Fatehpur Sikri India’s abandoned city

from Heritage Photography September 2021

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Abandoned settlements, even once-important cities, have featured in our pages in previous issues – Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, Tel el Amarna in the Nile Valley, for example – and here we look at Fatehpur Sikri, the one-time imperial capital of India’s great 16th-century emperor Akbar. R. KEITH EVANS FRPS

Arocky ridge high above the plains of Uttar Pradesh in northern India would seem an unlikely site for a great city, but here, acting on the guidance of a Sufi holy man in the village below, the Muslim emperor Akbar decided to build his new capital. The time was the mid-16th century – Akbar had inherited the throne in 1556 – and construction began in1565. The largest building in the city, the Jami Masjid or imperial mosque, was completed in 1575, just ten years later. The mosque’s great entrance gate, the Buland Darwaza (Gate of Victory) still dominates the surrounding plains; once able to accommodate 10,000 worshippers, the mosque itself is over 130ft high and is reached by a broad 34ft flight of steps. Beyond the mosque, within once-massive walls over six miles in circumference and pierced by nine entrance gates, there today lies abandoned a wide variety of red sandstone buildings both public and private. Akbar’s Seat of Judgment is the centrepiece of the Diwan-i-Am, or Hall of Public Audience, 350ft long. Nearby is its counterpart the Diwan-i-Khas, Hall of Private Audience, where Akbar would receive ambassadors and other dignitaries while seated on a lofty marble throne; thus was he able to greet visitors without having to mingle with them. Though Muslim himself, Akbar was impressed by the local Hindus’ trust in astrology, and he consulted his personal astrologer daily; the Astrologer’s Seat resembles a small stone summerhouse adjacent to the Diwan-i-Khas.

The feminine touch ...

For his Hindu empress wife, Akbar built the Jodh Bai palace. In the southwest corner of the complex, this is a delicate mix of Muslim and Hindu architecture, with living quarters facing a large interior courtyard and Mogul domes rising above. One upper room, walled with a sandstone screen, is named “Palace of the Winds’’, where ladies of the court could watch passers-by without being seen. Akbar himself, meanwhile, could perhaps be found entertaining his harem in the nearby Ankh Micauli, decorated with stone monsters supposedly guarding the imperial jewels and other treasures.

... and a short-lived dream

Numerous other preserved sandstone buildings still surround this regal complex – stables, barracks, watchtowers, a once-vast caravanserai for visitors or traders. But the entire city was abandoned in 1585, when Akbar decided to move his court and capital north to Lahore, either because the water supply failed, or more likely for military and strategic reasons. In the dry desert air the abandoned city has survived largely intact for over four centuries, and relatively little erosion has occurred to the sandstone buildings and their ornate decoration. In the past decade the State government and the

Stonework combines Hindi and Mogul decoration – here in the Panch Mahal.

Archaeological Survey of India have developed a management plan to improve access to this remote site. My pictures were taken on two visits, in 1998 and 2012. On both occasions I was almost the only visitor, and so untouched by time did the city seem that one sensed its former inhabitants could reappear at any moment ...