India Guide
Madhya Pradesh
Gwalior fort
Price: Rs100; museum Rs30
Opening time: Daily sunrise to sunset; museum Tues– Sun 10am–5pm
Gwalior's imposing fort sprawls over a 3km-long outcrop of sandstone to the north of the modern city. Its mighty turreted battlements encompass no less than six palaces, three temples and several water tanks and cisterns, as well as a prestigious public school and a Sikh gurudwara.
Just beyond the Gwalior Gate, the fort's most accessible entrance, on the northeast corner of the cliff, the modest Gujuri Mahal was built by Man Singh to woo his favourite rani, Mrignayani, when she was still a peasant girl. The elegant sandstone palace now houses Gwalior's archeological museum, where the large exhibition of sculpture, inscriptions and painting is well worth a look, even if the labels are woefully uninformative. The most famous piece here is the exquisite salabhanjika, a small, exquisitely carved female figurine found in the ruins of the temple at Gyaraspur, and often dubbed "India's Mona Lisa".
Entered via the Hathiya ("elephant") Paur gateway, with its twin turrets and ornate blue tilework, the Man Singh Palace, built between 1486 and 1517 by the Tomar ruler Man Singh, is also known as the Chit Mandir ("painted palace") for the rich ceramic mosaics that encrust its facade. The best-preserved fragments of tilework, on its south side, can be seen from the bank left of the main Hathiya Paur gateway.
By contrast, its interior is very plain. The circular chambers in the lower storeys were formerly dungeons. Prisoners incarcerated here in Mughal times were fed on a preparation made with boiled poppy heads called poust – which ensured a protracted and painful death from malnourishment and drug addiction.
The thirty-metre-tall Teli-ka-Mandir, on the south side of the plateau, is the oldest surviving monument in the fort. Dating from the mid-eighth century, it consists of a huge rectangular sanctuary tower capped with an unusual vaulted-arch roof, whose peepal-leaf shape derives from the chaitya windows of much earlier rock-cut Buddhist caves. Set back from the road at the head of the Urwahi ravine, just north, the Suraj Kund is the hundred-metre-long tank whose magical waters are supposed to have cured the tenth-century ruler Suraj Sen, later Suraj Pal, of leprosy.