The Seven Cities of Delhi

Delhi makes more sense once you stop thinking of it as one city. Tradition counts seven cities of Delhi — really more like a dozen — built over eight centuries on the same stretch of plain between the Aravalli ridge and the Yamuna river, each new dynasty raising its capital beside, or on top of, the last. Nothing was ever fully demolished, so the layers are all still there: a 12th-century victory tower in the south, a Mughal fortress-city in the north, a British imperial capital in between, and the modern megacity of over thirty million poured around all of it. Your three days here happen to work through the stack almost in order.

The sultans: where Delhi began (day 4)

The story starts at the Qutb complex, which you visit on your last Delhi morning but which is chronologically first. In 1192 Muhammad of Ghor defeated the Rajput ruler Prithviraj Chauhan, and his general Qutb-ud-din Aibak — a former slave — stayed on to rule, founding the Delhi Sultanate, the first of the Muslim dynasties that would govern northern India for the next six and a half centuries. His victory monuments set the tone: the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, built fast from the carved columns of demolished Hindu and Jain temples (look closely at the pillars — the figures are defaced but the garlands and bells remain), and beside it the Qutb Minar, a 73-metre tower of fluted red sandstone banded with Quranic calligraphy, still the tallest brick minaret in the world. In the mosque courtyard stands something far older: a 7-tonne iron pillar cast around 400 CE, which after sixteen centuries in the open has barely rusted — a metallurgical puzzle only properly explained in recent decades.

Five sultanate dynasties followed — Mamluks, Khiljis, Tughlaqs, Sayyids, Lodis — and most built a city of their own: Siri, Tughlaqabad, Jahanpanah, Firozabad. You will brush past their leftovers all over the south of the modern city, most pleasantly in Mehrauli Archaeological Park next to the Qutb (a thousand years of tombs and stepwells in parkland) and in Lodi Gardens, where the domed tombs of the last two dynasties now stand among joggers and picnics. The stepwell of Agrasen ki Baoli, wedged between office towers near your hotel, is another fragment of this Delhi surfacing through the modern one.

The Mughals: from Humayun’s Tomb to the Red Fort (days 2–3)

Babur ended the sultanate in 1526 and founded the Mughal empire; his son Humayun — a talented, unlucky ruler who lost the empire, won it back, and then died falling down his library stairs — got the dynasty’s first great monument. Humayun’s Tomb (1570), which you see on your first afternoon, was commissioned by his widow and built by a Persian architect: the first monumental garden tomb in India, red sandstone and white marble, a dome on a plinth in a walled charbagh garden quartered by water channels. Stand in front of it and you are looking at the Taj Mahal’s direct ancestor, eighty years early — the same composition you will see finished in white marble on day 11. The tomb has a coda: in 1857, after the failed uprising, the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was captured here where he had taken refuge among his ancestor’s graves.

The dynasty’s Delhi masterpiece came from Shah Jahan, who moved the capital back from Agra and in 1639 began a whole new city, Shahjahanabad — today’s Old Delhi. Its anchors are your day-3 morning: the Red Fort, the palace-city whose marble private apartments and audience halls held the Peacock Throne until a Persian invader carried it off in 1739; the Jama Masjid, India’s largest and grandest congregational mosque, whose courtyard holds 25,000; and Chandni Chowk, the processional avenue laid out — canal down the middle, moonlight reflecting in it, hence the name — by Shah Jahan’s daughter Jahanara. The canal is long gone and the avenue is now the densest bazaar in India, which is the point of walking it: the lanes off it still sort by trade (silver, wedding gear, parathas, and at the western end Khari Baoli, Asia’s largest wholesale spice market), much as the 17th-century plan assigned them.

New Delhi, and how to read the whole thing

The eighth city is the one you sleep in. In 1911 the British announced the transfer of their capital from Calcutta, and Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker spent twenty years building New Delhi: a garden city of white bungalows and vast axial avenues, its centrepiece the two-kilometre line from the Viceroy’s House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan, the president’s residence) down to India Gate, a war memorial arch carrying the names of some 13,000 dead of the Indian Army. The scale was meant to declare permanence; sixteen years after its inauguration the British were gone, and independent India simply moved in. The axis — renamed Kartavya Path — is now Delhi’s evening promenade, at its best after dark, which is when your day-2 plan has you there. Connaught Place, the colonnaded circle near your hotel, was the new capital’s commercial hub and still behaves like it.

Practical notes for the stack. Distances are the trap — Delhi is enormous, and the Qutb, Old Delhi and India Gate are each 30–45 minutes apart by car, so the day plans keep each day in one layer. For Old Delhi take the metro (Yellow Line, Rajiv Chowk to Chawri Bazar): it is faster than any car there, clean, cheap and air-conditioned, with a security check and a women-only first carriage. Mornings are the working hours for sightseeing — big sites open around sunrise, and both crowds and traffic build steeply from mid-morning. Early November is the start of Delhi’s smog season, so expect milky light and check the air-quality index; it is also why the dawn and dusk slots in the plans matter more here than anywhere else on the trip. Mosques and the Sikh gurudwara need covered shoulders and legs, shoes off, and a head covering at the gurudwara (scarves are lent at the door).