The city with nine lives

Tomorrow is one of the most colourful days in India’s calendar – Republic Day, celebrated with a dazzling parade of pomp, pageantry and patriotism. Every year on Jan 26, thousands of high-kicking soldiers, their arms swinging like pendulums, their caps crested like exotic birds, strut along Rajpath, the great ceremonial avenue at the heart of Delhi.

The two-hour extravaganza, marking the anniversary of India’s birth as a republic in 1950, brings together regimental bands, tanks, missile carriers, soaring aircraft and lolloping elephants. One of the world’s great march-pasts, it would surely have appealed to Donald Trump, who was invited as this year’s chief guest but declined “due to scheduling constraints”.

The parade takes place in New Delhi, the imperial capital built last century by the British, ironically in the dying days of the Raj. Its broad leafy boulevards are a startling contrast to the teeming alleys of nearby Old Delhi, created in the 17th century by Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal.

Visitors often cover both the old and new cities in one busy day and think they have got Delhi wrapped up. Scattered across it, however, are the remains of a good half-dozen even older Delhis. And there’s now an even newer one: a grand total of nine cities, if you like, for the price of one.

Some survive as splendid memorials to lost dynasties and empires; others are now little more than glorified rockeries. They’re a thousand-year legacy of rulers who – like the British – came, saw, conquered and built new cities of their own just to hammer the point home. The 14th century in particular was a boom time for builders, with new settlements going up practically every other week.

The first four cities, scattered across desolate dusty plains, were in what is now residential South Delhi. Edward Lear was here – as an artist, rather than a writer of nonsense verse – in 1874 and was underwhelmed by the “endless heaps of ruin; the countless tombs; the small amount – at least apparently – of population”.

Today the various remains are meshed together by the capital’s relentless expansion (its population is now about 20 million), so you need to know where to look. Which is why my wife Clare and I are joining Vivek Sheel, an experienced and knowledgeable guide, for a couple of days of light urban archaeology.

“Every dynasty wanted a city named after them,” he says when we meet in the grand lobby of the Taj Mahal Hotel, where our room offers a fine panorama of New Delhi. He suggests we start where Delhi itself did – at what’s now Mehrauli Archaeological Park. It could fill a day in itself; its 200 acres include the site of 11th-century Lal Kot (City No 1) and are dotted with mosques, tombs and gateways – more than 100 monuments all told.

The best-known of them is the Qutub Minar, the 13th-century sandstone minaret that features on many city tours, shooting up like a rocket (or, some reckon, a factory chimney). It gave Lear a rare moment of Delhi delight; he called it a “wonderful column”, a “chef d’oeuvre”.

Vivek is keen to show us the nearby but much less-visited 16th-century Adham Khan’s Tomb. In an unprepossessing setting behind a bus terminal near the White Smile Dental Clinic, it’s a striking structure, domed and octagonal. A 19th-century British official converted into his home, but it’s now converted back to a tomb.

Students sit inside absorbed in their mobile phones and a couple of elderly men are having a break from visiting relatives in a nearby hospital. “They are curious to see you; no tourists come here,” says Vivek. “And you are taking notes, so they think you are important.”

He walks us around the Archaeological Park. It twitters with parakeets, black kites soar overhead, wild boars trot daintily around. This was overgrown forest until a few years ago, which explains why so many of the monuments – including a three-storey stepwell, whose water is reached down flights of steps – are so well-preserved.

We pass a notice instructing visitors not to “erect tent or put banners and umbrella” and to avoid “throwing polythene, old statue and old clothes”. If you want to practise your statue-throwing, go elsewhere.

Three miles or so up the road is 14th-century Siri, City No 2. There’s not much to see, but it’s arguably the most charming and certainly the quietest of the lost cities. A fine 15th-century mosque is tucked away in a great expanse of parkland, which a picnicking family have to themselves. Amazingly for Delhi, there is no litter. Why? “Nobody comes here,” says Vivek, simply. “Nothing is here.”

The same could be said of Jahanpanah (City No 4) but certainly not of 14th-century Tughlakabad (City No 3). Vivek has known this imposing ruin from childhood and it’s a favourite of his – “a nice place to imagine how life used to be at that time”.

Its fort has formidably massive ramparts, an abandoned subterranean souk and four miles (6.5km) of outer walls. When Clare and I were last here more than 20 years ago, it felt very remote from central Delhi and was practically deserted apart from grazing cows, mongooses and shifty men who whispered offers of “weed”.

Now it’s heaving with visitors, not least because it features in many Indian films. Teenagers clamber up the ramparts to pose with selfie sticks and chorus Bollywood hits.

Like many Indian monuments it has a two-tier ticket system. Indians pay five rupees (5p) to go in; foreigners pay 100 rupees (￡1.10). In Britain, I suggest, charging foreigners so much more might be viewed as discrimination. “It’s not the foreigners who are paying more,” says Vivek. “It’s the Indians who are paying less.”

We ponder this as we drive north to Firozabad (City No 5), also from the 14th century. It’s a quiet retreat with a pleasant garden and the remains of a mosque that reputedly inspired Tamburlaine to build a similar one in Samarkand.

Not far away is the most familiar and centrally sited of the cities so far: Shergarh (City No 6), within the 16th-century citadel of Purana Qila. It’s a public holiday and more crowds of under-25s seem to be surging through the huge gateway to stroll around the landscaped interior with its banyan and frangipani trees and pots of marigolds.

They gaze at the spot where the emperor Humayun fell to his death while rushing downstairs to evening prayer and many take in the engaging museum. Its exhibits, including a 20,000-year-old terracotta lion’s head, are displayed without fuss.

Next day we give Old Delhi (City No 7 – also known as Shahjahanabad) and New Delhi (City No 8) a miss on the grounds that they’re pretty much known quantities. Instead we head 20 miles (32km) south-west down an expressway to City No 9: Gurgaon.

Twenty years ago, the area was just fields, a few dusty villages and shepherds with their sheep. In 2003, however, a shopping mall was built, then another. Now there are dozens of them, ever-swankier.

Gurgaon (also known as Gurugram) has grown into a vast multinational finance and industrial hub with business and cyber parks, call centres and residential tower blocks, some of them rising to 30 storeys high. It’s an ever-expanding embodiment of modern middle-class India: corporate, confident and consumerist.

As a slick-suited young man from an asset management company I once met here wryly pointed out, this is significantly not the Western cliché of India as “bullock carts and snake charmers”.

We pass a “boutique real estate development”, gyms, spas, “lifestyle stores” and Mercedes showrooms and stroll round Ambience Mall (“Space for a million smiles”). It has Calvin Klein, Louis Philippe, Armani Jeans, Samsung, Swarovski – and Marks & Spencer.

Tom Cross, a Gurgaon-based British businessman, is browsing the M&S racks. “In India you’ve got a Western culture that’s growing and growing every day,” he says. “You get out of bed and there’s another housing development, another intersection.”

On the way back into central Delhi, we pass a sign: New Gurgaon. Coming soon: City No 10?

How to do it

Cox & Kings (020 3642 0861; coxandkings.co.uk) has a 10-day/eight-night private tour of the Golden Triangle from ￡1,795 per person, including international flights, one domestic flight, all transfers, excursions and breakfast daily. It features four nights at the Taj Mahal, Delhi; three nights at Shahpura House, Jaipur; and one night at Coral Tree Homestay, Agra.