Current Time in Rāmpur, India

Rampur is a city in the western part of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, standing on the banks of the Kosi River in the fertile plain between the Ganges and the foothills of the Himalayas. It lies roughly three hundred kilometres east of Delhi and a short distance from the larger centres of Moradabad and Bareilly, in flat farming country of sugar cane, wheat and mustard. Summers are long and very hot, the monsoon arrives in July, and winters are cool and often misty.

The city has a population of well over three hundred thousand and is the administrative headquarters of Rampur district. It matters far beyond its size because of its cultural inheritance. For nearly two centuries Rampur was the capital of a princely state ruled by Rohilla Afghan nawabs, and their patronage of scholarship, music and craftsmanship left the town with a reputation as one of the great centres of Indo-Islamic culture in northern India.

The state was founded in 1774 by Nawab Faizullah Khan, whose family had settled in the region known as Rohilkhand. Rampur survived the upheavals of the following century as a small but wealthy princely state under British paramountcy, and its rulers used their revenues to gather manuscripts, invite poets and support musicians. Writers fleeing the collapse of Delhi and Lucknow found refuge here, and the court became a late flowering of a courtly world that was disappearing elsewhere. The state merged with independent India in 1949.

The outstanding landmark is the Raza Library, housed in the elegant Hamid Manzil inside the fort complex. Its collection includes tens of thousands of printed books and thousands of rare manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Urdu and Turkish, among them illuminated Qurans, Mughal miniatures and a celebrated early copy of the poetry of Amir Khusrau. The Jama Masjid, with its white domes and tall minarets, the Kothi Khas Bagh palace, the Gandhi Samadhi gardens and the old city gates complete the picture of a former court town.

Rampur gave its name to a distinguished school of classical music, the Rampur Sahaswan gharana, whose singers are still admired across South Asia, and the court also nurtured instrumentalists and Urdu poets. The city is known for finely made knives, for embroidered caps and coats, for patchwork quilting and for a breed of tall hunting dog, the Rampur greyhound. Local cooking, rich in slow cooked meats and aromatic spice, has its own distinctive style.

Sugar mills, textile and cotton processing, and small manufacturing form the modern economy. Rampur Junction lies on the busy railway line between Moradabad and Bareilly, and national highways connect the city to Delhi and the hills of Uttarakhand. Local colleges are affiliated to regional universities, and the library itself functions as a research institution.

Rampur rewards visitors interested in manuscripts, music and the quieter corners of India's princely past.