Rohtas Fort: Sher Shah Suri's fortress on the Jhelum

At a glance

• Rohtas Fort stands on a low hill beside the Kahan stream, about 16 km north-west of Jhelum in Pakistan's Punjab. Sher Shah Suri, the Afghan king of Delhi, began it in 1541 after driving Humayun out of India. [7, 9]

• It was built to hold the Gakhar hill country and to bar the road from Kabul against Humayun's return. His chronicler, the Afghan Abbas Khan Sarwani, calls it the fort "on the road to Khurasan". [1, 4]

• The walls run for more than 4 km round 70 hectares, with 68 bastions and twelve gates. [6, 7]

• Sher Shah died in 1545, and the sources disagree on when the fort was finished. Its governor gave it up to Humayun without a fight in 1555. [4, 6]

• UNESCO listed it in 1997. Its walls have fallen in places, and a village still lives inside them. [7, 10]

Why a fort on the Jhelum

In 1540 Humayun lost Hindustan to a Pashtun army and fled to Lahore and then out of India (see Sher Shah Suri). Sher Shah then came up to the Punjab. Abbas Khan Sarwani, the Afghan chronicler of the Sur kings, says that on this journey Sher Shah gave "to many of his kindred who came from Roh money and property far exceeding their expectations". [1] He then moved against the Gakhars, the hill people of the Salt Range and the country below Rawalpindi. Their chief, Sarang, had not come to wait on him. [1]

Abbas gives the king's plan in one sentence. Sher Shah marched through the hills of Padman and Garjhak "in order that he might choose a fitting site and build a fort there to keep down the Ghakkars, in which he might leave a garrison on the Kabul road". [1] He chose Rohtas, laid waste the Gakhar country, took captives and gave Sarang's daughter to his commander Khawas Khan. [1]

The Gakhars were not Pashtuns, and Olaf Caroe, a British frontier official writing in 1958, notes that on this frontier the Surs "contended" with Punjabi tribes and not with Pathans. [5] Mishra, whom the Patna translator B. P. Ambashthya quotes, explains why the Gakhars held out. Sarang had fought Babur, been won over by the Mughal emperor's generosity and become a firm supporter of the Mughals, so he would not submit to Sher Shah. [4] The ground mattered too. Ambashthya calls the Gakhar country a springboard for three provinces, the Punjab, Kabul and Kashmir. [4] The fort was meant to keep the Mughals out of India and to hold the Gakhars at the same moment. [4]

The Afghan chronicles do not agree on who built it for the king. Ahmad Yadgar says Sher Shah ordered Haibat Khan Niyazi to raise it. Niamatullah, as Ambashthya reads him, puts Todar Mal Khatri and Haibat Khan in charge, and Ambashthya notes that this is the first mention of the man who later became Akbar's finance minister. [4] Abbas himself names neither as its builder. UNESCO says the building began in 1541, and Ambashthya has Sher Shah leaving the Punjab for Delhi in the spring of that year after laying the foundations. [4, 7]

Todar Mal and the price of stone

The best-known story of the building is the Gakhars' vow. In the account Ambashthya prints, the men of the Gakhars swore not to work for the Afghans, and anyone who hired himself out was to be put out of the tribe. Todar Mal could not find one labourer to carry stone, and the work stopped until he wrote to Sher Shah, who told him to spend whatever was needed. On the first day of resumed work Todar Mal paid one ashrafi, a gold coin, for each stone carried. The Gakhars broke their vow, the crowd of labourers grew, and the price of a stone fell from an ashrafi to a rupee. [4]

Abbas has a different story about money. Stone was hard to find, and the overseers wrote that it could only be had at great cost. Sher Shah wrote back "that his order should not be allowed to fail from avarice", and that they should go on building even if they paid for the stone its weight in copper. [1] Abbas says the king called the new fort "Little Rohtas". [1] Ambashthya notes that the older and bigger Rohtas is in Bihar, and ICOMOS says the name comes from Rohtasgarh, the site of Sher Shah's victory in 1539 over a Hindu power. [4, 6] The Tarikh-i Daudi of Abdullah gives the cost as 8 krors, 5 lakhs, 5,000 and 2.5 dams of Bahloli coin, a figure it says is written over the gate. [2, 4]

A fort Sher Shah did not live to finish

Sher Shah died in 1545. The sources do not agree on the date of completion. Ambashthya cites Sajan Rai for the statement that Islam Shah, Sher Shah's son, finished it while campaigning against the Niazis and the Gakhars, and Caroe, telling the story of Humayun's brother Kamran in Islam Shah's reign, writes that the fortress "had just been completed". [4, 5] Shahamat Ali, the Persian secretary of Colonel Wade's mission, who passed Rohtas in 1839, wrote that it took twelve years and one month. [3] Caroe, who quotes Shahamat Ali, thought so large a work could not have been done in Sher Shah's short reign, and that it was finished about the middle of the next one, but that "the conception was Sher Shah's". [5] ICOMOS, the body that advised UNESCO, dates the building 1541–43. [6]

Its commanders were Pashtun nobles. Abbas puts Haibat Khan Niyazi, titled Azam Humayun, near the fort with 30,000 horse, to hold Kashmir and the Gakhars in check. [1] Other chroniclers give 20,000 horse (Tarikh-i Daudi) or 50,000 (Niamatullah). [4] Under Islam Shah, Azam Humayun and other Niazi chiefs rebelled, were beaten near Sambhal, and fled to the Gakhars. Islam Shah spent two years fighting the Gakhars. In the Tarikh-i Daudi it is Islam Shah who caught Sarang and had him flayed alive, while Ambashthya, citing Niamatullah, says Sher Shah ordered it. [2, 4] Ambashthya judges that the act did not win the Gakhars over and made them worse enemies. [4]

What the walls are

ICOMOS read the fort in 1997 as a complex of defences round a small hill beside the Kahan river. [6] Its figures are the ones UNESCO repeats.

• The wall is irregular, bending with the ground, and runs for more than 4 km round 70 hectares. [6, 7]

• It is built of stone and is up to 12.5 m thick. Its height varies from 10.05 m to 18.28 m with the terrain. [6]

• There are usually two inner terraces, three where the wall is high, joined by stone stairs, with merlons on top. Inside the thickness of the wall are vaulted galleries for the garrison's quarters and stores. [6]

• The wall is lined with 68 semicircular solid bastions, spaced unevenly. [6]

• It has twelve gates, some double and some single. Four cover especially vulnerable approaches and are double or oblique, so that an attacker has extra hazards to cross. [6]

• A cross-wall 533 m long cuts off the inner citadel. [6]

The 2023 list of gates in The News on Sunday names Sohail, Shah Chandwali, Kabuli, Shishi, Langar Khani, Talaqi, Kashmiri, Khawas Khani, Gatali, Tulla Mori, Pipalwala and Sar. [11] The Sohail Gate is the finest. ICOMOS gives it as 21.34 m high, 20.7 m wide and 5 m deep, with a central opening 4.72 m wide, flanked by balconies on brackets and by bastions. [6] The Shishi Gate takes its name from the glazed tiles in the spandrels of its outer arch, one of the earliest uses of tile facing in the region. [6] The Shahi Masjid, a small mosque near the Kabuli Gate, has a prayer hall 19.2 m by 7.3 m. [6]

Water came from two baolis, stepped wells cut into the limestone, one of them near the Kabuli Gate with small chambers round it thought to be baths for the ruling family. [6] Little else was built inside, and much of the ground was given over to growing food for the garrison. [6] The Haveli Man Singh, the one palace, came later, in the Mughal period. [7]

Caroe called the walls "growing from the cliff like a Wall of China", and noted that the binding quality of the mortar was such that the fallen masses hold together like rocks. [5] ICOMOS said of the Sohail Gate's style that it was "based on earlier Pathan models" and had a profound influence on Mughal building. [6] UNESCO adds that the fort "blended architectural and artistic traditions from Turkey and the Indian subcontinent" and was a new form of fortification, based on Turkish military architecture developed in reaction to gunpowder and cannon. [7]

The Great Road

Rohtas is tied to the roads Sher Shah is remembered for. Abbas lists them. One went "from the fort which he built in the Panjab to the city of Sunargaon", near the sea in Bengal. Another ran from Agra to Burhanpur, a third from Agra to Jodhpur and Chitor, and a fourth from Lahore to Multan. [1] On every road he built a sarai at every second kos, 1,700 in all by Abbas's count. Each had separate lodgings for Hindus and Muslims, a well, a brick mosque with its imam and muezzin, and two horses to carry news. Villages grew up round the sarais, and fruit trees were planted beside the road for shade. [1] Islam Shah later added sarais between them, so that there was one at every half kos. [2]

Abbas also records how the king kept the roads safe. If a theft occurred and the thieves were not found, the headmen of the villages round it were arrested and made to pay. If they named the thieves, the penalty fell on the village that had sheltered them. [1] Dowson, the British editor of the 1872 translation, adds a footnote that Badauni saw the highway from Bengal to Rohtas "in many places so ornamented" after fifty-two years, and that in his own day "not a trace can be found of sarai, mosque, road, or tree". [1]

The route later became the Grand Trunk Road. India's 2015 tentative-list entry for the road at UNESCO lists it as Sadak-e-Azam or Shah Rah-e-Azam, "the Great Road", under the Sur dynasty (1540–1556), running from Kabul to Sonargaon, and says Sher Shah is "popularly credited" with rebuilding it. [8] Under the Mughals it was the Badshahi Sadak, and under the British the Grand Trunk Road. [8]

After the Surs

Humayun came back in 1555, ten years after Sher Shah's death. The governor of Rohtas, Tatar Khan Kasi, gave up the fort without resistance, according to ICOMOS. [6] It was then used by the Mughals until Aurangzeb's death in 1707. [7] In the winter of 1580–81 Akbar's half-brother Hakim, who ruled Kabul, made two incursions into the Punjab. He made overtures to the commander at Rohtas, and Caroe says they were "indignantly rejected". [5]

Ahmad Shah Durrani took Rohtas later, and Shahamat Ali was told that Baland Khan, once governor of Multan, held it for the Afghans with 3,000 men and no guns. [3] About 1768 Charat Singh and Gujar Singh, with a force of horse, foot and local men, besieged it for three months, and it fell chiefly through famine. [3] Baland Khan had killed Himmat Khan, the chief landowner of the neighbourhood, and appears to have been disliked. [3] Himmat Khan's son Raja Ghiasuddin was left as governor under the Sikhs, and his cousin Nur Khan held the post for thirty years. [3] In 1795 Zaman Shah, the Durrani king, sent a party forward from Hasan Abdal to take the fort's nominal surrender and then had to return to Kabul. [5]

Shahamat Ali found the fort "going to ruin" in 1839, with a village of about 350 houses and 1,200 people, mostly Muslims, inside the walls. [3] He was told that it had been meant to hold 3,000 cavalry, 50,000 infantry and a hundred guns. [3]

World Heritage and its condition

UNESCO inscribed Rohtas on 7 December 1997 under criteria (ii) and (iv), as "an exceptional example of early Muslim military architecture in central and south Asia". [7] Its text adds that "there are no surviving examples on the subcontinent of military architecture of this period on the same scale and with the same degree of completeness and preservation." [7] The fort has been a protected antiquity under Pakistan's Antiquities Act of 1975, and a conservation programme began in 2000 between the archaeology department and the Himalayan Wildlife Foundation. [7]

UNESCO's own account of the state of the fort is that most of its parts are in reasonable condition, but "the fortification wall, however, has collapsed at some places", and encroachment has disturbed the original drainage. [7] UNESCO adds that the wall is vulnerable to rainwater flooding and choking the original drainage. [7] In 2011 Dawn reported that the left inner face of the Talaqi Gate had collapsed after seepage, heavy rain and neglect, and that the right bastion and supporting wall of the Gatali Gate had also gone. The Shah Chandwali Gate's fallen arch had been rebuilt, and a Sher Shah Suri museum had been opened in the Sohail Gate. [9]

The village that Shahamat Ali counted is still there. In May 2023 Dawn reported that the number of houses inside the walls had risen sharply, mostly because families already living there were building more, and that a plan drawn up about eight years before to move the residents out, put at Rs2 billion, had not been carried out while the number of houses nearly doubled. [10] Officials proposed a police post at the main entrance to stop building material coming in without an NOC. [10] Waseem Shabbir Arain, writing in The News on Sunday the same year, said the fort had been "considerably encroached upon" and that residents had used its stone for their houses. [11]