Marathas & Sikhs

Came from Delhi television with no industry background at all, played villains for two films because nobody would cast him otherwise, and became the most globally recognised Indian actor of the era.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Built a state out of hill forts and light cavalry against two empires at once, ran a navy when nobody in the Deccan thought they needed one, and crowned himself at Raigad in 1674 with the full works, because legitimacy is also a weapon.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Reachable by roughly 1,700 steps, or now by ropeway, which the original garrison would have considered a serious security flaw.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Joined the salt satyagraha, then spent the next forty years rebuilding Indian handicrafts and theatre from the ground up. Most of the craft emporia, cooperatives and the National School of Drama trace back to her.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Fought around forty engagements and lost none of them, largely by moving faster than anyone believed an army could move. Died at forty on campaign, on the march, as expected.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Deliberately elaborate, deliberately public, deliberately expensive. The point was that a new sovereign state had come into existence and everyone would have to acknowledge it.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Ran a small kingdom with famously clean accounts, heard petitions herself, and spent her treasury rebuilding temples, ghats, wells and rest houses from Kashi to Rameswaram. Almost every pilgrimage town in India has something she paid for.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Beat a much larger Mughal force on the Brahmaputra by fighting them on water, where his boats were better. Commanded the battle while seriously ill and refused to leave.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Described over 300 procedures and 120 instruments, including cataract removal and a nose reconstruction using a flap of forehead skin that plastic surgeons still call the Indian method.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Ruled for sixteen years, fought a Mughal invasion with a fraction of the troops, was wounded by arrows, and refused capture.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Iron tubes, longer range than anything in Europe at the time, launched in salvos. The British took the technology home and the Congreve rocket followed.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Founded the Khalsa at Anandpur in 1699, wrote poetry in three languages, and then declared that after him the scripture itself would be the Guru — ending the line of human succession deliberately.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Took Sirhind, abolished the zamindari system in the territory he held and gave the land to those who farmed it — an agrarian reform three centuries before the phrase existed.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

One of the largest single-day battles of the 18th century, and a Maratha disaster on a scale that changed who would end up governing India.

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Built a Sikh empire that employed Muslim and Hindu generals and European officers, never enforced conversion, banned capital punishment, and had the good sense to be the one Indian ruler the East India Company decided not to fight.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Reported that the city was as large as Rome, with a bazaar for every trade and more water than he could account for. Then it was sacked in 1565 and left to the monkeys.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Has said "last one" eleven times. There will be a drone. There is always a drone.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

One of the very few living forts left anywhere — several thousand people still live inside the walls, with all the drainage consequences that implies.

Find it on the floor: Forts, Sardars & Regional Powers

Its perimeter wall runs for about 36 km, making it one of the longest continuous walls on earth after the Great Wall of China. Never taken by direct assault.

Find it on the floor: The Fort Ramparts

Four doors facing four directions, so that anyone may enter from any side. The kitchen serves free meals to roughly a hundred thousand people a day, more on festivals.

Find it on the floor: The Fort Ramparts

Almost every serious Indian fort has at least one, and almost every local guide will tell you it goes considerably further than it does.

Find it on the floor: The Fort Escape Tunnels

Moved without tents, cooked without fires, and covered ground that regular armies took a week to do. The whole military doctrine was built on being somewhere else.

Find it on the floor: The Fort Escape Tunnels