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Few capitals carry their contradictions as openly as New Delhi. Planned and built by the British in the early twentieth century to project imperial permanence, it was inaugurated in 1931 only to become, sixteen years later, the capital of a newly independent India. That compressed, layered history is visible everywhere: in Edwin Lutyens's grand ceremonial axis stretching from Rashtrapati Bhavan down Rajpath to India Gate, in the Mughal geometry of Humayun's Tomb, and in the medieval density of Shahjahanabad, the walled city that predates the British quarter by three centuries.

Most first-time visitors find their bearings in two very different parts of the city. Connaught Place, the colonnaded commercial circle at the centre of Lutyens's Delhi, gives a sense of the planned capital's scale and ambition, while Old Delhi, centred on Chandni Chowk and the Jama Masjid, operates at an entirely different register: narrower, louder, and saturated with the kind of street food culture that has been refining itself for generations. The Red Fort, which anchors the eastern edge of Old Delhi, was the ceremonial heart of the Mughal empire and remains one of the most visited monuments in the country. Moving between these two zones in a single day is one of the more instructive things a visitor can do, because the contrast clarifies just how many cities have been superimposed on this particular stretch of the Yamuna plain.