Gingee Fort: Three Hill Citadels, Rajaram’s Refuge and a UNESCO Listing

Gingee fort, also written Senji or Jinji, is a hill fortress in Villupuram district of Tamil Nadu, spread across three rocky hills that its walls tie into one defended triangle. It matters for two reasons: from 1689 it sheltered the Maratha king Rajaram through a Mughal siege that lasted more than seven years, and in July 2025 it became the only Tamil Nadu fort in UNESCO’s Maratha Military Landscapes of India.

Most readers file Gingee under “Maratha fort” because of that listing, and that’s where the confusion starts. The Marathas held it for 21 years, from 1677 to 1698. The walls and palaces worth studying are older, mostly the work of the Nayaks of Gingee, and UNESCO’s own advisers doubted that the fort belonged in a Maratha series at all. Keep the builders apart from the holders and the rest of Gingee’s story falls into place.

What is Gingee Fort and where is it?

Gingee Fort is a hill fort in Tamil Nadu that ICOMOS, UNESCO’s advisory body for cultural sites, places on the Eastern Ghats at the crossroads of two important trade routes. The Archaeological Survey of India describes an outer wall about 13 km long running in a triangle over the hills and enclosing about 11 sq km, with the old city in the space between. The name Gingee is the English form of the Tamil Senji, which local belief links to the goddess Senjiamman.

The fort changed hands six times in the 112 years from 1649 to 1761, and three of its holders gave it a name of their own:

• Badshabad, under the Bijapur Sultanate;
• Chandry or Chindy, under the Marathas;
• Nusratgarh (recorded as Nasrat Gaddah), under the Mughals, after their siege commander Zulfiqar Khan’s title, Nusrat Jang.

Who built Gingee Fort?

No single ruler built Gingee Fort. It grew in layers, and the layer that matters most is the Nayak one.

The oldest layer is tradition. A chronicle in the Mackenzie manuscripts, South Indian records collected in the early 19th century, says a shepherd chief named Ananda Kon found treasure on the western hill around 1200 and built a small fort he called Anandagiri. The ASI calls the attribution traditional, and C. S. Srinivasachari, whose A History of Gingee and Its Rulers (1943) is still the fullest study, warns that the chronicle was compiled two centuries after many of the events it describes. ICOMOS’s summary of India’s nomination calls Gingee a Chola stronghold built at the end of the 12th century, which fits the rough date without confirming the shepherd story.

The fortress took its present shape under the Nayaks. A Nayak was a military chief whom the Vijayanagara king placed over a territory; he governed it in the king’s name and kept troops ready for the king’s wars. The chronicle says Krishnadevaraya sent an army south whose commanders included Tubaki Krishnappa Nayaka, and that Krishnappa’s descendants ruled Gingee for about 150 years. One outside witness anchors that tradition: the Jesuit Father Pimenta visited around 1597, when a Krishnappa Nayaka ruled there.

The same manuscripts credit a Krishnappa with the Kalyana Mahal, which Srinivasachari assigns to the Vijayanagara school, so Gingee’s best-known building predates Shivaji by generations. The wider political frame is in the note on the Vijayanagara Empire.

The Marathas added to what they took. ICOMOS says the fort was strengthened after Shivaji’s forces captured it, and the thick earthen ramparts behind the older granite walls are believed to be Maratha work of 1677 to 1698. Srinivasachari doubts that Shivaji rebuilt the defenses himself, though, since he spent only about two years in the Carnatic.

Gingee Fort’s history, from Bijapur to Rajaram

The dates are what most readers mix up. The sequence below follows Srinivasachari and the ICOMOS summary, which agree on the order; where the records differ on a date, the note says so.

Bijapur takes Gingee (1649)

In the 1640s the sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda pushed south into what remained of Vijayanagara. A Bijapur army under Mustafa Khan besieged Gingee, and the Nayak surrendered towards the end of December 1649; Jadunath Sarkar, whom Srinivasachari follows, gives 17 December. The city was plundered and the fort renamed Badshabad. Shahji, Shivaji’s father, served in that army, and Mustafa Khan had him arrested during the campaign on suspicion of intrigue. His son took the fort 28 years later.

Shivaji’s capture (1677)

Shivaji came south on his Carnatic expedition as an ally of the Golconda Sultan, who backed him with men and money. Bijapur’s court was split between rival factions, and its governor at Gingee, Nasir Muhammad, had already been beaten by a rival Bijapur commander. Shivaji took the fort from him in 1677, and it became the Maratha base in the Tamil country; Harji Mahadik governed it from early 1681, in Sambhaji’s reign. The note on Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj covers the wider campaign.

Rajaram’s refuge (1689)

Gingee became a capital almost by accident. The Mughals captured Sambhaji early in 1689 and put him to death, and Raigad surrendered that October. His younger brother Rajaram rode out of Panhala on 26 September 1689, reached Vellore on 28 October and went on to Gingee, where the English at Madras were planning a visit to him by 4 December. With Mughal armies across the western Maratha country, a strong Maratha-held fortress far to the southeast was the safest seat left, and for the next eight years the Maratha state was run from Gingee.

Why did the Mughal siege of Gingee last so long?

Because Gingee could be surrounded but not easily starved, and the commanders surrounding it had reasons not to hurry. Aurangzeb sent Zulfiqar Khan, son of the grand wazir Asad Khan, to the Carnatic in June 1690, and the fort didn’t fall until early 1698.

The siege of Jinji, as older books spell it, dragged on for four reasons:

• Terrain: three citadels on separate hills meant that taking the lower town ended nothing.
• Supply: springs and reservoirs kept the garrison in water, while Maratha field forces under commanders such as Santaji Ghorpade harried the besiegers almost daily. In January 1693 the English at Madras recorded that the Mughal generals might be forced to quit.
• A divided command: Prince Kam Bakhsh, sent to lead the siege, opened a secret correspondence with Rajaram and was seized by Zulfiqar Khan, according to a report recorded at Madras in January 1693.
• Suspicion of collusion: accounts that Srinivasachari quotes accuse the generals of delaying on purpose. Treat it as a charge made at the time, not a proven plan.

The end came quickly once Zulfiqar Khan could delay no longer without risking the emperor’s anger. Rajaram slipped out to Vellore first. Daud Khan’s men scaled Chandrayandurg from the south while the Bundela commander Dalpat Rao scaled the north wall of Krishnagiri, and the garrison, driven into the inner fort, was overrun.

The date is disputed. Srinivasachari says the siege ended in January 1698, and the Madras records of 2 January report every fort taken but one; the Mughal chronicle Maasir-i-Alamgiri gives a date that works out to 7 February 1698. “Early 1698” is the answer that survives every source.

Put the siege beside Aurangzeb’s other Deccan campaigns and the pattern is hard to miss:

• Golconda fell in September 1687 after about eight months.
• Raigad surrendered in October 1689, the year Sambhaji was captured.
• Gingee held for more than seven years, and Rajaram still got away.

The Mughals won the fort and lost the prize. The long war that followed is traced in the Maratha Empire note.

Who held Gingee after the Marathas?

Gingee changed hands four more times between 1698 and 1761:

• the Mughals, from early 1698, with a Bundela family holding it for them from 1700;
• the Nawab of Arcot, from 1714;
• the French, from September 1750;
• the British, from 6 April 1761.

Aurangzeb gave the fort to a Bundela chief, Sarup Singh, with a mansab of 2,500, a numbered rank in Mughal service that fixed an officer’s pay and the troops he kept. His son Raja Desing, the hero of Tamil ballads, clashed with Sadatullah Khan, the Nawab of Arcot, and was killed in 1714. The ballads are legend; the clash and the year are on record.

In September 1750, during the Anglo-French rivalry taught as the Carnatic Wars, a French force under Bussy captured Gingee, after his officers had talked a doubtful Dupleix into the attempt. The French held it until after Pondicherry fell to Eyre Coote, and Gingee surrendered to Captain Stephen Smith on 6 April 1761.

How Gingee’s defenses work, from the outer wall to Rajagiri

Gingee is easiest to picture as three castles sharing one outer wall: Srinivasachari describes the three hills as the citadels and the walled triangle between them as the lower fort. The picture breaks on the point that shaped the siege, because a castle usually falls with its keep, while Gingee’s lower town could be lost as the citadels held out.

The three hills are:

• Rajagiri (“king’s hill”), the highest at 500 to 600 feet by Srinivasachari’s account, carrying the main citadel.
• Krishnagiri, the second citadel, with pleasure pavilions and a Krishna temple on top.
• A lesser third hill that many accounts call Chandrayandurg and the ASI’s description calls Chakkilidurg; Srinivasachari treats these as two separate small hills.

The walk below follows the order in which an attacker met the defenses.

The outer wall and its gates

Srinivasachari suggests the outer wall grew in two stages: an original granite wall about five feet thick, laid without mortar, and an earthen rampart about 25 feet thick later piled behind it, with guard rooms built into it. That rampart is the part believed to be Maratha. Two gates pierced it, the Arcot or Vellore Gate on the north and the Pondicherry Gate on the east, and the French probably added the gun batteries between them and the Royal Battery on a knoll between Chandrayandurg and Krishnagiri.

The lower fort

Inside the triangle lay the town, which the ASI calls the ancient city. An attacker who broke a gate met these landmarks:

• the Venkataramana temple, whose tall pillars are said to have been carried off by the French to Pondicherry;
• Sadatullah Khan’s mosque, reached directly from the Pondicherry Gate;
• the Chakrakulam and Chettikulam tanks;
• the Prisoners’ Well, a hollowed boulder where, by local account, condemned prisoners were left to starve.

The inner fort and the Kalyana Mahal

At the foot of Rajagiri an inner wall ringed the royal quarter. The ASI lists what stands there and corrects two popular labels:

• the Kalyana Mahal;
• rows of rooms for the royal staff, “wrongly named horse stables”;
• huge granaries, “wrongly named Gymnasium”;
• the ruler’s private quarters and audience hall, and a large reservoir called the Elephants’ tank.

The Kalyana Mahal is the building people remember. Its name suggests a wedding hall, but the ASI calls it a pleasure pavilion. Srinivasachari describes a square court ringed by rooms for the women of the household, with a square tower rising from the middle to a pyramidal roof and earthenware pipes carrying water to its upper floors. The ASI counts seven stories; Srinivasachari’s 1943 description counts eight. Its arched verandas under a pyramidal roof suggest a meeting of Indo-Islamic and southern forms, the kind of blending the note on Vijayanagara architecture explains.

Climbing Rajagiri

Srinivasachari counts seven gates on the path up Rajagiri. Near the top, the walls rule out an escalade everywhere except the north flank, where a chasm about 24 feet wide and 60 feet deep does the work instead; a wooden bridge now crosses it. The summit held what a garrison needed to sit out a siege:

• a Ranganatha temple and a mantapam in the Vijayanagara style;
• two brick granaries and a chamber that probably served as the treasury;
• two natural springs that, Srinivasachari records, never dry up even in the hottest months.

The ASI says the inner layout was planned for “security and sustainability in the event of protracted siege”. The siege of 1690 to 1698 put that design to its longest test.

Is Gingee Fort a UNESCO World Heritage Site?

Yes. Gingee Fort is component 12 of the Maratha Military Landscapes of India, which the World Heritage Committee inscribed on 11 July 2025 at its 47th session in Paris. The listing made it India’s 44th World Heritage property, and Gingee is the only one of the twelve forts outside Maharashtra.

The key entries on UNESCO’s page for the property are these:

• Component: 1739-012, with 225.49 ha inside the property and a buffer zone of 2,775.34 ha.
• Criteria: (iv), an outstanding example of a type of building, here forts adapted to varied terrain; and (vi), a direct link with events and traditions of outstanding importance, here Maratha military history. India had also proposed (iii), which the inscription does not carry.
• Type: one of six hill forts in the series; the other five, Rajgad and Shivneri among them, are all in Maharashtra.
• Protection: the Archaeological Survey of India, while four Maharashtra components, Rajgad among them, are protected by the state’s Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, according to the PIB release of 11 July 2025.

Gingee drew some of the sharpest questions from ICOMOS, which recommended in March 2025 that the whole nomination be deferred. On Gingee it made three points:

• the fort predates the Marathas and Shivaji;
• the Mughals took it after several years of siege;
• it lies far to the east, outside the two Maratha lines of defense along the Sahyadri and the Konkan coast.

India answered that Gingee reflects Shivaji’s intent to control the Karnataka plains and the Coromandel coast, for crop revenue and ports. The Committee inscribed the property as nominated, and PIB reported that 18 of the 20 States Parties supported it. Both sides have a point, and it is wise to frame the listing that way in an answer: Gingee is recognized for what the Marathas did with it, not for who built it.

Conservation is the live question. ICOMOS put Gingee at the head of its list of components where the most significant challenges seem concentrated, and it named National Highway 77, which crosses the fort, among the interventions that harm heritage elements. The current affairs note on the inscription covers the full listing.

How to study Gingee Fort for exams

Gingee sits where three parts of the syllabus meet:

• Art and culture in GS Paper I: fort architecture and World Heritage Sites.
• Medieval history: the Nayaks under Vijayanagara, then the Maratha and Mughal wars in the Deccan.
• Modern history: the Anglo-French struggle in the Carnatic.

Mains questions tend to test the ground Gingee stands on rather than the fort by name. Mains 2026 GS Paper I asked “Vijayanagara architecture exemplifies the amalgamation of past traditions with contemporary practices. Elucidate with examples.“, and the Kalyana Mahal is a ready example from outside Hampi. The History optional has reached the same decade as the siege: Mains 2023 History Paper I set “The Marathas posed a significant threat to the integrity of the Mughal Empire. Discuss.” In Prelims, Art and Culture accounts for 94 of the 1,403 questions in the Prelims question bank.

For revision, fix these:

• Main citadels: Rajagiri and Krishnagiri; the third hill is Chandrayandurg or Chakkilidurg, depending on the source.
• Holders: the Nayaks, Bijapur (December 1649), the Marathas (1677), the Mughals (early 1698), the Nawab of Arcot (1714), the French (September 1750) and the British (6 April 1761).
• Shivaji took Gingee in 1677 from the Bijapur governor Nasir Muhammad, with Golconda as his ally.
• Rajaram arrived late in 1689; Zulfiqar Khan’s siege ran from 1690 to early 1698, and Rajaram escaped before the fall.
• The Kalyana Mahal is a Nayak-period tower, seven stories by the ASI’s count, with a pyramidal roof.
• UNESCO: component 12 of the Maratha Military Landscapes of India, 11 July 2025, criteria (iv) and (vi); ASI-protected.

Four confusions cost marks here:

• Jinji and Janjira: Jinji is Gingee, in Tamil Nadu; Janjira is the Sidi island fort off the Konkan coast.
• Krishnagiri: here it’s a hill inside Gingee, not the Krishnagiri district of Tamil Nadu.
• Holder and builder: the Marathas held Gingee from 1677 to 1698, but the Nayaks built most of what survives.
• Raigad 1689 and Gingee 1698: the first surrender ended Sambhaji’s capital, the second Rajaram’s refuge.

Set against its siblings, Gingee’s profile is distinct:

Gingee rewards the aspirant who refuses to flatten it into one label. Learn it as a Nayak fortress that the Marathas held for 21 years and the Mughals needed more than seven years to take, and the same page of notes will carry a history answer and a heritage-policy answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Questions

Prelims

1. Consider the following statements about Gingee Fort: 1. It is the only component of the Maratha Military Landscapes of India located outside Maharashtra. 2. It was inscribed on the World Heritage List under criteria (iv) and (vi). 3. It is protected by the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Maharashtra. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 and 2 only
• (b) 2 and 3 only
• (c) 1 and 3 only
• (d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (a) Gingee lies in Tamil Nadu and the property was inscribed under (iv) and (vi); the ASI, not Maharashtra’s directorate, protects it.

2. Arrange the following holders of Gingee Fort in chronological order: 1. The French 2. The Marathas 3. The Bijapur Sultanate 4. The Mughals. Select the correct answer using the code given below.

• (a) 3-2-4-1
• (b) 2-3-4-1
• (c) 3-4-2-1
• (d) 2-4-3-1

Answer: (a) Bijapur took Gingee in 1649, the Marathas in 1677, the Mughals in 1698 and the French in 1750.

3. The Maratha ruler who used Gingee Fort as his base during the Mughal siege of the 1690s was

• (a) Shivaji
• (b) Sambhaji
• (c) Rajaram
• (d) Shahu

Answer: (c) Rajaram reached Gingee late in 1689 and escaped to Vellore shortly before the fort fell in early 1698.

4. Consider the following statements about the Kalyana Mahal at Gingee: 1. It is a multi-story tower with a pyramidal roof. 2. It was built by the French during their occupation of Gingee. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) The Kalyana Mahal is Nayak-period work in the Vijayanagara style; the French added gun batteries, not the Mahal.

5. Consider the following pairs of names given to Gingee Fort and the power that used them: 1. Badshabad : Bijapur Sultanate 2. Nusratgarh : Mughals 3. Chandry : French. Which of the pairs given above is/are correctly matched?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 1 and 2 only
• (c) 2 and 3 only
• (d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (b) The Marathas, not the French, called the fort Chandry or Chindy.

Mains

1. Safeguarding the Indian art heritage is the need of the moment. Discuss. (10 marks, 150 words) Previous year: Mains 2018, GS Paper I.
2. The Mughal siege of Gingee (1690-98) shows that terrain and supply lines, more than numbers, decided wars in the late 17th-century Deccan. Examine. (15 marks, 250 words)
3. Gingee Fort predates the Marathas, yet it is a component of the Maratha Military Landscapes of India. Critically examine the case for and against its inclusion. (15 marks, 250 words)
4. Trace the succession of powers that held Gingee between 1649 and 1761. What does it reveal about the politics of the Carnatic in this period? (15 marks, 250 words)
5. Describe the Kalyana Mahal and the defenses of Gingee as evidence of Nayak-period building under Vijayanagara. (10 marks, 150 words)