Delhi

Delhi is a city that refuses to die. Seven successive capitals have risen and fallen on this contested ground over a thousand years, each buried beneath its successor, creating an archaeological layer cake of ambition, conquest, and reinvention that makes the National Capital Territory less a single city than a palimpsest of civilizations.

The site's appeal is geographic inevitability. Positioned at the gap between the Aravalli Range and the Yamuna River, Delhi controls access between the Punjab plains and the Gangetic heartland. The Tomara Rajputs established Lal Kot in the 8th century. The Delhi Sultanate built five successive cities nearby. Then Shah Jahan constructed Shahjahanabad in 1639, the walled city whose Red Fort still anchors Old Delhi. Each conquest brought destruction; each reconstruction absorbed survivors into the new order.

British administrators shattered that pattern when they moved the colonial capital from Calcutta in 1911. Edwin Lutyens designed New Delhi as a statement of permanent imperial authority: vast ceremonial axes, administrative buildings scaled to intimidate, and garden districts segregated by race and rank. The city was completed in 1931. Sixteen years later, the British departed and Partition arrived. Between 1947 and 1951, roughly 500,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan flooded into Delhi, nearly doubling its population. Refugee colonies became permanent neighborhoods.

Contemporary Delhi operates as three overlapping cities: the political nucleus around Lutyens' Delhi, where the central government employs over 400,000 civil servants; the commercial sprawl of Gurgaon and Noida in adjacent states, home to corporate headquarters and IT campuses; and the informal settlements housing millions of migrants who power the service economy. The elected Chief Minister controls most city functions but answers to a Lieutenant Governor appointed by the central government.

The environmental debt compounds annually. Winter air quality regularly exceeds hazardous thresholds by tenfold. The Yamuna River runs biologically dead through the city. Groundwater extraction has dropped water tables by 10 meters in two decades. Yet Delhi's economy continues expanding, its population approaching 35 million across the metropolitan region. The city that absorbed seven destructions now faces a slower crisis: not conquest but exhaustion of the resources that made settlement possible.