Bala Hisar, Peshawar: the fort of the Durrani kings

At a glance

• The Bala Hisar (بالا حصار, "high fort") is the brick fort on the mound at the north-west corner of old Peshawar. Kabul's citadel has the same name.

• Babur planned in September 1519 to fit up a fort at Peshawar and store corn in it, then dropped the plan within days when news came from Badakhshan. His memoirs do not name the Bala Hisar. [1]

• Under the Sadozai Durrani kings the hill held the royal palace and its gardens. Timur Shah made Peshawar one of his two capitals, and Elphinstone was received in the Bala Hisar by Shah Shuja on 5 March 1809. [2, 8]

• The Sikhs wrecked the palace and gardens after the battle of Nowshera. Caroe dates this to 1823; Burnes found a heap of ruins in 1832. [4, 8]

• A Sikh inscription of 1834 names the rebuilt fort Sameer Garh (Sumergarh). The name did not last. [9, 10]

• The British rebuilt the outer walls in 1849. The Frontier Corps has held the fort since 1948, and a small museum of weapons and uniforms stands inside. [10–12]

The mound and its walls

The Bala Hisar stands on a small rise outside the old wall on the north-west side of Peshawar, and from there it commands the whole city. The Punjab Gazetteer of 1883 measured it as a four-sided fort, 220 yards along its south, west and east faces and 200 yards along the north. The walls were sun-dried brick 92 feet high, with a lower outer wall of 30 feet in front, bastions at the corners and on three faces, magazines inside, three wells and guns and mortars on the ramparts. [6]

The name is Persian: bālā "high" and hiṣār "fort". Arab News gives it as "high fort". [11] Kabul has its own Bala Hisar, the citadel that Pashtun kings ruled from, and the story of that one is told in Kabul and its Pashtuns. The older history of Peshawar's mound, from the Kushan city to the Mughal fort, is in Peshawar: a short history.

Babur's plan for a fort at Peshawar

Babur's memoirs mention a fort at Peshawar once, in a plan that came to nothing. In September 1519 he left Kabul to deal with the Yusufzai. Near Sultanpur the Dilazak chiefs Bu Khan and Musa, Pashtuns of the Peshawar plain, told him there was a large horde in Hashtnagar and much corn to be had there, and pressed him to go. After a council Babur agreed that the Afghans there would be overrun, that "the forts of Hash-naghar and Parashāwar shall be put into order", that part of the corn would be stored in them and that Shah Mir Husain would be left in charge with a body of men. [1]

The Hashtnagar plan failed on the ground: "Not a half, not a fourth indeed of the promised corn was had," Babur wrote on 29 September, and the Dilazak who had urged it "were ashamed". [1] He then settled on a second plan, to raid the Afridi and fit up the Peshawar fort from their goods and corn. On 1 October news came that Sultan Said Khan had designs on Badakhshan, and "it seemed inadvisable to victual the fort (Pūrshāwūr)". The army turned back through the Khyber. [1]

Babur does not say where the fort stood, and he does not call it the Bala Hisar, so the passage cannot be tied to the mound. Seven months earlier, in March 1519, he had written of the same plain that "in spring near Parashāwar the fields of flowers are very beautiful indeed". [1] The Imperial Gazetteer adds that in 1552 Humayun found the fortress at Peshawar in ruins, repaired it and left a governor, who held it against the Afghans under Khan Kaju. [7]

The Sadozai court on the hill

Ahmad Shah Durrani made Kandahar his capital. Caroe writes that Ahmad knew Peshawar "only as a staging-point for his invasions of the Panjab, and a place where difficult questions of tribal loyalties and backslidings had always to be faced". His son Timur Shah, in Caroe's words, had "Babur's love for Kabul in summer and for the flower-strewn beauty of Peshawar in spring", and made his summer and winter capitals in the two places, building palaces in both. [8] Caroe describes Timur's palace and gardens as lying "in and below the Bala Hissar at Peshawar". [8] How Timur came to leave Kandahar, and how his sons held the kingdom, is told in Timur Shah, Zaman Shah and the Sadozai kings.

The palace was also where a plot against the king came to a head. In 1779, Elphinstone writes, the Khalil chief Feizullah Khan marched his Khyber levies up to the citadel of Peshawar on the pretence of showing them to Timur, killed the guards at the gate and rushed in. Timur withdrew to an upper room, and his guards cut Feizullah's men down. Elphinstone names the place: many of the levies, discovering the plan "after they had reached Balia Hissaur", refused to follow, and Feizullah cut down his own nephew at the gate for refusing to enter the palace. [3]

Elphinstone at Shah Shuja's court, 1809

Mountstuart Elphinstone, a British envoy, reached Peshawar on 25 February 1809 and spent the next months there. His account of the Bala Hisar is the only close description of the Durrani court on the hill. He was not allowed to see Shah Shuja for the first week, because the two sides disagreed about the form of presentation. [2]

On 5 March the mission rode about three quarters of a mile through crowded streets to "the palace, or castle, in which the King resides". The open ground below was full of people, who "covered the side of the hill on which the castle stands, like the audience at a theatre". At the gate the king's band was playing, and the mission's drums and trumpets were told to stop. After about a hundred yards on foot and a flight of steps they came to a long, narrow guard-room, the kishik khāna, where about a hundred and fifty people sat along the walls. A man Elphinstone took to be the king's imam received him, and across the room sat the lords of the court. Some looked like Persians and some like Durranis, and lower down "were some of the chiefs of the hill tribes near Peshawer". [2]

The conversation while they waited was about learning. The imam asked about the Christian sects and explained the Muslim ones, and another courtier asked how many universities England had and what they taught, and then asked for an account of the European picture of the heavens. [2] The mission then passed through an oblong court with painted cypresses, a pond and fountains to the hall where Shuja sat beneath arches; the king and his jewels are described in the Timur Shah article. The hall was open on all sides, and from it, Elphinstone writes, he saw "an extensive garden, full of cypresses and other trees, and beyond was a plain of the richest verdure". [2]

He saw that garden at closer range later, on a day spent there, and called it the garden of "Shauh Lemaun". Part of the hill under the Bala Hisar was included in it, and handsome buildings of the fort looked down on it from the south. Six long ponds fell in cascades to a basin with a two-storey summer-house, and there were sixty-nine fountains. Elphinstone spent the afternoon in a pavilion reading the Persian verses written on its walls, most of which "alluded to the instability of fortune, and some were very applicable to the King's actual condition". [2] He judged the fort itself harshly in another passage: "a castle of no strength", handsome and commanding on its north side but showing "strong signs of weakness and decay" from the town, and "only the occasional residence of the King", so "much neglected". [2]

The Sikhs wreck the palace

In 1823 Muhammad Azim Khan, the Muhammadzai Sardar who ruled Kabul, marched to Peshawar to meet Ranjit Singh's army at Nowshera. Caroe's account of the battle puts the fighting on the tribesmen. Pashtun ghazis, Yusufzai and Khattak, held the rocky hillocks at Pir Sabak and, after a hand-to-hand struggle with the Sikh Akalis, in which the Akali leader Phula Singh was killed, almost broke the Sikh infantry. The Sikhs took Pir Sabak only at the fourth attempt, with Ranjit Singh himself at the head of his Gurkhas and bodyguard. Azim Khan, on the other bank of the river, never crossed and retreated that evening. The tribesmen rallied the next morning under their Pirzada, Akbar, and found the Sardar gone. Caroe says the vast graveyards south of the Tarakai hillocks near Nowshera still mark "a sacrifice that is still remembered". [8]

Ranjit Singh then marched to Peshawar. Caroe writes that he "battered down the Bala Hissar and sacked the fair palace within, where fourteen years earlier Shah Shuja had received Elphinstone so regally", cut the cypresses of the garden below and let his cavalry ruin the orchards. [8] Caroe adds that "the Sikhsāhī", the Sikh rule, "is a synonym for misgovernment and oppression in the mouths of teachers and children to this day". [8] Caroe was writing in the 1950s and gives this as what he heard.

The sources agree on the ruin and differ on its date. The 1883 gazetteer says in one place that Ranjit Singh, returning to Peshawar shortly after the defeat of Sayyid Ahmad at Saidu, "caused a part of the city, including the royal residence of Bala Hissar to be destroyed", and in another that the Sikh fort stood "on the ruins of the Bala Hissar or state residence of the Duranis, which was destroyed by the Sikhs after the battle of Nowshera". [6] Two visitors saw the result. Charles Masson, an Englishman who crossed from Kohat to Peshawar in the years after 1826, found the Bala Hisar "entirely in ruins, only the garden remaining, in a neglected condition". [5] Alexander Burnes, who stayed with the Barakzai chief Sultan Muhammad Khan in 1832, wrote: "I visited the Bala Hissar, in which Shah Shooja had received so gorgeously the Cabool mission of 1809. It is now a heap of ruins, having been burned by the Seiks in one of their expeditions to this country." [4]

Sumergarh, the Sikh fort

The Sikhs made the hill a fort of their own. By 1835 Hari Singh was the Sikh governor of the province. The gazetteer says that in 1835 and 1836 he strengthened his position "by building a new fortress on the site of the Bala Hissar". [6] The marble inscription over the arched gate of the main courtyard, as the Friday Times quoted it in 2016, reads: "Victory to Porakh. Through the grace of Sri Akal under the liberal government of Maharaja Ranjeet Singh Bahudur over the region of Peshawar, in the year 1891 (Vikram Samrat) (A.D. 1834) this was built by Raja Bikramajit and named Sameer Garh." [9]

The inscription spells the name Sameer Garh; other writers give Sumergarh, Samir Garh or Samargarh. An official of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa archaeology directorate told Associated Press of Pakistan that the Sikhs "tried to rename it" but the name stayed unpopular. [10] Peshawar went on calling the fort the Bala Hisar. Writers differ on who rebuilt it: the gazetteer and the Friday Times name Hari Singh, while the same official credits Sher Singh, on his father Ranjit Singh's orders, and says the work was in unbaked brick. [6, 9, 10] A watercolour by the traveller G. T. Vigne, dated 7 November 1836 and labelled "Runjeet Sing's fort at Peshawur", shows the new fort from the south-west, with the direction of the Khyber pass marked beside it.

Dost Muhammad tried to retake Peshawar. In April 1835 he came into the Khyber and camped at Shaikhan, where the Afridi maliks who had been taking Sikh pay joined him, but he withdrew when Ranjit Singh arrived with about 40,000 men. [6] The attack of 1837 at Jamrud, in which Hari Singh was killed, is told in Peshawar: a short history.

British walls and the Frontier Corps

The British annexed the Punjab in 1849 and took the fort with it. The same archaeology directorate says that at annexation the Bala Hisar had mud walls and that the British replaced them with red brick, the shape the fort has today. [10] Caroe was blunter: the fort on the site of the Bala Hissar was "a Sikh barrack affair, patched up by the military engineers of the British time". [8] The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 still gave the wall as 92 feet high, with guns mounted on top. [7]

Since 1948 the fort has been the headquarters of the Frontier Corps, the paramilitary force. [11, 12] In February 2018 the Peshawar High Court ruled that the fort should be open to the public and, if it could not be vacated, handed to the civil administration. A senior Frontier Corps official told Arab News that the fort held "sensitive gadgetry related to security". [11] In June 2019 the Express Tribune reported that the provincial archaeology department had proposed restoring the fort as a tourist site, that parts of it were open on weekends, and that a museum of antique weapons, uniforms and equipment had been set up inside. [12] The fort remains the Corps' headquarters.