Place · Mughal fort · India

Red Fort, Delhi

/laːl 'qɪlaː/

Also known as Siege of Delhi, Siege of Delhi 1857

Function

Military & resistance

Patron dynasty

Mughal

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

28.656, 77.241

Worth knowing

In 1857 the last Mughal, Bahādur Shāh Zafar, was proclaimed here; the British siege and recapture of Delhi ended the dynasty.

Connections (24)

• Successor capital ofAgra Fort

  Shah Jahan moved the capital from Agra to a new city at Delhi in 1648, laying out Shahjahanabad around the Red Fort with Chandni Chowk running west from it — a planned imperial city rather than an accretion. The two forts are the same institution in two reigns, and Shah Jahan ended his life imprisoned in the older one by his son, with a view of the Taj.

• Imperial administration ofLahore Fort & Shalimar

  Delhi and Lahore were the two poles of Mughal north India: the Punjab capital with its Picture Wall of glazed tile and the Shalimar terraces, and the Shahjahanabad citadel. The court moved between them, and Lahore was where the empire faced Kabul and Kandahar. After 1947 the pair was cut by a border, and two cities that had governed one region for four centuries became capitals of different countries.

• Trade routeUttarapatha–Dakshinapatha junction

  The Uttarapatha ran from the northwest across the Ganga plain to Pataliputra long before the Mauryans, and its central-plain terminus was the axis Delhi settled on twenty centuries later. Every capital that has claimed the plain — Indraprastha, Delhi, Shahjahanabad — sat where the western trunk road turned into the interior of Aryavarta, and the Delhi–Kabul line the Mughals ran is that same route with a different name.

• Siege ofKarnal

  Nadir Shah destroyed a far larger Mughal army at Karnal in an afternoon in 1739, entered Delhi, and after a riot ordered a general massacre in which tens of thousands died. He left with the Peacock Throne, the Koh-i-Noor and enough treasure to suspend taxation in Persia for three years. The Mughal empire continued nominally for another century and never again controlled anything much beyond the city.

• Succession in timeNew Delhi, Lutyens' plan

  The Red Fort was where Bahadur Shah Zafar was tried in 1858 and where Nehru raised the flag in 1947 — the end of Mughal rule and the beginning of the Republic performed on the same ground. Between the two, the British moved the capital from Calcutta back to Delhi in 1911 and built Lutyens' axial city three kilometres south, finishing it less than two decades before they left.

• CampaignJhansi Fort

  Jhansi and Delhi were two centres of the 1857 rebellion, and they show its two faces: the old Mughal capital, where the sepoys placed a reluctant eighty-two-year-old emperor at the head of a movement he did not control, and a Bundela fort where a widowed ruler whose adoption had been refused under the doctrine of lapse fought and died in the field.

• Traveller routeDaulatabad

  Ibn Battuta served as qadi of Delhi under Muhammad bin Tughlaq and was in the city during the removal of its population to Daulatabad, which he describes — the Sultan ordering everyone out, the search of the empty streets, the man found who could not walk. The stops recorded here are representative of the Rihla's Indian sections, and the chronology varies slightly between reconstructions of his route.

• Traveller routeAgra Fort

  Bernier spent eight years in India from 1658, much of it as physician to Danishmand Khan and in the imperial camp, and saw the war of succession and its aftermath at first hand. His Travels in the Mughal Empire shaped European ideas of Asian despotism for a century. These nodes are representative of his movement between the two Mughal capitals rather than a complete itinerary.

• Succession in timeTughlaqabad

  Delhi has at least seven capital cities within a fifteen-kilometre radius — Qila Rai Pithora, Siri, Tughlaqabad, Jahanpanah, Firozabad, Dinpanah and Shahjahanabad — each built beside its predecessor rather than over it, which is why the ruins of five centuries of sultanate and Mughal building stand in the middle of a modern city. The Red Fort is the last of them and the only one still substantially intact.

• Succession in timeKangla Fort, Imphal

  The INA's campaign failed at Imphal and Kohima in 1944; its officers were tried the following year at the Red Fort, three of them together — a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh — on charges of waging war against the King. The defence was led by Bhulabhai Desai and Nehru put on a barrister's gown for it after twenty-five years. The trials produced the largest political mobilisation of the decade and the naval mutiny of February 1946, and weighed on the British decision to leave far more than the campaign ever had.

• Imperial administration ofBahādur Shāh Zafar

  Zafar held a nominal court in the Red Fort on a Company pension, with authority over its walls and a household of several thousand, and it was there that the Meerut sepoys came on 11 May 1857 to demand he lead them. He was tried in the fort's own Diwan-i-Khas the following year. The building in which the Mughal dynasty ended is the one on whose ramparts the Indian flag has been raised every August since 1947.

• CampaignNāder Shāh

  Nader entered Delhi after Karnal as a guest of the emperor and the city was quiet for a week; then a rumour that he had been killed produced attacks on Persian troops, and he ordered a general massacre that ran from morning until he was persuaded to stop it. Contemporary estimates run from twenty to thirty thousand dead. He left with the Peacock Throne, this stone and a treasure convoy that took weeks to leave, and the Mughal empire never recovered its finances.

• Power passed toBuxar

  Buxar defeated the emperor Shah Alam II in person, and the Treaty of Allahabad the next year granted the Company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in return for a tribute and the promise of restoring him to Delhi. He got back to the Red Fort in 1772 under Maratha escort, not British, and the emperor became a Company pensioner there in 1803.

• CampaignAhmad Shāh Abdālī

  Both sides at Panipat claimed to be acting for the Mughal emperor, who was in neither camp. Abdali had sacked Delhi in 1757 and installed his own candidate; the Marathas held the fort in 1760 in the name of Shah Jahan III. After the battle the throne belonged to whoever escorted its occupant, and from 1803 that was the East India Company.

• Power passed toSamugarh

  Aurangzeb was crowned at Delhi in July 1658 and again, formally, in 1659, and moved the centre of gravity of the empire from Agra to Shahjahanabad and then to the Deccan camp, where he spent his last twenty-six years. Dara Shukoh was paraded through the streets of the city on an elephant before being killed, which was the point of the procession.

• CampaignKarnal

  Nader Shah's army came down the northern highway from the Khyber through Lahore to Karnal on 24 February 1739, beat the Mughal army in an afternoon, and marched down the same road to Delhi to sack Shahjahanabad — the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor went back with him. The trunk route was as much a corridor of invasion as it was of imperial supply, and Abdali used it nine times over the next thirty years.

• Succession in timeQutb complex, Delhi

  Four hundred and fifty years and eleven kilometres separate the Qutb complex from the Red Fort, and between them Delhi was refounded at Siri, Tughlaqabad, Jahanpanah, Firozabad and Dinpanah. Each new dynasty built a new city rather than occupying the last one, which is why Delhi is a twenty-kilometre archaeological strip rather than a single stratified mound.

• CampaignFlagstaff Tower, Delhi Ridge

  The recapture of Delhi was organised from the Ridge camp above the city, and the object of it was the Red Fort. Between 8 June and 20 September 1857 the besiegers held the high ground and the rebels held the walls, and afterwards the population was expelled, the area between the fort and the Jama Masjid cleared, and the Ridge planted as a cantonment forest.

• AnalogueCellular Jail, Andaman Islands

  The Red Fort was inscribed in 2007 and the Cellular Jail is still on the list, and both are sites of colonial trials and imprisonment: Bahadur Shah Zafar and the INA officers in one, the Ghadr, Chittagong and Andaman political convicts in the other. One is a Mughal palace with that history attached; the other is only that history, which is a harder thing to inscribe.

• Monument relocationDeeg Palace

  Suraj Mal's Jat army sacked Delhi in 1761 and a good deal of what furnishes Deeg came back with it, including a marble swing taken from the Red Fort. The Jat state's palace architecture is literally built out of Mughal material, which is a more honest record of the eighteenth century than most buildings of the period give.

• TransmissionParis

  Bernier read Gassendi and Descartes aloud to Danishmand Khan in Persian at Delhi, and wrote his essays on Mughal land tenure for a Paris readership. The traffic ran both ways in one household: European natural philosophy into Persian conversation, and a description of Mughal government into European political theory, where Montesquieu and Marx both took it up.

• Site withinDelhi

  Red Fort, Delhi sits inside Delhi 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.

• BuiltShah Jahan

  Shah Jahan commissioned the Red Fort as the imperial palace of his new capital Shahjahanabad from 1639, with construction running to 1648 when he formally moved the court from Agra. The Diwan-i-Am and Diwan-i-Khas held the Peacock Throne, built over seven years with the Koh-i-Noor and the Timur Ruby set into it. The Lahori Gate's audience bazaar, Chandni Chowk running west, and the Jama Masjid two kilometres southwest were part of the one urban ensemble.

• Affiliated withMirza Ghalib

  Mirza Ghalib received a court pension from the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar at the Red Fort of Delhi from 1854 as his poetic teacher, and lived through the 1857 revolt and the British sack of Delhi that followed from his Ballimaran haveli within sight of the fort. His Dastanbuy and his correspondence with his students describe the Red Fort's fall, the public executions of Mughal princes, and the city's recovery through the plainest prose in Urdu literary history. The Red Fort pension ended with Zafar's deposition.

On these journeys

• The Mughal line
• The Grand Trunk Road — Kabul to Chittagong
• The three battles of Panipat
• Rise and crisis of the Mughal state
• How the Company took India
• UNESCO World Heritage — cultural
• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier — six voyages for stones (1630–68)
• François Bernier — physician at the Mughal court (1658–68)
• Cities through time — many civilisations, one place
• Delhi — the seven cities and beyond
• British India — 1600 to 1947
• INA — Southeast Asia to Imphal

Sources

Red Fort Complex — UNESCO

• Wikipedia