India Trip with My Parents: Delhi

What will follow over the next few days will be photo-essays of the amazing trip I took with my parents in the first half of January (it has indeed been an eventful few months of travel!)

So, this was Delhi at New Year's, the anti-Mumbai, bitterly cold and foggy whereas our sunny ocean-front home is almost always hot and humid, orderly (at least the New Delhi districts) whereas Mumbai looks like it's about to crumble in most parts, and filled with world-class monuments while in Mumbai... we do have our gorgeous Victorian Gothic architecture.

Here, I attach pictures that trace Delhi's Islamic legacy, from the short-lived dynasties of Turkic and Afghan origin collectively called the Delhi Sultanate, which date from the 13th to the 16th centuries, to the Great Mughals that superceded them and controlled most of the Indian subcontinent for the next 300 years. The great Delhi builders among the latter were the second Mughal emperor Humayun, who left as his main architectural legacy the tomb that is one of Delhi's most beautiful monuments and Shah Jahan, the visionary 17th-century emperor who was behind the Red Fort in Delhi (as well as the Taj Mahal.) Finally, the bottom picture is of the 18th-century Safdarjung Tomb, the last great Mughal monument built by an official in the government who was the eminence grise of the decaying empire.

What are the unifying features of the Mughal style? Unlike the squat, heavy buildings of their predecessors (see the top images of the 15th-century Lodi Gardens and the 12th- to 14th-century Qutb Minar complex), the emperors, who used architects from Persia, created structures of harmony, lightness and airiness. The decorative features create long vistas where the eye gets lost: gossamer enfilades of arches, curlicues of Arabic letters from the Koran... It is elegance and refinement at their most exquisite, making the fabled Mughal emperors and their short-lived, dissipated Golden Age come to life in one's imagination.