Page 23 - Lohgarh

Chapter 1

LOHGARH FORT :

The Largest Fort of the World

Almost each and every historian has mentioned that a mammoth army
of more than one hundred thousand soldiers led by the Mughal Emperor
Bahadur Shah laid siege to the Lohgarh Fort on the 29 of November
th
1710 and captured it the very next day. This author (Harjinder Singh
Dilgeer) too had said so in his earlier works, but when he visited the
whole zone of and around the Lohgarh Fort, he wrote: “on the face of
this propaganda of victory it seems that the Mughal army had made a
great achievement, but, in fact this was just a funny claim. This gives
the impression that as if Lohgarh Fort were just a small hill or a building
which they had captured so easily. But, a survey of the geographical
area and the structure of the Fort (from the remains of its ruins) proves
that the Mughal claim was not only far from reality, but also exaggeration
and fraud with history.”
Lohgarh Fort was not identified as such in 1710,in fact it had its
birth in 1609 when Guru Hargobind had built a Fort in Guru-Da-Chakk
(now Amritsar); nowadays a Gurdwara has been built at that site. This
is the second Lohgarh Fort, which was built by Bhai Lakhi Rai Vanjara
under the command of Guru Har Rai. The Guru monitored the
construction of the Fort between 1645 and 1657, when he spent 12-13
years at Thapal (as mentioned by Maubad Zufiqar Ardastani in his work
Dabistan-i-Mazahib). After this Guru Gobind Singh too supervised its
construction during his stay at Paonta Sahib from 1685 to 1688. When
Guru Gobind Singh returned to Chakk Nanaki (now a part of a greater
Anandpur Sahib), he built another Fort of the same name there too, in
1689-90. At that Fort, the Guru had established a factory to manufacture