New Delhi

Delhi has been destroyed and rebuilt at least seven times across three millennia—a city that keeps dying in the same spot because the spot is too valuable to abandon. The Yamuna River, the Indo-Gangetic plain's agricultural surplus, and the mountain passes connecting Central Asia to the subcontinent converge here, creating a geographic node so strategically obvious that every empire from the Tomars in the 8th century to the British in the 20th chose it as their capital. Delhi is not a city with history. Delhi is a city made of history, each layer growing over the ruins of the last like a strangler fig that feeds on the trunk of its predecessor until the original structure disappears entirely.

The Mahabharata locates the legendary Indraprastha at what is now Purana Qila, though excavations have found no ancient foundations. What archaeology does confirm is continuous habitation and continuous destruction: the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526), the Mughal Empire (1526-1857), and the British Raj (1911-1947) each constructed their capital on or near previous ruins. Shah Jahan built Shahjahanabad—Old Delhi—around the Red Fort in 1639. Edwin Lutyens designed New Delhi on Raisina Hill in 1911, placing it directly opposite the ancient citadel, creating a geometric axis of power that physically connected modern administration to legendary antiquity. Each succession colonized cleared ground the way primary succession colonizes a lava field—new institutional growth rooting in the ash of the old.

This pattern explains Delhi's modern structure. Lutyens' Delhi remains the federal government district: Rashtrapati Bhavan, Parliament House, the Supreme Court, and the bureaucratic ministries that administer 1.4 billion people. Services generate 85% of Delhi's GSDP, which reached ₹11.07 lakh crore ($130 billion) with 9.2% annual growth. Information technology, banking, telecommunications, and media cluster here not because of market logic but because proximity to government decisions is worth more than proximity to customers—the same gravitational pull Beijing exerts, refracted through democratic institutions.

Delhi's successional debt is enormous. Each rebuilding buried but never resolved the previous city's infrastructure. Water supply, sewage, and transport systems designed for Lutyens' planned capital of 70,000 now serve a metropolitan region exceeding 32 million—like a banyan tree whose crown has expanded far beyond its root system's capacity. The Yamuna carries 80% of Delhi's untreated sewage. Air quality regularly exceeds WHO limits by ten times.

The eighth city of Delhi is being built right now—not through demolition but through demographic pressure, informal construction, and the same geographic logic that placed seven cities here before: whoever controls the Yamuna-Gangetic junction controls northern India's heartland, its trade routes, and its political imagination.