Gwalior Fort: Gopachal’s Temples, Man Singh’s Palace and the Zero Inscription

Gwalior fort runs along Gopachal, a flat-topped sandstone hill nearly 3 km long that rises about 90 m (300 ft) from the plain at Gwalior in northern Madhya Pradesh. No single ruler built it. The ASI traces its history to the 5th century CE or earlier, and the monuments on the hill record a long run of ruling powers, from the Hunas to the Scindias and the British. It is known above all for Raja Man Singh Tomar’s tiled palace, the Man Mandir, and for a temple inscription of 876 CE that holds one of the earliest dated zeros in India.

The usual mistake is about age. Because the most famous building on the hill is a Tomar palace of about 1500, many answers treat Gwalior as a late medieval fort, when its earliest inscription is nearly a thousand years older and its oldest standing temple predates the palace by some seven centuries. A second mistake is about recognition: Gwalior is a UNESCO Creative City of Music and the fort is on India’s Tentative List, but neither makes it a World Heritage Site. This note puts the layers in order and keeps those labels apart.

Where Gwalior fort stands and who held it

Gwalior fort is a hill fort on an isolated sandstone plateau, protected by the ASI, with a recorded history that runs from at least the 6th century to the 20th. Its strength is the hill itself: Britannica describes a cliffed plateau rising a sheer 90 m, and the figures Annette Beveridge took from Cunningham’s survey put it at about 300 ft at the north end and 274 ft at the south, about 1.75 miles long.

Read the last row as a timeline, not a list. It spans more than seven centuries of building on one hill.

The oldest layer: Hunas, temples and the zero

The hill’s written history begins in the 6th century. Britannica dates the fort’s first mention to a temple inscription of about 525 CE, and the Huna ruler Mihirakula left a stone inscription at Gwalior, catalogued today as the Gwalior Stone Inscription of Mihirakula. The names for the hill all mean the same thing: Gopa Parvat, Gopachal Durg, Gopagiri and Gopadiri are forms of “cowherd’s hill”.

The next layer is a temple unlike almost any other in north India. Teli ka Mandir stands about 28 m high on a rectangular plan, and the ASI describes its superstructure as a mixed type, a Valabhi roof on a Nagara base. A Valabhi roof is a barrel vault, shaped like an upturned boat or the top of a wagon, which suits a rectangular sanctum; a Nagara base belongs to the north Indian tradition of the curved spire. If you’ve studied Nagara temple architecture as a family of square shrines under curved towers, Teli ka Mandir is the exception that tests the rule.

Its date is the harder question, and the sources don’t agree:

• The ASI assigns it to the mid-8th century, on the evidence of the script of its short inscriptions, its art style and its design, and notes that the date matches the time of King Yasovarman of Kannauj.
• Britannica’s short entry on Gwalior gives the 11th century.

For the exam, the ASI’s mid-8th-century date is the one to use, because it rests on evidence from the building itself. One of its inscriptions is a metrical hymn to a many-armed Durga, a sign that the shrine’s history is more layered than its present dedication to Shiva suggests.

The third layer is the one mathematicians travel for. The small Chaturbhuj temple, carved out of the rock and dedicated to Vishnu, the four-armed god of its name, carries a dedication tablet dated to the year 933 of the local era that began in 57 BCE, which is 876 CE. The tablet records a gift of land 270 hastas long for a flower garden and an endowment for 50 garlands a day; a hasta is a forearm’s length, roughly a cubit. The zeros in 270 and 50 are why the mathematician Bill Casselman, writing for the American Mathematical Society, called it the oldest “0” in India to which a definite date can be assigned.

So is it the world’s first zero? No, and the difference matters. In 2017 radiocarbon dating of the Bakhshali manuscript, published by Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, placed parts of that text centuries earlier; Oxford said the Gwalior inscription had until then been considered the oldest recorded example of a zero used as a placeholder in India. Dated is the key word. Gwalior’s zero is fixed by its own inscription, while the manuscript’s age rests on laboratory dating of its material.

The last temple layer is the Sas-Bahu pair. The ASI records that the larger of these twin Vaishnava temples was completed by the Kachchhapaghata king Mahipala in 1093, when Gwalior was that dynasty’s main seat. Its three-storied hall carries a bell-shaped roof about 24 m high, and its lintels show scenes from Krishna’s life. The ASI’s verdict is candid: the workmanship is poorer than Teli ka Mandir’s, but the temple matters because it is securely dated.

The Tomar century and Man Singh’s palace

The Tomars made Gwalior a kingdom in its own right. After Iltutmish took the fort in 1232, the Delhi Sultans held it for nearly two centuries and, as Cunningham’s survey notes, used it as a state prison for kinsmen they wanted out of the way. Then, during Timur’s invasion of 1398, the Tomar chief Vira Sinha Deva broke away from the Delhi Sultanate and made Gwalior independent.

That kingdom lasted about 120 years among three larger Muslim states whose rivalry with one another, Cunningham argues, kept any one of them from swallowing it. Its greatest builder was Raja Man Singh Tomar (1486-1516), whom the ASI calls a great patron of architecture and music. His palace, the Man Mandir, is the fort’s signature:

• Its eastern face is about 300 ft long, broken at intervals by six round towers crowned with domed cupolas.
• The wall is inlaid with enameled blue, green and yellow tiles in bands showing men, ducks, elephants, crocodiles, tigers and trees.
• Inside, two open courtyards are ringed by rooms with carved screens and tiled patterns.

The tiles were so abundant that the building was also known as the Chit Mandir, the painted palace. The Gujari Mahal, which Britannica dates to about 1500, is attributed by Cunningham to Man Singh’s Gujar queen, Mrignayani.

The Tomar kingdom ended in a siege. Cunningham records that Ibrahim Lodi‘s army besieged the fort for a whole year after Man Singh’s death, taking the gates one by one and capturing the Badalgarh outwork in 1518, until only the uppermost gate was left and Man Singh’s son Vikramaditya surrendered on favorable terms. The Lodi dynasty gave him an estate, and the last Tomar raja died in 1526 at the first of the battles of Panipat, fighting for the Sultan who had taken his fort.

Babur’s visit and the Mughal state prison

The best eyewitness description of Man Singh’s palace comes from its new owner’s family. In September 1528, Babur toured the fort, entering through the Hathi Pol, a gate named for the carved elephant with two riders that stood at its exit, and he wrote that of all the Rajas’ buildings, “Man-sing’s is the best and loftiest”. He noticed the green tiles worked into the shapes of plantain trees, and he found the lowest storeys so dark that his party went through them with candles.

The same pages record a harder moment. In the Urwahi valley on the western side of the hill, Babur saw the Jain images cut into the rock faces and wrote that he had “ordered them destroyed”. The ASI dates these rock-cut colossi mostly to the 15th century and records that the largest standing figure is 57 ft tall; they survive, and the ASI calls them unique in northern India for their number and their size.

A line often credited to Babur, calling Gwalior the pearl among the fortresses of Hind, does not appear in Annette Beveridge’s standard English translation of his memoir. Treat it as a later attribution unless you can cite the passage.

Under the Mughals the fort’s old role as a prison returned. Britannica records that the emperor Jahangir, wary of the growing strength of the Sikhs, had Guru Hargobind jailed in the fortress of Gwalior. How long he was held is disputed: Britannica gives twelve years, while the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says historians differ widely and that he appears to have been held for a few months sometime between 1617 and 1619.

Sikh tradition remembers how he left. It holds that when the emperor ordered the Guru’s release, he refused to go unless 52 captive chiefs held with him were freed too, and that is why he is remembered as Bandi Chhor, the liberator of prisoners. Gurdwara Data Bandi Chhor, inside the fort, marks the place.

Marathas, the British and the battle of 1858

After the Mughals, Gwalior passed to the Marathas and became the seat of one of their greatest houses. Britannica says the fort changed hands between Muslim and Hindu rulers until 1751 and remained a Maratha stronghold after that. The Sindhias, a dynasty of the Maratha Empire, laid the foundations of the Gwalior state around 1745 under Ranoji Sindhia, and the state reached its greatest extent under Mahadaji Sindhia (r. 1761-94), whose officers, Britannica notes, took tribute even from the Rajput rulers of Jaipur and Jodhpur.

The British took the fort three times, in 1780, 1843 and 1858. In between, the state lost territory to them in 1803 and 1818 and came completely under British domination in the 1840s.

The revolt of 1857-58 split Gwalior down the middle. Britannica records that the Sindhia ruler stayed loyal to the British while his army joined the rebels. Then Tatya Tope and Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi mounted a successful assault on the city-fortress of Gwalior, seized its treasury and arsenal and proclaimed Nana Sahib as peshwa. The Rani rode east to Morar to meet the British counterattack under General Hugh Rose and was killed in combat near Kotah-ki-Serai in June 1858. Accounts differ on whether she died on 17 or 18 June; 18 June is the date popularly observed. Her cenotaph stands in Lashkar, the city south of the fort that began in 1810 as a military camp and later became the capital of the princely state.

The British retook the fort in 1858 and held it until 1886, when they evacuated it in exchange for British rule over the city of Jhansi. The princely state of Gwalior joined independent India in 1948.

The six gates, in the order an attacker climbs them

Gwalior’s main defense is the cliff itself; the gates only guard the one practical way up. Cunningham’s survey counts six gates on the eastern ascent, and taken from the bottom they are:

• Alamgiri Gate, the lowest, added in 1660 by Motamid Khan, the Mughal governor, and named after the emperor Aurangzeb (Alamgir); Cunningham calls it the plainest of the six.
• Badalgarh or Hindola Gate, named after Badal Singh, Man Singh’s uncle, and dated by the ASI to about the 15th century; it leads into the Badalgarh outwork.
• Bhairon Gate, the third on the climb.
• Ganesh Gate, built by the Tomar raja Dungar Singh in the 15th century.
• Lakshman Gate, named after Lakshman Singh of the Tomar line, where the ASI thinks an earlier gate stood in the 9th century.
• Hathi Pol, the uppermost, set into Man Singh’s palace, with the carved elephant Babur described.

The sequence is not theory. In Ibrahim Lodi’s siege, Cunningham records, the lower gates fell one after another after stubborn resistance, and a leading Lodi noble, Taj Nizam, was killed in the first assault on the Lakshman Gate, which he calls the fourth gate because the Alamgiri Gate had not yet been built. When only the Hathi Pol was left, the Tomar raja chose terms over a final assault. Each gate had done its job, which was to make every stage of the climb cost time and lives.

The western side was guarded differently. Babur describes the mouth of the Urwahi valley closed by two stages of high wall, one of them curving inward to enclose a stepped well so that the garrison’s water could not be cut off, and he read an inscription of Iltutmish above its gate dated 630 AH, or 1233 CE. The ASI dates the Urwahi gate to the years after Iltutmish’s conquest of 1232. On a hilltop, as at Daulatabad, the water supply was a defense in its own right.

Gwalior fort today: Tentative List, not World Heritage

Gwalior fort is centrally protected by the ASI and sits on India’s Tentative List for World Heritage, but it has not been inscribed. Three labels are in play, and they are easy to blur:

• ASI protection: the Bhopal Circle protects the fort’s monuments, including the Man Mandir, Teli ka Mandir, the Sas-Bahu temples, the Jain colossi and the gates.
• Tentative List: India submitted “Gwalior Fort, Madhya Pradesh” on 8 February 2024 as a cultural property under criteria (ii) and (iv), as the UNESCO entry shows. Criterion (ii) concerns an exchange of human values in architecture and art; criterion (iv) an outstanding example of a type of building or ensemble that illustrates a significant stage in history.
• Creative City: the city of Gwalior joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network for music in 2023, and UNESCO’s profile describes it as the birthplace of the Dhrupad and Khayal forms and notes that the Tansen Sangeet Samaroh draws 4,000 to 5,000 people a day.

A Tentative List entry is a statement of intent, the step before a nomination; India’s list still carries entries submitted in 1998. The roundup of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in India lists what has actually been inscribed.

The music title connects back to the fort. The ASI remembers Man Singh as a patron of music as much as of building, and Gwalior is also where Tansen lies, in a 16th-century tomb in the city. The Creative City listing honors that living tradition; it says nothing about the fort’s walls.

How to study Gwalior fort for exams

Gwalior fort touches an unusually wide slice of the syllabus:

• Early medieval temple architecture, through Teli ka Mandir and the Sas-Bahu temples.
• The history of Indian mathematics, through the dated zero of 876 CE.
• The Delhi Sultanate, the Tomars, the Lodis and the Mughals, in medieval history.
• Sikh history, through Guru Hargobind’s detention.
• The Revolt of 1857, through Rani Laxmibai and Tatya Tope at Gwalior.
• Heritage recognition, through the Tentative List and the Creative Cities Network.

The medieval layer is where Mains reaches for sources. Mains 2020 GS Paper I asked: “Persian literary sources of medieval India reflect the spirit of the age. Comment.” Babur’s description of Gwalior is a tempting example, but handle it with care: Babur wrote his memoir in Turki, and early British translators such as William Erskine worked from its Persian version. Saying so in one line shows the examiner you know your source.

Revise these facts until they come without effort:

• Gopachal means cowherd’s hill; the fort’s first mention is a temple inscription of about 525 CE.
• Teli ka Mandir has a Valabhi roof on a Nagara base, and the ASI dates it to the mid-8th century.
• The Chaturbhuj temple tablet is dated 876 CE (year 933 of the local era), with zeros in 270 and 50.
• The larger Sas-Bahu temple was completed by the Kachchhapaghata king Mahipala in 1093.
• The Tomars ruled from 1398; Man Singh (1486-1516) built the tiled Man Mandir; Ibrahim Lodi took the fort in 1518.
• Under Jahangir the fort held Guru Hargobind, remembered at Gurdwara Data Bandi Chhor.
• In 1858 Tatya Tope and Rani Laxmibai took Gwalior, and she was killed near Kotah-ki-Serai on 17 or 18 June.

Four confusions come up again and again. Teli ka Mandir is mid-8th century in the ASI’s reading, so don’t copy the 11th-century date from shorter references. Gwalior’s zero is the oldest in India with a definite date, not the oldest zero anywhere. The pearl-among-fortresses line is not in Babur’s memoir as Beveridge translated it. And a Creative City of Music is a title for the city, not a heritage listing for the fort.

The four labels sit side by side like this:

Gwalior fort rewards the aspirant who learns it in layers. One hill carries evidence from the 6th century to the 19th, and very few sites let a single paragraph cover that much of the syllabus. Learn the layers in order, and each becomes an example you can drop into a different answer, from temple architecture to the revolt of 1857.

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Questions

Prelims

1. Consider the following statements about the Chaturbhuj temple inscription at Gwalior:
1. It is dated to 876 CE and writes the numbers 270 and 50 with a symbol for zero.
2. It is the oldest known use of zero anywhere in the world.
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 inscription is securely dated to 876 CE, but radiocarbon dating of the Bakhshali manuscript in 2017 suggested earlier zeros, so it can’t be called the world’s oldest.

2. Consider the following statements:
1. Gwalior Fort was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2024.
2. Gwalior is a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the field of music.
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: (b) The fort entered India’s Tentative List in 2024 but is not inscribed; the city became a Creative City of Music in 2023.

3. The larger of the Sas-Bahu temples at Gwalior, completed in 1093, was built under which dynasty?

• (a) Gurjara-Pratiharas
• (b) Kachchhapaghatas
• (c) Tomars
• (d) Chandelas

Answer: (b) The ASI records that the Kachchhapaghata king Mahipala completed it in 1093.

4. Consider the following statements about Teli ka Mandir at Gwalior Fort:
1. Its superstructure combines a Valabhi roof with a Nagara base.
2. The ASI dates it to the mid-8th century.
3. It was built by Raja Man Singh Tomar.
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) Teli ka Mandir predates Man Singh by some seven centuries; he built the Man Mandir palace.

5. Which one of the following gates on the eastern approach to Gwalior Fort was added in 1660 by the Mughal governor Motamid Khan?

• (a) Hathi Pol
• (b) Alamgiri Gate
• (c) Ganesh Gate
• (d) Lakshman Gate

Answer: (b) The Alamgiri Gate, the lowest of the six, is named after the reigning emperor Aurangzeb (Alamgir).

Mains

1. How will you explain that medieval Indian temple sculptures represent the social life of those days? (10 marks, 150 words) Previous year: Mains 2022, GS Paper I.
2. The rock-cut architecture represents one of the most important sources of our knowledge of early Indian art and history. Discuss. (10 marks, 150 words) Previous year: Mains 2020, GS Paper I.
3. “Gwalior fort is less a single monument than a layered archive of Indian history.” Discuss with reference to its inscriptions, temples and palaces. (15 marks, 250 words)
4. Distinguish between the UNESCO World Heritage List, the Tentative List and the Creative Cities Network, using Gwalior as the example. (10 marks, 150 words)
5. Trace the use of Gwalior fort as a state prison from the Delhi Sultanate to the Mughals, and assess what that role reveals about the fort’s strategic value. (15 marks, 250 words)