose. Abul Fazl wrote that Humayun chose to build on the very spot believed to be ancient Indraprastha. By the time Humayun's rival Sher Shah Suri defeated him and took control, the walls and fortifications were nearly complete. Sher Shah strengthened those fortifications, finished the walls, and built an additional fort on the same ground, calling it Shergarh, where the governor would reside. The Tarikh-i-Da'udi records that Sher Shah's royal city remained unfinished at his death. Abbas Sarwani goes further, stating that both forts he was constructing were incomplete when he died. Later sources credit Salim Shah Suri with constructing a wall defending Humayun's Dinpanah, adding yet another builder to the list. The extent of each ruler's contribution remains disputed; primary sources do not settle the question cleanly. What is clear is that the fort's outer walls rise 18 metres high and trace a path of about 1.5 km, punctuated by three arched gateways: the Bara Darwaza facing west and still in use today, the Humayun Gate to the south, and the Talaqi Gate, known as the forbidden gate. All three are double-storeyed sandstone structures with large semi-circular bastions decorated with white and coloured marble inlays and blue tiles, topped by chhatris and ornamented with jharokhas whose design connects to Rajasthani architectural traditions and would echo through later Mughal building projects.

• 4. Sher Shah's Mosque

  ›

  In 1541, Sher Shah completed the Qila-i-Kuhna Mosque inside the fort, and it remains the best-preserved building in Purana Qila today. Sher Shah designed it as a Jami Mosque, a Friday mosque for the sultan and his courtiers. Its prayer hall measures 51.20 metres by 14.90 metres and contains five arched prayer niches, or mihrabs, set into the western wall. The mosque's five doorways feature true horseshoe-shaped pointed arches, placing it among the early examples in the region of that architectural form used at significant scale. Calligraphic inscriptions on the central iwan are worked in marble of red, white, and slate shades, a combination that scholars read as a transition point between Lodhi and Mughal styles. A second storey, reached from staircases within the prayer hall, contained a narrow passage reserved for female courtiers. A separate doorway framed by ornate jharokhas gave members of the royal family their own access. The courtyard once contained a shallow tank with a fountain. On a marble slab inside the mosque, an inscription reads: "As long as there are people on the earth, may this edifice be frequented and people be happy and cheerful in it."

• 5. The Tower Where Humayun Fell

  ›

  Babur ordered the construction of the Sher Mandal, an octagonal tower of red sandstone, intending it to serve as an observatory and library for his son Humayun. Work halted when Humayun was driven out of Delhi, and the structure was finished only after he retook the fort. The tower was meant to reach a greater height than it stands today; its builders never completed that ambition. Inside, traces of decorative plasterwork and the ghosts of stone shelving suggest where the emperor's books once rested. Sher Shah, whose given name was Farid, attempted to finish what Babur had begun but died before the project was complete, lending his name to the tower nonetheless. At the top of this private observatory, Humayun pursued his passion for astronomical star-gazing. On the 24th of January 1556, hurrying down from the roof to answer the call to evening prayers, he slipped on the steep stairs and fell headlong. He died two days later. The building is also counted among the earliest observatories of Delhi; the earliest is in Pir Ghaib at Hindu Rao at Ridge, built in the fourteenth century by Firoz Shah Tughlaq. Entry into the library tower is now prohibited.

• 6. Crownings and Battles

  ›

  On the 7th of October 1556, a Hindu king named Hem Chandra Vikramaditya was crowned inside Purana Qila. He had just defeated Akbar's forces at the Battle of Delhi that same year. His reign from the fort lasted barely a month. The Mughals met Hemu and his army at the second battle of Panipat and decisively defeated them. Edwin Lutyens, designing the new British Indian capital of New Delhi in the 1920s, chose to align the central vista, now known as Rajpath, so that it pointed directly toward Purana Qila, acknowledging the fort's centrality to the city's geography even as a new capital was being drawn from scratch around it.

• 7. Refuge and Internment

  ›

  In August 1947, as the Partition of India tore the subcontinent apart, Purana Qila and the neighbouring Humayun's Tomb became emergency shelter for Muslims fleeing to the newly founded Pakistan. By September 1947, between 150,000 and 200,000 Muslim refugees had poured into Purana Qila. The camp also held over 12,000 government employees who had opted for service in Pakistan. The Indian government took over management of both camps that September. Trains to Pakistan did not begin running until October 1947, and the Purana Qila camp remained open until early 1948. Years earlier, during the Asia-Pacific War of 1941-1945, the fort had served a grimmer purpose. Over 2,000 Japanese civilians were interned across British India; among them, around 554 were women and 224 were children. Planning for the internments had begun as early as July 1940, with camps being prepared from at least February 1941. After Japan entered the war, civilians from Malaya, Singapore, and other British colonial territories joined the Japanese internees. By December 1942, the Purana Qila camp held 2,115 Japanese internees, the vast majority brought from Singapore. They lived in tents that offered little protection from winter cold or from summer temperatures that reached 120 degrees. The Japanese government formally protested that food, cooking, washing, and sanitation conditions were inadequate. British officials rejected the complaint, recording in their own words that the Japanese were "notoriously unable to cope with extremes of heat or cold" and that rations were "adequate for proper nourishment" by what they called "Asiatic standards." British authorities believed the poor conditions at Purana Qila had, with some justification, provoked the ill-treatment of Allied prisoners of war by Japan as a reprisal.

• 8. Stage and Sound

  ›

  In the 1970s, the ramparts of Purana Qila found a new life as a performance backdrop. The National School of Drama staged three productions against the fort's walls: Tughlaq, Andha Yug, and Sultan Razia, all directed by Ebrahim Alkazi. The space has since hosted cultural events, concerts, and theatre productions of many kinds. After sunset today, visitors can watch a daily sound and light presentation on the outer walls tracing the history of the Seven Cities of Delhi, from Indraprastha through to New Delhi. Several outlying monuments complete the complex, including the Kairul Manzil, a mosque built by Maham Anga, Akbar's foster-mother, which was later used as a madrasa. Across Mathura Road to the south-east stands the Sher Shah Suri Gate, also called Lal Darwaza, which once served as the southern entrance to Shergarh.