Delhi

est. 1052 — the long account

Delhi is not one city but a succession of them, built and rebuilt on the same triangle of land between the Yamuna and the Aravalli ridge. The Tomar Rajputs raised the first fortified settlement, Lal Kot, around 1052, and when Ghurid armies took the plain in 1192 their commander Qutb ud-Din Aibak raised a mosque from the columns of the temples they dismantled and began the Qutb Minar beside it — a pattern of layering that never stopped. Over the next three centuries the Sultanate built new forts and cities across the plain — Siri, Tughlaqabad, Firozabad — and the Mughal-era Purana Qila followed, each abandoned for the next.

The Mughals made Delhi an imperial seat off and on from 1526, but the city's defining act began in 1639, when Shah Jahan started building Shahjahanabad from scratch and, in 1648, moved his court there from Agra: the Red Fort as palace and garrison, the Jama Masjid as its congregational heart, and Chandni Chowk as a moonlit processional bazaar laid out by his daughter Jahanara. When the Mughal empire bled out in the eighteenth century the city shrank inside its walls, but its Urdu culture — poetry, court etiquette, food — kept it the subcontinent's capital of refinement even in decline.

The British took Delhi in 1803 as a pensioner's court, and took it for good in 1857 after the rebellion was fought street by street through Shahjahanabad; they demolished large parts of the old city and turned the Red Fort into a barracks. In 1911 the crown moved its capital from Calcutta, and Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker raised New Delhi beside the old one, inaugurated in 1931. Independence and Partition in 1947 doubled the city with refugees in a matter of months, and modern Delhi grew over all seven of its earlier selves — which is why a walk here is never through one period at a time.

Delhi · Yamuna