Journey

Delhi — the seven cities and beyond

Stops (28)

1. Indraprastha / Purana Qila · Indraprastha · Dinpanah 1533 · Shergarh 1540

   The mound the Mahabharata's Indraprastha is traditionally identified with, on which Humayun built Dinpanah in 1533 and Sher Shah rebuilt Shergarh after taking it in 1540. Hemu was crowned here in 1556, and Humayun died the same year falling down its library stairs. Painted Grey Ware has been found in the lowest levels.

2. Lal Kot · 11th century

   The Tomar fortification, the first defended settlement of the Delhi we now mean, on the Mehrauli ridge above the Yamuna floodplain. Anangpal Tomar is credited with it, and the Iron Pillar was brought to the site by one of the Tomars or their predecessors before any of the later building began.

3. Qila Rai Pithora · 1180s

   Prithviraj Chauhan's enormous rubble enlargement of Lal Kot, whose line can still be traced across south Delhi. It is the last Hindu fortification of the city, and everything the Sultanate built for its first century was built inside it, out of the material of the temples it had contained. The transfer of sovereignty is legible in one place, in one building's materials.

4. Qutb complex, Delhi · from 1192

   Qutbuddin Aibak's Quwwat-ul-Islam and the minar beside it, inside Prithviraj's walls. This is the first Delhi of the Sultanate, and it is a reused city: temple columns in the colonnade, a fourth-century iron pillar left standing in the court, and a tower finished by three successive rulers. The tower itself was begun by Aibak and finished by Iltutmish, and repaired twice afterwards.

5. Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque · 1192–1229

   The mosque itself, built in stages by Aibak, Iltutmish and Alauddin, its prayer screen carved with Quranic inscription in a style Indian masons were improvising from scratch. The corbelled arches of the earliest phase show workmen who had not yet been taught the true arch. The corbelled arches of the earliest phase show masons who had not yet been taught the true arch, and the true arch appears next door nineteen years later.

6. Alai Darwaza · 1311

   Alauddin Khalji's gateway, the first true arch and dome in India built on proper voussoirs, with red sandstone, marble inlay and Seljuq ornament. It is the architectural dividend of the Mongol wars and the Deccan campaigns: money and confidence spent on an entirely new structural vocabulary. The unfinished Alai Minar beside it was meant to be twice the height of the Qutb.

7. Qutb Sāhib, Mehrauli · d. 1235

   The shrine of Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki at Mehrauli, the second Chishti master in India, around which the dargah quarter grew. Sultans from Iltutmish to Bahadur Shah Zafar asked to be buried near it, so the oldest inhabited part of Delhi is a graveyard around a saint rather than a palace.

8. Sīrī & Jahānpanāh · 1303 and 1327

   Alauddin's Siri, built as a camp against the Mongols and then walled, and Muhammad bin Tughlaq's Jahanpanah, which enclosed the ground between Siri and the Qutb. Two of the seven cities, a generation apart, both essentially responses to an army that might arrive. Both were essentially responses to an army that might arrive, and Siri was demolished for its stone by Sher Shah four centuries later to build Shergarh.

9. Hauz Khās · 1295 and 1354

   Alauddin's great reservoir, dug to water Siri, and the madrasa, mosque and tomb Firoz Shah Tughlaq built round it fifty years later. Ibn Battuta and Timur's chronicler both describe the tank. It is the clearest case in Delhi of a water work becoming a monumental quarter. Timur's chronicler and Ibn Battuta both describe the tank, a generation apart.

10. Tughlaqabad · 1321–1325

    Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq's city, built in four years with sloping rubble walls on a rock outcrop and abandoned within a generation. The walls are still enormous. It is the point at which Delhi's building turns defensive rather than triumphal, and its water supply is usually blamed for the abandonment. Its water supply, and a quarrel with a Sufi, are the two explanations usually offered.

11. Fīroz Shāh Kotla & the Topra pillar · 1354

    Firozabad, Firoz Shah Tughlaq's citadel on the Yamuna, on whose pyramidal platform he re-erected an Ashokan pillar hauled from Topra wrapped in silk and reeds. A sultan moving a sixteen-hundred-year-old imperial column into his own capital is the earliest deliberate act of monument relocation in India. The pillar is still standing on the platform, and its edict was first read here in 1837.

12. Lodi Gardens tombs · 1440s–1510s

    The Sayyid and Lodi tombs — Muhammad Shah's, Sikandar Lodi's, the Bara Gumbad and the Sheesh Gumbad — now standing in a public garden laid out in 1936. This is the architecture of the dynasties between the Tughlaqs and the Mughals, and the octagonal tomb type here is what Humayun's Tomb was built against.

13. Humayun's Tomb · 1565–1572

    Haji Begum's tomb for Humayun, the first great Mughal garden tomb in India, on a charbagh plan with a double dome — and the direct model for the Taj Mahal eighty years later. Bahadur Shah Zafar was captured in its enclosure in September 1857. It is the earliest Mughal building in India to use a double dome, and the first to sit in a quartered garden of this scale.

14. Hazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi · d. 1325

    Nizamuddin Auliya's dargah, and around it the tombs of Amir Khusrau, Jahanara, Mirza Ghalib and the Chausath Khamba — the densest concentration of Delhi's cultural memory in one settlement. Qawwali is still sung here on Thursday nights in the form Khusrau is credited with shaping. The Sufi and the poet were contemporaries and are buried within twenty metres of each other.

15. Chausath Khamba, Nizamuddin · 1623–24

    Mirza Aziz Koka's marble tomb at Nizamuddin, sixty-four pillars carrying twenty-five bays with no walls at all — a pavilion rather than a chamber. It stands at the head of the lane to the dargah, beside Ghalib's grave and the Mirza Ghalib academy. A tomb with no walls is a rare thing anywhere, and it was built for Akbar's foster brother, who is buried in it.

16. Red Fort, Delhi · 1639–1648

    Shahjahanabad's citadel, the seventh city and the one still lived in. Zafar was tried in its Diwan-i-Khas in 1858, 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 start of the Republic. The Diwan-i-Khas still carries the inscription about paradise on earth above its arches.

17. Salimgarh Fort · 1546 · 1857 · 1945

    Islam Shah Suri's fortification beside what became the Red Fort, absorbed into it by Aurangzeb and used afterwards as a prison — by the Mughals, by the British after 1857, and for the INA detainees whose trial followed. One small fort, four sovereignties, the same function under all of them.

18. Kashmere Gate · September 1857

    The northern gate of Shahjahanabad, blown in by an engineering party on 14 September 1857 to let the assault columns into the city. The marks are still on the masonry. The siege and capture of Delhi ran from the Ridge to this gate, and the city was emptied of its population afterwards.

19. Flagstaff Tower, Delhi Ridge · May–September 1857

    The tower on the Ridge where British civilians gathered on 11 May 1857 before evacuating north, and which the besieging force then used as a signal post. The Ridge camp is where the recapture of Delhi was organised, and it is now a city forest with the 1863 Mutiny Memorial on it.

20. St James Church, Delhi · 1836

    The cruciform Anglican church near Kashmere Gate, built by James Skinner — the son of a Scottish officer and a Rajput mother — in fulfilment of a battlefield vow. Skinner's own grave is under the chancel. It is the oldest church in Delhi and the centre of the pre-1857 British quarter.

21. Safdarjung Tomb · 1754

    The last great Mughal garden tomb, built for Safdarjung with marble stripped from an earlier tomb because there was no money for new. It is usually described as the decline of the style, and the reuse is the evidence: the empire that built Humayun's tomb could no longer quarry for one.

22. Rashtrapati Bhavan · 1912–1929

    Lutyens' Viceroy's House on Raisina Hill, with a copper dome derived from the Sanchi stupa, chattris on the roofline and three hundred and forty rooms. The Viceroy moved in two years before the Government of India Act promised what the building's occupants were resisting. The dome's profile was taken from the Sanchi stupa, which was a deliberate choice.

23. Parliament House / Sansad Bhavan · 1921–1927

    Baker's circular Council House, built for the legislature the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms created, and the chamber in which the Constituent Assembly then wrote the Constitution. A building designed for a consultative colonial council became the parliament of a republic without alteration. The Constituent Assembly sat in it from December 1946 to January 1950, and the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha used the same chamber and the one beside it until 2023.

24. India Gate · 1921–1931

    Lutyens' arch at the end of the ceremonial axis, carrying the names of some ninety thousand Indian soldiers killed in the First World War and on the North-West Frontier. The canopy behind it held a statue of George V until 1968, and the Republic has reused the same axis for its own parades.

25. Connaught Place · 1929–1933

    The two Georgian colonnaded circles of New Delhi's commercial centre, built where the village of Madhoganj and Jaisinghpura had been. It was planned as the shopping quarter for the imperial capital's officials and has been the centre of the city's public life ever since. The villages of Madhoganj and Jaisinghpura were cleared to make room for it.

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

    The whole imperial city, laid out on axial sightlines between Raisina Hill and the arch, with hexagonal roundabouts and bungalow plots at a density the city has argued about ever since. Finished sixteen years before the empire ended; inherited intact and still the seat of government. The bungalow plot density it was laid out at is still argued about every few years.

27. Sacred Heart Cathedral, Delhi · 1930–1934

    The Catholic cathedral behind Connaught Place, built in Italianate style by Henry Medd, who also designed the Anglican cathedral on the other side of the centre. New Delhi was given its churches at the same time as its secretariats, on the same axial plan. Medd designed both of New Delhi's cathedrals, Catholic and Anglican, at the same time.

28. Yogmaya, Delhi · Mehrauli

    A small shrine to Yogmaya at Mehrauli, said to be one of the few pre-Sultanate temples in Delhi still in worship, and the site of the Phoolwalon ki Sair — the flower-sellers' procession that Akbar Shah II instituted, which goes to this temple and to the Qutb Sahib dargah in the same walk.

Sources

• Wikipedia