The Fort With a Town Inside It

There is a rusted metal board just inside the gate of Gulbarga Fort, and it is the most useful thing written about the place anywhere. It is signed by the Archaeological Survey of India, the letters are half gone, and it tells you almost everything the internet gets wrong.

It says the fort occupies 74.10 acres inside a circumference of three kilometres. It says there are two rounds of fortification, the outer wall lower and the inner wall higher. It says there is a thirty-foot-deep moat, fifteen bastions, twenty-six guns, and that one of the cannon is about twenty-nine feet long. It says the principal gateways are on the east and the west, pointed-arched, flanked by bastions and reached by bridges across the moat. And it ends, drily, with the observation that the palace and the other structures inside are in ruins, but the Jumma Masjid is well preserved and noteworthy.

Half an acre, or seventy-four?

Now go to the Kalaburagi district administration’s own website, which is the first result most people will find, and read its page on the fort. It says the fort "has an area of 0.5 acres (0.20 ha) and periphery length of 3 kilometres".

Half an acre is about the footprint of two tennis courts. You cannot put a three-kilometre wall round it. The figure comes from an old revision of the Wikipedia article, which has since been corrected to 57 acres, and it has been copied outward from there into a great deal of published writing about the fort — including, evidently, onto a government website.

We measured it ourselves rather than pick a side. OpenStreetMap has the fort’s wall lines mapped in detail — 788 nodes across three dozen separate wall segments — and the outer line encloses about 25 hectares, an oval roughly 510 metres east to west by 640 metres north to south. That is around 62 acres of enclosed ground, which sits between the ASI’s 74.10 and Wikipedia’s 57, and is exactly what you would expect: the board is measuring the protected site, moat and outworks included, and the wall line encloses less. The one figure that cannot be right is half an acre.

The keep, which is the reason to come

Straight ahead of the east gate is a great blunt mass of masonry with almost no openings in it. This is the Bala Hisar, and on the Kannada half of its signboard it is Ranamandal, which is what people here call it.

The second board explains something you would never work out by looking. It was probably begun as a vaulted audience hall — a domed room for the sultan to sit in — and then deliberately filled in, packed with rubble, to turn it into a solid elevated keep. The evidence the ASI cites is that the ruined interior now sits high off the ground, which is what happens when you backfill a hall. It goes on to say that the Bala Hisar survives, when almost nothing else inside the fort does, because the Adil Shahi governors of Bijapur repaired it after the Bahmanis were gone.

A staircase on the north side takes you to the top, and up there are three cannon — the only three of the twenty-six you can walk up to. The famous one is not among them. The twenty-nine-foot gun, the Bara Gazi Toph, is said to be in a large unnamed bastion behind the two mosques, and that bastion was fenced off for repair through the middle of 2026, along with the ground where the royal buildings stood.

From the top the fort makes sense for the first time. You can trace the double wall, count bastions, see the moat green with water hyacinth, and look down on the long low roof of the Jama Masjid, which is a building you cannot read from ground level at all.

And the part nobody writes about

Walk on past the mosque and the fort stops being a monument. There are houses. Not huts at the edge — dwellings built into and against fourteenth-century structures, with wiring and washing and doorways, inside the boundary of a centrally protected Monument of National Importance. Other buildings have simply gone under the vegetation and cannot be reached.

The paper trail is public and it is not flattering to anybody. A public interest petition filed in 2018 by Sharan Desai put the number of illegal occupants at 194, a figure he had obtained under the Right to Information Act in May 2011. The Karnataka High Court ordered the encroachments removed on 8 November 2019.

Five years later, on 6 January 2025, the matter came back before a division bench of Chief Justice N V Anjaria and Justice K V Aravind. No compliance report had ever been filed. The bench said the authorities’ conduct "cuts a sorry figure" and called the disregard of its order contemptuous, ordered the Regional Commissioner to explain himself on personal affidavit by 25 February, and told the ASI to file a pictorial account of what it was actually doing to protect the monument. The state’s advocate said a scheme had been prepared to rehabilitate 282 families living inside the fort. The petitioner said no such scheme existed.

We have looked and cannot find any reported outcome after that hearing. So the honest position is this: as of the last thing anyone published, several hundred families live inside Gulbarga Fort, a court is pressing for their removal and a rehabilitation scheme is either being prepared or is not, depending on whom you believe.

How to be a decent visitor to a place in that state

Go anyway. It is free, it is open, photography is allowed, and the alternative — heritage tourism that only visits the swept and ticketed sites — is its own kind of dishonesty. But hold two things in mind while you walk round.

The first is that the doorways are homes. Photograph the walls, the cannon, the arches and the mosque as much as you like; do not photograph people or their houses without asking, and do not treat somebody’s front step as a picturesque ruin. Whatever the legal position, the people living there did not create it and will be the ones moved.

The second is that the ruin is fragile and unmonitored. There is no gate staff, no guide, no barrier and nobody to stop you climbing on a bastion. Do not. Sections are unrepaired, the masonry is loose in places, and the only reason the fort is not roped off is that nobody is here to rope it off.