Place · Cholistan desert fort · Pakistan
Derawar Fort
Also known as Derawar, Derawar Fort, Cholistan, Bahawalpur
A square fort in the Cholistan desert with forty round bastions thirty metres high, visible for forty kilometres across flat sand, built by a Bhati ruler in the ninth century and rebuilt by the Abbasi Nawabs of Bahawalpur in the eighteenth. It stands on the dry bed of the Hakra.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.767, 71.333
Worth knowing
That is the point of its position: the fort and the ring of Cholistan sites around it sit along the palaeochannel that carried water when the Harappan towns of the region were occupied, so a medieval desert fort marks a Bronze Age river. Ganweriwala, one of the five largest Harappan cities and still undug, is on the same dry course.
Connections (3)
- Site adjacencyGanweriwala
Derawar's forty bastions stand on the dry bed of the Hakra in Cholistan, and Ganweriwala — one of the five largest Harappan cities, still essentially undug — is on the same palaeochannel. A ninth-century desert fort and a Bronze Age city mark the course of a river that has not run for four thousand years, which is why both are in the middle of sand.
- AnalogueRanikot Fort
Two enormous forts raised on the desert margins of the lower Indus within a few decades of each other, by dynasties that were rivals. Derawar is the Abbasi Nawabs' work in Cholistan, forty square bastions in a solid drum-walled block standing clear of the sand. Ranikot is the Talpurs' in the Kirthar, a wall that disappears into the hills for kilometres at a stretch. One concentrates mass at a point on a caravan route; the other encloses a landscape. Both were built as the Sikhs and then the British closed in from the north-east.
- Patronage networkNoor Mahal, Bahawalpur
Derawar and Noor Mahal are the two faces of the Bahawalpur Nawabs. Derawar is the dynasty's desert authority — forty bastions in the Cholistan, holding the caravan route and the family graves, in use from the eighteenth century. Noor Mahal, built between 1872 and 1875 for Sadiq Muhammad Khan IV, is what the same family built once a British political agent was resident and the Sutlej canals were paying: Italianate, neoclassical, designed by an English engineer and furnished from Europe.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Derawar Fort”. Punjab (Pakistan) archaeology department records; Rafique Mughal, Ancient Cholistan: Archaeology and Architecture (1997).
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