Qila Mubarak, Bathinda

Put your hand against the wall in front of you. It is not cut stone. It is brick... small, flat, baked bricks, laid by hand in thousands of courses. In the heat of a Punjab afternoon they hold the warmth of the sun. In the early morning they feel cool and slightly rough, like old pottery. You are touching one of the oldest standing forts in India.

This is Qila Mubarak, which means the Blessed Fort. It rises out of the old heart of Bathinda, a town in the south of Punjab. For centuries, the plains of northern India have had very little stone. So people built with what the earth gave them, which was clay. Clay fired into brick, and brick stacked into walls tall enough to dominate the flat land for kilometres around.

Stand back for a moment and take in the shape. The walls do not run in a straight line. They swell outward into rounded towers, called bastions, at regular intervals. A bastion lets defenders see along the face of the wall and fire at anyone trying to climb it. From a distance, the fort looks less like a building and more like a ridge of earth that grew upward, with rounded shoulders pressed against the sky.

How old is it, exactly? Here we have to be careful. Nobody can give a single founding date with confidence. Local tradition links the earliest fort on this site to the first centuries of the common era, and some accounts connect it to the age of the Kushan kings, who ruled a large empire across northern India and Central Asia. What we can say is that people have fortified this mound for a very long time, and each age rebuilt on top of the last.

The name of the town carries a story too. In medieval Persian chronicles, the place appears as Tabarhinda. Local tradition says the later name, Bathinda, comes from the Bhatti Rajputs, a warrior clan who are said to have held this region. As with many old towns, the legend and the history overlap, and it is not always possible to separate them. But the name itself shows how many peoples have passed through these gates.

And they passed through for a reason. Bathinda sat on the route between the northwest frontier and the rich Gangetic plain, the heartland of northern India. Any army moving from Afghanistan towards Delhi had to think about this fort. Chroniclers record that raiders from the Ghaznavid empire, based in what is now Afghanistan, came through this region around the turn of the eleventh century. A fort on this road was not a quiet place.

Now for the story that surprises many visitors. In 1240, this fort became a prison for a queen. Razia Sultan was the only woman ever to rule the Delhi Sultanate in her own name. She rode at the head of her troops, and she refused to hide behind a veil at court. Her nobles turned against her. After a revolt, she was held captive here at Bathinda by Malik Altunia, the local governor.

What happened next has the shape of a novel. According to the chronicles, Razia and Altunia married, and together they marched on Delhi to win back her throne. They failed. Both were killed soon after, in the same year. Locals still point to a part of the fort as the place where she was confined. Whether that exact room is authentic is hard to prove, but the captivity itself is part of the historical record.

Centuries later, the fort gained a very different kind of meaning. Sikh tradition holds that Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, came to Bathinda in the early eighteenth century. A gurdwara, which is a Sikh place of worship, now stands within the fort to mark his visit. Listen as you walk. You may hear the steady sound of hymns, or see people removing their shoes and covering their heads before they enter.

That small act matters here. If you visit the gurdwara, you will need to cover your head and leave your shoes outside, as you would in any Sikh shrine. Visitors of every faith are welcome. Many people find that this living devotion is what makes the fort feel different from a museum ruin. It is an old military building, but it is also a place where people come to pray today.

In the eighteenth century, the fort passed into the hands of the rulers of Patiala, a Sikh princely state that grew powerful in this part of Punjab. Under them, parts of the complex were repaired and rebuilt, and new structures were added inside the walls. So when you look at the brickwork, you are not seeing one moment in time. You are seeing patches from many centuries, side by side, in slightly different colours and sizes of brick.

That patchwork is worth studying up close. Look for places where the brick changes, where one section is darker, or where newer, more regular bricks fill a gap in older, softer ones. Mud brick does not last forever. Rain washes it away and roots crack it open. The fort is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India, the national body that cares for ancient monuments, and conservation work has been carried out to stop the walls from crumbling further.

If you can reach the higher levels, take the chance. From above, you see how the fort sits in the town. Old bazaars press right up against the walls, with narrow lanes, shop shutters, motorbikes and the call of vendors. There is no wide empty lawn here. The town grew around the fort like a ring around a tree, and life simply carried on at its feet.

Before you leave, stand still for one more moment and look along the line of the wall. Think of the hands that pressed this clay into moulds, the soldiers on the bastions, a captive queen, and the pilgrims at the gurdwara today. Then touch the brick once more on your way out. It is warmer now, perhaps, or cooler. Either way, it is still here.