Delhi

• 1. Introduction

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  Delhi loses control of nothing more often than its own name. One legend traces it to Dhillu, a king who built a city here in 50 BCE and called it after himself. Another says the Tomaras coined dhili, the Prakrit word for loose, because the famous iron pillar of Delhi sat on a weak foundation and had to be moved. A third strand reads the name as dehleez or dehali, words meaning threshold or gateway, the city imagined as a doorway into the Gangetic Plain. This is the National Capital Territory of India, a megacity straddling the Yamuna river yet spreading chiefly west of its right bank. From the early 13th century to the mid-19th century it served as the seat of two great empires. Then a southern district was carved out and renamed, and a new capital rose in 1911. How did a place argued over for two thousand years end up the world's most polluted capital, ringed by satellite cities holding more than 28 million people? The answer runs through forts, refugees, smog, and a metro built across a falling water table.

• 2. Seven Cities

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  Indraprastha is the oldest name tied to this ground, set on a knoll above the Yamuna in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata. The epic was composed roughly between 400 BCE and 300 CE but describes an earlier age. Art historian Catherine B. Asher notes that its topographical description matches the area of Purana Qila, a 14th-century fort. The analogy stops there. Excavations turned up uneven findings of painted grey pottery characteristic of the eleventh century BCE, but no signs of a built environment, much less fortifications.

  In 1966, an inscription of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka, who reigned from 273 to 235 BCE, was discovered near Srinivaspuri. The earliest architectural relics date to around 300 BCE, the Maurya period. Centuries later, in 1052 CE, the Tomara Rajput king Anang Pal built the Lal Kot and several temples in the southern part of present-day Delhi. The Chauhan Rajputs under Vigraharaja IV took Lal Kot in the mid-12th century and renamed it Qila Rai Pithora. Tradition counts seven cities associated with this region, and these early forts were only the first layers of a habit Delhi never broke.

• 3. Sultans And Mughals

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  Prithviraj Chauhan was defeated in 1192 by Muhammad Ghori at the second battle of Tarain. When Ghori died without an heir in 1206, his governor Qutb-ud-din Aibak seized the Indian possessions and founded the Delhi Sultanate and the Mamluk dynasty. He began the Qutb Minar and the Quwwat-al-Islam mosque, the earliest surviving mosque in India.

  The Qutb Minar rises 72.5 metres and was completed under Sultan Iltutmish in the 13th century. Iltutmish, who ruled from 1211 to 1236, consolidated the conquest of northern India, and his daughter Razia became Sultana of Delhi after his death. For three hundred years the throne passed through Turkic, Indian, and Afghan hands. Under Ala-ud-din Khalji the sultanate pushed south of the Narmada River. Muhammad bin Tughluq, who ruled from 1325 to 1351, stretched it to its greatest extent, then moved his capital to Daulatabad in central India and lost the north before being forced back.

  Timur captured and sacked Delhi in 1398, massacring 100,000 captive civilians. The Sayyid dynasty presided over decline, the Afghan Lodi dynasty briefly recovered Punjab and the Gangetic plain, and in 1526 Babur destroyed the sultanate at the First Battle of Panipat. Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan and Timur from the Fergana Valley, founded the Mughal Empire, which ruled from Delhi and Agra. Shah Jahan built the seventh city, Shahjahanabad, capital from 1638 and known today as Old Delhi.

• 4. Plunder And Conquest

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  Aurangzeb died in 1707, and Mughal power fell away as the Hindu Maratha Empire rose from the Deccan Plateau. In 1737, Maratha forces under Baji Rao I sacked Delhi after defeating the Mughals at the First Battle of Delhi.

  Nader Shah of Persia broke the Mughal army in less than three hours at the Battle of Karnal in 1739, despite being outnumbered. He sacked and looted the city, carrying away the Peacock Throne, the Daria-i-Noor, and the Koh-i-Noor. He left only after forcing the emperor Muhammad Shah I to beg for mercy and hand over the keys of the city and the royal treasury. The wound never healed, and it opened the road for later invaders, including the British.

  A treaty in 1752 made the Marathas protectors of the Mughal throne. Ahmad Shah Durrani's forces sacked Delhi again in 1757, though the Afghans did not annex it. The Marathas then fought the Afghans and won back control, holding the city until the British East India Company defeated them at the Battle of Delhi in 1803 during the Second Anglo-Maratha War.

• 5. Capital By Decree

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  During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Delhi fell to East India Company forces after the bloody Siege of Delhi. The city passed to direct British government control in 1858 and was made a district province of the Punjab. In 1911 came the announcement that the capital of the British Indian Empire would move from Calcutta to Delhi, formally transferred on the 12th of December 1911.

  The name New Delhi was given in 1927, and the new capital was inaugurated on the 13th of February 1931. After independence on the 15th of August 1947, New Delhi was declared the capital of the Union of India. The slice built during the British period came to be known informally as Lutyens' Delhi.

  Legal status followed in stages. The States Reorganisation Act of 1956 created the Union Territory of Delhi from the Chief Commissioner's Province. The Sixty-ninth Amendment in 1991 renamed it the National Capital Territory and granted a legislative assembly with limited powers. That assembly had been abolished in 1956 and only re-established in 1993.

• 6. Partition And Its Wounds

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  Around five hundred thousand Hindu and Sikh refugees, mainly from West Punjab, poured into Delhi during the partition of 1947. About three hundred thousand Muslim residents migrated to Pakistan. The city was transformed from a Mughal one into a Punjabi one, losing two-thirds of its Muslim population. That Punjabi influence still shows in the language, dress, and cuisine of the city.

  Delhi was the primary site of the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, which killed around 2,800 people in the city by government figures, with independent estimates running higher. The riots followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.

  Violence returned in new forms. In 2001, armed militants attacked the Parliament of India building, killing six security personnel and triggering a diplomatic crisis with Pakistan. Further attacks in 2005 and 2008 caused 92 deaths in total. In 2020, Delhi saw its worst communal violence in decades, when riots driven mainly by Hindu mobs attacking Muslims killed 53 people, two-thirds of them Muslims and the rest Hindus.

• 7. The Air And The Water

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  The World Health Organization named Delhi the most polluted city in the world in 2014. By 2016 it had slipped to eleventh-worst in the urban air quality database, but in 2022 several groups again ranked it the fourth most-polluted city globally. One estimate attributes about 10,500 deaths a year to its air. The index sits at moderate levels between January and September, then crashes to Very Poor, Severe, or Hazardous between October and December, driven by stubble burning, Diwali firecrackers, and cold weather.

  A Ministry of Earth Sciences paper in October 2018 blamed almost 41% of the city's PM2.5 on vehicular emissions, 21.5% on dust and fire, and 18% on industries. In 2020, the annual average PM2.5 reached 107.6 micrograms per cubic metre, almost 21.5 times the WHO guideline of 5 set in September 2021. Such levels are estimated to cut the average resident's life expectancy by about 10.1 years.

  The city has fought back. After a public interest litigation begun in 1996, the Supreme Court ordered Delhi's buses and taxis converted to compressed natural gas and banned leaded petrol in 1998. In 2003, Delhi won the United States Department of Energy's first Clean Cities International Partner of the Year award. Water tells a parallel story of strain. The Delhi Jal Board supplies 900 million gallons per day, drawing 240 million from Bhakra storage alone, yet the groundwater level keeps falling, and research suggests up to half the city's water use is unofficial groundwater.

• 8. Movement And Memory

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  Indira Gandhi International Airport handled more than 48 million passengers in 2015-16, making it the busiest in India and South Asia. Its Terminal 3 was built between 2007 and 2010 to handle an additional 37 million passengers a year. The city's flying history reaches back to the Delhi Flying Club, founded in 1928 with two de Havilland Moth aircraft named Delhi and Roshanara.

  Buses carry about 60% of Delhi's transport demand, and the state-owned Delhi Transport Corporation runs the world's largest fleet of CNG-fuelled buses. As of February 2024 the city had around 1,650 electric buses, the highest in India and third highest in the world after Shenzhen and Santiago. The Delhi Metro, built and run by the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, spans 348.12 km across ten colour-coded lines and 255 stations. It is the world's tenth-largest metro system by length, and Phase-I was built for 2.3 billion US dollars.

  The city's monuments hold its many pasts in stone. Three World Heritage Sites stand here, the Red Fort, the Qutub Minar, and Humayun's Tomb, while the Jama Masjid, India's largest mosque, was built in 1656. The Lotus Temple, a Baha'i House of Worship completed in 1986 and shaped like a flower, serves as the Mother Temple of the Indian subcontinent. The Archaeological Survey of India recognises 1,200 heritage buildings and 175 monuments as national heritage sites, more layers added to a place that has been building over itself since the Maurya period.