Gwalior Fort

A sheer sandstone plateau about 3 km long rises abruptly from the plain of northern Madhya Pradesh, and its whole crown is walled. Gwalior Fort has been fortified since at least the eighth century and possibly much earlier, and over twelve centuries it passed through the hands of the Pratiharas, the Kachchhapaghatas, the Delhi Sultanate, the Tomars, the Mughals, the Marathas of the Scindia family and, for a time, the British. Each left buildings on the summit, so the fort is less a single castle than a hilltop city of palaces, temples and water tanks.

The best-known building is the Man Mandir palace, built by the Tomar raja Man Singh in the late fifteenth century. Its outer walls are banded with glazed tiles in turquoise, green and yellow, which earned it the name Painted Palace. Older still is the Teli ka Mandir, a towering ninth-century temple about 25 metres high whose barrel-vaulted roof recalls southern Indian forms, and the pair of richly carved Sas-Bahu temples completed in 1093. On the slopes below the walls, Jain sculptors of the fifteenth century cut colossal figures of the tirthankaras directly into the cliff; the tallest, of Rishabhanatha, is close to 18 metres high.

A small rock-cut shrine, the Chaturbhuj temple, carries one of the most important inscriptions in the history of mathematics. Dated 876 CE, it records a garden of 270 by 187 hastas and an offering of 50 garlands a day, and the numerals 270 and 50 end in a small circle: the oldest known stone-carved zero in India. The fort also contains a Sikh gurdwara marking the place where Guru Hargobind was held prisoner in the seventeenth century. Below the hill, Gwalior grew as the capital of the Scindia state and remains a major city with a long tradition of Hindustani classical music.

Getting there

The fort rises directly above the city of Gwalior, about 0.4 km from the centre. Gwalior Airport (GWL) is about 9 km away, and Gwalior Junction railway station is a major stop on the trunk line from Delhi to central India.