Place · plains fort & palace complex · India
Junagarh Fort, Bikaner
Also known as Bikaner, Junagarh, Junagarh (Bika Rathore fort), Junagarh Fort
Junagarh at Bikaner, built between 1589 and 1594 by Rai Singh, a general of Akbar's, on flat ground rather than a hill, with a moat and a double wall. It was never taken by siege in four centuries, and its interest is inside: lacquer, gold leaf, Chinese tiles, Venetian glass and mirror work accumulated over three hundred years.
- Date
- 1589–1594
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.021, 73.318
Worth knowing
The Anup Mahal's walls are worked in gold leaf on lacquer to a depth that has no parallel in Rajasthan, and the Karan Mahal carries the state's Mughal war trophies. Bikaner's income was the caravan trade between Gujarat, Sindh and the Punjab, and Ganga Singh later added a First World War aeroplane to the collection.
Connections (4)
- CampaignSomnāth / Prabhāsa
Junagadh, whose Nawab acceded to Pakistan in 1947 despite a Hindu majority, was integrated into India by plebiscite in February 1948. Somnath lay within its territory, and Sardar Patel's Somnath reconstruction pledge came directly out of the Junagadh integration, tying the temple's rebirth to the accession crisis that shaped western India's borders.
- Succession in timeLallgarh Palace, Bikaner
Junagarh of 1589 and Lallgarh of 1902 are the two Bikaner palaces, three hundred years and one empire apart. The first was built by a general of Akbar's on flat ground and never taken; the second by a British architect for a ruler who sat in the Imperial War Cabinet, in a style British architects had invented to look Indian. Both were paid for by the same caravan trade.
- Patronage networkShekhawati painted havelis
The Marwari merchant families who painted the Shekhawati havelis and the Bikaner rulers who filled Junagarh with lacquer and Venetian glass were living off the same thing — the caravan trade between Gujarat, Sindh and the Gangetic plain. When the railways rerouted it the merchants followed the money to Bombay and Calcutta and painted what they found there on their desert walls.
- Site withinBikaner
Junagarh Fort, Bikaner sits inside Bikaner and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Junagarh Fort”. Karni Singh, The Relations of the House of Bīkāner with the Central Powers 1465–1949 (1974); Archaeological Survey of India monument records.
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