Chittorgarh Fort

Where it sits. Chittor Fort occupies a plateau 180 metres above the plains of the Berach valley, in southern Rajasthan roughly 115 kilometres north-east of Udaipur and 300 south of Jaipur. It is one of the largest forts in India: about 280 hectares of hilltop, some 13 kilometres of wall, and inside them 65 surviving historic structures, including four palaces, nineteen major temples, twenty water bodies and several memorial towers. The scale is the first thing that surprises people. This is not a building on a hill but a fortified town on a plateau, and a car or an auto-rickshaw is genuinely useful for the circuit.

The story behind it. Chittor was the capital of Mewar from the eighth century until 1559, when Maharana Udai Singh II moved the court to the new city of Udaipur. Its history is dominated by three sieges — Alauddin Khalji in 1303, Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1535, and Akbar in 1568 — each ending in the fort's fall and, in Rajput tradition, in jauhar, the mass self-immolation of the women of the garrison before the men rode out. Whatever the historical detail behind those accounts, they made Chittor the emotional centre of Rajput identity, and the fort has functioned ever since as a memorial rather than a working stronghold. UNESCO inscribed it in 2013 within the Hill Forts of Rajasthan.

What you actually see. A serpentine road about a kilometre long climbs to the plateau through seven successive gates — Padan Pol, Bhairon Pol, Hanuman Pol, Ganesh Pol, Jorla Pol, Laxman Pol and Ram Pol — with memorial chhatris marking where Rajput commanders fell. On top, the highlights spread over several kilometres:

• Vijay Stambha, the tower of victory raised by Rana Kumbha between 1448 and 1458 to mark a defeat of Mahmud Khilji: 37 metres, nine storeys, sculpted inside and out, and climbable by a narrow internal stair of 157 steps.
• Kirti Stambha, a slimmer twelfth-century Jain tower of 22 metres dedicated to Adinath, older than its famous neighbour and far less visited.
• Rana Kumbha's palace, now a roofless shell, with the underground chambers associated with the jauhar of 1535.
• Padmini's Palace, a small water pavilion in a tank, whose mirror is part of the legend surrounding Alauddin Khalji's siege.
• The Meera Temple and the larger Kumbha Shyam Temple of 1449, both linked to the poet-saint Mirabai.

Beyond those, the plateau holds the Gaumukh Kund, a spring-fed reservoir under the western rim that supplied the garrison and still runs, the Fateh Prakash palace with its small archaeological museum, the Kalika Mata temple converted from an eighth-century sun shrine, and long stretches of rampart where nothing has been restored at all and the wall simply runs off into scrub.

On screen. Chittor's cinematic history contains one famous presence and one famous absence. The presence is Guide (1965): Vijay Anand filmed Aaj Phir Jeene Ki Tamanna Hai, picturised on Waheeda Rehman, on the fort — one of the most-replayed sequences in Hindi film, and the reason a generation of Indian travellers first knew what Chittorgarh looked like. The absence is Padmaavat (2018). Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film is set at Chittor, but not a frame of it was shot there. The production began at Jaigarh Fort near Jaipur in January 2017, where Bhansali was assaulted and the set vandalised by protesters from the Rajput Karni Sena; the shoot moved to the Masai plateau near Kolhapur in Maharashtra, was disrupted again, and finished on constructed sets in Mumbai. Protests closed markets in Chittorgarh town and blocked access to Kumbhalgarh in late 2017. The fort that the film is about was, in the end, the one place it could not use.

Getting there and timing. Chittorgarh has a railway station on the Delhi–Ahmedabad line, about six kilometres from the fort gate, and the town sits on the highway between Udaipur and Kota, making the fort a straightforward day trip or a stop on the drive north from Udaipur. Entry is ticketed by the Archaeological Survey of India, and a light-and-sound show runs in the evening near Rana Kumbha's palace. October to March is the season; May and June exceed 42°C on an entirely unshaded plateau. Allow three to four hours, hire a guide at the gate for the sieges and the temples, and budget for a vehicle: the distances between the monuments inside the walls are measured in kilometres, not metres.