Delhi has a fascinating history. For the last millennium the city has been fought over, conquered, sacked, ruined, and resurrected, many times over. Before it became the capitol of the modern Indian state, the Rajput Chauhans, the five dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate, the brief but brilliant Sur Empire, the Mughals, and, finally, the British, all took their turns on the throne of Delhi and left behind an incredible wealth of tombs, temples, mosques, fortifications, and civic architecture. Chaotic, ever-evolving Shahjahanabad, the Mughal capitol now referred to as Purani Dilli, or Old Delhi, is in fact one of the city’s newer incarnations. Further back in time are the extensive ruins of several much older Delhi’s, founded by conquerors who would build fresh cities from the rubble left behind by their predecessors.
Now all of these lost cities of Delhi are buried underneath the vast seething metropolis of India’s National Capitol Region. The architectural ghosts of the city’s tumultuous past are hemmed in with the teeming urban development that has sprung up as a result of India’s exploding middle class. Delhi’s civic infrastructure, such as its truly magnificent metro system and gigantic international airport, only expands and develops year by year, making the city far easier and more pleasant to visit, while further burying so much of what makes it interesting.
Some of Delhi’s heritage sites are among the most visited tourist attractions in India. The early Sultanate Qutb Minar, or Old Delhi’s Mughal Red Fort, both consistently rank just below the Taj Mahal in terms of numbers of visitors. They fit the 21st century stereotype of must-see attractions constantly overrun with social media influencers and selfie-clicking tourists. But in the shadows of both world-famous monuments are hundreds of neglected architectural remnants of Islamic and pre-Islamic Delhi that most visitors don’t even know exist. And some of these structures, perhaps, won’t exist for much longer.
This series of blog posts is going to focus on these lesser-known monuments. I’ll be writing about the structures themselves, including their history and architecture, along with their context within modern Delhi and the unique challenges of visiting them. Even over the brief time I’ve been travelling to India, I’ve witnessed Delhi’s historical sites change and develop with mixed results; tombs nearly swallowed by squatters and illegally built commercial enterprises have been brought back from the brink, though at the high cost of evictions and destroyed livelihoods; centuries-old, aesthetically crumbling ruins have been “fixed” with the use of copious amounts of cheap concrete and ill-advised plaster; mounds of vaguely historical-building-shaped rubble have been gathered up and conjecturally reassembled; the garbage strewn depths of magnificent stepwells have been decluttered and local hooligans have been barred from descending into them and scratching their names into the ancient masonry, the tradeoff being that everyone else has been barred as well. In Old Delhi, an incredible 19th century haveli will be ground into sad dust by that area’s perpetual colorful chaos, while its next-door neighbor will be painstakingly (and expensively) restored into a semi-historically accurate heritage hotel. Not every change has been tragic. Much valuable excavation and archeological work has been performed in recent years. The good must be taken with the bad. But Delhi never rests.
I envision this project to be a sort of perpetual work in progress, with more material being added every time I get the chance to spend a few days in Delhi. It will include both new photography along with pictures I took as far back as my first visit to India in 2009. I don’t know how many posts I’ll write, or for how long. But hopefully I’ll have many to add over the years. I don’t expect Delhi to run out of surprises any time soon.
PART 1: THE TOMB OF YUSUF QATTAL
PART 4: (POSSIBLY) THE TOMB OF BAHLOL KHAN LODI
Patrick Rogers 