Who ruled Delhi?

Delhi lies on the west bank of the Yamuna, where the last spurs of the Aravalli hills reach the river. The site guards the narrow corridor between the Thar Desert and the Himalayan foothills, so any power coming from the north-west into the Ganges plain had to pass close by. That position explains its long record as a seat of empire: Delhi is less one city than a series of capitals built side by side, each dynasty raising its own walls a few kilometres from the last.

Tradition identifies the area with Indraprastha, the Pandava capital of the Mahabharata, and excavations at the Purana Qila have found occupation going back to the first millennium BCE. An inscription of Ashoka cut into rock in south Delhi shows that the region lay within the Maurya Empire in the 3rd century BCE. The first fortified city with a continuous history is Lal Kot, built by the Tomara Rajputs, traditionally under Anangpal Tomar in the 11th century. The Chauhans took it in the 12th century and enlarged it as Qila Rai Pithora.

In 1192 Muhammad of Ghor defeated Prithviraj Chauhan at Tarain, and his general Qutb ud-Din Aibak made Delhi the base of Muslim rule in north India. From 1206 it was the capital of the Delhi Sultanate, ruled in turn by the Mamluk, Khalji, Tughlaq, Sayyid and Lodi dynasties. The Qutb Minar, begun under Aibak, still marks this first Islamic city. Later sultans added Siri, Tughlaqabad and Firozabad. In 1398 Timur sacked Delhi and massacred much of its population, and the Sultanate never fully recovered its reach.

Babur defeated the last Lodi sultan at Panipat in 1526 and founded the Mughal Empire. The early Mughals often governed from Agra, but Shah Jahan returned the court to Delhi and built a new walled city, Shahjahanabad, between 1639 and 1648, with the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid at its heart. This is the Old Delhi of today. Mughal power faded in the 18th century. The Persian ruler Nadir Shah sacked the city in 1739, Afghan armies raided it repeatedly, and from 1771 the emperor depended on Maratha protection.

The British East India Company took Delhi in 1803. During the uprising of 1857, rebel soldiers proclaimed the aged Bahadur Shah Zafar as their leader; the British recaptured the city in September after a long siege, exiled the last Mughal emperor to Rangoon and demolished large parts of the old town. In 1911 George V announced that the capital of the British Raj would move from Calcutta to Delhi. A new administrative city designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker was inaugurated as New Delhi in 1931.

At independence in 1947 Delhi became the capital of India. The partition of India brought hundreds of thousands of refugees from Punjab, while many of the city's Muslims left for Pakistan, reshaping its population almost overnight. Delhi has since grown into one of the largest urban areas in the world, with more than 30 million people in the wider metropolitan region, and it remains the seat of India's government as the National Capital Territory.