Gwalior

Gwalior is dominated by a long sandstone hill, crowned with walls, palaces and temples, that rises abruptly above the plain and commands the roads between northern and central India. Its fort, once called Gopagiri, carries Jain sculptures cut into the cliff faces and the brightly tiled Man Mandir palace. Babur later described it as the pearl among the forts of India.

Raja Vir Singh established the Tomar line at Gwalior in the late fourteenth century, and the Tomars made it a regional power. Man Singh Tomar, who reigned from 1486 to 1516, built the Man Mandir and gathered a noted school of singers, the world in which the musician Tansen grew up. Ibrahim Lodi besieged the fort in 1516, the year Man Singh died, and the Tomars surrendered after a year. Babur took the fort within the decade, and after Akbar recaptured it in 1558 it served the Mughals as a state prison, holding Guru Hargobind from 1609 and later Aurangzeb's brother Murad Bakhsh and his nephew Sulaiman Shikoh. In 1780 a British East India Company force captured it in a night raid, but the fort was handed back to the Rana of Gohad, and four years later the Marathas retook it.