Gwalior Fort's Chaturbhuj Temple Carries an 876 CE Inscription With the Zero Sign Cut in Stone, and the Same Hill Holds Man Singh Tomar's Tiled Palace and Jain Figures Up to 57 Feet Tall

A small temple cut into the rock beside the road up to Gwalior Fort carries a stone dated Samvat 933, which Epigraphia Indica converts to 876 CE. It records that the whole town of Gwalior gave the temple a flower garden 270 royal hastas long and 187 wide, and that the gardeners’ guild was to supply fifty garlands every day. Both 270 and 50 are written with the zero sign, which is why the stone turns up in histories of mathematics as well as in guidebooks.

The rest of the hill is as well documented. It has a Sun-temple inscription from the fifteenth year of the Huna king Mihirakula, an 11th-century temple with a dated porch, the tiled palace of Man Singh Tomar, and Jain figures carved into the cliffs from 1440, the tallest of them 57 feet. India submitted the fort for UNESCO’s Tentative List on 8 February 2024 (reference 6730).

The temple on the road and the stone inside it

E. Hultzsch published the two inscriptions in the first volume of Epigraphia Indica in 1892, working from mechanical copies he took on a visit to Gwalior in 1885. He describes a small monolithic temple, one cut from a single mass of rock, on a turn of the road that leads up to the fort. Alexander Cunningham’s survey of 1862 to 1865 measures the temple at 12 feet square, with a four-pillared porch in front and a low stepped pyramid for a roof. The temple’s name today is Chaturbhuj, the four-armed god, which Cunningham took to mean Vishnu.

The first inscription, over the front door, has 27 Sanskrit verses. Hultzsch reads it as saying that a man called Alla, son of Vaillabhatta and grandson of Nagarabhatta, built the Vishnu temple and consecrated it in the year 932. Nagarabhatta’s family, Hultzsch says, came from Anandapura in Lata, which he identifies as Vadnagar in Gujarat. Alla succeeded his father in office and was appointed guardian of the Gwalior fort by a king whose title the inscription gives as Adivaraha, whom Hultzsch takes to be a title of Bhojadeva himself.

The second inscription, inside on the left wall, is in prose. It is dated 933 in words and in figures and set at Sri-Gopagiri, the old name of the fort hill, in the reign of the paramesvara (supreme lord) Bhojadeva. Alla appears in it as the fort’s guardian. It records four gifts made by the town to two temples Alla had built: the Navadurga temple, and the Vishnu temple called Vaillabhattasvamin, which sat “on the descent of the road of the illustrious Bhojadeva”.

The gifts were practical. There was the garden plot, two fields, and a monthly supply of lamp oil from the guild of oil-millers, with the individual guild heads named, along with their fathers. The guild of gardeners was to supply fifty garlands a day. The text says the gifts are to last “for as long a time as the moon, the sun and the earth exist”.

Hultzsch tabulates the dates of this Bhojadeva as 862 CE at Deogarh, 875 and 876 at Gwalior and 882 at Peheva, and, following the scholar Franz Kielhorn, identifies him as a king of Kanauj. Amar Farooqui’s history for Sahapedia puts the same picture more briefly: in the late ninth century Gwalior, then called Gopadri in some inscriptions, belonged to the Pratihara king Bhoja, with Kanauj as the capital and Gwalior as a frontier outpost.

The zero on the stone

The MacTutor History of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews calls this the first Indian record of zero that is dated and agreed by all to be genuine. It describes the garden as 187 by 270 hastas, says the temple was to receive 50 garlands a day, and notes that both numbers are written almost as they are today, with the zero “smaller and slightly raised”.

The claim has limits that the sources themselves state. The UNESCO dossier and Incredible India both call the carving the second oldest reference to zero in mathematics. The dot zeros of the Bakhshali manuscript are older as marks, if Oxford’s 2017 radiocarbon dating of the birch bark holds, a reading scholars still discuss (see the Bakhshali manuscript and its dating). What Gwalior offers is a zero in stone with a date given in the text itself, in a temple anyone can walk to. The longer story, from Aryabhata to Brahmagupta’s rules, is told elsewhere on tuput.

Earlier and later records on the same hill

The earliest inscription the UNESCO dossier cites for the fort is on a broken red-sandstone slab that J. F. Fleet published in 1888 as number 37 in the third volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum. It was found built into the wall of the porch of a Sun temple in the fortress and is an inscription of Sun worship, in verse. Its date is given in words as the fifteenth year of Mihirakula’s reign, with no named era, in the bright fortnight of Kartika. Fleet reckoned that the year falls close to 533 to 534 CE. The UNESCO dossier gives 525 CE for the same record, so the date is a reading of Fleet’s, not a fixed one.

The UNESCO dossier says the fortification around the plateau was completed in 773 CE under a king it names Raja Sourya Sena. Ross Lee Bernhaut, an art historian at Colgate University, writes for Sahapedia that monumental building on the hilltop is first attested in the sixth century and multiplied from the eighth. Incredible India repeats the tradition of the name: a king called Suraj Sen, cured by a sage called Gwalipa, built the fort and named it after him. Cunningham gives the same story from the annalists he consulted. The dossier suggests the modern name Gwalior comes from an old form, Gopalikera.

The best-known temple pair on the east side is the Sas Bahu, two neighbouring temples, one large and one small, of which the large one is dedicated to Vishnu. Cunningham read the porch inscription as dated Samvat 1150, which he converted to 1093 CE, and said the temple was dedicated in Samvat 1149, 1092 CE. The Siddham inscription database lists it as a record of the Kachchhapaghata ruler Mahipala. The dossier writes the date as “1150 CE”, which looks like the Vikrama year without the conversion. The same dynasty’s temples at Bateshwar, Padavali and Kakanmath lie to the north in Morena district.

Another temple, the Teli ka Mandir, stands highest on the hill. Cunningham measured it at 60 feet square and called it the loftiest building in Gwalior, noting a Garuda over its original doorway, the sign of a Vishnu temple later adapted to Shiva. Sahapedia’s piece on the fort’s prison history dates it to the eighth or ninth century, and the dossier says the Archaeological Survey of India restored it around 1881 to 1883.

Man Singh Tomar and the tiled palace

The Tomar Rajput line held Gwalior from 1398, according to the dossier. Man Singh is the best-known king, with his reign given as 1486 to 1516 in Beveridge’s note to the Baburnama and as 1488 to 1518 in Farooqui’s history. Bernhaut says the Tomars lost the fort when Ibrahim Lodi took it in 1518.

Man Singh’s palace, the Man Mandir, has a long description from a visitor in the first Mughal emperor’s own hand. Babur reached Gwalior in September 1528, and on 27 September, in Beveridge’s conversion of the dates, he toured the palaces of Man Singh and his son Bikramajit. In Beveridge’s translation he calls them “wonderful buildings” of hewn stone and judges Man Singh’s the best and loftiest of the rajas’ buildings. He counts four storeys in places and five cupolas, the larger ones covered in gilded copper, and describes plantain trees worked in green tiles around the outside walls. The Hathi Pol (elephant gate) took its name from a carved elephant with two riders at its exit.

Cunningham, visiting in the 1860s, checked the account and found the green-tile plantain leaves and the blue diamond patterns still in place. Farooqui adds that the palace was much admired by the Mughal emperors and was one of the sources of the architecture that evolved under Akbar and his successors. The dossier claims that the serpentine brackets in the Man Mandir influenced Bundela buildings at Chanderi and the Salim Chishti dargah at Fatehpur Sikri. That is India’s own submission, not a finding from the sources read here. The Gujari Mahal, now the fort’s archaeological museum, was built by Man Singh for his queen Mrignayani, Incredible India says.

Man Singh’s court was known for music. Meeta Pandit writes for Sahapedia that he founded the Gwalior school of music, that he and his musicians wrote the treatise Mankutuhal, and that he popularised dhrupad with lyrics in Brajbhasha, which is why he is sometimes called its father. A Persian translation of the Mankutuhal was made in 1666 by an administrator named Faqirullah. Farooqui credits Man Singh’s ancestor Dungar Singh with commissioning Hindavi versions of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which he calls the earliest known versions of those epics in the language. Tansen, the court musician of Akbar, came out of this tradition, Pandit says.

Jain figures cut into the cliffs

Bernhaut, who is writing a monograph on the fort’s architecture, traces Jain carving on the hill to about the eighth century. The colossal figures of the Tirthankaras, the Jain teachers who show the path out of the cycle of rebirth, belong to the Tomar period. After Timur’s invasion of Delhi in 1398, many Digambara Jain merchant families moved to Gwalior, and the poet Raidhu presided over the consecration of many of the images. Work began in 1440 on the south side of the Urvai gorge, which has the tallest figure, a standing Adinatha of 57 feet. The south-east group dates from 1468 onwards, and the north-west group has recorded consecrations in 1470 and 1474.

Cunningham gives the same height and adds that the figure’s foot is 9 feet long. The Tomar-period figures sit in four main groups around the hill, and Bernhaut calls their sophistication and variety unparalleled among the Jain caves of the region.

When Babur saw the Urvai valley he wrote that the figures were its one defect and that he ordered them destroyed. Cunningham and Bernhaut both say the figures were mutilated, not destroyed. Bernhaut notes that the heads and other features of most figures were defaced, and that the Jain community has since restored most heads with stucco. The figures at the Trishala site, which are earlier, survive intact. The statues are venerated today.

Sultans, Mughals and a fort used as a prison

Gwalior was held briefly by the Ghurids and then by the Delhi Sultanate, according to Farooqui. Cunningham reports from the annalists that Iltutmish captured the fort in 1232, and Babur records an inscription of Iltutmish at the Urvai gate dated 630 in the Hijri calendar, which Beveridge converts to 1233. Ibn Battuta, passing through in the time of Muhammad bin Tughlaq, called Gwalior “a big city with an impregnable fortress”, in Farooqui’s quotation.

Under the Mughals the fort became a state prison. Sarthak Sharma’s essay for Sahapedia lists the prisoners as rival sultans, royal princes and religious figures, beginning with Akbar’s cousin Abul Qasim and continuing into Aurangzeb’s reign. Cunningham writes that the cells were the place where Akbar kept rebellious relatives and Aurangzeb the sons of his brothers. The sixth Sikh guru, Guru Hargobind, was held there under Jahangir. Sharma writes that the reasons and the length of his stay are debated, and that he was released in 1620. The Gurdwara Data Bandi Chhor Sahib inside the fort marks the Sikh tradition of Bandi Chhor Divas, the day of releasing prisoners.

The fort’s last wars were in the nineteenth century. The rebels of 1857 under Rani Lakshmibai and Tatya Tope reached Gwalior in early 1858, and Farooqui writes that the Rani died in the fighting there in June, after which British forces took the city. The British kept the fort until 1886, when it returned to the Scindias in exchange for Jhansi, as the dossier puts it. For the Rani herself, see Rani Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi.

The fort on India’s list

The dossier proposes the fort under criteria (ii) and (iv) of the World Heritage criteria, citing the mix of Rajput, Mughal and other styles and the range of palace, temple and military buildings on one rock. It lists six gates on the eastern ramp, seven named reservoirs, among them the Mansarovar Tal and the Gangola Tal, and notes that the Scindia School has been housed inside the fort since 1897. It also records restoration dates from Archaeological Survey of India files: the Sas Bahu temple in 1844, the Teli ka Mandir around 1881 to 1883, and the Man Mandir in 1881.