HistoriCity | Delhi’s Red Fort: A monument of power, rebellion, and independence
Delhi’s Red Fort has always been a stage for politics, sometimes bloody, at other times petty. Its history hides layers of drama, both tragic and monumental.
2024 marked yet another year that the Indian Prime Minister hoisted the national flag from the Red Fort’s ramparts. But, how did the towering monument come to be a symbol of India’s power?
The Red Fort marked the high point of emperor Shah Jahan’s extravagant building spree. The art-loving Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, left an unparalleled architectural legacy. He had ordered the construction of the exquisite Taj Mahal, Jama Masjid, and the Red Fort in Agra besides numerous other important and enduring structures such as the Wazir Khan mosque, and the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore and elsewhere.
The Red Fort’s foundation was laid in May 1638, near the site of the Salimgarh Fort, which was built by Salim Shah Suri, son of Sher Shah Suri in 1546 CE. Overlooking the Yamuna, the construction of the fort spanned a decade, with its red walls encircling an area of more than 250 acres, which is twice the size of the Red Fort at Agra. Inside these walls lay a series of palaces of varying sizes, and almost all of them were built in marble. The high defensive walls that lend the fort an air of impregnability are made of red sandstone from Fatehpur Sikri, while the royal palaces – only a handful of them survive today – were made of the famous Makrana marble.
Shah Jahan inaugurated this opulent fort-palace complex in 1648, naming it Qila Mubarak (the blessed fort) and the Qila-i-Moalla (the exalted fort). Along with the fort, Shah Jahan also built the Jama Masjid, and the walled city, Shahjahanabad, nowadays known as Old Delhi.
For the inauguration of the Red Fort, an extremely extravagant celebration was organised. Supported by silver poles, a magnificent shamiana (tent structure) was put up outside the Diwan-i-Aam, which was named Dil ba-dil (heart within the heart). The velvet tent was created over seven years in the royal workshops in Ahmedabad.
For the royal family, a series of beautiful buildings that included personal royal quarters, pleasure halls, gardens, baths (hammams) and courts (Diwan-i-Aam and Diwan-i-Khas) were built. Each structure was showered with delicate ornamentation and most common among them were the quintessential floral prints that characterise the assimilative Mughal style. The carvings of birds in colourful stone tiles look life-like as if these winged creatures are ready to flutter away. The surviving Pietra dura or stone inlay work in the Diwan-i-Khas and Diwan-i-Aam is breathtaking even though it is but a shadow of the original. Amir Khusro’s famous couplet “Agar firdaus bar ru-ye zamin ast, Hamin ast-o hamin ast-o hamin ast (If there is heaven on earth, It is this, it is this, it is this!) is inscribed above two corner arches of the Diwan-i-Khas.
Yamuna’s waters were lifted into the fort to fill the Nahar-i-Bhist or ‘stream of paradise’ which flowed through the Diwan-i-Khas and the Rang Mahal, which served as a salon for the women of the royal household. This ornamented structure was turned into a cookhouse for British soldiers after the 1857 rebellion was quelled the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar and his sons were expatriated and executed respectively.
Shah Jahan could enjoy his new capital Delhi for just a decade, from 1648 to 1658. Aurangzeb ascended the throne after a bloody and ugly succession war which left his Shah Jahan imprisoned, and his favourite son, Dara Shikoh, dead, with his body being abused and paraded in the streets of Shahjahanabad. Afterwards, Aurangzeb moved the capital back to Akbarabad or Agra but he too added to the architectural beauty of the Red Fort by constructing the delicately domed Moti Masjid, which is among the few structures that survive today.
What remains today of the Red Fort is akin to scraps and empty bookshelves of a destroyed library. After capturing the fort, besides the merciless massacres of Indians, unprecedented acts of vandalism were committed by the British on some of the most wonderful architectural masterpieces of that age. Most of the marble structures were razed to the ground, others were converted into barracks, and the pool in front of the Naubat Khana was filled up.
"Even at the time, the destruction was regarded as an act of wanton philistinism. The great Victorian architectural historian James Fergusson was certainly no whining liberal, but recorded his horror at what had happened in his History of Indian Architecture: "Those who carried out this fearful piece of vandalism," he wrote, did not even think "to make a plan of preserving any record of the most splendid palace in the world... The engineers perceived that by gutting the palace they could provide at no expense a wall round their barrack yard and one that no drunken soldier could scale without detection, and for this or some other wretched motive of economy the palace was sacrificed". He added: "The only modern act to be compared with this is the destruction of the summer palace in Pekin. That however was an act of red-handed war. This was a deliberate act of unnecessary Vandalism", wrote William Dalrymple quoting Fergusson in The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty.
Even before the British destroyed the Red Fort, it had continuously suffered plunder at the hands of rival armies and invaders. In 1739, less than a century after its inauguration, Nadir Shah descended from the passes of Afghanistan and defeated a much larger Mughal army at Karnal. He took back with him Shah Jahan’s beloved Peacock Throne and other riches from the Red Fort. Nearly two decades later, in 1760, the cash-starved Marathas, who had become de-facto rulers of Delhi, took down the silver ceiling of Diwan-i-Khas and melted it to prepare against another conqueror: Ahmad Shah Durrani.
Just five years later, Jat militias from Bharatpur captured the Red Fort, and along with extracting tribute from Shah Alam II, took back as trophies the throne and the doors of the Red Fort, these now adorn the Jat Fort at Bharatpur. The Mughal authority by this time existed only in name and didn’t extend much beyond the borders of Delhi. In 1783, Sikh armies took over Delhi and the Red Fort and withdrew only after forcing emperor Shah Alam II to allow the construction of seven Sikh temples, including one right opposite the Red Fort.
Red Fort and Delhi had come to symbolise temporal and political power for centuries, and within decades of the failed 1857 uprising, the British transferred their capital to Delhi from Calcutta. Those who controlled the Red Fort and Delhi ruled India. And it also became an inspiration for those fighting against the British colonial rule. In 1944, one of India’s greatest freedom fighters, Subhas Chandra Bose, exhorted his fledgling Indian National Army (INA) to ‘March to Delhi’ and unfurl the Indian tricolour flag. That attempt united the Indian national movement, whose leading lights, led by Jawaharlal Nehru (who later became India’s first and longest-serving Prime Minister), appeared as defence counsels for a celebrated trio of INA officers. Colonel Prem Sahgal, Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon and Major-General Shah Nawaz Khan were tried and executed in the Red Fort, which by then had become a cantonment of the British army. At that time the entire country had resounded with the patriotic cry of “Lal Qile se aayi aawaz, Sahgal, Dhillon aur Shah Nawaz” (Voices cry from the Red Fort, we are with Sahgal, Dhillon and Shah Nawaz).
HistoriCity is a column by author Valay Singh that narrates the story of a city that is in the news, by going back to its documented history, mythology and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal
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