The Layered Capital: Reading Mughal Delhi on Foot

Delhi is a capital built on other capitals, and its Mughal layer can be read whole, from birth to height to end, across three walks on foot beside the Yamuna. Begin at a garden-tomb raised in fifteen sixty-five, where a Persian double dome first rose over an Indian grave. Walk next through the fortress and the walled city that Shah Jahan founded a lifetime later, when the empire stood at its full reach. Then return to that same first tomb, where in eighteen fifty-seven the last emperor was captured and nearly five centuries of rule came to an end. Three sites, one dynasty, told at your own pace: the moment the pattern was invented, the moment it commanded a capital, and the moment it closed in the very building where it began.

Where the paradise-dome was invented

The oldest of the three walks is also the quietest. In fifteen sixty-five the widowed empress Bega Begum, also called Haji Begum, began a tomb for her husband Humayun, the second Mughal emperor, who had died in fifteen fifty-six. A Persian architect from Herat, Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, and his son Sayyid Muhammad raised a red sandstone and white marble mausoleum at the center of a vast fourfold garden cut by shallow water channels. The Archaeological Survey of India records it as the first garden-tomb built in India, and UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in nineteen ninety-three.

What made it new was the dome. This was the first building in India to lift a high Persian double dome on a drum, a form that had never appeared on the subcontinent before. The Archaeological Survey of India records the marble double dome at forty-two and a half metres, on a structure rising about forty-seven metres in all. The Humayun's Tomb walk sets the invention against what came just before it. The first grave you meet is not Humayun's at all but the tomb of Isa Khan Niyazi, built about fifteen forty-seven, a low octagonal chamber under a single dome in the older Lodi style. Hold that shape in mind, then walk to the great garden-tomb twenty years its junior, and you see exactly what the Mughals changed. A century later, this same pattern of a central tomb in a paradise garden was perfected at the Taj Mahal in Agra. The garden itself, its water channels standing for the four rivers of the Quranic paradise, is the direct ancestor of the more famous one downriver.

The empire at its height

Skip forward roughly ninety years and the Mughal capital moves back to Delhi in full ceremony. Shah Jahan founded the Red Fort, called Lal Qila, in sixteen thirty-nine and finished it about sixteen forty-eight, its architect Ustad Ahmad Lahori, the same builder credited with the Taj Mahal. For two centuries this red sandstone octagon was the seat of the emperors. The Red Fort walk moves along the axis the court itself used: through the Lahori Gate, down the vaulted Chatta Chowk bazaar, past the drum-house where all but royal princes had to dismount, to the Diwan-i-Am where the emperor heard grievances each morning at a marble balcony.

The height of it all is the Diwan-i-Khas, the white marble hall of private audience, its ceiling once inlaid with silver and gold and its floor threaded by the Nahr-i-Behisht, the Stream of Paradise. Inlaid over its arches is a Persian couplet attributed to the poet Amir Khusrow: if there be a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this. This is the hall the jewelled Peacock Throne is associated with, and its story is already one of loss. In seventeen thirty-nine the Persian ruler Nadir Shah sacked Delhi and carried the throne off to Persia, and it never returned.

The fort did not stand alone. Around it Shah Jahan laid out Shahjahanabad, the walled city that is now Old Delhi, with the ceremonial avenue of Chandni Chowk running from the Lahori Gate. The Old Delhi walk reads that avenue as a single line through stacked faiths and trades. By tradition the moon reflected in a water channel down the street's middle gave it its name, Chandni, meaning moonlight, and the market was designed by Shah Jahan's eldest daughter, Jahanara Begum. Within a short walk stand the Jama Masjid, which Shah Jahan built between sixteen fifty and sixteen fifty-six as one of the largest mosques in India, its courtyard said to hold about twenty-five thousand worshippers; the Lal Mandir, the oldest Jain temple in Old Delhi, with a charity bird hospital that treats roughly fifteen thousand birds a year; the Sikh shrine of Sis Ganj Sahib, marking where Guru Tegh Bahadur was executed in sixteen seventy-five for defending Kashmiri Pandits' right to their own faith; and Khari Baoli, one of the largest wholesale spice markets in Asia, its name from a stepwell laid on the site in fifteen fifty-one. This was the living city that surrounded the throne.

Where the line ran out

The empire's end is written into the two mosques that bookend Chandni Chowk and, most sharply, back inside Humayun's Tomb. At the far western end of the avenue stands the Fatehpuri Masjid, built in sixteen fifty by a wife of Shah Jahan. After the revolt of eighteen fifty-seven the British confiscated it and auctioned it to a merchant, Lala Chunnamal, for nineteen thousand rupees, then reacquired it in eighteen seventy-seven and returned it to Muslim worship. Inside the Red Fort, the same revolt cut deeper. After eighteen fifty-seven the British demolished much of the palace to build barracks, by one account about eighty percent of the inner structures, and the last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was tried in eighteen fifty-eight and exiled.

But the closing scene belongs to the garden where the story started. The interior of Humayun's Tomb is honeycombed into a hundred and twenty-four vaulted chambers holding more than a hundred graves, so many later royals that it earned the name the Dormitory of the Mughals. Among them lies Dara Shikoh, a son of Shah Jahan. And here, at what was then the edge of Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar took refuge during the Rebellion of eighteen fifty-seven. Company forces led by Major William Hodson surrounded the building, and on the twentieth of September eighteen fifty-seven the twentieth and last Mughal emperor was captured here, then exiled to Rangoon, where he died. The dynasty ended a few feet from where its paradise-dome had first risen three hundred years before.

That is the reason to read these three walks together and unhurried. Each stands on its own, and each is famous in its own right, but taken in sequence they close a circle. The form born under one dome at the center of a quiet garden went on to crown a capital, then failed in the same walls that first held it. You can trace the whole arc at your own pace, no group van and no schedule, in a single visit to one city. For the fuller set of routes through the Mughal capital, see the Delhi walking tours hub.

Sources

• Archaeological Survey of India, site records for Humayun's Tomb and the Red Fort, Delhi.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, inscriptions of Humayun's Tomb (1993) and the Red Fort Complex (2007).
• Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Humayun's Tomb and Nizamuddin conservation project documentation.
• Roamer self-guided tour transcripts for Old Delhi (Shahjahanabad), the Red Fort, and Humayun's Tomb, fact-audited against the above.