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23 places
Madhya Pradesh
Amarkantak is where the Narmada is born — a hilltop sanctuary in the Maikal range where India's holiest westward river rises from a small white-tiled kund ringed by temples. The Sone river springs from the same plateau to flow east, making this a rare watershed of sacred geography. Around the Narmada Udgam cluster the ancient Kalachuri-era temples, Kapil Dhara falls where the infant river first leaps, and forests rich with medicinal herbs.
Karnataka
Sringeri, folded into the Western Ghats on the Tunga river, is the first and foremost of the four peethams founded by Adi Shankaracharya in the 8th century — chosen, says tradition, when he saw a cobra shading a frog in labour from the sun. The Vidyashankara temple's zodiac-pillared hall and the golden Sharadamba shrine anchor a living centre of Vedic learning, while thousands of fish swarm the ghats where pilgrims feed them as the goddess's own.
Punjab
Gurdwara Fatehgarh Sahib rises in white marble over the site of Sikhism's most heart-rending sacrifice — where in 1704 the two youngest sons of Guru Gobind Singh, aged just seven and nine, were bricked alive by the Sirhind governor for refusing to abandon their faith. The underground Bhora Sahib preserves the wall's site; nearby stand Mata Gujri's tower prison and the shrine of Todar Mal, who bought the cremation ground with gold coins laid edge to edge.
Jharkhand
At Rajrappa the Damodar and Bhairavi rivers meet below a red-washed shrine of Chhinnamastika — the self-decapitated Tantric goddess who feeds her attendants from her own severed head, an image of fearless self-sacrifice. One of India's most important Tantric peeths, the temple hums with drummers, sacrifices and river-bathing pilgrims, while the waterfall confluence below gives the place a wild, elemental setting.
Jammu & Kashmir
In a spring-fed pool at Tulmulla, shaded by great chinars, sits the marble shrine of Ragnya Devi — Kheer Bhawani, named for the rice-pudding offered to her. She is the beloved guardian goddess of the Kashmiri Pandits, and her spring is famous for changing colour, read for generations as an omen for the Valley. The annual mela on Jyeshtha Ashtami brings Pandit families home from across India in Kashmir's most poignant homecoming.
Arunachal Pradesh
Parshuram Kund, on the Lohit river where it leaves the hills, is Arunachal's holiest Hindu site — the pool where, by legend, sage Parshuram washed away the sin of matricide and the axe fell from his hand. Every Makar Sankranti (mid-January), tens of thousands of pilgrims from Assam and beyond descend to the boulder-strewn river for a freezing holy dip, turning the remote gorge into a great mela. The rest of the year it is a quiet, mountain-ringed bend of jade water.
Chhattisgarh
Bhoramdeo, wrapped in the forested Maikal hills, is called the 'Khajuraho of Chhattisgarh' — an 11th-century Shiva temple of the Nagvanshi kings whose walls carry tier upon tier of sculpted musicians, dancers, deities and frankly amorous couples. The sanctum's dark stone Shiva sits behind a hall of carved pillars, and two earlier brick temples and a sculpture-filled lawn complete the complex beside a lotus pond.
At Dongargarh the goddess Bamleshwari watches from a 1,600-step hilltop — the Badi (elder) Bamleshwari — while her sister shrine, Chhoti Bamleshwari, stands in the town below. The temple is Chhattisgarh's busiest pilgrimage, its twin Navratri fairs drawing lakhs of devotees who climb through the night as the hill glows with lamps. A ropeway now glides over the boulders for those who skip the stairs.
Leh & Ladakh
Alchi is unlike any other gompa in Ladakh: it sits low by the Indus rather than on a crag, and its temples preserve some of the finest 11th–12th century Buddhist art in the world. The Kashmiri-style murals of the Sumtsek and Dukhang — thousand-Buddha walls, colossal bodhisattvas painted with miniature scenes on their robes — survive from the era of the great translator Rinchen Zangpo. It is a quiet village of apricot orchards, a living museum of a vanished artistic world.
Deep inside the sal forests of what is now Palamau Tiger Reserve stand the twin forts of the Chero kings — the old fort of Medini Ray on the banks of the Auranga river and the newer, unfinished fort on the hill above, with its ornate Nagpuri gateway. Abandoned to the jungle after Mughal and British campaigns, their moss-grown walls are now patrolled by langurs and the occasional elephant — ruins in the truest, wildest sense.
Hari Parbat rises at the heart of Srinagar, ringed by a wall Akbar began in 1590 and crowned by the fort the Afghan governor Atta Mohammad Khan completed in the early 19th century. The hill is sacred to every faith of the Valley: the Sharika Devi temple of the goddess Chakreshwari, the shrine of Makhdoom Sahib on the slope, and a historic gurdwara at its foot. From the ramparts the whole of Srinagar — Dal Lake, old city and Zabarwan hills — spreads below.
Tamil Nadu
Thirumayam's ring fort was built in 1687 by Vijaya Raghunatha Sethupathi of Ramanathapuram and later held by the Tondaiman rulers of Pudukkottai. Its concentric walls wrap a rocky hill in the heart of Chettinad, restored handsomely by the ASI, with a rock-cut Shiva shrine partway up. At the base stand the great twin temples of Sathyamurthi Perumal — with one of the largest reclining Vishnu images in Tamil Nadu carved into the rock — and Sathyagiriswarar.
Odisha
Barabati is the moated riverside fort of the Eastern Ganga kings, raised around the 13th century beside the Mahanadi at Cuttack, the millennium-old capital of Odisha. Its carved laterite gateway and wide moat survive, and excavation has uncovered palace foundations within. The fort gave its name to the modern Barabati Stadium next door, and the Kadam Rasul shrine and silver-filigree lanes of old Cuttack are minutes away.
Maharashtra
Harishchandragad is an ancient hill fort where the boundaries of Thane, Pune and Ahmednagar (Ahilyanagar) districts converge, renowned for the Kedareshwar cave temple, the dramatic Konkan Kada cliff, and Puranic-era origins predating most Maratha-era forts.
Naldurg is the Deccan's great water-engineered fort: a basalt stronghold of 114 bastions where the Bori river was dammed to fill the moat and, in flood, to spill over the Pani Mahal — a machine-room palace built inside the dam wall itself, with rooms behind the waterfall. Held by the Bahmanis, Adil Shahis and Mughals, its Upli Buruj and ravine-edge walls are astonishingly intact and astonishingly empty.
Torna Fort (also called Prachandagad) sits near Velhe village in Pune district at 1,403 metres above sea level, the highest hill fort in the district. It is famed as the first fort captured by a young Shivaji Maharaj.
Chanderi Fort looks down on a medieval town famous for its gossamer handloom sarees. Fought over by Malwa sultans, Rajputs and Mughals, it is remembered for Babur's 1528 assault and the jauhar of the Rajput garrison at the Jauhar Smarak. The Kirti Durg's walls, the Khooni Darwaza gate and the Kati Ghati — a gateway sliced clean through the hill's rock in a single night, says the legend — watch over lakes, tombs and bazaars below.
Uttar Pradesh
Kalinjar is one of the legendary strongholds of central India, crowning a flat spur of the Vindhyas above the Bundelkhand plain. Sacred to Shiva as Neelkanth — the rock-cut Neelkanth temple sits in a cleft of the cliff — it resisted Mahmud of Ghazni, saw Sher Shah Suri fatally wounded during his 1545 siege, and passed through Chandela, Mughal and British hands. Gates, tanks, palaces and centuries of sculpture lie scattered across its windswept plateau.
Goa
Cabo de Rama takes its name from the legend that Lord Rama sheltered on this cape during his exile. The headland fort — held by the Soonda rajas until the Portuguese took it in 1763 — is mostly a romantic ruin now: laterite ramparts, a few rusting cannon and the little white church of St. Anthony still in use inside the walls. The real spectacle is the cliff-top view down the wild Canacona coastline and the hidden beaches below.
Asirgarh Fort is a roughly 60-acre, three-part fortress (Asirgarh, Kamargarh and Malaygarh) in the Satpura Range about 20-27 km north of Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh, commanding a historically important pass between northern India and the Deccan.
Qila Mubarak at Bathinda is counted among the oldest surviving forts in India, its enormous weathered brick bastions rising from foundations associated with the Kushan age. Razia Sultan, Delhi's first and only woman sultan, is said to have been imprisoned here after her defeat in 1240. Within the walls stands a gurdwara marking the visit of Guru Gobind Singh, and the fort's 30-plus metre bastions still dominate the city's skyline.
Delhi
Tughlaqabad is the colossal abandoned third city of Delhi, built by Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq in the 1320s and deserted within years — blamed by legend on the curse of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya: 'may it be inhabited only by herdsmen'. Its cyclopean sloping walls, sky-high bastions and ruined citadel stretch for kilometres of scrub, with the sultan's red-and-white tomb standing across the old causeway.
Rajasthan
Gagron is Rajasthan's great jala-durg — a water fort — standing where the Ahu meets the Kali Sindh, with rivers guarding three of its sides in place of a moat. Seat of the Khichi Chauhans and besieged repeatedly by the sultans of Malwa and later held by the Mughals and Kotah, it is one of the six forts inscribed together as the UNESCO World Heritage 'Hill Forts of Rajasthan'. Unlike its famous siblings, you will often have its ramparts to yourself.
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