Red Fort

The Red Fort, Lal Qila in Hindi, is the fortified palace built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan on the bank of the Yamuna in what is now Old Delhi, India. Begun in 1638 or 1639 and completed in 1648, it was the main residence of the Mughal emperors for two centuries. Its later history follows the fortunes of north India closely: it was looted by invaders, held in turn by Marathas, Jats and Sikhs, gutted by the British after 1857, and finally chosen as the place where independent India raises its flag.

Shah Jahan decided to move his capital from Agra to Delhi and laid out a new city, Shahjahanabad, with the fort at its heart. The design is attributed to Ustad Ahmad Lahori, also credited with the Taj Mahal, and construction began in the month of Muharram in 1638, though some accounts give the commissioning date as 1639. It was finished on 6 April 1648. Originally called Qila-i-Mubarak, the Blessed Fort, it was decorated in red and white, and its irregular outline was shaped to take in the older Salimgarh Fort beside it.

The walls run for about 2.4 kilometres and rise from 18 metres on the river side to 33 metres facing the city, enclosing some 103 hectares. Inside were audience halls, marble pavilions along the river, gardens fed by water channels, and a covered bazaar entered from the Lahori Gate. The style blended Persian, Timurid and Indian traditions. Shah Jahan's son Aurangzeb added the Pearl Mosque and built barbicans before the two main gates, which Shah Jahan compared to a veil drawn across a beautiful woman's face.

After Aurangzeb's death the Mughal Empire weakened and the palace decayed. Two emperors, Jahandar Shah and Farrukhsiyar, are believed to have been murdered within its walls. In 1739 Nader Shah of Persia defeated the Mughal army, occupied Delhi and carried off the fort's treasures, including the Peacock Throne. From then on the emperors were largely figureheads. A treaty of 1752 made the Marathas protectors of the throne; in 1760 they melted down the silver ceiling of the Hall of Private Audience to pay for Delhi's defence against Ahmad Shah Durrani, who raided the city after defeating them at Panipat in 1761.

The fort changed hands repeatedly over the next decades. The Jat ruler of Bharatpur, Jawahar Singh, captured it in February 1765 and withdrew with tribute. Sikh forces led by Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, Jassa Singh Ramgarhia and Baghel Singh took Delhi in 1783 before agreeing to leave and restore the emperor Shah Alam II. In 1788 the Rohilla chief Ghulam Kadir seized the fort, imprisoned Shah Alam and killed women of the royal family; the Maratha commander Mahadaji Shinde freed the emperor, and the Maratha flag flew over the fort until 1803.

In 1803, during the Second Anglo-Maratha War, the British defeated Daulat Rao Sindhia's army at the Battle of Delhi, and the East India Company placed a resident at the fort. The last of them, Bahadur Shah Zafar, became a figurehead of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. He left the fort on 17 September 1857, was captured, tried there in 1858 and exiled to Rangoon. The British then demolished most of the interior: harem apartments, servants' quarters, gardens and furniture were swept away, stone barracks were built in their place, and only the marble pavilions on the river side survived, damaged. Lord Curzon, viceroy from 1899 to 1905, began restoration, and the fort was declared a monument of national importance in 1913. In late 1945 officers of the Indian National Army were court-martialled there.

On 15 August 1947 India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, raised the national flag above the Lahori Gate, and every prime minister since has done the same and addressed the nation from the ramparts on Independence Day. The army kept much of the fort as a cantonment until December 2003, when it passed to the Archaeological Survey of India. Militants of Lashkar-e-Taiba attacked the fort on 22 December 2000, killing two soldiers and a civilian. UNESCO inscribed the Red Fort Complex as a World Heritage Site in 2007. A 2018 agreement letting a private company maintain the site under a government heritage scheme drew criticism, and on 26 January 2021 protesting farmers broke into the fort and damaged it. Studies have also linked a black crust on its walls to Delhi's air pollution.