India III: Agra Fort

Still in Agra after the Taj Mahal, we had a long night kept up by a boisterous Indian wedding celebration.  Indian wedding season is from late September to January, and I was visiting right at its peak in November.  Unlike Western weddings, Indian weddings often last several days, have upwards of 400 attendees,  and may include long processions complete with the groom on horseback and a brass band (although increasingly today couples hire a DJ as well for the party afterwards).   It’s a lovely celebration but very noisy, it goes very late, and resulted in many sleepless nights on my trip through India!

Bleary-eyed, our tour group got up early to visit Agra’s Red Fort at sunrise.   The fort is another example of beautiful and imposing 16^th century Mughal architecture, mainly built by two generations of emperors.  Akbar (whose tomb we visited the day before) created the red sandstone walls and buildings, and Shah Jahan – Akbar’s grandson and the emperor who commissioned the Taj Mahal – added buildings of white marble. 

Agra Fort at sunrise 

We had a lovely 75 year old guide who drew our attention to the tall gates, high enough to allow an elephant with litter and canopy to pass beneath them. 

Our tour guide (on the right) had us guess what purpose this huge granite bowl could have served – possibly emperor Akbar’s bathtub?  Archaeologists still don’t know.

Agra Fort is an enormous complex and is more accurately a walled city than a fort. Just one of the many massive courtyards below.

Towards the end of his life, Shah Jahan was deposed by his son and imprisoned in Agra’s Fort.  Rumour has it he died there, in a tower with a marble balcony and a view of his Taj Mahal a few kilometres away.  This could have been the tower, although the morning fog obstructed the view over Agra.

Monkeys were scampering around everywhere you looked!

One of the cool, white marble chambers built by Shah Jahan.

Next we move from the big city of Agra to the rural town of Orcha.  Stay tuned…