Gwalior Fort

The fort was founded, on the evidence of the Gwalior Kalachuri inscription, by the Kachhwaha ruler Suraj Sen in the eleventh century, and was the seat of the Kachhwaha dynasty for several centuries before the city passed to the Tomars of nearby Dhar. Its position explains its endurance: the hill is a flat-topped sandstone table some thirty metres above the plain, with sheer cliffs on three sides, so the fort needs a wall but little else to be defensible.

From the fourteenth century the fort changed hands repeatedly, and each occupation left architecture. The Sultanate period added the enormous water cisterns cut into the rock and the Tulsidas Temple. Under Akbar, who took the fort in 1528, the Gujari Mahal was built for the emperor's son Dara Shikoh and his wife, and stands as a rare piece of Shahjahan-period architecture outside Agra and Delhi. Sher Shah Suri, who held the fort from 1540, strengthened the defences. The Marathas took it in 1731, and the fort changed hands repeatedly through the eighteenth century until British control was consolidated in 1804.

The Rani Roopmati Pavilion, at the southern end, is later in date than its romantic reputation suggests; the building is eighteenth-century Maratha work, though it is named for a Rajput queen of the earlier Kachhwaha dynasty. Visitors are usually told that she leapt from it, which is legend. The Sahastra Bahu temple below it dates to the eleventh century and is one of the earliest structures in the fort.