The Upper Kot Bazaar is the commercial heart of old Aligarh, and exploring it gives a better sense of the city's character than any monument. Aligarh is famous across India as the country's lock capital — the city produces around 80 percent of India's locks and padlocks — and the bazaar reflects that industrial identity. Shops selling locks of every conceivable size and type sit alongside ironmongers, hardware dealers, brass fittings merchants, and the small workshops where the actual manufacturing happens.
Walk through in the morning when the workshops are active and you can watch craftsmen hand-finishing lock mechanisms using techniques that have changed little in decades. It is not picturesque in a postcard sense but it is completely authentic, and the lock market itself is a genuinely odd and memorable spectacle.