Fatehpur Sikri

Fatehpur Sikri is a red sandstone palace city on a ridge about 36 kilometres from Agra in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. The Mughal emperor Akbar founded it in 1571 beside the hermitage of a Sufi saint and made it his capital until 1585, after which it was largely deserted. Because it was abandoned so soon and never rebuilt, its mosque, palaces and courts preserve the layout of an early Mughal court with unusual completeness.

The ridge was not empty land. Excavations by the Archaeological Survey of India in 1999 and 2000 at the mound known as Birchhabili Tila found remains of a Jain shrine dating from about the sixth century and a red sandstone Jain temple of the ninth to eleventh centuries. One sculpture records its installation in 1010 at Saikrikya, an early form of the name Sikri, under a king who may be the Kachchhapaghata ruler Vajradaman of Gwalior. The temples seem to have survived the raid of Mahmud of Ghazni in 1018 and 1019; scholars think it more likely they were destroyed around 1300, under Alauddin Khalji of the Delhi Sultanate, whose mosque in Sikri still stands. Rajput Sikarwar chiefs held a fortress in the area for centuries.

In 1527 Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, defeated the Rajput ruler Rana Sanga at the Battle of Khanwa nearby. According to his memoirs he laid out a "Garden of Victory" here, and he called the place Shukri, meaning thanks, after its large lake.

Akbar had no surviving heir until 1569, when his son Salim, the future emperor Jahangir, was born at Sikri, as the Chishti saint Sheikh Salim had foretold. Akbar first built a religious compound in the saint's honour and then, from 1571, a walled city and palace. The chronicler Abu al-Fazl explained that because the emperor's sons had been born there, Akbar wished to give outward splendour to a place of spiritual grandeur. Tying his capital to a popular Sufi order also lent prestige to his rule. After his conquest of Gujarat in 1573 the city took the name Fatehpur Sikri, the City of Victory.

The city covered a ridge about three kilometres long, enclosed on three sides by a wall some six kilometres long and on the fourth by a lake. The Jama Masjid, completed in 1571 or 1572, was among the first buildings; the Buland Darwaza, a towering gateway added about five years later, commemorated the Gujarat campaign. In the mosque courtyard is the white marble tomb of Sheikh Salim Chishti, who died in 1572. The palace buildings mix Timurid, Gujarati and Rajput forms: halls of public and private audience, the five-storey Panch Mahal and the residence of Akbar's Rajput wife Mariam-uz-Zamani. In the Ibadat Khana, built in 1575, Akbar hosted debates between representatives of different religions. The English traveller Ralph Fitch thought both Agra and Fatehpur Sikri much larger than London.

In 1585 Akbar left to campaign in Punjab and did not return to live there; he visited only once more, in 1601, and the city was wholly deserted by about 1610. The usual explanation is that the water supply failed, though Akbar losing interest in the city may have contributed too. A few years after Akbar's death the English visitor William Finch called it "all ruinate". Jahangir stayed there for three months in 1619 while plague raged elsewhere, and in the eighteenth century Muhammad Shah began repairs, but as the Mughal Empire declined the buildings decayed.

In October 1803, during the war against the Maratha leader Daulat Rao Sindhia, the British general Gerard Lake left his siege guns and heavy baggage in the town. After taking Agra that year the East India Company made Fatehpur Sikri an administrative centre, which it remained until 1850, and in 1815 the Marquess of Hastings ordered repairs to its monuments. The town beside the ruins became a municipality in 1865 and had about 33,000 people at the 2011 census. UNESCO inscribed Fatehpur Sikri as a World Heritage Site in 1986, recognising both its role as a Mughal capital and its architecture.