Journey

Cities through time — many civilisations, one place

Stops (18)

1. Kannauj · Kanyakubja

   Harsha's capital, described at length by Xuanzang, then the prize in a two-century war between the Pratiharas, Palas and Rashtrakutas because it held the middle Ganges. Mahmud sacked it in 1018. By the nineteenth century it was a small town making attar of roses, which is what a city reduced to its position looks like.

2. Hampi / Vijayanagara · 1336–1565

   The Vijayanagara capital, built over ground the Ramayana calls Kishkindha, and at its height one of the largest cities in the world. Sacked over five months in 1565 and never reoccupied, which is why the site survives as a ruin field rather than under a living town. The unfinished carving at the Vitthala complex is the physical record of a court that stopped.

3. Golconda · 1518–1687

   A Kakatiya mud fort rebuilt in granite by the Qutb Shahis, with an acoustic system that carries a clap from the outer gate to the citadel and the diamond market of the world at its foot. Aurangzeb took it in 1687, the court moved down to Hyderabad, and the fortress was left standing empty.

4. Bhāgyanagar · the naming

   The tradition that Hyderabad was first called Bhagyanagar, after Bhagmati, the woman Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah married. The story is contested and the repository carries it as a tradition rather than a fact, but the way a city's name is argued over is part of the city's history. The way a city's name is argued over is itself part of the city's history.

5. Chārmīnār · 1591

   The four-minaret gateway at the centre of the new city Muhammad Quli laid out on the plain below Golconda, on a grid with the mosque, the bazaar and the palace on its axes. It was built as a ceremonial arch and a mosque at once, and the streets of the old city still radiate from it.

6. Qutb complex, Delhi · from 1192

   Qutbuddin Aibak's mosque, raised from the columns of demolished temples inside the walls of Prithviraj's Delhi, with a fourth-century iron pillar left standing in its court and a minar begun beside it. The first Delhi of the Sultanate is built literally out of the last Delhi of the Chahamanas. The first Delhi of the Sultanate is built out of the last Delhi of the Chahamanas.

7. Red Fort, Delhi · 1639–1648

   Shahjahanabad's citadel, the seventh of Delhi's cities and the one still lived in. Zafar was tried in its audience hall, the INA officers in 1945, and Nehru raised the flag over it in 1947. The same walls staged the end of Mughal rule and the beginning of the Republic. It is the seventh of Delhi's cities and the only one still inhabited.

8. New Delhi, Lutyens' plan · 1911–1931

   An imperial capital laid out on axial sightlines below Raisina Hill, finished sixteen years before the empire it was built for ended. The Republic inherited it intact and still governs from it, which makes Lutyens' Delhi the only one of the city's eight that has never changed function. No other Delhi has kept the same function through a change of sovereignty.

9. Bombay Castle · 1661–1862

   The fort at the south end of Bombay island, begun by the Portuguese and rebuilt by the Company after the island arrived as a royal dowry. Seven marshy outcrops were joined into one landmass by two centuries of reclamation, and the fort walls came down in the 1860s to let the city out.

10. Victorian Gothic & Art Deco, Mumbai · 1860s–1940s

    A Victorian Gothic seafront facing an Art Deco one across a maidan — the High Court, the University and the Secretariat on one side, and the cinemas and apartment blocks of the 1930s on the other. Two imperial generations in one sightline, inscribed together as World Heritage in 2018. Both frontages were inscribed together as World Heritage in 2018.

11. Towers of Silence & Parsi Mumbai · 19th century

    Parsi philanthropy built much of colonial Bombay's civic fabric — hospitals, schools, the docks, the university's buildings — and the dakhmas on Malabar Hill are the community's own space in the middle of it. They are now threatened by the collapse of India's vulture population, which is a twenty-first-century problem for a third-millennium-BCE rite.

12. Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus · 1878–1887

    Bori Bunder, where India's first train left for Thane in 1853, rebuilt as a Gothic cathedral to the railway with a dome, gargoyles and a figure of Progress on top. The station is the point at which the colonial city stopped being a port with a hinterland and became the head of a network.

13. Kolkata: Fort William & the Maidan · 1690–1911

    Three villages on the Hooghly became a fort, then the capital of Bengal's revenue administration, then of British India, and the cleared field of fire around the fort became the Maidan. Most nineteenth-century Indian reform movements first argued with each other in this city. Most nineteenth-century Indian reform movements first argued with each other in this city, and the Bengal Renaissance, the Brahmo Samaj and the Indian National Congress all have addresses within a mile of the Maidan.

14. Magen David Synagogue, Kolkata · 1884

    The Baghdadi Jewish synagogue in Calcutta's business district, built by traders who had come with the opium and jute economies from Aleppo and Baghdad. The community numbered several thousand and now numbers a few dozen; the building is maintained by Muslim caretakers whose families have looked after it for generations.

15. Shaniwarwada, Pune · 1732–1818

    The Peshwas' palace fort, the administrative centre of the Maratha confederacy, burnt out in 1828 with only its walls and its fountain court left. Pune was a Nizam Shahi town, then a Maratha capital, then a Company cantonment and a monsoon seat of the Bombay government, in under three centuries.

16. Srirangapatna / Srirangapattana · Chola to Company

    A Kaveri island with a major Ranganatha temple, which became the Wodeyar capital, then Haidar Ali's and Tipu Sultan's fortified city with a French-drilled garrison and a Jacobin club, and then a ruin after the assault of 1799. The temple is still functioning; almost nothing else is. The temple is still functioning, and almost nothing else on the island is.

17. Ahmedabad / Karnāvatī / Āshāval · 1411–1573

    Ahmad Shah's city on the Sabarmati, whose sultanate architecture worked Gujarati temple carving into mosque and tomb form — the pierced stone screens, the Rani Sipri ensemble, the stepwells. It then became a Mughal provincial capital, a textile town, and the first Indian city inscribed as World Heritage. Its pierced stone screens are the best surviving instance of that absorption anywhere.

18. Gaur (Lakhnauti) · 1204–1575

    The Bengal sultanate's capital under the Ilyas Shahis and Husain Shahis, and a Pala and Sena centre before that: a brick city of mosques, gateways and a minar spread over several square kilometres of what is now farmland. The Ganges moved east, plague followed, and the whole city was simply left.