A blast outside Delhi’s Red Fort ruptured the calm of a cool November dusk this week. The explosion near the Lahori Gate sent tremors through the narrow arteries of Old Delhi, a place accustomed to clatter, not chaos. Sirens rose above the chorus of rickshaw bells and tea-seller chatter, and for a moment, the city seemed to hold its breath.
It is strange, almost unbearable, to see violence frame a monument so steeped in beauty. Yet even shrouded in smoke, the Red Fort stood with the quiet dignity that only centuries of endurance can bestow. This is not the first time it has witnessed turbulence. It has watched empires rise and fall, revolutions unfurl, and flags change hue and each time, it has stood still, letting history flow around it like the Yamuna once did.
But the Red Fort’s story is not written in stone alone. It is painted, imagined, and reimagined through Mughal miniatures, Company watercolours, colonial prints, and modern art. To trace its journey is to see how India has looked at itself, century after century, through the same red walls.
When Emperor Shah Jahan commissioned the Red Fort in 1638, it was less a fortress than a philosophy, an architectural manifesto of order, beauty, and divine symmetry. Designed by Ustad Ahmad Lahori, the architect of the Taj Mahal, it was completed after a decade of meticulous labour. Within its sandstone walls bloomed marble pavilions, mirrored halls, and gardens through which the Nahr-i-Bihisht the Stream of Paradise quietly flowed.
Mughal court painters, working in the luminous style of the Padshahnama, captured this vision in pigment and gold. Their miniatures portrayed the emperor enthroned under canopied arches, courtiers bathed in amber light, fountains sparkling under painted skies. The Diwan-i-Khas, the Hall of Private Audience, shimmered in these works as a dream in marble and silver adorned with that fabled inscription:
‘If there be a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.’
These were not mere architectural studies, they were acts of devotion. Each stroke immortalised the empire’s confidence, the belief that art and rule were reflections of the same divine order.
A century later, that paradise began to fade. By the mid-18th century, Delhi’s skies were no longer filled with poetry and rosewater, but the echoes of invasion. Yet in art, the fort lived on transformed from a seat of splendour into a site of nostalgia.
The Company School painters, Indian artists working for European patrons, turned their eyes toward its architectural subtleties. Their watercolours now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library depict the Diwan-i-Khas and Rang Mahal with haunting intimacy. The marble jaalis glow softly, the Yamuna drifts away in the background, and silence replaces courtly song. These paintings are tender acts of witnessing as if the artists, sensing the twilight of an era, were painting to remember.
Then came 1857 the Uprising, the exile of Bahadur Shah Zafar, and the British conquest that gutted the Red Fort. The palaces were stripped, gardens flattened, and marble halls turned to barracks. The empire of beauty became a garrison of order.
British painters such as Thomas and William Daniell, and later colonial lithographers, reinterpreted the fort in the ‘Picturesque’ idiom a theatre of romantic ruins, bathed in melancholy light. Soldiers stood where poets once recited, the arches softened by overgrown vines, the skies tinged with imperial sunset.
In these images, the Red Fort was no longer a symbol of sovereignty; it was a conquered relic, a trophy painted for European parlours. Yet, even then, its dignity persisted. Beneath the colonial gaze, it remained too monumental to be diminished.
In 1947, as Jawaharlal Nehru hoisted the tricolour from its ramparts, the fort finally returned to itself not as an emperor’s paradise, but as the people’s emblem. That gesture, simple and monumental, reversed the centuries. The Red Fort, once a symbol of absolute rule, became the face of freedom.
Artists followed this shift with renewed fervour. Abanindranath Tagore, in his poetic reinterpretations of India’s heritage, saw in the fort a continuity of spirit. Later, M.F. Husain and Satish Gujral abstracted its domes and arches into lines and colour fields suggesting not architecture, but emotion. Photographers captured the annual unfurling of the flag as ritual a renewal of faith in endurance.
The Red Fort’s image, replicated in posters, textbooks, and postage stamps, entered the national imagination. It was no longer a backdrop to history; it had become its face.
Today, the Red Fort endures as both monument and muse. Each evening, the Sound and Light Show transforms its sandstone walls into a living palimpsest: Shah Jahan’s vision, Zafar’s lament, Nehru’s voice rising again over the ramparts. Beams of colour ripple across arches as narration and music entwine, turning the fort into a stage where centuries converge.
Contemporary artists reinterpret it through new media installations, photography, digital projections casting it not as ruin, but as reflection. In Raghu Rai’s photographs, the fort glows through Delhi’s winter haze, its silhouette softened but unbroken. In digital art and film, it becomes an ever-shifting mirror of nostalgia, nationhood, and survival.
The recent blast was a wound, tragic and senseless yet it reminded Delhi of something essential: the Red Fort has never been merely a monument. It is a witness. It has seen emperors and rebels, processions and trials, conquests and celebrations. It has been the throne, courtroom, prison, museum and muse.
Delhi has always been a city built upon ruins. The Red Fort is its heartbeat steady, patient, and strangely alive. And through every upheaval, someone a court painter, a colonial draughtsman, a modern artist, a photographer at dawn has tried to capture that pulse, to paint it back into being.
The empire may have vanished, but its echoes remain shimmering through sandstone and pigment alike, making me wonder what is ever gained by wounding what has already survived so much, by destroying what still holds our collective memory together?