Place · Mughal city gate · India
Kashmere Gate
The northern gate of Shahjahanabad on the road to Kashmir, built as part of Shah Jahan's 1648-1659 city wall. Kashmere Gate was the hinge of the 14 September 1857 British recapture of Delhi — the breach of the gate at 3 a.m. by John Nicholson's 5,000-strong column, after a week of siege batteries, broke the Mughal-Mutineer defence. Over 1,170 British soldiers died in the three-day storming and subsequent street fighting that captured Delhi back from Bahadur Shah Zafar's forces. The last Mughal emperor was arrested on 20 September at Humayun's Tomb. The gate itself survived the storming; the adjacent memorial to Nicholson (killed outside Kashmere Gate on 14 September) and the ruins of the Magazine (blown up by the British on 11 May 1857 to prevent capture) stand nearby.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.667, 77.230
Connections (4)
- CampaignMeerut
The Meerut sowars rode forty miles to Delhi on the night of 10 May 1857 and no pursuit was sent after them — the single decision that turned a cantonment mutiny into a rebellion, because it gave them the old imperial capital and an emperor to proclaim. Delhi was then held for four months and stormed through Kashmere Gate in September, after which the city was emptied and looted for weeks and the Mughal line ended.
- Site adjacencySīrī & Jahānpanāh
Kashmere Gate is where the assault on Delhi came in on 14 September 1857, after engineers blew the gate in daylight under fire, and the marks are still on the masonry. It stands in the northern wall of Shahjahanabad, the last of the sequence of cities strung across this plain from Qila Rai Pithora through Siri, Jahanpanah, Firozabad and Tughlaqabad — and the only one still lived in as a city when the siege train arrived.
- CampaignSalimgarh Fort
Kashmere Gate was blown in on 14 September 1857 and the assault columns fought their way to the Red Fort; Salimgarh beside it became the prison for those taken. Eighty-eight years later the same fort held the INA officers before their trial. The city's northern defences and its gaol are one sequence in 1857 and again in 1945.
- Site withinDelhi
Kashmere Gate lies within Delhi — the two sites sit about 6 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Kashmere Gate is one of the specific sites that give Delhi its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kashmiri Gate”. Parliamentary Papers and the Mutiny Narratives; Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt; William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal.
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