Journey
The Grand Trunk Road — Kabul to Chittagong
The subcontinent's spinal road, older than the name it wears. Chandragupta ran it as the Uttarapatha, Sher Shah rebuilt it in five years in the 1540s with sarais a day's march apart, the Mughals kept it, the British metalled it, and partition cut it in two places. This walks it from Kābul to Chittagong, holding the Afghan, Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi stretches in one line.
Stops (22)
- Kābul · Kushān to Mughal
The road's western terminus, sitting where the Silk Road down from Bactria meets the descent through the Khyber to the Punjab. Kabul was the Mughal empire's summer capital as much as Delhi was its winter one — Babur is buried here — and every serious army that entered north India from Kandahar or the west staged from it. British Kabul missions ran the same way in the nineteenth century.
- Khyber Pass · Mauryan to modern
The single hardest stretch of the road, a fifty-kilometre defile cut through the Safed Koh where five-metre-wide gorges channel any march through the same slots. Alexander, the Kushans, Mahmud of Ghazni, Babur, Nader Shah, Ahmad Shah Abdali and the British-Indian army in 1878 all used it. The Grand Trunk Railway was blasted through it in 1873 as the imperial answer to that risk.
- Torkham & the Durand Line · 1893 CE
Where the road meets the Durand Line, a border Mortimer Durand drew for the Government of India across Pashtun country in 1893, which Afghanistan has never accepted. The customs post at Torkham is the only functioning land crossing of that line; the road's Afghan and Pakistani stretches run into different administrations and different maintenance regimes here, and each side's condition of pavement betrays which state is paying attention.
- Purushapura / Peshawar · Kushān to early modern
The first plains city east of the Khyber, and the road's oldest continuously inhabited stop. The Kushans made it their capital, Kanishka's stupa stood beside it, and its caravanserai economy — hundreds of trading houses served by generations of Peshawari Hindkos, Pashtuns and Kabuli merchants — long pre-dates Sher Shah. The road's Bala Hissar fort and the Qissa Khwani bazaar face each other on its central axis.
- Attock Fort · 1581 CE
Where the road crosses the Indus at a narrow gorge. Akbar's fort of 1581 was built specifically to hold this crossing against the northwest, and the Grand Trunk Road east of the fort effectively begins here — the Punjab plains open out. Nader Shah crossed in 1739 going both ways with his loot, Abdali did the same nine times, and the British-built railway bridge of 1883 sits beside the fort.
- Rohtas Fort · 1541 CE
Sher Shah Suri's own fort, seventy metres of stone wall built by Todar Mal in 1541 to hold the Punjab against Humayun's return through the northwest. The Gakhar tribes who would have helped Humayun were kept in check from this fort while the road below was being rebuilt. Rohtas and the road are one project — the trunk route is only a route if somebody garrisons the difficult part of it.
- Lahore Fort & Shalimar · 1566–1673 CE
The Mughal Punjab capital and the road's central stage. Akbar's fort of 1566, Shah Jahan's Shalimar gardens of 1642 and Aurangzeb's Badshahi mosque of 1673 all sit within a mile of each other and all sit on the road. Lahore was garrisoned continuously and the imperial mint operated here from Akbar to Ahmad Shah Abdali, which is why Lahore's own trade was often unusually shielded from the road's convulsions.
- Attari · 1947 CE
The 1947 border cut clean across the road at Wagah, and the only stretch of the road that is ceremonially closed every evening in a synchronised flag-lowering by Indian and Pakistani border guards. Refugee columns of ten to fifteen million people crossed at this point in the six weeks after August 1947; the Grand Trunk Road became a corridor of displacement rather than of commerce, and never fully recovered as a trade line.
- Harmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple) · 16th c. onwards
The road's first major stop in independent India, and the reason the road still carries pilgrim traffic east from the Punjab. Amritsar was founded by the fourth Guru at a tank on the trunk line, and the city was built around Sikh pilgrimage and Punjab's trade with Kabul and Kashmir. When partition closed Lahore's markets to Amritsar's merchants, the road east from here — through Delhi to Kolkata — is what the Punjab economy pivoted onto.
- Panipat · 1526 · 1556 · 1761
The road's most-fought-over ground, a flat plain fifty miles north of Delhi through which everything moving to and from the capital has to pass. Three battles on this stretch decided north India: Babur beat Ibrahim Lodi in 1526, Akbar's regent beat Hemu in 1556, and the Afghans beat the Marathas in 1761. Each battle broke the political system that maintained the road and set up whoever ran it next.
- Karnal · 1739 CE
Where Nader Shah of Persia beat the Mughals in an afternoon on 24 February 1739 and marched down the road to sack Delhi. The invasion moved along the Grand Trunk Road in both directions at speed, took the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor with it, and demonstrated that the road Sher Shah built to hold the empire together was also the road that let an invader reach Delhi in a single campaign.
- Red Fort, Delhi · 1648 CE
The road's Mughal midpoint. Shah Jahan built the Red Fort in 1648 as a capital on the trunk line, moving from Agra so the new Shahjahanabad could sit at the point where the road crossed the Yamuna and the imperial post could reach both directions in three weeks. Its sarais, mints and post relays were rebuilt under Aurangzeb, and every imperial durbar drew the road's traffic to it.
- Aligarh · Mughal to colonial
A Mughal military headquarters guarding the doab stretch of the road, later the seat of a formative colonial university. The Muslim community that grew around Aligarh Fort's garrison was recruited from Mughal north India's Rohilla, Pathan and Sayyid establishments, and Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College here in 1875 for that community's sons. The road carried them east and west for two generations.
- Kanpur · 19th c.
A colonial-era leather and cotton mill town, and the 1857 revolt's decisive turning point. Kanpur sat at the road's Ganges crossing and had the Company's largest leather workshops and cantonment. The June-July 1857 events at Kanpur — the massacre at Satichaura Ghat and the killings at Bibighar — turned the revolt's British public reception from a colonial mutiny into a moral rallying point, which reshaped what came after.
- Prayāga / Prayagraj/ Allahabad · Mauryan onwards
Where the road meets the Sangam of Ganga and Yamuna, and the mythic Sarasvati is said to join underneath. Every twelve years the Kumbh brings tens of millions of pilgrims down the road in a few weeks; historically the road's Ganges stretch functioned as a pilgrimage corridor as much as a trade route, and the Company's revenue at Allahabad depended on the pilgrim tax it charged them for the swim.
- Kabīr Chaurā, Varanasi · Kabīr's time
The road's Kāshī stop, where its pilgrim traffic has always dwarfed its trade. Kabīr's dyer's workshop sat on the trunk road three miles from Vishwanath, and his verses circulated with pilgrims moving up and down it: the road carried the Nirguni tradition into Punjab as much as anywhere. Aurangzeb passed through here in 1669 to destroy Vishwanath, and the road brought the news to Sikh Punjab within weeks.
- Sasaram · 1545 CE
Sher Shah Suri's own tomb, a stone octagon rising a hundred feet on an artificial island in a tank at Sasaram, on the road he built. Placing the tomb on the Grand Trunk Road was deliberate: the road, the rupee and the revenue survey were his three works, and the tomb sits on the first of them, where every traveller between Bengal and Delhi passes it. The tomb was finished after his death in 1545.
- Patna Sāhib · 1666 CE
The road's Magadhan stop, on the Ganges south bank, where a Mughal city grew around the imperial post. Guru Tegh Bahadur's son Gobind Rai was born here in 1666 while his father was on a preaching tour up the road; the tenth Guru's birthplace is now Takht Sri Patna Sahib, a Sikh pilgrimage that arrives via the road from Punjab and Delhi. The Company's Patna factory was on the same stretch.
- Nabadwīp · 16th c.
Where the road bends into Vaishnava Bengal. Chaitanya was born in Nabadwip in 1486 on the Bhāgīrathī bank, and the kīrtan tradition and Gaudiya Vaishnavism that he sent through Bengal and Odisha carried down the road as they carried down the river. Late-Mughal and early-Company travellers moved from the road's Bihar stretch to Nabadwip's landing stages here for onward river passage to Murshidabad and Calcutta.
- Murshidabad · 1704–72 CE
Nawabi Bengal's capital sat on the road and controlled the road's Bengal commerce. Murshid Quli Khan moved the deputy governor's seat from Dhaka in 1704 and built a city where the road crossed the Bhāgīrathī. At its peak Murshidabad handled the silk, opium and cotton trade that reached Kolkata; Robert Clive took it after Plassey in 1757 and moved everything down the road to Calcutta over the next fifteen years.
- Kolkata: Fort William & the Maidan · 1698 CE
The British capital that turned the road into an imperial supply line. Fort William was built in 1698 as an East India Company factory, and once the Company took Bengal in 1757 the road became a two-thousand-mile supply chain reaching from Kolkata to Kabul. Every regiment that fought in Afghanistan came out of here, every road maintenance contract was let from here, and every crop tax reached the Treasury via the road.
- Chittagong armoury · 1930 CE
The road's eastern terminus at the Bay of Bengal. On 18 April 1930 Surya Sen and sixty-five students in Indian Republican Army uniforms took the two armouries at Chittagong for four days in one of the anti-colonial period's most audacious raids. The Chittagong armoury on the road's Bengal terminus is a reminder that the trunk line the Company built to move troops in was the same one used against them.