Bahadurgarh

Bahadurgarh fort, about six kilometres from Patiala, was built in the seventeenth century by Nawab Saif Khan and rebuilt by Maharaja Karam Singh of Patiala in the 1830s. It is a circular fort with a moat, unusual in Punjab.

Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji stayed here for about three months on his way to Delhi in 1675, and Gurdwara Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Sahib is inside the fort.

It housed the National Security Guard's training centre for a long period, which is the same pattern as Gobindgarh: a historic fort preserved because a security force occupied it.

Punjab's forts have generally survived in proportion to how useful they were to a later army. The ones that were not useful, at Batala, at Bahadurgarh's smaller equivalents, at the misl seats, are gone.

There is no inventory of Punjab's fort sites and no condition survey of the ones that remain.

The fort is circular with a moat and was rebuilt in the eighteenth century by Patiala state, which gave it the name it now carries.

The gurdwara inside marks the Guru's stay. The rest of the complex has been in institutional use for decades and is not open.

Punjab has fort sites at Bathinda, Phillaur, Anandpur, Faridkot, Patiala, Bahadurgarh, Nabha, Jagraon, Ropar and a long list of smaller places. No department holds a list of them.

What we don't know

  • A complete list of Punjab's surviving fort structures.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Punjab archaeology records.
  • Gurdwara records at Bahadurgarh.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 130 accounts in The Ten, the chapter of this site covering the Gurus, from 1469 to 1708.