Chittorgarh

I have seen a great many forts in Rajasthan, and after a while they begin to blur into a single golden-stoned impression of ramparts and palaces and gift shops. Chittorgarh does not blur. It is the largest fort in India — a plateau-top citadel sprawling over nearly seven hundred acres, far too big to feel like a single building and far too heavy with history to feel like a museum. We drove up the winding fortified road through seven successive gates, each a chokepoint where attackers would once have been funnelled and slaughtered, and emerged onto a flat hilltop that is essentially a ruined city.

A citadel of last stands

Chittorgarh’s story is one of magnificent, terrible defiance. The fort was besieged three times — by Alauddin Khilji in 1303, by Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1535, and by the Mughal emperor Akbar in 1568 — and on each occasion, with defeat certain, the Rajput warriors rode out to die in battle while the women performed jauhar, mass self-immolation, rather than be taken. The local guides recount this with a kind of solemn pride that I found genuinely unsettling, standing in the courtyard where it is said to have happened. There is no way to romanticise it and the better guides don’t try. It hangs over the whole plateau, this history, and it gives the ruins a gravity that the prettier forts simply don’t have.

The single most extraordinary structure is the Vijaya Stambh, the Tower of Victory — a nine-storey sandstone column built in the 1440s to commemorate a military win, covered from base to crown in carved figures of Hindu deities. You can climb the narrow internal staircase, which spirals up through cramped, dim chambers and emerges onto a top platform with the whole plateau laid out below. Lia, who is better with both stairs and heights than I am, went all the way up while I caught my breath at the fifth floor and pretended to be admiring the carvings, which to be fair are admirable.

Wandering the plateau

What I liked most about Chittorgarh, paradoxically, is how unmanaged it is. After the towers, the crowds thin to almost nothing, and you can wander among the ruined palaces — the Rana Kumbha Palace, the Padmini Palace beside its lotus pond, the scattered temples and step-tanks — largely alone. Cows graze in the courtyards. Parakeets nest in the broken windows. We spent a whole afternoon just walking, finding crumbling shrines and dry reservoirs and the occasional fellow wanderer, the only sounds being birds and wind and our own footsteps on old stone.

Most people do Chittorgarh as a rushed half-day stop between Udaipur and Bundi, and that’s a mistake. It deserves a slow afternoon and a willingness to sit with the discomfort of its history rather than just photographing the towers and moving on.

When to go: October through March for bearable temperatures — the plateau is exposed and brutally hot from April. Hire a guide at the entrance for the history, then send them away and walk the far end of the fort on your own. Allow at least half a day; a full one is better.