Delhi’s rise as an imperial capital, national capital, and modern metropolis was built not only by creating grand avenues, government buildings, monuments, and planned colonies, but also through the repeated absorption, displacement, and erasure of villages that had long occupied the land beneath the city.
From the Delhi Durbar of 1911 to the building of New Delhi, from the aftermath of the 1857 uprising to the refugee crisis that followed Partition, rural settlements around the city supplied land, labour, food, soldiers, and space for successive political projects. Many of these villages survived between older ruins and newer regimes, only to be pushed aside when the needs of empire, the colonial state, or the postcolonial capital demanded expansion.
The history of Delhi is often narrated through its rulers, forts, tombs and monumental avenues. But beneath that visible history lies another geography: villages that farmed the land, maintained water systems, reused abandoned structures, sheltered people in moments of crisis and gave way when the city expanded.
Their role has rarely occupied the centre of Delhi’s public memory, even though their disappearance made much of the modern capital possible.
Before the Durbar, There Was Dhaka
In the winter of 1911, Delhi became the stage for one of the most elaborate imperial spectacles held in British India.
On the plains north of the old city, a temporary settlement was built for the Delhi Durbar, where King George V announced on 12 December that the capital of British India would move from Calcutta to Delhi. Tents, ceremonial routes, military camps, arches, reception spaces and administrative arrangements were laid out to project imperial order and authority.
Before the imperial city of canvas appeared, however, the land was already inhabited.
One of the villages in this landscape was Dhaka. Like other rural settlements around Delhi, it was part of a working agrarian world of homes, fields, cattle, wells, tracks and seasonal rhythms. For the Durbar grounds to appear grand, orderly and suitable for imperial ceremony, village life had to be moved out of sight.
The compensation that followed such disruption was often measured in terms of crops, land or immediate material loss. The wider costs were harder to record. A village was not only a set of fields or houses. It was a social and economic system built around kinship, grazing, water, worship, labour and memory.
To many imperial observers, the land around Delhi seemed empty, ruined or underused. Travellers and officials saw broken tombs, abandoned domes, dried channels, hunting lodges, scattered masonry and the remains of earlier capitals. But this was not a dead landscape. It was inhabited and worked.
Farmers cultivated the soil. Women drew water. Children played near mud homes. Bullocks circled Persian wheels. People lived beside old walls, tombs and shrines not as trespassers on history, but as inheritors of a landscape shaped by several earlier Delhis.
The Durbar projected imperial power. The villages held the ground on which that power was staged.
Shahjahanabad and the Many Delhis Around it
Before New Delhi was planned, the city most people recognised as Delhi was Shahjahanabad, the Mughal capital built by Shah Jahan on the western bank of the Yamuna.
It was a dense walled city of gates, bazaars, mosques, gardens, lanes, havelis, neighbourhoods and commercial networks. Chandni Chowk formed one of its principal arteries, lined with traders, craftsmen, jewellers, merchants and places of worship. At one end stood the Red Fort, the former seat of Mughal sovereignty, which later became a heavily controlled military space under British rule.
But Shahjahanabad was never the whole of Delhi.
The region had long been made up of multiple settlements. Older capitals and urban fragments lay scattered across the terrain. Some had fallen into ruin. Some had been absorbed into village life. Others were reused as homes, shrines, storage spaces, grazing grounds or sources of building material. Stones moved from one city to another. Dynasties collapsed, but village communities continued to live in the spaces between them.
This wider geography is central to understanding Delhi’s history. The city was not only a succession of royal capitals. It was also a region of agrarian settlements that cultivated land, managed water, maintained local routes and gave continuity to a landscape repeatedly altered by conquest, abandonment and rebuilding.
Outside the walls of Shahjahanabad, rural communities lived beside the remains of older political orders. They used what earlier regimes had left behind. A ruined wall could become a boundary. A tomb enclosure could sit beside fields. A stepwell could remain part of daily life long after the authority that built it had vanished.
These villages were not outside Delhi’s history. They were among its foundations.
1857 Mutiny and the Villages Around Delhi
The uprising of 1857 is most often remembered in Delhi through the Red Fort, Kashmiri Gate, Bahadur Shah Zafar, and the siege of the city. These remain central to the history of the revolt, but they do not tell the entire story.
The rebellion also moved through the countryside.
Villages around Delhi, including those in the direction of Mehrauli and other surrounding areas, became part of the wider upheaval. Some settlements provided shelter, information, food or support. Others witnessed the violence that followed as British forces re-established control over the city and its hinterland.
The British response after the fall of Delhi was severe. Shahjahanabad was punished heavily. Neighbourhoods were emptied. Muslim residents suffered disproportionately. Parts of the Red Fort were demolished or converted to military use. Bahadur Shah Zafar was exiled, and members of the Mughal royal family were killed.
The repression did not stop at the walls of the city.
Villages were watched, punished and disciplined. Public executions and displays of violence were used to create fear. In and around Delhi, the uprising altered the colonial state’s view of rural communities. Villages were no longer regarded only as agricultural settlements that supplied grain, revenue and labour. They were also seen as possible sites of rebellion and political danger.
That suspicion shaped how the British governed Delhi’s countryside in the decades that followed. Land, movement, and village networks came under closer scrutiny. The rural belt around the old city was treated not merely as productive territory, but as a political landscape that required surveillance and control.
The memory of 1857 also helped shape the geography of colonial power in Delhi. Areas associated with British suffering and victory were preserved, marked or incorporated into a new imperial landscape. At the same time, village lands remained vulnerable to state intervention whenever the authorities required space for institutions, camps, roads or ceremonial display.
North of the City After 1857
After 1857, north Delhi became a landscape of imperial memory.
Kashmiri Gate, damaged during the siege, was preserved as a symbol of British victory. St James’s Church stood nearby, tied to the memory of British lives lost in the conflict. The Civil Station expanded beyond the old city walls, with bungalows, clubs, churches, tennis courts, compounds and wide roads.
This was a colonial world built to separate rulers from the old city and to remind them of their own authority. It offered distance from Shahjahanabad, while keeping the former Mughal capital under administrative and military control.
Beyond this enclave, however, lay another geography.
Sabzi Mandi, gardens, cultivated land and village territories stretched further north towards Rajpur, Wazirpur, Shakurpur, Malakpur, Azadpur, Sahipur, Burari, Dhaka, Bhalswa and other settlements. These areas were part of Delhi’s everyday rural economy. They supplied food, supported livestock, held local religious sites and connected the old city to its hinterland. They were not empty spaces awaiting imperial use. They were working landscapes.
Yet, the colonial state increasingly viewed such land through its own administrative and ceremonial needs. When Delhi required military camps, institutional grounds, durbar spaces or later urban expansion, village land could be reclassified, acquired or repurposed. The needs of the state carried greater weight than the continuity of rural life.
The land that supported farming families could be transformed into an imperial stage with remarkable speed. The same fields that had sustained a village could become a camp, parade ground or administrative site. The people who had lived there were often treated as obstacles to order, rather than as communities with their own claims to the city.
This pattern would become more visible after the decision to build a new capital.
When Villages Became the Capital Site
After the 1911 announcement, British officials began the process of selecting the site for the permanent imperial capital.
Shahjahanabad was considered too crowded and too closely tied to the old Mughal city. The northern areas carried the memory and infrastructure of 1857. The British eventually turned southward, towards the Ridge and the plains beyond it, where they saw elevation, open land, ruins and visual possibility.
For imperial planners, the area offered the chance to build a city of authority. It could be designed with long avenues, ceremonial axes, government buildings and carefully framed views. The landscape seemed suitable for a capital that would project permanence.
But what appeared available on survey maps was already inhabited.
Villages existed among tombs, old walls, stepwells, shrines, fields and tracks. In and around places such as Purana Qila, people had lived within or beside historic structures. Across the chosen capital zone, rural communities had built lives in a landscape shaped by the remains of earlier cities.
The next stage involved surveys, classifications and acquisitions. Officials identified land for the capital. Archaeological authorities distinguished between ruins that should be preserved and structures that could be ignored or removed. Planners decided which monuments suited the image of the new capital and which settlements stood in the way of that image.
The result was a hierarchy of value. Certain ruins were treated as heritage. Villages were treated as removable.
This 1924 map titled “Map of the Country round Delhi” from the 11th edition of the John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in India is a significant visual archive — not just of Delhi’s imperial core, but also of its vast rural periphery before the city was overtaken by urban sprawl. It captures a moment just before Delhi’s villages began disappearing under the pressure of Partition, land acquisition, and "planned" development.
Raisina Hill became the symbolic centre of the new imperial capital. Around it, village lands and settlements were acquired as Viceroy’s House, government offices and ceremonial avenues began to rise. The villages of Raisina, Rakabganj and others in the area receded from the official story as the architecture of empire took their place.
Some temples, mosques, graves and older structures survived if they could be incorporated into the new landscape or if their removal was politically difficult. Many homes, fields and village commons did not. The new capital was not constructed on empty ground. It was built over lived-in land.
The transformation was not only physical. It also changed how the area was remembered. Once the capital’s buildings were completed, the landscape came to be understood through its imperial architecture: Viceroy’s House, the Secretariat, ceremonial avenues and planned vistas. The villages that had occupied the same land became harder to see.
Their absence was folded into the idea of progress.
'Lodi Road'and the Making of Heritage
The area now known as Lodi Road shows another way in which Delhi was remade. The stretch between Humayun’s Tomb and Safdarjung’s Tomb contained a dense concentration of tombs, shrines, spiritual sites, garden remains and scattered settlements. British observers often described the area as a necropolis because of its many tombs and ruins.
But it was not only a city of the dead.
Athpula Bridge, also known as Khairpur ka Pul, stands near Sikandar Lodi’s tomb. Built on eight pillars, this Akbar-era bridge once crossed a Yamuna tributary, connecting the old village landscape of Khairpur, Kotla, Pilanji, Jorbagh, and Aliganj—now absorbed into modern Delhi.
When the new capital expanded, this landscape was reorganised. Many settlements were cleared, absorbed or pushed aside. The tombs, however, were treated differently. They were preserved, arranged, landscaped and placed within gardens, parks and elite residential zones.
Lady Willingdon Park, later known as Lodi Garden, became one of the clearest examples of this process. Tombs were set within a curated landscape, giving them a new role in the image of the capital. They became heritage features, visual markers and recreational spaces for the city’s elite. The villages around them did not receive the same protection.
This pattern repeated across Delhi. Monuments were preserved because they suited the capital’s historical image. Rural communities that had lived with, used and maintained those landscapes were often displaced or ignored. The state and its planners separated ruins from the social worlds around them, turning some structures into heritage while treating village life as temporary or expendable.
The result was a selective memory. Delhi could celebrate its tombs, domes and garden landscapes, while forgetting the people who had lived around them for generations. Heritage was detached from habitation. The monument survived; the village became a footnote.
Partition and Another Transformation
In 1947, Delhi changed again.
Partition brought mass violence, migration, and displacement. Sikh and Hindu refugees arrived from what had become Pakistan. Many Muslims from Delhi and its surrounding areas left for Pakistan, whether through fear, pressure or expulsion. The city’s demography, culture and geography were altered in a short period.
Places associated with imperial ceremony and older regimes took on new meanings. The old Durbar grounds, once used for a display of British power, became connected with refugee camps and emergency settlement. Kingsway Camp, once part of an imperial geography, became a place of survival.
Historic monuments again became shelter. Purana Qila filled with Muslims waiting to leave for Pakistan. Humayun’s Tomb housed large numbers of displaced people. Delhi’s older landscapes, which had repeatedly absorbed political change, became emergency spaces during one of the subcontinent’s greatest human crises.
Once again, village land became the answer. Agricultural fields and rural edges were acquired or converted for refugee colonies, government housing, markets and planned settlements. New neighbourhoods were laid out to accommodate displaced families. The state’s priorities were different from those of the British imperial government, but the pressure on village land continued.
The post-Partition transformation was driven by the need to resettle people who had suffered enormous loss. But for Delhi’s rural communities, it meant another round of acquisition and absorption. Fields became colonies. Village edges became urban plots. Rural landholders were drawn into a city expanding under the pressure of national crisis.
The logic of using rural land to solve the needs of the capital survived the end of British rule. The rulers changed, but the vulnerability of village land remained.
By the 1950s, Delhi’s expansion was moving rapidly southward.
The refugee crisis, the needs of the central government and the planning of new residential colonies pushed the city into areas that had previously remained outside the formal urban core. Rural land around Hauz Khas, Mehrauli, and other older settlements began to change as fields were converted into colonies, roads, institutions and markets.
This process did not erase every older structure. Ancient monuments were often left in place and incorporated into new neighbourhoods. Tombs, walls, gateways and towers became landmarks inside planned colonies. In some areas, residential layouts were designed around visible remains of earlier Delhis.
Chor Minar, for example, became part of the urban landscape rather than being removed. Other ruins survived as roundabout markers, park features, enclosed sites or fragments inside neighbourhoods.
The treatment of villages was different. The rural communities whose lands surrounded many of these monuments were not preserved with the same care. Their histories were rarely built into the identity of the new colonies. A tomb might become a recognised landmark, while the village that had lived beside it was reduced to a name, an urban pocket or an administrative category.
The city learned to aestheticise ruins while forgetting the rural life around them.
This was not a sudden event, but a gradual process. Village land was acquired in phases. Some villagers became landlords, tenants, workers, shopkeepers or litigants in the new urban economy. Others were displaced to less valuable or more distant areas. Agricultural livelihoods declined as the land itself changed function.
Delhi’s southward expansion therefore involved more than urban growth. It transformed social relationships, property regimes and the meaning of place. The village was not always erased completely. In many cases, it survived as an urban village, surrounded by planned colonies and rising land values. But its relationship to the city changed fundamentally.
What had once been a settlement with fields, commons, ponds and grazing space became a dense pocket inside the metropolis. The village remained, but the rural world that had sustained it was gone.
The Rural Ground Beneath the Capital
Delhi’s transformation is often described as a sequence of political and urban milestones: Mughal capital, colonial station, imperial capital, Partition city, national capital and planned metropolis. Each stage is important. But each also depended on rural land and rural communities.
Villages were moved for spectacle during imperial ceremonies. They were punished or watched after the rebellion. They were acquired for the construction of New Delhi. They were cleared or absorbed to make space for parks, roads, government buildings and elite neighbourhoods. They were drawn into refugee rehabilitation after Partition. They were renamed, fragmented and converted as the city expanded south, west and north.
This history complicates the idea that Delhi’s growth was a natural process of urban progress. The capital did not grow into empty space. It expanded through inhabited landscapes that already held homes, fields, shrines, water systems, grazing networks and memories.
The cost of this expansion was not always recorded in official histories. Land acquisition files could list acreage and compensation. Archaeological reports could identify protected monuments. Planning documents could draw roads and housing schemes. But they rarely captured the full social life of the villages being altered.
The loss was not only the disappearance of houses or fields. It was the weakening of relationships between people and place. It was the transformation of common land into state property, cultivated land into planned colony, village path into avenue, and inherited landscape into real estate.
Delhi still carries traces of these villages. Their names survive in neighbourhoods, metro stations, markets, urban villages, police stations, roads and revenue records. Some remain visible in dense settlement pockets surrounded by planned colonies. Others exist mainly through memory and archival fragments.
The city’s monuments often appear timeless, while the villages that lived beside them are treated as temporary. That distinction was produced by planning, heritage policy and power. It was not inevitable.
To understand Delhi fully, its villages cannot be seen as leftovers or interruptions in the city’s story. They were part of the structure on which the capital was built. They supplied land for empire, space for refugees, labour for construction, soldiers for war and continuity through centuries of political change.
Delhi did not merely expand around villages. In many places, it expanded through them.
The capital’s grand buildings, ceremonial roads, preserved ruins and planned neighbourhoods stand on a landscape shaped by rural worlds that were repeatedly asked to yield land, labour and memory. Their role remains central to the making of Delhi, even when the city’s official history leaves them at the margins.
(Puneet Singh Singhal is a Disability Inclusion & Climate Justice Advocate, Co-founder of Billion Strong and Founder/Curator of the Green Disability & Dilli Dehat Project. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)