Barapullah Elevated Road and Khan Khana’s Tomb

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A short note to follow up on my post about construction work for the elevated road around the Barapullah bridge, in which my concluding remarks were that the separate governmental authorities need to really work together cohesively in Delhi to accommodate both conservation and development, and use Delhi’s historic architecture as a unique facet of the city. Unfortunately, it looks like another section of the elevated road construction may indicate that examples of such collaboration are pretty hard to come by. Continue reading →

Barapullah In The News

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An image of Barapullah I took sometime in 2009, showing its basic design and construction (and the ganda nala – dirty drain – flowing under it)

Barapullah is an early 17th century bridge close to Humayun’s Tomb and Khan Khana’s Tomb in the Nizamuddin area. The monument has been in the news recently as part of the ongoing tussle between the ASI (Archaeological Survey of India) in Delhi on one side, and various other governmental bodies (such as the railways, Delhi metro, MCD, Commonwealth Games people etc) on the other, playing out an intra-government-department preservation-versus-development urban slug-fest. Continue reading →

Shahjahanabad I: Khari Baoli & Katra Neel

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A Brief History of Shahjahanabad

Carrying on with my Dilli Darshan posts, I’m going to put up a series of them about Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi). Shahjahanabad is the 17th century Mughal walled city that also contained the Mughal palace and court, and which was the occupied part of Delhi during the time the British took increasing control of the city throughout the first half of the 19th century. Which means that Shahjahanabad was what they took increasing control of, and was the core area that Delhi grew out of in the late 19th c. and throughout the 20th c. Continue reading →

Thursday Afternoon at Bakhtiyar Kaki’s Dargah

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I visited Bakhtiyar Kaki’s dargah in Mehrauli on a Thursday, the busiest day at Sufi shrines, and here are a few images of the scenes and crowds, to complement the images and descriptions in the main dargah post.

North entrance to the dargah
Passageway leading into the dargah complex
Bakhtiyar Kaki’s tomb
Women are not allowed into the courtyard of Kaki’s tomb, and can only view the tomb through the surrounding screen
The large dargah complex has many courtyards and open spaces, some crowded and some more leisurely, like this one
Makeshift marketplace at the western entrance to the dargah
Food being prepared for pilgrims and visitors to the dargah, in front of the Zafar Mahal gateway

Out with the old, In with the new … Part II

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I went back to the site where I’d taken the Out with the old, in with the new photo in Dec ’06 to see if the tombs there were still standing and how the area around it had developed, and was pleased to find that the tombs are indeed still there, even though the area around is developing at a pace in keeping with the rest of Delhi! Maybe these tombs are on the INTACH listing and/or are protected by ASI, though that doesn’t seem to be much of a deterrent to the encroachment and demise of such monuments elsewhere! Continue reading →

A brief history of Delhi, to explain it’s urban villages

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This post explains the development of Delhi’s “urban villages” over the past few decades, and is a supplement to the Back to Dilli Darshaning post below.

To understand the idea of the urban village in Delhi, a short primer on the history of Delhi is in order. Some of you might have heard/read this stuff before at various venues, but I love to tell this tale, so here goes! Continue reading →