The plain that has always been worth fighting for
The Gangetic Plain between the Yamuna and Indus rivers is the most productive agricultural land in South Asia. Control it, and you control the subcontinent's food supply and its main overland trade routes. This is why armies have been fighting over the ground on which Delhi stands for at least three thousand years. By one count, the city has been besieged or sacked more than a dozen times — by Timur in 1398, Nadir Shah in 1739, the British in 1803, the Mutineers in 1857 — and has been rebuilt, each time, on the rubble of the last version.
Historians identify at least eight distinct cities of Delhi, each founded on a slightly different part of the Yamuna-Indus plain south and west of the modern capital. The oldest remains are at the Purana Qila mound, where archaeological layers extend back to the 3rd century BC and where some scholars identify the site of Indraprastha — the Pandava capital of the Mahabharata. Whether the mythological city was historical is debated; the physical layers of occupation on that ridge are not. People have lived here, continuously, for a very long time.
The minaret that announced a new civilization
In 1193, Muhammad of Ghor's general Qutb ud-Din Aibak sacked Qila Rai Pithora — the fortress of the last Hindu Rajput ruler of Delhi — and established the Delhi Sultanate, the first Muslim sultanate in South Asia. Aibak began construction of the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, the first mosque built in India after the Islamic conquest, using materials from 27 demolished Hindu and Jain temples. The columns of those temples are still visible in the mosque's arcades today, their original decorative carvings intact, repurposed into a new prayer hall.
Aibak also began the Qutb Minar, though he completed only one storey before his death in 1210. His successor, Iltutmish, added three more storeys and completed the minaret around 1220. At 73 metres, it remains the world's tallest brick minaret. The tower was built to call the faithful to prayer — its four projecting balconies mark each storey break — but it also served a political function. Visible for miles across a flat agricultural plain, it announced the permanence and scale of the new order. A fire in the 14th century damaged the top; the current fifth storey was added by Sultan Firuz Shah Tughlaq in 1368, in a lighter marble that marks the repair.
The Sultanate era produced five successive dynasties — Mamluk, Khilji, Tughlaq, Sayyid, Lodi — each building its own version of Delhi slightly offset from the last. Siri, Tughlaqabad, Jahanpanah, Firozabad: the names of these cities survive in neighbourhoods and monument clusters scattered across the southern plain. Each has a fort or tombs. Most are visited by almost nobody. The physical archaeology of the Sultanate — 320 years of history — lies in plain sight across Delhi, largely uninterpreted.
The Mughals and the world's most expensive tomb
In 1526, Babur, a descendant of both Timur and Genghis Khan, defeated the last Lodi sultan at the First Battle of Panipat and founded the Mughal Empire. Babur himself is buried in Kabul. It was his son Humayun who cemented Delhi as the Mughal capital — intermittently. Humayun was expelled by the Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri in 1540 and spent fifteen years in Persian exile before retaking the city in 1555. He died the following year, falling from his library steps.
Humayun's widow, Haji Begum, commissioned a tomb for him in 1562. It was the first garden tomb on the subcontinent — a Mughal architectural form derived from Persian precedents, placing the mausoleum at the centre of a formal charbagh with water channels and cypress trees. The central dome rises 42 metres on a high platform of red sandstone; the first large-scale use of this form in India. Within a century, Humayun's Tomb would serve as the direct template for the Taj Mahal. It was also, in 1857, the location where the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was captured by British forces after the uprising.
The empire's high-water mark came under Shah Jahan, who in 1638 began construction of Shahjahanabad — the seventh Delhi, which became what we now call Old Delhi. Its Red Fort, built over nine years from 1639, stretched along the Yamuna's western bank for 2 kilometres, its red sandstone walls rising 33 metres on the river side. Inside: palaces, pavilions, a marble hammam, a covered market selling gems and silks. Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India, was completed in 1656 after six years of construction; it required 5,000 artisans and holds 25,000 worshippers. These were buildings designed to project permanence and divine sanction in stone.
Nadir Shah and the price of a diamond
In 1739, the Persian emperor Nadir Shah invaded India, defeated the Mughal army at Karnal, and marched into Delhi. The Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah surrendered and received him as a guest. Forty-two days later, Nadir Shah ordered a massacre that killed somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 inhabitants of the city in a single day — triggered, by most accounts, by an altercation in the bazaar in which some of his soldiers were killed.
When Nadir Shah left, he took the Peacock Throne — the jewelled seat of Mughal power, worth by some estimates more than the annual revenue of all of France — and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. The Peacock Throne was destroyed when Nadir Shah was himself assassinated. The Koh-i-Noor passed through Persian and Afghan hands before becoming part of the British Crown Jewels, where it remains. The massacre effectively ended the coherent Mughal state. Delhi survived but was never again the centre of a functioning empire for the next hundred years.
The British and the third Delhi
The British East India Company took Delhi in 1803. After the uprising of 1857 — in which Indian soldiers mutinied against the Company, and Delhi became the symbolic centre of resistance under the nominal leadership of the last Mughal emperor — the Company's rule was replaced by direct Crown rule, the city was garrisoned, and the Mughal court was permanently dissolved. Bahadur Shah Zafar died in exile in Rangoon in 1862.
In 1911, at the Delhi Durbar marking the coronation of George V, it was announced that the capital of British India would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi. The decision was administrative — Calcutta was too far from the agrarian north — and symbolic. Delhi's historical resonance as a seat of imperial power made it the obvious choice. Architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker were commissioned to design an entirely new city on the plain south of the old walled city. New Delhi was constructed between 1911 and 1931 at a cost that made it one of the largest colonial building projects in history.
India Gate, completed in 1931, commemorates the 70,000 Indian soldiers who died fighting for Britain in the First World War. This is the monument around which office workers eat lunch and families fly kites in the evening: a British war memorial, built with Indian labour, now fully absorbed into the texture of Indian public life.
Partition and the city that doubled overnight
India gained independence on August 15, 1947. The Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan set off one of the largest forced migrations in human history. Somewhere between 10 and 20 million people crossed the new borders in both directions. Approximately one million were killed. Delhi was at the centre of it.
Muslim families who had lived in Delhi for generations — many for centuries, in the lanes around Jama Masjid and in the old Mughal quarters — fled to Pakistan. Their departure was often violent: properties seized, families separated, people killed in the streets. Simultaneously, hundreds of thousands of Hindu and Sikh refugees arrived from what had become Pakistan — from Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan — bringing nothing, sleeping in camps set up in mosques, schools, and abandoned government buildings.
The city's population roughly doubled in months. The refugees who arrived — the Punjabis displaced by Partition — remade the cultural character of Delhi more than any event since the Mughal period. They brought their cuisine, their commerce, their networks. The butter chicken, the tandoori cooking, the particular energy of Connaught Place — these are Partition inheritances, carried in by people who had lost everything else.
The capital that keeps building itself
Independent India chose Delhi as its capital. The government of Jawaharlal Nehru moved into Lutyens's imperial buildings and found them fit for purpose, if ideologically uncomfortable. The irony was noted and set aside. The Lok Sabha met in the same circular Council Chamber where the British Imperial Legislative Council had sat. The Viceroy's House became Rashtrapati Bhavan, the President's official residence.
In the decades that followed, Delhi grew at a pace that its infrastructure consistently failed to absorb. The 2001 census counted 9.4 million people in the city. By 2011 it was 11 million within the municipal limits and over 16 million in the National Capital Region. Current estimates put the metropolitan area at over 32 million — the second-largest urban agglomeration in the world. The speed of this growth is visible in the built landscape: monuments from eight different civilizations sit alongside ring roads, flyovers, DLF commercial towers, and entire planned satellite cities that did not exist fifteen years ago.
The Delhi Metro, which opened in 2002, now runs 390 kilometres of track across the city and its suburbs. The system handles roughly 6.5 million trips per day. It is arguably the most significant public infrastructure project in India since independence, and it has made it possible for a city of this size to function at all during peak hours. The Yellow Line, which connects the old walled city at Chandni Chowk to the government district at Central Secretariat, runs through layers of history that the train passes without comment: the medieval stepwells below, the British-built civic buildings above, the contemporary commuter flow carrying all of it forward.
Historians count eight cities of Delhi. The ninth — the National Capital Territory of Delhi that exists today — is still under construction.