Delhi

History

Delhi has been the seat of power for a long list of rulers and each one left something behind. The Qutub Minar in the south of the city was started in 1193 by Qutb al-Din Aibak and finished by his successor Iltutmish. It stands 72.5 metres tall across five storeys and is the tallest brick minaret in the world. In the same complex is the iron pillar, which dates to around the fourth century and has barely rusted in all that time, which still puzzles people who study metals.

The Mughals gave the city most of what visitors come to see now. Humayun's Tomb was finished around 1570 and was the first garden tomb built anywhere in the subcontinent, laid out with water channels and walled quarters. The design was so influential that the Taj Mahal borrowed heavily from it about eighty years later. Then Shah Jahan moved his capital here and built the Red Fort between 1639 and 1648 out of the red sandstone it is named after, along with Jama Masjid, which is still the largest mosque in India.

The British shifted the capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911 and laid out a whole new district of wide avenues and government buildings. That is why people talk about Old Delhi and New Delhi as two separate places. Old Delhi grew organically around the fort and is narrow and crowded, while New Delhi was drawn on paper by Edwin Lutyens. India Gate, finished in 1931, sits at the centre of it as a memorial to the tens of thousands of Indian soldiers who died in the First World War.

Akshardham

Swaminarayan Akshardham opened on the banks of the Yamuna in November 2005 and is the newest of the major sites in the city by a long way. It was built by the BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha at the inspiration of Pramukh Swami Maharaj, and in 2007 it was recognised by Guinness World Records as the largest comprehensive Hindu temple in the world.

What makes it unusual is how it was built. The main monument uses no steel and no concrete, only carved Rajasthani pink sandstone and Italian marble held together the way temples were built centuries ago. It has 234 carved pillars, nine domes and around 20,000 carved figures. The plinth it sits on is called the Gajendra Peeth and is ringed by 148 stone elephants, each one carved differently. Around 11,000 artisans and volunteers worked on it and the whole thing was finished in about five years.

Cultural significance

Delhi is where a lot of India meets in one place. People come from every state for work, so you hear different languages on the same street and can eat food from parts of the country you have never been to. The lanes of Chandni Chowk below Jama Masjid have been a market since the 1600s and are still one of the best places in the country to eat, mostly from small stalls that have been run by the same families for generations.

My visit

I have to start with the bad news. I lost my camera almost as soon as I landed in Delhi, so I have none of my own photos of this leg of the trip. Everything in the gallery further down is sourced from online and credited at the bottom of the page. It is not how I wanted this page to work, but I would rather show you the place properly with someone else's photos than leave it blank.

The first thing that hits you in Delhi is the noise. There is a constant sound of horns that never really stops, and the traffic moves in a way that looks like it should not work but somehow does. Coming from Australia it took a day to stop flinching every time a car came close. Once you get used to it the city is much easier to enjoy.

Old Delhi and New Delhi feel like two different cities that happen to share a name. In the old city the lanes are so narrow that two people passing have to turn sideways, and there are shops stacked on top of each other selling things you did not know were sold separately. Then you drive twenty minutes and you are on a wide boulevard with lawns and government buildings and hardly anyone walking around.

Akshardham was the part I was looking forward to most and it did not disappoint. You have to leave your phone and bag at the entrance and go through a security check, which is annoying for about two minutes and then turns out to be the best thing about the place, because nobody is filming and everyone is actually looking at it. The carving is the part that gets you. Every pillar is different and you can stand in front of one section for a long time and still find things you missed. Not being able to take photos means the only record I have of it is what I remember.

What I would tell you before you go

Go to the monuments early in the morning before the crowds and the heat build up. The metro is cheap and much faster than sitting in traffic. Old Delhi is far easier to walk than to drive through, so get dropped at the edge and go in on foot. Bags and phones are not allowed inside Akshardham, so leave them behind or use the lockers.

Agra and the Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal is not in Delhi. It is at Agra, a bit over 200 kilometres away, but it gets done as a day trip out of Delhi so often that the two end up joined together in most itineraries. It was built by Shah Jahan as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal after she died in 1631, and it took around twenty years to finish.

The design owes a lot to Humayun's Tomb back in Delhi, which was the first garden tomb built in India about eighty years earlier. Standing in front of both on the same trip makes the connection obvious.

Photos

None of these are mine, for the reason above. Sources are listed at the bottom of the page.

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