Place · Mughal imperial city · India

Fatehpur Sīkrī

Also known as Fatehpur Sikri, Fatehpur Sīkrī, Salīm Chishti, Fatehpur Sīkrī — Salīm Chishti

Function

Religious institution & practice

Patron dynasty

Mughal

Tradition

Chishti silsila; Mughal court records

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

27.094, 77.661

Connections (9)

• Imperial devotion toAjmer Sharīf

  Akbar walked the three hundred and sixty kilometres from Agra to Ajmer on foot more than once, in fulfilment of vows, and built an entire capital at Fatehpur Sikri around the hermitage of Salim Chishti after the saint's blessing was credited with the birth of his heir. Imperial urbanism organised around a shrine is unusual anywhere; Fatehpur Sikri was abandoned within fifteen years, largely for want of water, and the tomb is what is still visited.

• Contemporary capital withAgra Fort

  Akbar's court moved between Agra and Fatehpur Sikri through the 1570s and 1580s, and the two sites are the two halves of his reign in building: the red fort at Agra as the working citadel, rebuilt in marble by Shah Jahan and later his prison, and Sikri as the experiment — a whole city in red sandstone, built at once to a single design, and abandoned almost as quickly.

• Power passed toPanipat

  Babur's victory at Panipat in 1526, won with field artillery and a flanking manoeuvre against far greater numbers, ended the Delhi Sultanate and began the Mughal state; Akbar, his grandson, built Fatehpur Sikri fifty years later. The line between the two is short and not at all smooth — Humayun lost the empire to Sher Shah and recovered it only just before dying, so the dynasty's survival was a near thing twice over.

• Imperial administration ofAkbar

  The Ibādat Khāna debates brought Sunni and Shia scholars, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians and Portuguese Jesuits into one room, and Akbar's conclusion — that no tradition had a monopoly — produced the 1579 decree making him the final arbiter in religious disputes and the Dīn-i Ilāhī three years later. The experiment was reversed within two generations and provoked the Naqshbandi reaction that shaped South Asian Islam afterwards.

• Imperial inscription atAbu’l-Fazl

  The Ain-i-Akbari's account of court procedure, the translation bureau, the Ibadat Khana debates and the imperial household all describe this city, where Abu'l-Fazl worked for most of the years he was writing. The chronicle and the capital were built in the same fifteen years, and both were abandoned by the reign that commissioned them.

• Site withinAgra

  Fatehpur Sikri was Akbar's second capital, built thirty-six kilometres west of Agra Fort between 1571 and 1585, and functioned as the Mughal imperial centre alongside Agra through those fifteen years. The two sites belong to one administrative city — Agra as the working citadel on the Yamuna and Sikri as the ceremonial-and-shrine capital around the Chishti dargah of Salīm Chishti, where Akbar had sought the blessing that gave him his heir. The city was abandoned around 1585 when the court moved back to Agra. Reading Sikri as an isolated site misses that it is Agra's imperial twin.

• Related toAkbar's Church (Church of the Holy Name), Agra

  The Jesuit mission at Akbar's court was based initially at Fatehpur Sikri (1580–85) during the Ibadat Khana disputations, where Rodolfo Acquaviva, Antonio Monserrate and Francisco Henriques debated the ulama and the Hindu, Jain, Parsi and Zoroastrian pandits before Akbar. The mission moved to Agra when the court returned to the city in 1585, and the 1599 church grant at Agra was the institutional continuation of the Fatehpur Sikri disputations — the same mission anchored in the newer capital.

• Lived atMariam-uz-Zamani (Harkha Bai)

  Mariam-uz-Zamani lived at Fatehpur Sikri through the fifteen years Akbar used it as his capital (1571-1585), with her own house — the Jodh Bai Mahal, as popular tradition misnames it — and the Hindu temple that is the only such shrine known within a Mughal palace complex. The house was built around a central courtyard with devotional space for her Hindu practice and private chambers for her Mughal household role as empress mother to Prince Salim.

• Located atPachīsī / Ludo

  A courtyard in the palace complex at Fatehpur Sikri, the city Akbar built from 1571, is marked out in squares as a pachisi board big enough for people to stand in as the pieces — the Pachisi Court. It is the kind of board Rousselet described, and it gives a game with no fixed address a place on the map: the Mughal boards are the oldest that can be tied to pachisi for certain.

On these journeys

• Chishti silsila
• Major dargahs
• The Mughal line
• UNESCO World Heritage — cultural
• Akbar's court circle

Sources

Fatehpur Sikri — UNESCO; Tomb of Salim Chishti

• Wikipedia