Qila Gobindgarh.
Since 1760.

Gobindgarh began in the 1760s as a mud fortress raised by Gujjar Singh Bhangi, a chieftain of the Bhangi Misl. It was known then as Bhagian da Qila, and it stayed with that family for close to half a century.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh took the fort in 1809 and renamed it after Guru Gobind Singh. The British took it after the Second Anglo-Sikh War in 1849. The Indian Army garrisoned it from 1947.

For almost its entire existence it was a military post, shut to ordinary people and screened from the city by walls and trees. The Government of India handed it to Punjab in 2006 for conservation, and the gates opened on 10 February 2017.

By 1809 the Bhangi misl was short of money. Gurdit Singh was still a minor, ruling Amritsar with his mother, Mai Sukhan. When she demanded tribute from a local trader, Arur Mal, he moved to the territory of a rival misl and invited Ranjit Singh to take the fort instead.

Ranjit Singh asked for the Zamzama — Bhangian di Tope — claiming it as the Sukerchakia share of the spoils from Ahmad Shah Durrani’s defeat in 1765. Mai Sukhan refused. He entered the city through the Ahluwalia gate, and the Bhangis could not hold against his force.

The fort, the cannon and the treasury passed to him. Mai Sukhan and the Bhangi family were granted villages for their upkeep. Ranjit Singh renamed the fort for Guru Gobind Singh and gave it the job it kept for a century: standing between the city and the routes in from the north-west.

Zamzama — “the Taker of Strongholds”. The cannon Ranjit Singh demanded