What to see in Delhi

Humayun’s Tomb

The subcontinent’s first great Mughal garden mausoleum, finished around 1570: red sandstone inlaid with white marble, a tall double dome and a square garden cut into four by water channels, which is the paradise described in the Quran set out as a floor plan. Everything that comes afterwards in Mughal architecture, the Taj Mahal included, comes from here.

It’s worth knowing that what you see wasn’t always like this. Through the twentieth century the complex was a wreck, the channels dry, the gardens turned into vegetable plots and the building decayed. In 1947, during Partition, the grounds were used as a refugee camp and held thousands of people. The restoration of the last two decades has been enormous and has brought the water system back into operation.

Go early: first light on the red sandstone is why this building gets photographed.

The Red Fort

Shah Jahan’s palace-fortress, finished in 1648, which was the centre of Delhi’s sixth city: two kilometres of red sandstone wall around a compound of marble palaces, gardens and audience halls. It’s a World Heritage Site and it’s India’s most symbolic building.

That symbolism has to be understood for the visit to be worth it: every 15 August, the anniversary of independence, the country’s prime minister raises the flag and addresses the nation from that wall. It was chosen precisely because it was the seat of Mughal power and later the place where the British humiliated the dynasty.

Inside, look for the Diwan-i-Khas, the private audience hall, with a Persian inscription saying that if there is a paradise on earth, it is this. The Peacock Throne stood there, taken by the Persians in 1739 and never returned.

The stepwell in the middle of town

Five minutes’ walk from Connaught Place, the square of colonial arcades, boxed in between office buildings, there’s a rectangular stone hole sixty metres long with over a hundred steps descending in three flights to the bottom. It’s Agrasen ki Baoli, a medieval stepwell, and you’re inside it while traffic passes overhead.

Stepwells are an invention of northern and western India, and they’re social engineering as much as hydraulic: instead of hauling water up in a bucket, you walked down to it, and because the level rose and fell with the season, many steps were needed.

They were also cool places where people sheltered from the heat and gathered.

This one is in the middle of the centre, it’s free and almost nobody looks up from Connaught Place to find it. Going down to the bottom with forty degrees outside and feeling the temperature drop explains what it was for better than any sign.

The places of 1947 and 1948

Modern India is born in Delhi and there are two places where you can touch that. The first is Gandhi Smriti, the house where Gandhi spent his last months and where he was assassinated on 30 January 1948. His room is preserved, with his glasses, his sandals and his spinning wheel. And in the garden, stone footsteps set into the ground mark the exact route he took that afternoon from the house to the spot where he was shot, on his way to prayer. You walk that route. It’s thirty metres and it feels very long.

The second is the Partition Museum, devoted to what happened in 1947 when the border with Pakistan was drawn: some fifteen million people displaced within weeks, in both directions, and hundreds of thousands dead. Delhi changed its skin then: part of its Muslim population left and hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived from Punjab, and they are the ones who made the city that exists today, its commerce and its food.

It’s a hard museum and it’s told through the objects and testimony of the people who lived it.