You see, the Indian capital is not always an easy place to love. Indeed, it can be quite hateable at times – a rugged, aggressive, never-ending city. I often tell first-timers not to linger but to go somewhere that is easier on the nerves and simpler to understand, then return when they are acclimatised and a little streetwise. It took me many years to make my peace with this monstrous, addictive megacity – but I am a stubborn fellow, and it need not take so long.
Delhi has a cosmopolitan feel that was far from evident when I first visited in the 1980s – these days it has a much larger number of resident foreigners. We no longer stick out as we once did and, apart from in a few heavily touristed areas, are left largely unhassled in the streets and markets.
It’s still a hard place to walk in, a city where only the poor and a few eccentric foreigners are pedestrians, but there are wonderful rewards for those who are determined. I’ve trodden many hundreds of miles around the city and every time I step out on the streets I encounter surprises – chance meetings, forgotten ruins, hidden patches of wild nature that dazzle me – though the absence of pavements and the presence of open sewers can make the experience a challenging one.
Still, there are much easier ways of exploring. The most dramatic change has been the arrival of the metro – a gleaming, modern, under- and over-ground system that now reaches most parts of the city, including the anodyne but slightly sterile Red Fort, which is still the city’s most popular tourist destination.
In Old Delhi, one makes a magical Narnian transition from 21st-century subterranean steel-and-glass as one emerges on to the back streets of what is, in essence, a 17th-century Mughal city. It’s a short, bustling walk along the main thoroughfare, Chandni Chowk, to the Red Fort, but you can also go to the main mosque, the Jama Masjid – from the minarets of which one can begin to get a sense of the scale of this enormous city – and, near the main gate of the mosque, Karim’s restaurant (tel +91 112 3269 880; karimhoteldelhi.com), where traditional Delhi Mughlai food can still be eaten.
Many visitors end up seeing just one small scrap of this city of more than 17 million people, or well over 20 million if one includes its contiguous suburbs – it is much more spread out than India’s other megacities. The metro is now the best way of traversing these less well-known parts – and a joy-ride, with an electronic ticket shaped like a tiddlywink, will take you high above ground level to bustling suburbs where few tourists ever venture.
For many business people working in Gurgaon to the far south of Delhi, beyond the airport (see “Room to grow”, businesstraveller.com/archive/2009/september-2009), the metro has quickly proved a slightly overcrowded godsend. From Gurgaon, it is over ground, high above the streets and scrubland, with wonderful views over south Delhi before it plunges underground not far from the city’s most distinctive monument, the Qutb Minar.
Constructed in 1202, the Qutb Minar was for several centuries the world’s tallest tower, and it still dominates the south Delhi skyline. It’s in Mehrauli, one of many former “villages” that has been swallowed by the rest of the city in recent decades. In fact, Mehrauli is the most impressive of these, containing the ruins of what was once the first city of Delhi, the ancient walls of which can still be climbed by intrepid walkers in the large area of park and jungle known as Sanjay Van.
Mehrauli has buildings from each of the past ten centuries, including a tomb that was transformed into a country house (known as Dilkusha – or “Heart’s Desire”) during the British period, and a circular mid 20th-century library whose curved walls are quite inappropriate for bookshelves. The neighbourhood now also has fine restaurants – such as Olive, behind the Qutb Minar (tel +91 112 9574 444; olivebarandkitchen.com) and Thai High in the Ambavatta Complex (tel +91 112 6641 796; thaihigh.in) – and a few designer shops, and is gradually being gentrified. Old houses with courtyards – known as havelis – are being revived, and the smart set is moving in.
Several other “villages” have undergone the same process. The best known is Hauz Khas, in the heart of south Delhi, next to a 14th-century reservoir recently refilled with water. Alongside the lake are a ruined madrasa, medieval Muslim tombs, and hundreds of shops selling a mix of ethnic-chic items, Bollywood film posters and retro wooden furniture. There are dozens of eateries and cafés, including my current favourite, Gunpowder (tel +91 112 6535 700, gunpowder.co.in), a South Indian haunt hidden down a back street, four lift-less floors up, with a wonderful view of the reservoir. And, in another sign of the times, it’s easiest to reserve a table at Gunpowder on Facebook (visit facebook.com/gunpowderkitchen).
The formal heart of Delhi is a relatively heartless place. New Delhi, or Lutyens’ Delhi, is full of fine triumphalist architecture from the early 20th century but has a serious shortage of residents. This part of the city, planned by British architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker during the First World War, was the new imperial capital of India.
Prior to this, Calcutta (now known as Kolkata) had been the capital of British India, and Delhi was a city in decline, full of ruins of the Mughal Empire, and the Muslim sultanates that preceded it. Most of the land on which British New Delhi was built was scrub and jungle – they even had to decapitate the top half of a hill to accommodate the Viceregal Palace, now known as Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Mahatma Gandhi suggested that the vast palace be converted to a hospital for the poor, but it has instead been inhabited by a succession of presidents whose largely formal role in Indian politics means that its ballrooms and meeting halls get used only on ceremonial occasions. Once a year – for a period of a month (usually mid-February to mid-March), its well-kept Mughal-style gardens are open to the public.
For the rest of the year, as with much of Lutyens’ Delhi, the general public is not particularly welcome. The famous bungalows are occupied by politicians and bureaucrats, and apart from a few museums and open spaces, the centre of Delhi retains an authoritarian, exclusive feel.
But search a little harder and it’s possible to locate a few reminders of the city’s older incarnations. One of my favourites is hidden down an alleyway off Hailey Road, one of the few streets to retain its British name. It’s a grand stepwell called Agrasen’s Baoli, surrounded by high-rises, which probably dates to the 14th century (though the watchman may tell you it was built several millennia earlier). Wells such as these were not just sources of water but were also public meeting places, with arcaded rooms providing a refuge from the heat of the summer – Agrasen’s Baoli also has a small mosque attached.
Better known than the stepwell is the bizarre 18th-century observatory called Jantar Mantar, opposite the Park hotel on Parliament Street. It consists of a series of larger-than-human brick-built astronomical instruments set in a pretty park, and resembles a playground for the children of giants. Normal-sized youngsters go there in large numbers on school trips, and scientists show them how to measure the angles of stars and planets.
Just to the north of Jantar Mantar are the curving streets of Connaught Place. The formal centre of Delhi, it was built by the British as a commercial district, and is remembered by its oldest inhabitants with nostalgia for the brass bands that used to play in its central park, and the Hollywood matinees that once screened at the still-functioning Regal cinema.
There was a time when CP, as Connaught Place is widely known – though the official name of the area (and the metro station) is Rajiv Chowk – fell on hard times, and became the haven of the call girl and the black-marketeer. But today it has rebounded, its prime location and the arrival of the metro having helped it to return to something of its modest former glory. Though air-conditioned shopping malls have sprung up throughout the city, CP seems to be holding its own, attracting a wide range of domestic and international brands, and remaining Delhi’s most distinctive shopping district.
Between New Delhi (located within the metropolis of Delhi itself) and residential south Delhi is a large tract of land that includes some of the city’s most valuable real estate, and which was once a necropolis. So, unknown to the clients of several of Delhi’s best hotels – including the Oberoi, the Taj and the Aman – they are staying in the midst of what was once an enormous royal graveyard.
The necropolis stretches from the vastness of Humayun’s tomb – housing the grave of the second Mughal emperor – to the almost-baroque mausoleum of the 18th-century courtier Safdarjung in the east, via the tomb-littered Lodhi gardens, where politicians and bureaucrats can be seen busily networking and less-busily exercising.
Barely noticeable and immediately opposite the Taj Mahal hotel (tajhotels.com) on Mansingh Road are three 20th-century cemeteries – Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian – trisecting a spur of land next to a roundabout. Look out for the strangest of Christian gravestones, inscribed simply to “Stella of Mudge 1904-1984: a fable”. Stella, it turns out, was the pseudonym of Alice Villiers, a cabaret dancer from Kent who married the Maharaja of Kapurthala. I once climbed from the Christian cemetery to the Jewish graveyard and was appalled to see a hut with a swastika painted on it. But I discovered it was the hut of a Hindu watchman, and to him it was not a symbol of anti-Semitism but the carrier of its original meaning as a Hindu sign of good luck. In Delhi, I have learnt to expect surprises.
My own coming to terms with the city took some time, and I regret spending too long ignoring its many delights. My epiphany came when I moved to an area in the south of the city called Panchsheel Park. It’s unremarkable in many ways, a small affluent residential area squeezed into a long narrow space between the Outer Ring Road and the 14th-century walls of Siri Fort, which was briefly Delhi’s medieval citadel. I explored these crumbling walls – armed with a walking stick to break through the jungle and ward off angry pigs – and was entranced by a nearby wilderness.
In that wilderness – officially an unnamed Delhi Development Authority park – I walked and ran, and chatted with neighbours who had also discovered this secret place. I tried and failed to save a medieval mosque, torn down for the squash and badminton courts of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, but there are many old buildings that survive – including the ruins of what has been identified as a 14th-century palace, unlisted and unprotected.
Delhi is, in ways that continue to astonish me, ancient and modern, all at the same time. It still has its majestic, scattered ruins that, for this writer, equal those of Rome or Athens or Cairo. Yet it is the capital of a nation that is beginning to claim the 21st century as its own, whose struggle with poverty is far from complete, but whose aspirations for success seem unquenchable.
