Delhi Heritage Guide
Seven Cities Chronicles
Delhi is a sequence of capitals. This spine lists all seven layers. Pages marked In progress are labeled stubs—not empty shells and not finished museum essays.
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Layer 01 // Tomar / early Delhi
Lal Kot & Indraprastha
The First Foundations
The first of Delhi’s seven cities: Indraprastha in the living Mahābhārata tradition of Yudhishthira, and Lal Kot–Qila Rai Pithora under native Tomar and Chauhan sovereignty—before the clash that opened the Sultanate age.
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Layer 02 // Khalji
Siri
The Bastion Against the Mongols
Alauddin Khalji’s fortress-capital against Mongol-age fear—wall scraps in Shahpur Jat and Asiad, Hauz-i-Alai’s water landscape, and modern boutiques and stadiums on a broken ring that never became a continuous tourist wall.
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Layer 03 // Tughlaq
Tughlaqabad
The Cyclopean Fortress
Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq’s fortress-capital on Delhi’s southern ridge—cyclopean walls, a vanished lake, a lakeside tomb, and the short, fierce life of the third city— still readable beside modern South Delhi, never as a medieval mall.
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Layer 04 // Tughlaq
Jahanpanah
Refuge of the World
Muhammad bin Tughlaq’s fourth city—walls stitching Lal Kot and Siri into a “Refuge of the World,” with Begumpur, Bijay Mandal, Satpula, and Khirki still readable under South Delhi’s modern overlay.
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Layer 05 // Tughlaq
Firozabad
The Fifth City
Firoz Shah Tughlaq’s river capital—Kotla ruins, the Ashokan pillar raised as unread antiquity, a mosque that outlived a dynasty, and the living cricket ground that still answers to the name Kotla on Delhi’s Yamuna edge.
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Layer 06 // Mughal
Shahjahanabad
The Walled City
Shah Jahan’s walled capital after Mumtaz—Red Fort, Jama Masjid, Chandni Chowk— forged in grief and ambition, remade by Aurangzeb’s succession war, Nadir Shah, 1857, and the living bazaars travelers still meet as Old Delhi.
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Layer 07 // British Colonial / classical–Indic synthesis
New Delhi
The Imperial Zenith
The newest of Delhi’s seven cities: capital transferred from Calcutta in 1911, foundation stones laid by George V, contested by the Hardinge bomb of 1912, inaugurated in 1931—and still the living modern capital travelers meet.
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