Rohtas Fort

Purpose

In 1540 Sher Shah Sur, an Afghan noble from Bihar, defeated Humayun at Kannauj and drove him out of India. Humayun fled west towards Persia, and his brother Kamran held Kabul. The Grand Trunk Road from Bengal to the north-west passed through the Salt Range near Jhelum, country held by the Gakhar chiefs, who had sided with the Mughals. Sher Shah ordered a fortress to block any Mughal return and to subdue the Gakhars. He named it Rohtas after the hill fort in Bihar that he had taken in 1539.

The construction is usually dated from 1541. Tradition gives the supervision to Todar Mal, the Khatri official who later became Akbar's revenue minister, and says that the Gakhars forbade local men to work on it, so that wages had to be raised to attract labour.

The fortress

Rohtas sits on high ground above a gorge of the Kahan river. Its walls run for about four kilometres in an irregular circuit following the ground, with dozens of bastions and twelve gates. The walls are of dressed stone, in places more than twelve metres high and several metres thick, with multiple levels of firing positions. An inner wall divides off a citadel at the western end, where a smaller enclosure held the commander's quarters. The great gates, especially the Sohail Gate, combine Afghan and Persian forms with carved decoration from the Hindu building tradition of northern India.

Rohtas is one of the earliest large forts of the sultanate world built with gunpowder warfare in mind, but it was designed mainly as a strong garrison base rather than a royal residence. It had a mosque and stepwells to secure water for a large garrison.

The one notable later building inside the walls is a small palace on the highest point of the citadel, known as the Haveli of Man Singh. It is attributed to Raja Man Singh of Amber, Akbar's general, who passed through the region on campaigns to the north-west, and its style is quite unlike the Afghan work around it.

History

Sher Shah died in 1545 at the siege of Kalinjar, before the fort was finished. When Humayun returned from Persia in 1555, the commander of Rohtas abandoned it, and the Mughals took it without a fight. It was never besieged in earnest. Under the Mughals it lost much of its importance, since Kabul and Lahore were both in Mughal hands. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Afghan and Sikh forces passed through, and Ranjit Singh's government used it.

The village inside the walls is still lived in. The fort's size and its state of preservation led UNESCO to list it in 1997 as an example of early Muslim military architecture in South Asia.