49 Fun Facts About Indian Monuments

Which Mumbai waterfront landmark saw the last British troops leave the country in 1948?

The Gateway of India was built to welcome the empire in and ended up waving it out: the Somerset Light Infantry marched out through it on 28 February 1948. Its design was approved only in 1914, and it was finished in 1924.

Who was meant to watch Jaipur's streets unseen through the Hawa Mahal's latticed windows?

Women of the royal household watched festivals and street life from behind the lattice without being seen. The screen of small windows also keeps a breeze moving through the rooms, which is why it is called the Palace of Winds.

Delhi's Lotus Temple, built from 27 marble-clad petals grouped into nine sides, serves which faith?

Baha'i houses of worship are open to people of every religion and allow no sermons or ritual, so the Lotus Temple's hall hosts only prayers and readings from scripture. Iranian architect Fariborz Sahba designed it.

Whose statue filled India Gate's canopy in 2022, empty since George V's was removed in 1968?

Subhas Chandra Bose first appeared there as a hologram in January 2022, and the granite statue followed that September. The marble George V had been moved to Coronation Park in 1968, so the canopy stood empty for 54 years.

The Charminar, built in 1591 at the heart of Hyderabad, sits on the official emblem of which state?

Telangana put the Charminar on its emblem beside the Kakatiya Kala Thoranam when the new state was carved out of Andhra Pradesh in 2014. The monument is widely held to commemorate the end of a plague.

Which Indian banknote carries Konark's temple, the stone chariot of Odisha, on its reverse?

₹10 notes of the current series show the temple, which European sailors once called the Black Pagoda and steered by as a landmark on the run up the coast to Calcutta.

What was British officer John Smith doing in 1819 when shown the entrance to Ajanta's Cave 10?

Hunting a tiger led Smith of the 28th Cavalry to the caves on 28 April 1819, and he scratched his name and the date inside Cave 10, where they can still be read.

Where were the bronze panels that clad the 182-metre Statue of Unity cast?

China cast the bronze panels because no foundry in India could handle a job that size, although the statue was designed and built in India. It was inaugurated on 31 October 2018, Patel's birth anniversary.

What is the 27-metre Samrat Yantra at Jaipur's Jantar Mantar, said to tell local time to within seconds?

A sundial on this scale exists because Jai Singh II found the astronomical tables of his day no longer matched the sky, so he built giant masonry instruments to correct them. UNESCO listed the observatory in 2010.

What studs the walls and ceiling of Amer Fort's most famous hall so it glitters under candlelight?

Convex mirrors cover the hall so thickly that a couple of candles are thrown back from every surface like stars, which is why it is known as the Sheesh Mahal, the mirror palace.

Which building stands opposite the Taj Mahal's mosque purely to keep the complex symmetrical?

The Jawab, literally 'answer', mirrors the red sandstone mosque across the platform purely for balance: it has no mihrab, the niche that shows the direction of Mecca, so it is no mosque.

Which poet pictured the Taj Mahal as a teardrop on the cheek of time?

Rabindranath Tagore wrote that it rises above the riverbank like a solitary tear suspended on the cheek of time, a line since condensed into the teardrop of guidebooks and book titles.

Which city gives its name to the Red Fort gate the prime minister speaks from every 15 August?

Lahore gives its name to the Lahori Gate, the fort's main entrance, where Nehru raised the national flag in August 1947; the prime minister has addressed the country from its ramparts each Independence Day since.

Which sultan began a tower by the Qutb Minar meant to be twice its height, abandoned at one storey?

Alauddin Khalji meant his Alai Minar to dwarf the Qutb Minar, but work stopped at the first storey around his death in 1316 and no successor took it up. The rubble stump still stands in the complex.

Which sultan rebuilt the Qutb Minar's top after a lightning strike, turning one storey into two?

Firuz Shah Tughlaq replaced the damaged fourth storey with a smaller one and added a fifth, which is why the minaret has five storeys today, the top two partly faced in white marble above three of sandstone.

Which 7th-century Hampi shrine to Shiva stayed in worship after the city was destroyed in 1565?

Virupaksha's history runs unbroken from about the 7th century CE, so it outlived the empire that enlarged it and is still an active place of worship among the ruins. It stands on the bank of the Tungabhadra.

Which avatar of Vishnu does Hampi's 6.7-metre monolith, carved seated in a yoga posture, depict?

Narasimha, Vishnu's man-lion form, sits 6.7 metres tall in a yoga posture, and the damage done to the monolith still shows. Vishnu took that shape to kill the demon Hiranyakashipu, who could be slain by neither man nor beast.

Which dynasty built the Khajuraho temples, famed for their erotic carvings, about a thousand years ago?

Chandela kings built the temples at their first capital, then shifted to hill forts such as Kalinjar in the late 11th century and left Khajuraho to fade. The largest survivor is the Kandariya Mahadeva.

What had hidden Khajuraho's temples from the outside world until a British army captain was led to them in 1838?

Thick jungle grew over the temples once their builders had moved away, and that remoteness probably saved them from later conquerors. Of about 85 temples, only 20 or so survive.

Sanchi's Great Stupa, begun by Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, is in which state's Raisen district?

Madhya Pradesh holds the stupa on a hilltop near Bhopal. The site lay abandoned for about 600 years until a British officer recorded it in 1818, and Buddhist pilgrims have since returned to it.

Which material did the Vidisha craftsmen named in a Sanchi gateway inscription normally work?

Ivory workers from nearby Vidisha are named in an inscription on the southern gateway, which has led scholars to suggest that the finely cut stone reliefs carry an ivory-carving tradition over into stone.

Which stories predominate in the ancient murals of the Ajanta caves?

Jataka tales recount the Buddha's earlier lives as humans and animals. Major Robert Gill spent years copying the murals on canvas, only for most of his copies to burn in the Crystal Palace fire of 1866.

Which Ellora temple, Cave 16, was cut from a single rock and is credited to the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I?

Kailasa was excavated rather than built: carvers started at the top of the rock and worked downward, so the finished temple stands free inside its own quarry.

Ellora's 34 caves were cut by followers of Buddhism, Hinduism and which third faith?

Jainism claims the last five caves, numbers 30 to 34, after 12 Buddhist and 17 Hindu ones. Three faiths cutting shrines side by side is why UNESCO reads Ellora as a record of ancient India's religious tolerance.

Which dynasty ruled the Kingdom of Mysore from the palace Henry Irwin completed in 1912?

Wadiyar kings spent decades as figureheads while Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan held real power, and were put back on the throne by the British after Tipu fell in 1799.

What destroyed the old palace at Mysore in 1897, prompting Henry Irwin's replacement?

A fire after a wedding, the ceremony of Princess Jayalakshmi Ammanni, gutted much of the old palace, and the royal family moved into the nearby Jaganmohan Palace until the new one was finished in 1912.

Which fifth ruler of Hyderabad's founding dynasty built the Charminar in 1591, said to mark a plague's end?

Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah had just moved his capital from the old fortress to his new city of Hyderabad, and the Charminar went up as the centrepiece around which the city was laid out.

Which architect of New Delhi designed India Gate, inscribed with more than 13,000 names of the war dead?

Edwin Lutyens modelled the gate on Roman triumphal arches, though it mourns rather than celebrates: it was built as the All India War Memorial for soldiers who died in the First World War and the Third Anglo-Afghan War.

Which sculptor, long known for his statues of Gandhi, designed the Statue of Unity inaugurated in 2018?

Ram V. Sutar's design was built partly with iron from used farm tools that farmers across India were asked to donate, fitting for a statue of Vallabhbhai Patel, the unifier nicknamed the Iron Man of India.

Which short-lived Mughal capital, said to have run dry, holds the towering Buland Darwaza gateway?

Fatehpur Sikri was Akbar's 'City of Victory', his capital for little more than a decade; the failure of its water supply is the reason usually given for the court's move away in the 1580s.

Which Tamil Nadu city's temple honours the fish-eyed goddess Meenakshi with 14 towering gopurams?

Madurai's temple pairs Meenakshi, a form of Parvati, with her consort Sundareswarar, and their marriage is celebrated there every spring in the Chithirai festival.

Whose gift of gold to cover the sanctum gave Amritsar's Harmandir Sahib its English name?

Maharaja Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh Empire, had the shrine sheathed in gold, and the Golden Temple name followed. Guru Arjan had set the first building on low ground so that everyone must step down to enter.

Which Chola emperor built the great Brihadisvara Temple at Thanjavur, consecrated in 1010?

Rajaraja I had it built between 1003 and 1010, and within a generation his son Rajendra I raised a second Brihadisvara at his own new capital, Gangaikondacholapuram.

Which dynasty carved Mahabalipuram's monolithic ratha chariot-temples between 630 and 668?

Pallava kings had the rathas cut from single boulders on the shore south of Chennai, and European sailors who sighted the temple towers from the sea knew the place as the Seven Pagodas.

Which white-marble Kolkata landmark of 1906–21 carries a 4.9-metre bronze angel on its dome?

Victoria Memorial was Lord Curzon's project for the capital of British India, but the move of the capital to Delhi was announced in 1911, ten years before it opened, so it rose in a provincial city instead.

Which Gujarat stepwell, raised for the Solanki king Bhima I and now on the ₹100 note, is designed as an inverted temple?

Rani ki Vav, the Queen's Stepwell, is credited to Bhima's queen Udayamati. A flood of the Saraswati later buried it in silt for centuries, which is why its carvings came out so well preserved when it was dug clear.

Which Rajasthan fort's 36-km wall, built in the 1400s for the rulers of Mewar, is among the world's longest?

Kumbhalgarh is where, by tradition, the nurse Panna Dai hid the child heir Udai Singh II after giving up her own son to save him. He was crowned in the fort in 1540 and went on to found Udaipur.

Which 280-hectare Rajasthan fort on a 180-metre hill holds the nine-storey Vijay Stambha?

Chittorgarh's tower of victory was raised by a 15th-century ruler of Mewar to mark his defeat of the Sultan of Malwa. Tradition holds that the fort's women chose jauhar, mass self-immolation, after each of its three great sieges.

Tradition says Ashoka's daughter Sanghamitta carried a branch of Bodh Gaya's sacred fig to which country in the 3rd century BCE?

Sri Lanka's Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi at Anuradhapura is said to have grown from that branch. It is revered as the oldest living tree with a known planting date, and it has outlived its parent at Bodh Gaya.

Which 340-room Delhi residence, once the Viceroy's House, renamed its Mughal Gardens in 2023?

Rashtrapati Bhavan's viceregal apartments struck C. Rajagopalachari, the first Indian governor-general, as too grand, so he moved into the guest wing; presidents have lived there since, and state visitors get the viceroy's rooms.

At which Deccan fort does a clap at the gate carry to a pavilion almost a kilometre away?

Golconda's Fateh Darwaza is shaped so that a clap under its dome carries to the Bala Hisar pavilion at the top of the citadel, which worked as a warning to the court if the gate came under attack.

Which colonial prison, dreaded as Kala Pani, held political exiles in wings laid out like spokes?

Cellular Jail took its name from its design: wings of solitary cells radiating from a central watchtower like spokes, a version of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. Morarji Desai dedicated it to the nation in 1979.

Which fort's Chaturbhuj Temple holds one of the oldest known inscriptions of the numeral zero?

Gwalior's ninth-century inscription writes its zeros as small circles and was long counted the oldest zero of our number system, until a Cambodian stone dated 683 CE proved older. The shrine is still nicknamed the Zero Temple.

Which Amritsar garden, where troops fired on a crowd on 13 April 1919, still preserves bullet holes?

Jallianwala Bagh was hemmed in by buildings, with only a few narrow entrances, so the crowd had almost no way out; many died in the crush at the gates or by jumping into the garden's well to escape the firing.

Which Old Goa church, consecrated in 1605, holds the body of St Francis Xavier?

Basilica of Bom Jesus keeps the saint's body in a silver casket raised high above the floor and brings it down for public veneration roughly once every ten years. Construction began in 1594.

Which Mumbai station, named at its opening for Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, was listed by UNESCO in 2004?

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus opened as Victoria Terminus, a Gothic showpiece named for the queen's golden jubilee, and was renamed in 1996 after the 17th-century Maratha king Shivaji.

Which Rajasthan fort, begun by Rao Jodha in 1459, rises about 122 metres above the plains?

Mehrangarh's founding legend says a hermit evicted from the hill cursed the citadel with a scarcity of water, and that a man named Raja Ram Meghwal volunteered to be buried alive in the foundations to make the site auspicious.

Which island temple town in Tamil Nadu has the Hindu temple with the longest corridor in India?

Rameswaram's Ramanathaswamy Temple is famed for its long pillared corridors, and tradition holds that Rama worshipped Shiva here, on the island he crossed in his campaign to rescue Sita from the demon king Ravana.

Which Ahmedabad landmark's stone lattice, the city's unofficial symbol, inspired the IIM-A logo?

Sidi Saiyyed's mosque went up in 1572–73, the last year of the Gujarat Sultanate before Akbar annexed it, so its tree-patterned stone screens were among the final works of the old kingdom.