Join RAMAN MOHORA on a walk through Mehrauli, the first of Delhi’s many stories. The relaxed walking pace allows one to pause and stumble over the many monuments, memories, and complexities that tell poignant stories and teach important lessons.

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Delhi is best explored at a walking pace. For a few fleeting weeks every year - those brief interludes we call spring and autumn, before the city swings from furnace to smog - the city permits some flânerie. In those weeks, I walk.

I walk because I am a student of history, and Delhi, like Rome, is a dense litter of monuments, albeit literally littered. Most monuments do not line up neatly and are often stumbled over. They are neglected, half-buried, repurposed and yet stubbornly alive.

I live on the rocky remnants of the Aravallis at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Perched atop a boulder at the Parthasarthy Rocks, when the air is feeling charitable, one can make out the faint outline of the Qutub Minar and the squat dome of Adham Khan’s tomb in the distance. That is Mehrauli, the first of Delhi’s many cities. It is there, on certain weekends, where I like to take friends on a history walk.

Delhi’s poet, Mirza Ghalib wrote, “Dilli ki hasti munasir kayi hangamon par hain” - Delhi’s existence depends on many upheavals. Walking through Mehrauli, you begin to understand what he meant. The city’s layered past, both of violence and coexistence, finds itself built into the routes of everyday life. Delhi has endured not because it escaped tumult, but because it learned to live beside the memory of it, poised uneasily between forgetting and obsession. It survives because it contains multitudes. That inheritance is delicate, hard-won, and not assured.

The Many Afterlives of a Tomb

An autorickshaw will take you as far as the bustling Mehrauli bus depot and no further. The narrow lanes in Delhi’s oldest neighbourhood privilege feet and hooves over rubber tyres. Right by the gates of the bus depot, on a raised platform, stands the 16th-century tomb of Adham Khan.

Adham Khan was the Mughal emperor Akbar’s foster brother who discovered the fatal effects of gravity as he was twice thrown, forty feet, from the ramparts of the Agra fort for having murdered the new Wakil (Prime Minister). This incident also marks an instance showing Akbar’s use of Urdu in his personal life when in absolute rage, and in the words of the chronicler Bayazid, he exclaimed: ‘ayē gāndū’ - 'Oh you catamite!'.

His tomb is built in the Lodi architectural style, the dynasty that the Mughals had displaced, and though the structure is curiously dignified, it is atypical, and in art historian Catherine Asher’s words, a “tomb-type associated with traitors.” It is an edifice that seems to contain in stone, both affection and rebuke.

The locals call it the bhool bhulaiya, a maze whose corridors were designed so that the dead man’s soul would find no release. In the 1830s, an East Indian Company official displaced the grave, turning the inner chamber into a dining room. Later, it served as a post office, a police outpost and a guest house before the Viceroy Curzon restored it to its funerary purpose in 1901.

Today, lovers sit in alcoves, old men play cards in the corridors, and plastic litter collects in the corners. The living and the dead share in this democratic arrangement without ceremony.

“Christianity in an Indian Dress”

A short walk away, noise recedes, and in a quiet compound, one can find a gateway resembling a Mughal fort. Behind two towers and a pointed arch, a white temple shikara rises, crowned improbably, by a cross. A marble plaque in Urdu reads: “Moqaddas Yohna ka Girja” - Church of St John.

This church was built in the 1920s by Alfred Coore, who attempted to imagine what a church might look like if it adopted Indian architectural language. Author and Historian Sam Dalrymple writes that Coore had a desire to “realise Christianity in an Indian dress” so that “Churches would not simply be copies of English ones.”

Violence Remembered

Deeper inside the lanes, one comes across schools and businesses named after Banda Singh Bahadur. Painted signboards emerge pointing towards the Shaheedi Sthan which marks the spot where Banda Singh Bahadur, the first independent Sikh ruler was tortured and killed under the orders of the Mughal emperor Farrukhsiyar in 1716. Two East India Company eyewitnesses to the execution, John Surman and Edward Stephenson wrote in a despatch at the time:

“They dressed him [Banda Bahadur]... set him again on an elephant and took him away to the old city [Mehrauli]. Here they paraded him around the tomb of the late emperor, Bahadur Shah, and put him to a barbarous death. First they made him dismount, placed his child in his arms and bade him kill it. They ripped open the child before its father’s eyes, thrust its quivering flesh into his mouth and hacked him to pieces limb by limb.”

There are two imposing gates, barricaded by the gurudwara, which was most probably built post 1947 when a huge number of refugees from Pakistan settled in Mehrauli post-Partition.

This site, too, is a part of Mehrauli’s inheritance. Coeexistence in Delhi has never implied innocence. It has meant that the memory of violence did not make shared life impossible. Sites of martyrdom and devotion coexist without any attempts at a sanitised past.

The Dargah that Draws Everyone

Walking further still, within a short distance stands the dargah of the 13th-century sufi saint Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki. The narrow lane is filled with stalls selling flowers, chadars and religious memorabilia.

Outside the shrine, qawwals sing of devotion without distinction, while within, women pray silently from behind the latticed screens and men exercise a more mobile devotion, pushing through the narrow corridor to reach the saint’s open grave.

What’s unusually striking is the size of the grave. It is huge and unmarked, while the air is filled with the strong fragrance of rose attar and incense. The historian Rana Safvi writes about the local belief that, the spiritual successor of the saint, who was not present at the time of his death, was so overcome by grief that he kept pouring soil over his grave, to the

extent that there was a voice from the grave ‘Stop now, you are suffocating me.’

In 1948, three days before his assassination, Mahatma Gandhi visited the dargah to heal communal wounds post-Partition and reassure the afflicted of their place in India. Today, people of all faiths throng to the dargah to sit and pray and hope.

The Walk of the Flower Sellers

Perhaps the most extraordinary expression of this shared inheritance is the annual festival, the Phool Walon ki Sair, or the Walk of the Flower Sellers. Mirza Ghalib, in a verse writing of the five things that make Delhi the city it is, writes, “Aur Dilli mein har saal mela phool vaalon ka. Yeh paach baate ab nahin, phir Delhi kahan.” (And the festival of the flower sellers every year. Without these five things, what even is Delhi).

Historian Swapna Liddle writes that, in 1812, the Mughal queen Mumtaz Mahal vowed that if her son (exiled by the British for shooting at the British Resident) returned, she would offer a floral chadar at Kaki’s dargah. When he did return, the queen made good on her promise and walked barefoot through Delhi as flower sellers carpeted her path with petals.

The Mughal ruler also offered a floral pankha at the nearby and ancient Yogamaya temple. What began as a private vow was transformed into an annual citywide celebration.

Year after year, Hindus led the offerings at the dargah while the Muslims led the offerings at the temple. The week-long festivities included qawwalis, kite-flying and processions. While it faded during the colonial period, this festival of communal harmony was most remarkably banned during the Quit India movement in 1942. Post-independence, the festival was revived by Prime Minister Nehru.

For generations, this was Delhi’s most effortless demonstration of what is called the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb: unity without uniformity and diversity without division. In recent times, however, the festival has found itself entangled in a bureaucratic maze, with the festival being cancelled in 2025 - for the first time since independence - after timely “permission”

was denied by the Delhi Development Authority.

While Delhi’s history is not without fracture and while the city has periodically been forced to confront its own fragilities, the unity this festival enacts has endured and is renewed each year with both habit and hope.

A Full Lesson from an Empty Grave

Beside the dargah stands the Zafar Mahal, the last of the Mughal palaces, now crumbling in neglect. Built as a summer residence by Akbar II in the early nineteenth century, it no longer commands the grandeur it once did, hemmed in by shops and modern buildings. It was through the balconies of this very residence that palace folk watched the procession of the flower sellers winding past.

There is a fifty-foot gateway - the Hathi Gate - wide enough for elephants to enter in procession. Little remains of the palace interiors today, and one is greeted with a precarious balcony that bears no warning, floors strewn with litter and discarded syringes. The entire structure feels resigned to slow decay. From within the palace, the white dome of Kaki’s dargah rises into view and alongside is the Moti Masjid, once for royal use. The air of Zafar Mahal lends itself to a particular sadness and its history bears this fact.

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, had wished to be buried here, close to his family and the saint he revered, but after the uprising of 1857, he was deported by the British to Rangoon, where he died in exile.

Within this compound stands a modest marble enclosure containing the graves of three later Mughal emperors, and here lies, in my opinion, the most poetically tragic piece of real estate in all of Delhi.

There is an empty patch of grass between two graves - the space once intended for Bahadur Shah Zafar himself. Writing from exile in Burma, in his own words:

Kitna hai badnaseeb Zafar, dafn ke liye Do gaz zameen na mil saki kuu-e-yaar mein. “How unfortunate is Zafar! who couldn’t afford even two yards of earth to be laid to rest in the land of his beloved.”

Walking as Witness

By the time you emerge from Mehrauli’s lanes, you are hungry. You eat Chole Bhature and other deepfried comforts from the stalls nearby. Children run past. The dead remain where they are. Life goes on, with casual intimacy.

You are close to the Yogmaya Temple, whose origins, local belief traces back to the Pandavas after the Mahabharata war. You are also not far from the thirteenth-century Dadabari Jain shrine, with its unexpectedly opulent interiors. A little farther lies the Ashoka Mission, a Buddhist monastery set up by a Cambodian monk. There is also the Mehrauli

Archaeological Park and the Qutub Minar.

Vandals and lovers, saints and laypeople, have crossed these paths for centuries.

At the end of the day, what a stroll through Mehrauli teaches you is that the temple and the mosque, the gurdwara and the church, are never very far apart. They remain within walking distance—if only we choose to walk.