Derawar Fort

Forty bastions standing over the Cholistan

A desert fortress in the Cholistan of the southern Punjab, about 20 km south of Ahmedpur East in Bahawalpur District, whose forty bastions can be seen from miles away across the sand. Its walls run 1500 metres around and stand up to thirty metres high. The Cholistan is the western end of the Thar, and the ground holds traces of an Indus Valley people who farmed along the Hakra River, until around 600 BC, when the river shifted its course and sank into the ground and the land turned to desert. Ruins of up to a dozen forts still stand in the region, and Derawar is the best preserved of them, a stronghold on the old trade route and the road taken by travellers between India and Mecca. It was built in 858 under Rai Jajja Bhati, a Hindu Rajput ruler of the Bhati clan, as a tribute to Rawal Deoraj Bhati. In the 18th century the Nawabs of Bahawalpur took it from the Shahotra tribe, and the Abbasi ruler Nawab Sadeq Muhammad rebuilt it in its present form in 1732, only to lose it again in 1747. Carry plenty of water out into the Cholistan.