Every great fort has a story. Gwalior Fort has several — and the most fascinating ones are the ones nobody can fully prove.

Rising 300 feet above the plains of Madhya Pradesh on a flat-topped sandstone plateau that stretches nearly three kilometres from end to end, Gwalior Fort does not announce itself gradually. It simply appears — massive, abrupt, impossibly vertical — as though the earth decided at some point to push a piece of itself straight upward and dare anyone to argue with the result. Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, looked at it and called it the pearl among the fortresses of India. That is not a casual compliment from a man who had seen most of Central Asia.

But here is what the history books grow quieter about: nobody knows with complete certainty who built it first, when it was first fortified, or which of the many dynasties that fought over it deserves the title of its true creator. The fort that stands today is the accumulated work of centuries — layers of ambition, conquest, devotion, and artistry pressed together into sandstone — and the mystery of its origins is woven into every wall.

The Legend That Started It All

The founding story of Gwalior Fort is the kind of story that historians distrust and travellers love, which makes it perfect.

According to local legend, a chieftain named Suraj Sen was suffering from leprosy when he encountered the sage Gwalipa on the rocky plateau above the plains. The sage offered Suraj Sen water from a sacred pond — the Suraj Kund, which still exists within the fort complex today — and cured him of his illness. In gratitude, the sage gave Suraj Sen the name Pal and instructed him to build and protect a fort on this very rock. He was warned that his descendants would hold the fort only as long as the name Pal remained in their lineage. Eventually, the name was abandoned, and with it, the dynasty’s grip on the fort.

Whether or not you believe any particular detail of this legend, it tells you something true about how Gwalior Fort exists in Indian cultural memory. It is not merely a military structure. It is a place charged with spiritual significance, origin story, and moral consequence. The Suraj Kund at its heart is not decorative water. It is, in the local understanding of things, the reason the fort exists at all.

The earliest inscription found at the site dates to the 6th century CE, suggesting that the plateau was already being used as a fortified settlement long before the medieval period that most visitors associate with the fort’s major monuments. But inscriptions record what already exists — they do not record beginnings. The true first fortification of this rock likely predates anything the archaeological record can confirm with confidence.

The Tomars: The Builders Who Left the Deepest Mark

If any dynasty can claim primary authorship of the fort as it exists today, it is the Tomar Rajputs who controlled Gwalior between the early 15th and early 16th centuries — and within that dynasty, one figure stands above all others.

Man Singh Tomar, who ruled from 1486 to 1516, remade the fort with an ambition and aesthetic sensibility that still defines its character five centuries later. The Man Mandir Palace — named for him and built largely under his patronage — is among the most remarkable examples of pre-Mughal Rajput palace architecture anywhere in India. Its exterior walls are encrusted with tile work of deep blue, turquoise, and yellow in geometric and floral patterns that have somehow survived centuries of siege, conquest, and neglect with enough of their original brilliance intact to stop every visitor mid-step. Enormous cylindrical towers anchor its facade, each one decorated with bands of carved animals, birds, and figures that run like illustrated manuscripts in stone.

Man Singh was also, by all accounts, a man of genuine cultural sophistication. The Gwalior gharana — one of classical Indian music’s most distinguished schools — traces its origins to his court, where the musician Tansen would later develop the foundations of the tradition. The fort that Man Singh built was not just a military installation. It was a centre of artistic and intellectual life that attracted poets, musicians, and scholars from across the subcontinent.

The irony is that Man Singh’s accomplishments could not protect him from the same fate that had overtaken every previous ruler of the fort. In 1516, Ibrahim Lodi defeated the Tomars, and the fort passed from Rajput to Sultanate hands — the latest in a sequence of conquests that would continue through the Mughal period and beyond.

What the Jain Sculptures Are Doing on the Cliff Face

One of the most visually arresting things about approaching Gwalior Fort from the main ascent road is the series of enormous Jain tirthankara sculptures carved directly into the cliff face. Some of these figures stand over fifteen metres tall, carved with an assurance and a scale that implies significant resources and royal backing. They date primarily to the 15th century, created during the Tomar period, and their presence on the walls of a fort associated primarily with Hindu and later Mughal history tells you something important about the religious pluralism of the medieval Deccan.

These sculptures were not universally respected by subsequent rulers. Babur, who captured the fort in 1527, ordered the defacement of many of the figures — faces chiselled away, surfaces damaged in an act of iconoclasm whose thoroughness was fortunately incomplete. Many of the sculptures survived with their essential dignity intact, and a significant restoration effort in the 20th century has returned some to closer to their original condition. Standing before the largest of them on the ascent road, their sheer scale pressing down from the sandstone cliff above, it is difficult not to feel the audacity of their original creation as something almost physical.

The Unsolved Chamber and the Fort’s Darker Histories

Gwalior Fort’s history is not exclusively glorious. One of its recurring uses across several periods of its history was as a political prison — a place where inconvenient relatives, deposed nobles, and dangerous rivals were stored in its deep subterranean chambers, sometimes for decades, sometimes for the remainder of their lives.

The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb had his brother Murad Baksh imprisoned and later executed here. Earlier, the fort’s chambers held various nobles whose political circumstances had become uncomfortable for whoever held the plateau at a given moment. There is a particular quality to the underground sections of the fort — the cool, dark Gujari Mahal and the deep chambers below the Man Mandir — that carries this history in its stone in a way that is difficult to articulate but impossible to miss.

The Gujari Mahal itself is a love story in architecture. Man Singh Tomar built it for his wife Mrignayani, a woman of low birth whom he married against social convention and for whom he reportedly promised to build a palace with a constant supply of water from her home river. The Mahal now houses the Archaeological Museum, one of the finest collections of medieval sculpture in Madhya Pradesh. That a building born from a love story should end its days housing the cultural treasures of a region feels, somehow, appropriate.

Gwalior Fort as a Living Historical Argument

The question of who built Gwalior Fort has no clean answer because the fort is not a single building with a single author. It is a conversation across fourteen centuries — the Palas, the Kacchapaghatas, the Tomars, the Lodi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Marathas, and the British all leaving their mark on its stone in layers that the attentive visitor can read like stratigraphy.

What makes Gwalior Fort worth the journey from anywhere in India is precisely this layering. It is not a monument to a single moment of greatness. It is a record of how greatness is contested, transferred, built upon, and sometimes destroyed across time — and of how a piece of sandstone rising from the Madhya Pradesh plains managed, through all of it, to remain the pearl among the fortresses of India.

Visit in the cooler months between October and February. The Sound and Light show held at the fort in the evenings distils its complicated history into an hour of genuine drama, and the fort walls at night, lit against a dark sky, are a sight that the daylight hours cannot quite replicate. Arrive early in the morning to have the Jain sculptures and the Man Mandir largely to yourself — the light on those blue and turquoise tiles in the first hour after sunrise is one of those photographic and human experiences that Gwalior does not advertise loudly enough.

Some questions resist their answers, and Gwalior Fort’s origin is one of them. But perhaps the more interesting question was never who built it first. Perhaps it was always this: of all the hands that shaped this plateau across fourteen centuries of ambition and artistry and conflict, which of them loved it most?

The Man Mandir’s blue tiles suggest one answer. The Jain sculptures suggest another. The legend of Suraj Sen and the sacred pond suggests a third.

Go and form your own.