The Eight Cities of Delhi Part One

Delhi is the most layered and complex city I have ever been in. One in which the veil of separation between the past and present is not only indistinct, it is almost non-existent. Driving in nearly any given part of its urban sprawl and you’ll pass countless ruins and monuments.

Sleeping in a temple Trash on a tomb
Laundry in the British cemetery
These layers are all part of the intense and chaotic city of Delhi, one filled with a sensory overload of color, constant movement, and striking contrasts. You might find crumbling and dilapidated housing sitting next to gleaming and opulent new buildings, streets filled with luxury cars but also bicycles, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, and hand-pulled carts.

Driving through the city on a modern wide boulevard you’ll see the competing honeycombs of narrow lanes and alleys in countless side neighborhoods.

These extreme overlaps are totally different from other historic cities I’ve visited like Athens or Beijing where there’s a pretty distinct separation between the ancient city and the modern incarnation that surrounds it. (Though I’ve heard Rome is somewhat comparable). Partly this is because Delhi is composed of eight cities build atop and around each other, seven dead cities and modern New Delhi, planned by architect Lutyens and completed by the British in 1931 after they shifted their capital from Calcutta. (Some count eleven cities depending on how much significance is given to individual citadels and cities mentioned in ancient sources). Each of these different rulers left their mark on the city through architecture, layouts, and city walls, all of which today are jumbled up together within the boundaries of one mega-city which is now so massive, four satellite cities have cropped up, most notably Gurgaon I’ll describe four of these cities-within-a-city as I saw them.

The earliest reference to an urban center at Delhi is in the epic Mahabharata which tells of the city Indraprastha, built 1400 BCE by the Panavas brothers, though this is not yet proved conclusively by archeological evidence. Pottery found in layers under Delhi’s Old Fort, Purana Qila, suggest corroborating evidence, and, according to British historian Micheal Wood, the nearby modern village of Indraprastha may also hold clues as to the original site- unfortunately this was razed by the British in creating their capital in Delhi, thus destroying the possible evidence. The name Delhi may come from a Raja Dhilu of the Mauryan dynasty who built a city in the 1st c BCE, though this is disputed by scholars. During India’s Middle Ages, the city had a long and complicated history of overthrows and power struggles, as various Turkic military commanders vied for control of the Delhi Sultanate between 1206 and 1526. During this period, the city became a prominent commercial and political center connecting South, West, and Central Asia. The syncretic fusion of Arab/Persian/Turkic and Indian cultures led to a renaissance of architecture, music, literature, cuisine, language, religion, etc, all of which we had quite a bit of exposure to during the Institute. Red Fort

The “first” city of Delhi is generally regarded to be Lal Kot (later renamed Qila Rai Pithora), built in 736 by a Hindu kshatriya (warrior) clan, the Tomara dynasty.
Not much remains but part of the old walls and the Iron Pillar of Delhi which Lal Kot had installed and inscribed with his name, but which dates to Chandragupta the Great (5th c) or even earlier.

See the itinerary of this trip, and details about each destination.

The way in which this new era of rule is conventionally understood today largely reflects colonial and Hindu scholarship of the past two centuries. The common stereotype of brutal Islamic invasions of India begun by British scholars and now perpetuated by Hindu nationalists is a major oversimplification of both the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Era. (This historiography is something I’ll go into a bit deeper in another entry on the spread of Islam in India). We learned in lectures and readings from the esteemed historian Dr. Sunil Kumar , (see source list below) that the Persian medieval chroniclers privileged by British historians who employed a positivist methodology and seemed to ignore bias (when it suited them anyway), constructed a notion of seemingly monolithic and victorious Islamic rule. Yet these are very flawed “authoritative” sources as they clearly pressed a particular (and misleading) agenda. These Persian court-sycophants, who produced histories either by or for the state, acknowledged neither the lowly births of the sultans (from a Turkic military-slave class) nor the powerful discord among Muslims, both in the political/military and religious realms. It is definitely a misnomer to view the Sultanate and following Mughal era, as a monolithic period of homogeneous, stable, and brutal “Islamic rule” or to assume that a Muslim ruler automatically equaled a Muslim state of law. Not that their war-making wasn’t brutal and certainly there was intense conflict between Hindu chieftains and the Turkic military commanders. Yet, the most intense and frequent fighting occurred between competing Muslim leaders or in repelling the Mongol armies (13th and 14th c), not against a unified Hindu front resisting unified Muslim “invaders” from the North. In fact, much of the time, North Indian Hindu rajas allied with the Muslim sultans in order to better compete with other regional rajas with whom they were also at war with, or against the Hindu Marathas a bit further south. Summed up, Northern India was a seething and fluxing cauldron of military competition to control the agriculture and trade of the region and rivalries were not divided along monolithic religious lines. Delhi's dead cities are the striking testament to the rivalries of the Muslim leaders who grasped for Delhi in constantly changing cycles of power.

Historical monuments often hold differing and even multiple meanings for visitors depending on temporal context. The Qutb Minar complex (a World Heritage site) and the first major Islamic monument in Delhi, is symbolic of both the true historical complexity and the way in which the past is represented in modern historical memory.
Indeed, it mirrors Delhi itself as the complex is comprised of an amalgam of buildings of different religions and for differing purposes, all juxtaposed in a somewhat chaotic yet relentlessly compelling layout. This is the sort of place you can get photo overload very quickly as every angle you point your camera is unbelievably striking and photogenic! (Is this not a ridiculous amount of gorgeous architectural symmetry and contrast!?)

Public history is a fascinating subject for me when I’m traveling because it speaks so much to the intentionality of promoting particular historical narratives and also that the way different groups view and learn from monuments is also very much reflective of their own previous knowledge and background. Dr Kumar spoke to us quite compellingly about the way in which a typical visitor, steeped in the stereotype of Islamic conquests might view the Qutb complex. As the minaret (the tallest in the world!) celebrates the victory over a Hindu raja in battle and its corresponding mosque, or masjid, is constructed from the plundered remains of Hindu and Jain temples from the original complex, this appears to “confirm images of Muslim iconoclasm and fanaticism.
It resurrects memories of communal distinctions and strife which nearly every Indian regards as part of his country’s social history.” (Kumar, "Qutb in Modern Memory," 263) [photos] Thus, a visitor’s interpretation of the site is not based merely on their aesthetic impressions, but in what purposes and intentions they ascribe to the monuments themselves, based on conventional notions of the modern imagination of India’s history.

Scholars of the 19th and 20th century placed great importance on the use of temple material to build the masjid, seeing it as a statement of homogenous rule over an “infidel” population of Hindus and as an act of ritual destruction of profane and superstitious images and structures, purified and re-made into something holy.
This is in contrast to the more complicated reality of Hindu imagery which survived and still exists all throughout the complex and the fact that most of the craftsmen were themselves Hindu who incorporated local techniques and inspirations.
Dr Kumar argues that the site was constructed not as a show of power over local Hindus or as a ritualized cleansing of the blasphemous, but as an attempt to consolidate fractious Muslim forces around a centralized symbol of power, and consolidate new converts and various competing Muslim immigrant populations of Persian literati, Turkic military leaders, and Central Asian tribesman around a centralized place of worship.
Kumar’s careful reading of the available sources suggests that the use of the temple rubble was likely expedient more than anything else. It was on site and ready for re-use. Colonial scholars dubbed the mosque Quawwat al-Islam “Might of Islam” despite any evidence to authenticate their claims. This name came from an occasional reference to the city of Delhi itself during the 13th c, and historians transferred this name to the site as a product of their own suppositions about the intentionality of the minaret and masjid, in doing so, also misreading the word qubba (sanctuary), as quwwa (power). So the true name of the mosque, Qubbat al-Islam “Sanctuary of Islam” referred in its original context as a place of Muslim refuge from ongoing Mongol invasions. Time has changed this meaning to interpret the minaret a symbol of the divisive events of 1947 Partition of India and as visceral “proof” of the justification for anti-Muslim “communal violence” which re-emerged in the 1990s.

Sources:
Sunil Kumar. “Politics, the Muslim Community and Hindu-Muslim Relations Reconsidered: North India in the Early Thirteenth Century” in Annales: Economies, Societies, Civilization (2005). 239-264.
Sunil Kumar. “Courts, capitals and kingship: Delhi and its sultans in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE” in Court Cultures in the Muslim World. Eds. Albrecht Fuess and Jan-Peter Hartung. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. 123-148.
Sunil Kumar. “Qutb and Modern Memory” in The Present in Delhi’s Pasts. New Delhi: Three Essays, 2002. 1-61.