Delhi is India's show capital, a frankly weird place that feels more like a collection of unrelated towns than an organic whole. Mostly, this is a result of Delhi's varied history, making it one of few places I can think of that is both ancient and brand new at the same time -- not intermixed like Mumbai, but more like a patchwork quilt of pieces of modernity stitched together, but not blending with the ancient. Unsurprisingly, many people refer to the "eight cities" of Delhi, a term that's as accurate in describing modern Delhi as it is in describing Delhi's historical development.
Occupied for thousands of years, the first "city" to be founded in Delhi was Lal Kot in the 8th Century. For the next thousand years, the city was invaded, sacked, left in ruins, forgotten, rediscovered, rebuilt, abandoned, and rebuilt again. Eventually, before Delhi entered its final incarnation as the British capital of "New Delhi," it had been the site of seven cities, each of which -- Lal Kot, Siri, Tughlaqabad, Shahjahanabad, etc -- was effectively its own separate city and part of a separate civilization. When the British moved the capital of India from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Delhi, they effectively created another new city, excavated many of the past ones, and unified the whole thing into a calico metrozone.
M. W. and I arrived pretty late at night, due to the hours-long delay of our train from Agra to Delhi. We caught a cab to take us to our hotel, located in the Shahjahanabad "city" of Old Delhi, near the famous Red Fort and off of Chandni Chowk, a major market street. The reviews of the hotel were all fantastic, with the caveat that finding it could be tough and that in the wrong light, the location looked like a hovel. Sure enough, we found ourselves struggling to find our way through a patch of "Old Delhi," with tiny little crowded sidestreets, empty at this hour except for dozens of trucks inexplicably wandering the roads but seemingly accomplishing nothing but making it difficult for our taxi to get through. In the morning the area would prove quite interesting and fun, but out of context and late at night we approached it with raised eyebrows. Our hotel was located on what one could generously call an alley. In short, we were thrown right into the ancient and crazy part of what can also be a very modern and placid city.
We arrived and crashed. The next morning, we decided to explore New Delhi, the part of the city planned and built entirely by the British and therefore resembling more a grand European city of massive squares and broad boulevards than anything we had yet seen in India. New Delhi's hub is Connaught Place, a giant circle with a park, named Central Park, in its middle, and block after block of concentric colonnaded storefronts radiating outwards. Officially known as Rajiv Chowk, it's New Delhi's commercial and financial center, with shops, hotels, and businesses' headquarters thick on the ground. It is to New Delhi what Chandni Chowk, the crazy and messy market street, is to Shahjahanabad. M and I wandered about for much of the day, checking out shops, wandering Central Park, and having custom dress shirts ordered.
Day 2 we dedicated to more thoroughly exploring our own neighborhood of Shahjahanabad, built by and named for Shah Jahan, the same Mughal emperor who had built the Taj Mahal in Agra. We started at India's famous Red Fort, a symbol of intense national pride. Like the Agra Fort, this is a massive complex and essentially an entire walled city. Unlike many of the other forts we visited in India, there was so much space inside that the buildings had much green space between them and the atmosphere was more like a park than the stone spaceships that Agra, Amber and Udaipur had been.
From there we visited the Digambara Jain Temple opposite the fort. Technically it was closed, but the guardian was willing to show us around for a tip. This made M uncomfortable (see pic below), but it was still nice to look around. I think by then I'd gotten used to the fact that bribing people is standard behavior in India, but M found it less funny when we were bribing people to visit an active religious site than when we did so to see a dead queen's lavish bathroom (see post on Agra).
Next, further down Chandni Chowk, was Gurudwara Sis Ganj Sahib, a Sikh prayer site built on the site where the ninth Sikh Guru was beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam by Shah Jahan's son Aurangzeb, who had deposed him.
From there we took Delhi's metro system to New Delhi, where we wanted to walk around the Rajpath, the British Raj's answer to the National Mall in Washington. Like the Rajpath before it, the Delhi metro, an incredibly clean, modern, and efficient system, was built to make a statement: this, as India's show capital, is a modern city. Taking the escalator from the crazed Chandni Chowk to the "serene" (as our guidebook had it) metro was another of those calico moments. The view of Delhi that I got from Indians in the rest of the country was that Delhi is where the disconnected political classes of India live, spending tons of tax money on the metro system, banning cows from the streets, trying to regulate street food, and chasing prestige by doing things like hosting the Commonwealth Games. On the one hand I see their point, and I'm not sure it's a great thing that the political classes are ensconced in such a bubble (New Delhi is practically the only place in India where I didn't see obvious signs of poverty poking around even the nicest of facades). On the other hand, I see its value as an aspirational statement for what India is trying to become, though a less authentic one than Mumbai.
Anyway, the Rajpath is an enormous boulevard that looks strikingly like the National Mall, running through New Delhi from the National Stadium, through the India Gate monument, past government ministries and the Parliament House, to Rashtrapati Bhavan -- the President of India's official residence. Practically all of New Delhi was designed by Edwin Lutyens to serve as a capital befitting the crown jewel of the British Empire. To some degree, though, he went overboard: the President's residence, originally the residence of the Viceroy / Governor General of India, is absurdly large -- 340 rooms and more than 200,000 sq ft of floor space, still the largest official residence of a chief of state. Legend has it that at one point it employed 60 staff for the sole purpose of chasing away the birds.
After walking from the Parliament to the President's house, we grabbed a rickshaw and zoomed down to India Gate, an Arc de Triomphe-style monument envisioned by Lutyens to honor all the Indian subjects of the crown who fought and died in the wars on behalf of the Commonwealth.
We struck a deal with the rickshaw driver to take us to a few other sites around Delhi, starting with the Lodi Gardens, a park featuring the tombs and other buildings of the Lodi Dynasty, which ruled the fifth of Delhi's eight cities from 1451-1526. Now the park just seems to be a nice place to walk around in the midst of an upscale residential neighborhood. These tombs and other buildings are practically all that remain of the Lodi dynasty's Delhi (called Firozabad)...
Next up and last for the day was the Raj Ghat (meaning King's Bank) , a memorial marking the place where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated and honoring his memory. In addition to Gandhi's memorial the park has a few others, such as those of Indira Gandhi (no relation), Rajiv Gandhi (her son), and Jawaharlal Nehru -- in short, the founders and key leaders of the country.
The next day we went even further back in time to Qutub Minar, a set of monuments from Delhi's "second city," Mehrauli. The destruction of Lal Kot and the founding of Mehrauli marked a transition from Hindu to Muslim rule in Delhi that would hold until the exile of the Mughals by the British. Qutub Minar itself is an enormous tower, the tallest brick minaret in the world. It's so tall that taking a good picture of it was pretty hard. In another example of dashed architectural ambitions (think the Black Taj Mahal), one of the Mehrauli rulers wanted to build a tower several times taller than Qutub Minar, but was defeated before he could finish it. Still, the massive stump of it remains.
The rest of the Qutub Minar complex contains a variety of other monuments -- tombs, mosques, etc -- from the same era. The relatively well-preserved structures are among the finest examples of early Indo-Islamic architecture and yet another of Delhi's strange neighborhoods standing entirely out of context of the whole.
From there we wandered back to New Delhi and the Rashtrapati Bhavan area, because our guidebook had informed us that the President's Residence has an incredible Mughal garden that is open to the public only for a few weeks in the month of Febuary -- how lucky. We kept getting bad directions from the various palace guards and ended up walking quite a few kilometers entirely around the residence before finding the entrance. [Sidebar: Our guidebook had told us to be careful when asking Indians a question, because an Indian will rarely acknowledge that he doesn't know something. If you ask a yes or no question, the answer will always be yes. For that reason it suggests you avoid such questions; rather than "Is this the way to the Mughal Garden?" one should ask "Which way is the Mughal Garden?". In any case, though, if they don't know they will make something up rather than be shamed by admitting they don't know the answer. Even with this advice, though, we got pretty poor directions.] After a few hours of walking, including passing some pretty parks and another Gandhi memorial, we made it to the entrance of the gardens.
Unfortunately, cameras were strictly forbidden in the Mughal Gardens. If you ever find yourself in Delhi in February, however, definitely visit them -- by far the most impressive gardens I've seen this side of Versailles. First you walk through a variety of themed gardens: scented herbs and flowers, medicinal herbs, bonsai, and a "sacred garden" with trees and shrubs possessing mystical importance in a variety of religions. [To our amusement, Christmas Trees were among them -- perhaps they were thinking of their Druid origins.] Finally you arrive at the main Mughal Garden, right in the backyard of the President's Palace itself and full of the traditional Mughal elements of color, water, and geometrical arrangement. I wish I had been able to take pictures.
That's more or less it for our stint in Delhi. Though we left a good number of sites for a later trip, I think we saw most of the main things. Throughout this time we ate at a bunch of great restaurants, picked up our custom shirts, and wandered the city aimlessly. We learned the rules of cricket and watched a few matches of the locally-played Cricket World Cup. (M and I are now in the top 1%ile of Americans in terms of cricket knowledge, which is to say we have any at all.) We also met up with P. D., a friend from college who is in India on a Fulbright, and had drinks and traded stories at the Imperial Hotel. Delhi was a great place to unwind a bit and dip in and out of ancient and modern India, as well as to say goodbye to the country that had hosted me for the entire month of February. On the 28th, the final day of the month, M and I hauled ourselves to the Indira Gandhi International Airport and flew to Kathmandu, Nepal. As the Pythons used to say, "And now for something completely different."
Occupied for thousands of years, the first "city" to be founded in Delhi was Lal Kot in the 8th Century. For the next thousand years, the city was invaded, sacked, left in ruins, forgotten, rediscovered, rebuilt, abandoned, and rebuilt again. Eventually, before Delhi entered its final incarnation as the British capital of "New Delhi," it had been the site of seven cities, each of which -- Lal Kot, Siri, Tughlaqabad, Shahjahanabad, etc -- was effectively its own separate city and part of a separate civilization. When the British moved the capital of India from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Delhi, they effectively created another new city, excavated many of the past ones, and unified the whole thing into a calico metrozone.
M. W. and I arrived pretty late at night, due to the hours-long delay of our train from Agra to Delhi. We caught a cab to take us to our hotel, located in the Shahjahanabad "city" of Old Delhi, near the famous Red Fort and off of Chandni Chowk, a major market street. The reviews of the hotel were all fantastic, with the caveat that finding it could be tough and that in the wrong light, the location looked like a hovel. Sure enough, we found ourselves struggling to find our way through a patch of "Old Delhi," with tiny little crowded sidestreets, empty at this hour except for dozens of trucks inexplicably wandering the roads but seemingly accomplishing nothing but making it difficult for our taxi to get through. In the morning the area would prove quite interesting and fun, but out of context and late at night we approached it with raised eyebrows. Our hotel was located on what one could generously call an alley. In short, we were thrown right into the ancient and crazy part of what can also be a very modern and placid city.
We arrived and crashed. The next morning, we decided to explore New Delhi, the part of the city planned and built entirely by the British and therefore resembling more a grand European city of massive squares and broad boulevards than anything we had yet seen in India. New Delhi's hub is Connaught Place, a giant circle with a park, named Central Park, in its middle, and block after block of concentric colonnaded storefronts radiating outwards. Officially known as Rajiv Chowk, it's New Delhi's commercial and financial center, with shops, hotels, and businesses' headquarters thick on the ground. It is to New Delhi what Chandni Chowk, the crazy and messy market street, is to Shahjahanabad. M and I wandered about for much of the day, checking out shops, wandering Central Park, and having custom dress shirts ordered.
Day 2 we dedicated to more thoroughly exploring our own neighborhood of Shahjahanabad, built by and named for Shah Jahan, the same Mughal emperor who had built the Taj Mahal in Agra. We started at India's famous Red Fort, a symbol of intense national pride. Like the Agra Fort, this is a massive complex and essentially an entire walled city. Unlike many of the other forts we visited in India, there was so much space inside that the buildings had much green space between them and the atmosphere was more like a park than the stone spaceships that Agra, Amber and Udaipur had been.
From there we visited the Digambara Jain Temple opposite the fort. Technically it was closed, but the guardian was willing to show us around for a tip. This made M uncomfortable (see pic below), but it was still nice to look around. I think by then I'd gotten used to the fact that bribing people is standard behavior in India, but M found it less funny when we were bribing people to visit an active religious site than when we did so to see a dead queen's lavish bathroom (see post on Agra).
Next, further down Chandni Chowk, was Gurudwara Sis Ganj Sahib, a Sikh prayer site built on the site where the ninth Sikh Guru was beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam by Shah Jahan's son Aurangzeb, who had deposed him.
From there we took Delhi's metro system to New Delhi, where we wanted to walk around the Rajpath, the British Raj's answer to the National Mall in Washington. Like the Rajpath before it, the Delhi metro, an incredibly clean, modern, and efficient system, was built to make a statement: this, as India's show capital, is a modern city. Taking the escalator from the crazed Chandni Chowk to the "serene" (as our guidebook had it) metro was another of those calico moments. The view of Delhi that I got from Indians in the rest of the country was that Delhi is where the disconnected political classes of India live, spending tons of tax money on the metro system, banning cows from the streets, trying to regulate street food, and chasing prestige by doing things like hosting the Commonwealth Games. On the one hand I see their point, and I'm not sure it's a great thing that the political classes are ensconced in such a bubble (New Delhi is practically the only place in India where I didn't see obvious signs of poverty poking around even the nicest of facades). On the other hand, I see its value as an aspirational statement for what India is trying to become, though a less authentic one than Mumbai.
Anyway, the Rajpath is an enormous boulevard that looks strikingly like the National Mall, running through New Delhi from the National Stadium, through the India Gate monument, past government ministries and the Parliament House, to Rashtrapati Bhavan -- the President of India's official residence. Practically all of New Delhi was designed by Edwin Lutyens to serve as a capital befitting the crown jewel of the British Empire. To some degree, though, he went overboard: the President's residence, originally the residence of the Viceroy / Governor General of India, is absurdly large -- 340 rooms and more than 200,000 sq ft of floor space, still the largest official residence of a chief of state. Legend has it that at one point it employed 60 staff for the sole purpose of chasing away the birds.
After walking from the Parliament to the President's house, we grabbed a rickshaw and zoomed down to India Gate, an Arc de Triomphe-style monument envisioned by Lutyens to honor all the Indian subjects of the crown who fought and died in the wars on behalf of the Commonwealth.
We struck a deal with the rickshaw driver to take us to a few other sites around Delhi, starting with the Lodi Gardens, a park featuring the tombs and other buildings of the Lodi Dynasty, which ruled the fifth of Delhi's eight cities from 1451-1526. Now the park just seems to be a nice place to walk around in the midst of an upscale residential neighborhood. These tombs and other buildings are practically all that remain of the Lodi dynasty's Delhi (called Firozabad)...
Next up and last for the day was the Raj Ghat (meaning King's Bank) , a memorial marking the place where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated and honoring his memory. In addition to Gandhi's memorial the park has a few others, such as those of Indira Gandhi (no relation), Rajiv Gandhi (her son), and Jawaharlal Nehru -- in short, the founders and key leaders of the country.
The next day we went even further back in time to Qutub Minar, a set of monuments from Delhi's "second city," Mehrauli. The destruction of Lal Kot and the founding of Mehrauli marked a transition from Hindu to Muslim rule in Delhi that would hold until the exile of the Mughals by the British. Qutub Minar itself is an enormous tower, the tallest brick minaret in the world. It's so tall that taking a good picture of it was pretty hard. In another example of dashed architectural ambitions (think the Black Taj Mahal), one of the Mehrauli rulers wanted to build a tower several times taller than Qutub Minar, but was defeated before he could finish it. Still, the massive stump of it remains.
The rest of the Qutub Minar complex contains a variety of other monuments -- tombs, mosques, etc -- from the same era. The relatively well-preserved structures are among the finest examples of early Indo-Islamic architecture and yet another of Delhi's strange neighborhoods standing entirely out of context of the whole.
From there we wandered back to New Delhi and the Rashtrapati Bhavan area, because our guidebook had informed us that the President's Residence has an incredible Mughal garden that is open to the public only for a few weeks in the month of Febuary -- how lucky. We kept getting bad directions from the various palace guards and ended up walking quite a few kilometers entirely around the residence before finding the entrance. [Sidebar: Our guidebook had told us to be careful when asking Indians a question, because an Indian will rarely acknowledge that he doesn't know something. If you ask a yes or no question, the answer will always be yes. For that reason it suggests you avoid such questions; rather than "Is this the way to the Mughal Garden?" one should ask "Which way is the Mughal Garden?". In any case, though, if they don't know they will make something up rather than be shamed by admitting they don't know the answer. Even with this advice, though, we got pretty poor directions.] After a few hours of walking, including passing some pretty parks and another Gandhi memorial, we made it to the entrance of the gardens.
Unfortunately, cameras were strictly forbidden in the Mughal Gardens. If you ever find yourself in Delhi in February, however, definitely visit them -- by far the most impressive gardens I've seen this side of Versailles. First you walk through a variety of themed gardens: scented herbs and flowers, medicinal herbs, bonsai, and a "sacred garden" with trees and shrubs possessing mystical importance in a variety of religions. [To our amusement, Christmas Trees were among them -- perhaps they were thinking of their Druid origins.] Finally you arrive at the main Mughal Garden, right in the backyard of the President's Palace itself and full of the traditional Mughal elements of color, water, and geometrical arrangement. I wish I had been able to take pictures.
That's more or less it for our stint in Delhi. Though we left a good number of sites for a later trip, I think we saw most of the main things. Throughout this time we ate at a bunch of great restaurants, picked up our custom shirts, and wandered the city aimlessly. We learned the rules of cricket and watched a few matches of the locally-played Cricket World Cup. (M and I are now in the top 1%ile of Americans in terms of cricket knowledge, which is to say we have any at all.) We also met up with P. D., a friend from college who is in India on a Fulbright, and had drinks and traded stories at the Imperial Hotel. Delhi was a great place to unwind a bit and dip in and out of ancient and modern India, as well as to say goodbye to the country that had hosted me for the entire month of February. On the 28th, the final day of the month, M and I hauled ourselves to the Indira Gandhi International Airport and flew to Kathmandu, Nepal. As the Pythons used to say, "And now for something completely different."
Hi,
ReplyDeleteGurudwara Sis Ganj Sahib is NOT a mosque. It's a Gurudwara - a place of worship for Sikhs. Calling it a mosque is like calling a church a mosque, and is quite disrespecting.
I humbly request you to correct it.
Thanks.