Agra

Agra enters history properly in 1504, when Sikandar Lodi, sultan of Delhi, made it his capital and built on the Yamuna's bank. Babur defeated the Lodis at Panipat in 1526 and took the city, and it became the base of the new Mughal empire. Akbar moved his court here in 1558 and from 1565 rebuilt the riverside fortress in red sandstone, creating the fort that still dominates the river front. Between 1571 and 1585 he ruled from a new capital at Fatehpur Sikri, then abandoned it and returned.

The city's great age came under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, when the court, the workshops and the caravan trade of northern India were concentrated here. The Taj Mahal was built between 1632 and 1653 for Mumtaz Mahal, who had died in childbirth, and the riverside was lined with gardens, mansions and tombs of which only some survive. Shah Jahan moved the capital to his new city at Delhi in 1648; in 1658 his son Aurangzeb deposed him and held him in Agra Fort until his death.

Mughal power faded, and the city was fought over by Jats, Marathas and finally the British, who took it in 1803. Agra was the capital of the North-Western Provinces from 1836 until 1858, when the capital moved to Allahabad, and it became a centre of education and Christian missions; it was one of the centres of the rebellion of 1857. In the 20th century leather, footwear and foundries made it an industrial city, and in 1996 courts ordered polluting industries out of a protected zone around the monuments to slow damage to the Taj Mahal's marble.

Agra's identity is Mughal, and much of what visitors associate with north Indian court culture — the architecture, the cooking, the inlaid stone — was refined here. Pietra dura, the setting of coloured stones into white marble, has been practised by families in the city since the building of the Taj Mahal, and marble workshops still supply table tops, boxes and panels, along with a good deal of soapstone sold as marble to the unwary.

The city is mixed and the calendar shows it. Hindu festivals fill the streets, above all the Ramlila season and the Ram Barat procession, which is a specifically Agra tradition; Eid brings crowds to the Jama Masjid and the old city; and Holi is celebrated with a force that is famous in the Braj country just to the north, around Mathura and Vrindavan, where Krishna devotion shapes music, poetry and dance. Braj bhasha, a form of Hindi, is the old literary language of that tradition, and it is heard around Agra alongside standard Hindi and Urdu.

Tourism has shaped manners in a particular way. Agra sees enormous numbers of day visitors, and the industry around them — guides, drivers, touts, emporiums, photographers — is practised and persistent. Beyond it the city is a plain, hard-working place with little of the self-conscious heritage polish of Jaipur or Udaipur, and the bazaars behind the fort operate exactly as they would in any other Uttar Pradesh city.

About 1.6 million people live in Agra, making it one of the largest cities in Uttar Pradesh. Leather and footwear are the biggest industries, with thousands of small units supplying Indian and export markets, alongside foundries, engineering workshops, handicrafts in marble and stone, and the sweet trade that turns out petha by the tonne. Tourism employs a great many people directly and indirectly, and the restrictions of the protected zone around the monuments limit what industry may operate nearby.

Most residents live far from the monuments, in the dense lanes of the old city, the cantonment and the newer colonies spreading south and east, and across the river in the trans-Yamuna suburbs. Days start early, the bazaars open in the middle of the morning and stay busy into the night, and the Yamuna — polluted and often low outside the monsoon — is a daily reality rather than the ornamental river of the Mughal paintings.

Air quality, water supply and traffic are the standing complaints. Winter smog settles over the plain for weeks, and both the fog and the pollution obscure the monuments and delay trains. Investment has gone into a metro line opened in 2024, expressways and the corridor around the Taj Mahal, while the wider city remains crowded and patchily served.

Agra's best-known product is petha, a sweet made from ash gourd boiled in sugar syrup until it turns translucent, sold plain, dried, flavoured with saffron or rose, or stuffed with nuts, and carried home by almost every Indian visitor. The other local speciality is dalmoth, a dark, spiced dry mixture of fried lentils, nuts and raisins.

Breakfast in the old city is bedai, a puffed deep-fried bread with a spicy filling, eaten with potato curry and curd and followed by jalebi coiled into hot syrup. Chaat is taken seriously here, with plates of papdi, tikki and gol gappa sold at stalls in Sadar Bazaar and the lanes near the fort, and paratha shops fry bread stuffed with potato, cauliflower or paneer through the day.

The Mughal inheritance shows in the meat cooking of the old Muslim quarters — kebabs grilled over charcoal, korma, nihari and biryani — although much of the city eats vegetarian food, and many restaurants near the Taj serve no meat at all. Milk sweets, rabri and kulfi round off meals, lassi and sugarcane juice cool the summer, and masala chai is drunk at every hour from glasses at the roadside.