City of Hope
Mark Law explores Daulatabad’s mighty fortress
Once you have edged your way through Daulatabad’s market, a frenetic entanglement of people, fruit, vegetables, cattle and traffic, you cross an open space where pale honey-coloured Langur monkeys lollop across the lawns. Then you come face to face with those awesome walls and a formidable gateway with huge teak doors studded with long spikes to incapacitate charging elephants. It is here that you enter one of the mightiest examples of medieval military engineering in the world.
India is cluttered with massive fortifications which make our greatest Welsh castles look like the work of miniaturists but few can rival Daulatabad’s vastness and devilish ingenuity. What you are about to see is so ludicrously epic in scale, so intricate in its design that it resembles the creation of an animation studio for some big budget fantasy movie.
Daulatabad is in Maharashtra some 300 kilometres from Mumbai. Tourists around here head for the famous caves of Ellora and Ajanta and few visit this ancient stronghold. They are missing something special.
Usually forts are built but Daulatabad has been sculpted. The walls of its astonishing citadel have been created by carving away the contours of a hill to form a giant cylinder with a conical top and vertical sides making an unassailable 160-foot-high cliff-face of wall rising out of a moat hewn deep into the rock and once populated with crocodiles.
This place had one brief moment of glory in the 14th century when, following his conquest of much of India, Muhammad bin Tughlak declared the place to be his new capital and ordered the entire population of Delhi to move here. He renamed it Daulatabad or ‘City of Hope’ but hope died three year later when Tughlak realised that there wasn’t enough water to sustain the population and ordered everyone back to Delhi.
However, during his occupation, Tughlak caused a massive construction programme for his grand new city. Its defences were already powerful – the scarping of the hill had been carried out in