No city in the world has been founded, abandoned, and refounded as many times as Delhi. Between the Yamuna and the Aravallis, on a single rocky ridge, at least seven distinct cities were raised, used, and walked away from before the British arrived to build the eighth. Each is buried under, beside, or inside the next. Walk a half-mile in some parts of south Delhi and you cross three empires.
This is what a corporate visitor, a tourist, a newcomer most often misses. Delhi is not one city. It is a stack.
Indraprastha — the city in the Mahabharat
The earliest layer is legend. The Mahabharat names Indraprastha as the capital the Pandavas raised on the banks of the Yamuna, given to them by their uncle Dhritarashtra after a hostile partition. Tradition places it at present-day Purana Qila — the Old Fort. Excavations at the site have turned up Painted Grey Ware pottery dated to around 1000 BCE, broadly the same period the epic describes. Whether the Pandavas walked here is unprovable. That people did, three thousand years ago, is not.
Lal Kot & Qila Rai Pithora — the Hindu capital (8th–12th century)
The first historically attested city of Delhi is Lal Kot, raised in the 8th century by the Tomar Rajputs near modern Mehrauli. In the 12th century the Chauhan king Prithviraj III extended it into Qila Rai Pithora, a much larger fortification whose battered red walls still stand in the Mehrauli Archaeological Park. It was Prithviraj's defeat at Tarain (1192) at the hands of Muhammad of Ghor that ended Hindu rule of Delhi for the next 750 years.
The Sultanate cities (1192–1526)
Ghor's general Qutb-ud-din Aibak made himself the first Sultan of Delhi in 1206. He and his successors raised five distinct cities in three centuries:
Mehrauli — the Slave Dynasty (1206–1290) reused the Chauhan citadel and added the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque and the Qutub Minar. Siri (1303) was Alauddin Khilji's military camp, fortified after the Mongols nearly took Delhi. Tughlaqabad (1321) was Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlaq's massive walled citadel, abandoned within decades. Jahanpanah (1326), built by Muhammad bin Tughlaq, was an attempt to merge the older cities under one wall. And Firozabad (1354) — today Firozshah Kotla — was Firoz Shah Tughlaq's quieter capital on the Yamuna, where people still leave letters for djinns every Thursday.
The Mughal capitals (1526–1857)
Babur's victory at Panipat (1526) ended the Lodi dynasty and founded the Mughal empire. Humayun's Din Panah, built atop the Indraprastha site as Purana Qila, lasted barely a generation — Sher Shah Suri took it back briefly and renamed it Shergarh. Humayun fell down the library stairs of Sher Mandal in 1556. His widow, Hamida Banu Begum, commissioned the first true Mughal monument: Humayun's Tomb, the prototype that Shah Jahan's grandsons would refine into the Taj Mahal.
A century later, Shah Jahan moved the capital from Agra and built Shahjahanabad (1639–1648) — the seventh city, walled, planned, and centred on his new palace fort. He called it Qila-e-Mubarak, the Blessed Fort. The British later renamed it Lal Qila — the Red Fort.
The British interregnum and New Delhi (1858–1931)
After the 1857 uprising and the trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar in his own throne room, the British Raj formally absorbed Delhi but governed from Calcutta. That changed in 1911. At the Delhi Durbar, King George V announced the capital would move back to Delhi. Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker were appointed to plan a new imperial city south of Shahjahanabad. They drew their geometry around a single ridge axis: Rashtrapati Bhavan (then Viceroy's House) at the top, India Gate at the foot, three kilometres of formal vista between.
Inaugurated on 13 February 1931, New Delhi is sometimes counted as Delhi's eighth city — though most Delhi-walkers fold Indraprastha into the same line and call Lutyens the seventh. Either way, the British had built a capital from which they would be evicted in sixteen years.
What's still under your feet
The reason Delhi rewards walking is that none of these cities were fully demolished. Lal Kot's walls still rise out of the scrub in Mehrauli. Tughlaq battlements ring the Adilabad fort. Jahanpanah's gates appear at the edge of a south Delhi golf course. Firozshah Kotla still receives letters. Humayun's tomb is unchanged. Shahjahanabad still trades on Chandni Chowk. Lutyens' bungalows still house ministers. The city has eaten itself, and kept everything.
Whichever walk you book first, you are walking through layers — one foot in two centuries, sometimes three. That is what Delhi is. Not a destination. A section drawing.