Qila Mubarak at Bathinda is believed founded by Raja Dab around 90 to 110 AD. ASI records also suggest a sixth-century origin, built against the Hunas.
Mahmud of Ghazni took it in the eleventh century. Muhammad Ghori stormed it in 1191. Razia Sultan was imprisoned here in 1240 by Malik Ikhtiyar-ud-din Altunia. A gurdwara marks a visit by Guru Gobind Singh Ji.
A major bastion partially collapsed in 2022 after two years of repairs suspended by Covid. Reporting notes the walls are patched with at least seven different kinds of brick.
The fort takes four to five thousand visitors a day, ten thousand at weekends, and up to a hundred thousand on religious days. ASI conservator Sri Om and caretaker Gurdeep Singh are named in coverage.
Whether the medieval name Tabarhinda means Bathinda or Sirhind is disputed.
The bricks are the evidence. Surveys of the walls have identified several distinct brick sizes and types in the same fabric, each belonging to a different period of building and repair, stacked in one face.
Reading a wall that way is how a building with no documents is dated. The Bathinda walls have never been recorded course by course, so the sequence is known in outline and not in detail.
The 2022 collapse followed repairs that stopped when funding lapsed. Scaffolding standing on an unstable face through two monsoons is the usual way these losses happen, and there is no public record of what came down.