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 GILES TILLOTSON

DELHI DARSHAN
The History and Monuments of India’s Capital

PENGUIN BOOKS
 Contents

Introduction

MONUMENTS IN HISTORY

The Site
New Foundations: The ‘Slave’ Dynasty
Expansion and Division: Khaljis and Tughluqs
Death in the Park: Sayyids and Lodis
On the River: The Great Mughals
Staying On: The Late Mughals
Starting Anew: The British
Partition and Growth: Independent India

SUGGESTED ROUTES

Shahjahanabad: Red Fort and Jami Masjid

Humayun’s Tomb and Lodi Road
The Qutb Minar and Mehrauli
Rajpath and Janpath
Kashmiri Gate and Beyond
Central New Delhi—North
Central New Delhi—South
Rajghat to the Lotus Temple
Hauz Khas to Tughluqabad

Illustrations
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
To Rebekah and Hadassah
 Introduction

Its origin and antiquity may be disputed, but Delhi has without
doubt been a major city—even a capital city, on and off—for at least
a thousand years. It has served as a centre of power for Rajput
clans, for the first sultans, for Mughal emperors, for the
administrators of the British Raj in the early twentieth century, and
for India’s federal government since Independence in 1947.
Successive regimes established themselves on adjacent or
overlapping sites, adding to Delhi’s vertical layers and its horizontal
spread. Old guidebooks speak of the ‘seven cities of Delhi’; but these
were all Islamic citadels, built before the coming of the British, and
in recent times archaeologists have added more cities to the bottom
of the tally just as developers have added many more to its top.
The Mughals built their walled city in the seventeenth century by
the riverbank, as far away as topography would permit from the
earliest settlements. Three centuries later the British added their
geometrically planned extravagance in the mostly empty centre,
between the Mughal city in the north and the ruined sultanate forts
in the south. In the late twentieth century, new housing colonies
filled up all the spaces in between, and in the new millennium the
spread has extended beyond those historic boundary markers, both
south-westwards into the farmlands of the hinterland and eastwards
across the Yamuna river, to create the new satellite cities of Gurgaon
and Noida. The aggregate—officially called the National Capital
Region—is today among the largest and fastest-growing urban
conurbations in the world.
 Neither history nor geography, however, fully conveys the city’s
characteristic layering: the constant interaction between its present
and its past. The past informs the present in obvious ways, as we
live amid historic sites; but the present also informs the past in the
sense that we encounter old sites in our own time, through the lens
of recent use. This book, intended as an introduction for anyone
who lives in or visits the city, explores its sites not only in relation to
their own time, but in terms of what subsequent periods have made
of them, examining some of their accumulated meanings and myths.
To residents of Delhi, for example, the famous India Gate is not
just a war memorial; for a long time it has also been a favoured
place to go for an ice cream on a hot summer night, and lately it has
become a place where members of civil society collect to protest
miscarriages of justice. Political protesters traditionally prefer to
congregate at Jantar Mantar, an eighteenth-century observatory,
despite periodic attempts by the authorities to prohibit its use for
politics. The Lodi Gardens is not just the location of some early
tombs but a place for picnicking, jogging and falling in love; it is one
of the few spaces where public displays of affection are tolerated,
perhaps because the relative affluence of the average Lodi Gardens
visitor deters officious intervention. The Red Fort, built by the
Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, now serves as the podium for an
annual speech to the nation by the prime minister on Independence
Day. Such later uses are as important as the original functions in
explaining how the buildings are seen today.
The Purana Qila, or ‘old fort’, marks a point of origin or new
beginning in various time zones. Built in the sixteenth century, it is
by no means the oldest fort in Delhi, despite its name: it is called
‘purana’ because it predates the walled city of Shah Jahan and was
the Mughals’ first establishment in Delhi. It is also popularly believed
to mark the site of Indraprastha—the capital of the Pandavas, the
heroes of the Mahabharata—taking the history of the city into India’s
epic past. Modern excavations have indeed revealed very early
pottery remains, confirming that identification for those who are
willing to believe in it. But the archaeologists could move into the
site only after the departure of the refugees: at the time of
Independence and Partition in 1947, and for some years afterwards,
the enclosed sanctuary of the Purana Qila was used as a transit
camp by many who were escaping communal violence in the old city
or preparing to migrate to Pakistan; and later some of those who
had fled from it. Those who came from the western part of Punjab
form a significant core of Delhi’s senior generation, and for some of
them the ‘old fort’ was the site of their new beginning, in a new
nation.
Such layering is everywhere. Humayun’s tomb is not only the
burial place of one of the early Mughal emperors, it is also the place
where his last ruling descendant, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was arrested,
at the bloody denouement of the 1857 uprisings. Driving around the
elegant avenues of New Delhi, lined by government servants’
bungalows protected by high fences and armed guards, you might at
first take the scene as typical of Indian officialdom: such apparent
self-importance! But look again and you realize that nothing has
changed since the 1930s; that this is a colonial city after all,
modelled in part on a military cantonment. On the other hand, few
people today would regard Rashtrapati Bhavan (the former Viceroy’s
House) or the Secretariats as legacies of colonial rule: they may be
massive and imperial, but they are more popularly associated with
independent India’s successive presidents and ministers. They are
proud symbols not of the past but of the present.
Just as the past erupts into the present, so the present refashions
the past according to its own compulsions. This is what makes Delhi
so intriguing and makes spending time in it worthwhile. Highly
congested and with poor infrastructure, Delhi is a difficult city to live
or move around in, but its shortcomings fade if we have an eye for
its many layers. The chapters of this book together present a concise
history of the city, focusing on its most prominent people and places.
A brief concluding section describes some suggested routes for
exploring the city. I have avoided cluttering the text with the
scholarly apparatus of notes and references. Readers who are
curious about my sources for particular pieces of information and
quotations, or just want to know more, can look up the section titled
Further Reading.
Having thus conveyed an impression of a wish to be at once brief,
authoritative and helpful, I should add that this short book is very
much a personal view of Delhi which reflects my own prejudices and
preoccupations. Much has been written about the city, especially in
recent years, by a number of writers with a range of approaches and
specialist expertise. I point to some of this in Further Reading. I
have learnt from and draw from this writing; but I have made no
attempt to be comprehensive or encyclopaedic. I am an architectural
historian, with a range of interests in Rajput, sultanate, Mughal,
colonial and modern architecture. I look at design, but I also look at
how any building is rooted in history, often in more than one period.
So if you share my interests in history, architecture and design—and
whether you know Delhi less well, as well, or better than I do—I
hope that you will find something of pleasure and profit in reading
my take on it.
 Map of Delhi c. 1930, showing the roads of New Delhi laid out between
Shahjahanabad in the north and the ruined sultanate cities in the south
Monuments in History
 The Site

A river flows from north to south. A range of low hills rises close to
the bank at a northern point but then pursues its own diverging line
to the south-west. A broken arc of high ground reconnects the hills
with the river in the south, completing the boundary of a rough
triangular space of flat earth. It is a natural sanctuary, at once
watered and sheltered, fertile and of large extent. But no indigenous
tribe inhabits this domain. Almost everyone who has ever lived here
is of immigrant stock of one kind or another: the Rajput clans and
Turkic invaders who built the first cities; the British who began
another; the refugees from partitioned Punjab who came here in
1947; the labourers from Rajasthan and Bihar; and the middle-class
hopefuls who still come from all parts of India in ever-increasing
numbers. But this is no melting pot, as many communities retain
their distinct identities—like the proud Punjabis—and even specific
residential zones, like the cohesive Bengalis. This is Delhi, a
conglomerate of cities built by rulers with dreams of unity and
permanence, inhabited by a mixed and ever-changing population.
The citizens of Delhi are not bound together by ties of common
culture or even language. Their sense of identity is drawn from the
place itself, from the urban spaces that they share. Delhi’s distinctive
character is physical in kind: it consists of buildings in a landscape.
The points of reference on our mental map are the forts and tombs
of the Mughals; the bungalows, markets and roundabouts of the
British period; and the ‘bhavans’, the administrative and cultural
institutions of the post-Independence era. Many of the place names
—even those of housing colonies like Lodi Estate—evoke ancient
dynasties, the landlords of the past, as if we all live in rented houses
rather than ones that we built ourselves.
The first name that we must consider in detail, though, is that of
Delhi itself. Its origin and meaning are forgotten. Some historians
interpret it to mean ‘threshold’, marking it as the point of entry into
India for conquerors from the other side of the Hindu Kush. A rival
claim associates it with an earlier and more local hero, Raja Dhilu.
Each theory has its confident adherents but neither of them
persuades everyone. What we can be sure of, though, is that the
current and universally accepted spelling gained currency only in the
nineteenth century and was formulated by the British. And it is
wrong. It captures neither the spelling nor the pronunciation of the
name in Hindi, which is more accurately rendered as ‘Dilli’. The now
official ‘Delhi’ is in fact simply a sloppy mis-transliteration of the Urdu
version. A correct transliteration would be ‘Dehli’, which was indeed
the form that was used by Europeans earlier, but was somehow lost.
It is ironic that nationalist politicians, eager to cleanse the country of
traces of colonialism, have changed the hybrid but euphonious
names of many other cities, such as Bombay, Calcutta and
Bangalore, replacing them with pedantic transliterations from the
regional languages, but they have been content to leave the name
of the national capital in its mangled form. Some old-fashioned
scholars still call it Dehli. Subeditors correct them.
 New Foundations: The ‘Slave’ Dynasty

In 1192, Muhammad bin Sam, the sultan of Ghur in present-day

Afghanistan, crossed the Indus river. This was not his first visit to
India, and an alliance of Rajput rulers in northern India—determined
to make it his last—assembled its armies at Tarain to confront him.
But they were defeated, and in the following year the Ghurid forces
reached the Yamuna river and swept into Rajasthan to take
possession of both Delhi and Ajmer, cities associated with the
legendary Rajput leader Prithviraj Chauhan.
This outcome seems to have taken everyone by surprise. It
inspired—either at the time or (more probably) later—an epic
Rajasthani poem, the main source of our knowledge of Prithviraj,
celebrating his heroism and lamenting his defeat. The conquest may
even have surprised the victor himself and was probably not what he
intended. His expedition was planned as a temporary raid, following
a well-established pattern. A few generations earlier, in the opening
decades of the twelfth century, another sultan, Mahmud of Ghazni,
had made a series of almost annual incursions into India. He
targeted rich temple towns because his object was not conquest but
loot.
Muhammad of Ghur had already imitated this example once and
possibly had the same purpose again. He certainly had no plans to
settle, given India’s uncongenial climate and the need to return and
protect his homeland. But having occupied the Rajput territories, he
left behind his principal general, Qutb-ud-din Aibak, to rule in his
name as a Ghurid viceroy. Things continued in this way for over a
decade with Qutb-ud-din based in Delhi. But when Muhammad of
Ghur was assassinated in 1206, rather than pledging his allegiance
to his successor, Qutb-ud-din declared himself independent, thus
establishing a new political entity, known as the Delhi Sultanate.
The history of Delhi from this moment on is fairly well-
documented. Parts of the cities built by Qutb-ud-din and his
successors still survive, as do court histories that record their trials
and triumphs. But it is perhaps not surprising to find that many
people are dissatisfied that the history of India’s capital city should
begin with a defeat at foreign hands. Nationalist historians, and even
dispassionate antiquarians, would like to be able to flesh out the
period before the conquest. The problem is that what we have is
scanty and inconclusive.
There is, to begin with, a strong and long-standing tradition that
associates Delhi with Indraprastha, the capital of the Pandavas,
heroes of the national epic, the Mahabharata. Believers point to a
village, surviving until a hundred years ago, called Indarpat,
contained within but predating the Purana Qila, a fort of the Mughal
period. The site is certainly ancient, but professional historians and
archaeologists tread warily in a field that mixes emotion, religion and
politics. They have excavated some potsherds of a type known as
‘painted greyware’, which is dated to c.1000 BC, but it requires a leap
of faith to see this as evidence in support of the myth.
From the more immediate pre-conquest era, we have a few names
—such as that of the ruler Anang Pal—and some locations that are
clearly connected with them, such as Anangpur. We have coins and
potsherds. There are even some significant monuments, like the
large masonry reservoir known as the Suraj Kund, believed to have
been built in the tenth century. But these fragments of history are
strung together by doubts and questions, rather than by facts. Did
rulers like Suraj Pal, known only from bardic sources, really exist,
and if so, when? How do the kings mentioned in various inscriptions
relate to each other dynastically?
 Despite the uncertainty, a traditional scholarly view persists that
Delhi’s oldest and probably first fortification wall, known as Lal Kot,
located at the south-western extremity of modern Delhi, was built by
the Tomar Rajputs in the eleventh century. Some time in the twelfth
century this fort was captured by another Rajput clan, the
Chauhans, who came from Sambhar in Rajasthan. The most famous
member of this dynasty, Prithviraj, also known as Rai Pithora,
doubled the size of Lal Kot and renamed it after himself, Qila Rai
Pithora, only to lose it soon afterwards to the invading armies of
Muhammad of Ghur.
This inconvenient historical episode cannot be undone but it can
be symbolically reversed. In 2002 (that is 810 years after the event),
a section of crumbling wall, identified as part of Qila Rai Pithora, was
patched up, and the Delhi Development Authority replaced the
surrounding debris with verdant landscaping to create a public park.
At its heart, perched on top of a rather uninspiring interpretation
centre, is an enormous bronze equestrian statue of Prithviraj, bow
and arrow at the ready, all set to reconquer. Even the pigeons—its
most numerous devotees—look restless. The whole complex was
inaugurated by L.K. Advani, at the time minister of home affairs in
the central government, and a prominent member of the Bharatiya
Janata Party, which was then (as now) widely perceived as adept at
harnessing Hindu religious sentiment. A nearby information board
mentions the Chauhan capture of Delhi from the Tomars and
describes the extended Qila Rai Pithora as ‘the first of the so-called
seven cities of Delhi’. Er . . . one second. That phrase about the
seven cities was coined by colonial-era historians to describe the
sultanate and Mughal sites. There is today a well-established
practice of pseudo-scholarship that involves reattributing Islamic
monuments to Hindu authorship. But there is a nuance here. There
really was a pre-existing fort that the Ghurid forces captured and
used, so in this case the reattribution is not unreasonable. Even so,
deciding that a given stretch of wall was a part of Prithviraj’s fort and
sticking a massive statue of him on it rather smacks of trying to
replace the monuments of Delhi’s missing Hindu past.
The Ghurid general, Qutb-ud-din Aibak, developed the fort that he
had wrested from Prithviraj Chauhan, strengthening its defences and
constructing within it the new buildings required for the first capital
of the sultanate. These included a congregational mosque, aptly
(though probably only later) named Quwwatu’l-Islam, the ‘Might of
Islam’, and the towering Qutb Minar, standing at its south-eastern
corner.
Some of the material remains of the Rajput period survive in
recycled form. As the archaeologist Y.D. Sharma noted, an inscription
at the eastern entrance proudly records how no fewer than twenty-
seven Hindu and Jain temples, perhaps dating from the Tomar
period, which once stood in the Qila Rai Pithora or in its vicinity,
were demolished to provide material for the building of the
Quwwatu’l-Islam. The colonnade that encloses the mosque’s earliest
and inner courtyard is entirely composed of temple columns. Though
here redeployed in the service of a different religion, they still bear
the carvings that relate to their former use: depictions of hanging
bells, overflowing pots, the mask-like kirtimukha or ‘face of fortune’,
abundant foliage and even, in a few cases, figures of human form. It
is hard to know whether Qutb-ud-din appreciated this exquisite
work. Many of the columns have been cut and reassembled to make
them fit, which hardly suggests a connoisseur’s eye, and it is
possible that the carving was once concealed under plaster. Some
Hindu idols were originally inserted face down at the thresholds,
which indicates a more plausible interpretation of the whole project
as a gesture of intimidation over those he had conquered. So too
does the Qutb Minar, the tower that stands outside but looms over
the courtyard. Nearly 240 feet high, this minar is rather taller than is
required for the muezzin to give the call to prayer—indeed anyone
calling from the top would go unheard—and it makes more sense as
a splendid tower of victory. It certainly casts a long shadow.
 There is much nervousness in academic circles these days about
building episodes of this kind. There are many instances across
north India of temple parts having being reused in mosque
construction. Historians used to just refer to the stones as ‘spolia’
and move on. But the violent demolition in 1992 by Hindu fanatics of
a mosque in Ayodhya that had been built by the Mughal emperor
Babur, supposedly on the site of a demolished temple, stirred
tensions in Indian society that have still not subsided. The history of
Hindu-Muslim relations has itself become a battlefield, contested in
the present by various political and religious parties as well as by
rival schools of historians. One of the leaders of the Ayodhya temple
movement was the same L.K. Advani who ten years later so valiantly
recalled Prithviraj to Delhi. Nowadays, while many people believe
that Muslim invaders destroyed temples in large quantities, serious
historians mostly prefer to play the matter down, suggesting that
religious differences in India became marked only during the period
of British rule. Any account of history that points to communal
divisions is liable to meet with censure in certain academic circles.
One historian went so far as to list all the verifiable cases of temple
destruction, in an effort to demonstrate that they were few, while
running the risk of adding fuel to the fire by pointing out exactly
where they were. In my view, it might be more sensible to admit
that religious differences sometimes did spark violence in the past,
while deploring those who invoke such moments as a model or
justification for their own actions now. Some devout Hindus ask,
‘Since the Muslims destroyed so many temples, may we not rebuild
just one?’ But no one would stop at one. Those who seek to redress
the past allow themselves to be enslaved by it.
Reused temple columns in the aisles of the Quwwatu’l-Islam, postcard by H.A.
Mirza & Sons c. 1910
 An earlier response to the religiously inspired architectural
aggression of Qutb-ud-din—a response that is no more satisfactory
than pretending it doesn’t exist—was to turn the whole matter round
and claim that the Qutb Minar was built not by Qutb-ud-din at all but
by the defeated Prithviraj Chauhan. This line of thought gained
adherents with the rise of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth
century. Various specious arguments were advanced to show how its
features conformed to early Rajput architecture, an exercise that
involved overlooking its much closer resemblance to prototypes in
Afghanistan. An unlikely early proponent of the theory—writing in his
youth in the 1840s and trying to be non-partisan—was Syed Ahmad
Khan, later to emerge as an influential Muslim reformer and
educator.
In one sense—though not in the sense they mean—those who
challenge the identity of particular buildings have a point in this
case. If Qutb-ud-din, by building his mosque out of dismantled
temples, intended a gesture of mastery and control, then it
rebounded on him as the temple columns give the mosque a
decidedly Indian character. The colonnades do not look like parts of
a mosque in any other country where Islam had spread. Some such
thought seems to have struck Qutb-ud-din (or some think his
successor) because a screen of high-pointed arches, modelled on
the buildings of Seljuq Persia, was added as an afterthought across
the front of the prayer hall, screening some of the columns from
view. The idea seems to have been that inserting a row of pointed
arches across the western side, towards which the devout faced
while at prayer, would make the whole thing look less like a temple
and more like a mosque.
Up to a point, it does, but even this revision was not entirely
satisfactory. The arches may have the pointed outline that is
distinctive of Islamic architecture worldwide, but the technology of
arch construction was little known, if at all, in India at this time, and
the Indian masons employed to do the job used their own traditional
trabeate (post and beam) system. The arches are composed not of
voussoirs (wedge-shaped pieces arranged like a fan) but of
horizontal layers of stone, carved into shape. Variations in the colour
of the stone make this visible even on a casual inspection from the
ground. As a result, the screen may be more Islamic in appearance
than the rest of the mosque, but it is still Indian in method.
Approaching the screen reveals Indian hands in another respect: it
is covered in carved ornamentation. Much of it—notably the swirling
organic scrolls—is derived from designs customarily used in temples;
not in this case plundered from actual earlier temples but made new
and adapted to a new purpose. Around the arches run Quranic
inscriptions. The masons have faithfully copied a calligraphic model,
but they have not been able to resist adding their own flourishes,
filling every available gap with scrolling creeper and bursting bud.
The Arabic letters sprout Indian flora.
This early beginning set the tenor for all subsequent sultanate and
Mughal architecture. The patrons might have looked beyond India’s
borders for inspiration or for building specialists, but they also
engaged, willingly or by necessity, with Indian conditions: its climate,
its building materials and the expertise of its craftsmen. This gives
the Islamic buildings of India a distinctive aesthetic, despite their
many similarities with the buildings of Persia and elsewhere. The
architecture of the deserts of central and west Asia—composed of
brick and tile—is translated on India’s fertile plains into an
architecture of richly carved stone, worked by Indian expert hands.
The core of the Qutb complex—the courtyard and the tower begun
by the conquering general, Qutb-ud-din—is surrounded by the
extensions added by his successors. Even the Qutb Minar was a joint
venture. Qutb-ud-din completed only the lowest storey and the
remainder—up to an original total of four—was contributed by his
successor, Iltutmish, in the early thirteenth century. Through the
course of the fourteenth century, the tower was struck by lightning
more than once. After one such episode, in 1368, Sultan Firuz Shah
Tughluq dismantled the damaged top storey and replaced it with two
more, raising the total to five. He introduced white marble for the
first time, perhaps to make it harmonize with the Alai Darwaza, the
grand gateway that stands nearby, which had been built in 1310 by
Alauddin Khalji.
Even then it was not complete. An aquatint by the English
topographical artists Thomas and William Daniell, based on drawings
they made on site in 1789, shows a cupola on the top. The minar
was again struck by lightning in 1803, the year the British took
possession of Delhi, and the cupola was destroyed.
Some years later, in the 1820s, a military engineer named Robert
Smith was put in charge of Delhi’s historic monuments, and he
began to think about restoring them. Smith was an able
draughtsman who had long been sketching Indian buildings. During
a spell of leave in Britain, he met William Daniell and was evidently
impressed: his own later artistic work shows the influence of the
Daniells, as it is more ambitious in scale and focuses on grand
architectural scenes. He took advantage of his posting in Delhi to
paint large canvases of the city’s major sites including the Purana
Qila and the Quwwatu’l-Islam. He lived in an apartment within the
old city walls with his Indian bibi, and counted among his friends
James Skinner, the founder of Skinner’s Horse, for whom he
prepared the original designs for St. James’s Church at Kashmiri
Gate. From time to time, Smith was called on to exercise his military
skills: during the siege of Bharatpur in 1826, he laid the mine that
blew the fort. But back in Delhi, his mind turned towards
preservation.
It troubled him that the Qutb Minar lacked a top, so he had a
stone pavilion specially designed in what he thought was an
authentic period style and had it placed on the tower, surmounted in
turn by a wooden canopy and a flagpole. From the outset this
embellishment was controversial. Many people, from the governor
general downwards, derided it, while Smith stoutly defended it. He
pointed out that since no detailed records of the original survived, its
appearance must be a matter of guesswork. Fair point, said his
critics, but one thing we can be sure of: your guess is wrong. The
traveller Fanny Parks compared the wooden canopy to a Chinese
umbrella and was delighted when, during yet another storm,
‘lightning struck it off, as if indignant at the profanation’. The stone
part survived a little longer but was eventually dismantled in 1848. It
was then reconstructed at the edge of the lawn to the south-east of
the minar, where it remains today—a pretty but slightly forlorn and
neglected little folly. With its fluted columns and curved chajjas, the
pavilion’s late-Mughal style might be deemed incongruous, but the
criticism is pedantic because the construction of the minar has a
long history, stretching beyond any one period.
Even without Smith’s pavilion in place, the lofty grandeur of the
Qutb Minar exceeds the expectations of most visitors. Emily Eden,
the acerbic sister of Governor General Lord Auckland, developed a
finely tuned style of put-down for most Indian things, but when she
came to the Qutb Minar in 1838, she exclaimed, ‘Well of all the
things I ever saw, I think this is the finest.’ She felt ashamed that
she had not heard of it before and concluded, ‘I do say it is rather a
pity we were so ill taught.’ As one of Delhi’s finest landmarks, it does
indeed deserve to be better known outside of India.
Back in the courtyard of the Quwwatu’l-Islam mosque—and
featuring in one of Smith’s paintings of the scene—is an object of
greater antiquity. It predates the sultans, though it does perhaps tell
us something about their ideas concerning power and history. It is
an iron pillar, over twenty-three feet high, planted in front of the
central arch of the prayer hall’s screen. Its unblemished shaft is
surmounted by a bulbous capital and other ribbed and fluted
mouldings. An inscription in Sanskrit helpfully informs us that it is a
standard of Vishnu, raised on Vishnupada hill by King Chandra. The
first part is easily interpreted. A high pillar is sometimes raised as a
standard in front of a Hindu temple to support an image of the
vehicle of the god to whom the temple is dedicated. Such pillars are
still common in Kerala, for example, where they are often plated in
copper or brass. In this case, a neat hole in the top of the column
shows where an image of Vishnu’s vehicle—the eagle Garuda—was
once attached. King Chandra has been identified as Chandragupta II
(r. 375–413), making the pillar some 1600 years old—an age that
causes metallurgists to marvel at the absence of rust. There is no
agreement on where Vishnupada was, except that it was not in
Delhi.
So this remarkable object is an imported antique, hauled to Delhi,
according to bardic sources, by the Tomar Rajputs. Their veneration
for it seemed to have impressed the early sultans who promptly
appropriated it and set it up in the middle of their mosque. One may
assume that the sultans did not see it as a standard of Vishnu, but
they knew it was something old and special, and a symbol of
reverence. And even though they were concerned to have their
deeds recorded for posterity by wordy historians, they addressed the
population around them by more visual means. Holding the column
demonstrated authority.
That line of thought perhaps gave rise to the superstition that if
you can stand with your back to the column, pass your arms around
it and clasp your hands together, then you will live a long life. Parties
of people laughing as they took their turn were once a common
sight. But the pillar’s current official custodian—the Archaeological
Survey of India—has unsportingly erected a protective fence to stop
this harmless custom.
Behind the ruined prayer hall, to the north-west, is the tomb of
the second sultan, Iltutmish (d. 1236). The form of the tomb follows
a type that had long been established in west Asia: a single square
hall, with entrances on the south, east and north sides but closed on
the west side by a mihrab: a niche that indicates the direction of
Mecca. The hall was covered by a large dome which has collapsed—
like the arches of the mosque screen, it would have been built on
the trabeate system which is just not strong enough for a fully
rounded dome on this scale. So the hall stands open to the sky. The
sarcophagus, raised on a platform, occupies the centre of the
building and is laid out on a north-south axis. The sarcophagus is
visually very prominent—as one might expect—which makes it all the
more surprising to realize that here (as is often though not always
the case) it is empty; the sarcophagus you see is a dummy and the
real one lies in an underground burial chamber directly below. The
head of the staircase down to the lower chamber is located just
outside the building, to the north.
The essentials of this arrangement—the domed square hall, the
three openings, the mihrab, the orientation, the sarcophagus and
the crypt—can all be found in earlier tombs in central and west Asia.
An early prototype, for example, is the tomb of Ismail the Samanid
at Bukhara (c. 900). This is in fact open on all four sides; it has been
suggested that it derives in turn from pre-Islamic fire temples. The
fully developed form can be seen in the tomb of the Seljuq Sultan
Sanjar at Merv (c. 1157). The builders of Iltutmish’s tomb have
clearly imported this ready-made type. Their successors in India
were to retain all the essential components, even as they elaborated
them into the most complex of forms. Sometimes the hall is
octagonal rather than square, but all the other components are
always there, whatever else is added. A single core concept links
Iltutmish’s tomb to the Taj Mahal built some four centuries later, and
to every Muslim tomb in India in between.
What distinguishes Iltutmish’s tomb from its west Asian sources is
the profusion of rich ornament carved in stone over almost every
surface. As in the mosque, the material and its treatment are the
mark of the Indian craftsman’s hand. The ornament mixes Quranic
inscriptions with patterns, mouldings and motifs—like the lotus bud
—that the masons were accustomed to using when carving temples.
Some other additions to the mosque—extensions to the courtyard
and a new entrance to the south—date from the early fourteenth
century, nearly a hundred years later (and are discussed in the next
chapter). They show how the mosque founded by the first sultan
continued in use for a long time under his successors. Indeed,
despite the removal of the court to the other forts built by successive
dynasties, the tomb of Imam Zamin, built in 1537 next to the Alai
Darwaza, indicates that there was a resident imam here until the
early Mughal period. After that the whole site seems to have become
a graveyard, evident from the sheer number of graves all around,
with some situated in places where they would be inconvenient for
the people who came to pray, such as the central courtyard.
By the time Robert Smith and his critics came on the scene, the
mosque had long ceased to be a place of active worship. The
presence of a small formal garden with a late-Mughal-style mosque,
set aside near the modern entrance to the complex, suggests that by
the eighteenth century the site had become just a place for
members of the court to visit. They had need of a modern mosque
while visiting an antique one because the antiquity could no longer
be used, only seen. Many of the Mughal emperors from Babur
onwards were avid architectural tourists. They visited historic
monuments out of curiosity and to pass the time, much as we do
today.
From the outset, the architecture of the Delhi Sultanate was an
act of syncretism and assimilation. Similar things might be said
about the Delhi sultans’ approach to governance. Ethnically, they
were Turkish (descended from tribes which had migrated into central
Asia), but culturally they belonged to the wider Persian world, and
they looked westwards for models of kingship. They assiduously
read the classic Persian national epic, the Shah Nama, the ‘book of
kings’. They planned their courts on the Persian model, observing
Persian customs and ceremonies, such as the celebration of Nowruz,
the Persian new year. But at the same time they were tolerant, even
respectful, of Hindu cultural traditions, and some Hindu festivals
such as Holi, in spring, were also celebrated at court. They were
operating in a terrain that was on the fringes of what they
considered the civilized world and adapted themselves accordingly.
A case in point is their attitude to legitimacy. They had conquered
a non-Muslim land by force of arms, but they made no attempt to
convert the population forcibly. On the other hand, they sought to
establish their right to rule by reference to authorities in the wider
Muslim world. Qutb-ud-din, even while elevating himself to sultan,
requested and received symbols of kingship, including the royal
parasol, from the descendants of Muhammad of Ghur. His own
successors went further, obtaining the necessary legal investiture
from the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. To regard themselves as
kings they needed to know that they were seen as such within
Islamic law, by the highest Muslim authority. But the day-to-day
exercise of their power naturally meant interacting with many
Indians who were not Muslims and including them in the
administration. It would have been impossible, for example, to
manage agriculture and taxation without local knowledge and
support.
Qutb-ud-din made the transition from general to administrator
with great dedication, and he was admired by contemporary
chroniclers both for his piety and for his conspicuous generosity. His
one diversion from work was chaugan—the precursor of polo—and it
proved fatal: after serving just four years as sultan, he died in an
accident while playing the game in Lahore.
He was succeeded by his son-in-law, Iltutmish (r. 1210–36), who
seems to have been something of a mystic, much given to
meditation and conversing with Sufi saints. But he did not neglect
his duties, and considered the dispensing of justice the most
important among them. Adopting a Persian custom, he ordered that
anyone with a grievance should wear a particular dyed garment
when attending court, so that on seeing him the sultan would
immediately know there was some matter to be addressed. The
famous Muslim historian and traveller Ibn Battuta adds:
 But he was not content with this. He said to himself, ‘Some persons
might be oppressed in the course of the night and might desire
immediate redress of their grievances’. So he set up two statues of lions
on towers at the gate of his palace, and around their necks were two
iron chains with a huge bell. The oppressed person would shake the bell
in the night and the sultan hearing the sound would instantly look into
his case and administer justice.

The story might sound fanciful (and Ibn Battuta was reporting what
he learnt a century after the events), but the idea of the ruler as a
fair judge accessible to all—modelled on King Solomon—is a
recurring motif in Islamic history.
Besides impromptu court hearings, Iltutmish found his sleep
disturbed by numerous rebellions, staged by resurgent Rajputs or
ambitious ministers. With an eye on posterity, he continued the
building projects of Qutb-ud-din and paid particular attention to the
education of his children. His eldest son predeceased him and was
buried in a tomb, located near the modern housing colony of Vasant
Kunj, known as Sultan Ghari which is again composed of the
columns and lintels of an ancient temple. It was built around 1231
and was the first major mausoleum in Delhi.
This death left Iltutmish with a dilemma as he felt that his other
sons, despite his efforts with their schooling, lacked the necessary
qualities to rule, and he nominated his daughter, Raziya, as his
successor. The nobles at first overruled him. When Iltutmish himself
died in April 1236, they laid him to rest in the tomb next to the
Quwwatu’l-Islam mosque and elevated his son Rukn-ud-din Firuz to
the throne. As predicted by his father, Rukn-ud-din immediately
abandoned himself to pleasures of the flesh. After seven months of
forbearance, the nobles grew anxious for the safety of the realm and
killed him, replacing him with Raziya.
The short reign of Raziya (1236–40) has been described by one
historian as a ‘bold experiment’. It was one of the few instances in
Indian history of a woman ruling (and most of the others came
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