Diwan-i-Khas (Fatehpur Sikri)

The Diwan-i-Khas, or Hall of Private Audience, is among the most quietly astonishing structures in Emperor Akbar's abandoned capital of Fatehpur Sikri. From the outside it reads as a plain square block of red sandstone, crowned by four chhatris (domed rooftop pavilions), giving no hint of the spatial drama within.

• Step inside, however, and the whole interior organises itself around a single monumental central pillar — a design without close parallel anywhere in Mughal India, and the reason architects and historians single the building out.
• The central column rises from a square base into an octagonal shaft, both densely carved with bands of geometric and floral ornament, and blossoms at the top into a vast bracket capital: roughly three dozen serpentine stone brackets fanning outward to carry a circular platform.
• Four narrow diagonal stone walkways, or bridges, radiate from this raised platform to balconies at each corner of the hall's upper level, so that a figure standing at the centre appears suspended at the meeting point of the four galleries.
• The most common interpretation is that Akbar sat on the central platform to receive nobles, ambassadors and scholars ranged around the corner galleries; the building has also long been linked by scholars to the emperor's famous inter-faith debates, an association that remains a matter of academic discussion rather than settled fact.
• What is beyond dispute is the sheer ingenuity of the engineering and the symbolic power of a ruler poised, quite literally, at the hub of his court.
• The hall belongs to the ticketed royal palace complex that Akbar raised from 1571 onward and used for barely a decade and a half before the site was abandoned — a self-contained ensemble of secular imperial architecture in warm red sandstone that was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986.
• The Diwan-i-Khas stands a short walk from the Diwan-i-Am, the Pachisi Court, the Panch Mahal and the palaces, and is best appreciated as part of an unhurried circuit of the whole complex rather than in isolation.
• For vegetarian travellers, Fatehpur Sikri is comfortable ground.
• No food is sold within the monument itself, but simple pure-vegetarian thali dhabas cluster near the parking and bus stand below the ridge, and Agra — about an hour away — is a stronghold of pure-veg sweets, from petha to bedai and jalebi, making it easy to keep an entirely meat-free, alcohol-free day around a visit here.