What makes a city?

This might sound like a meaningless question, but that shouldn’t stop us from asking it. When does a village become a city? Is it just a question of the size of the settlement and population? After extensive debates, cutting across continents and disciplines, some broad determining parameters have emerged. The most important marker is that a city always produces more than it consumes, and so it always has marketable demands to meet, making trade the second requirement. It is through trade that new produce reaches place to place. As demand for specific produce from outside begins to grow, craft persons skilled in the manufacture of such produce travel to the area of increased demand —so skills travel— and they carry with them their attire, food, language, music, and mythology. The markers of their cultural identity begin to mix with their counterparts in their new habitat. The coming together of diverse crafts, cultures, languages, traditions and genres of writing, musical traditions, food and clothing, architecture and much else turns a settlement, a village, into a city. It is processes such as these that must have led to the evolution of the settlement around Mehrauli into a city.

Our knowledge of what happened in this region prior to the 12th century is rather sketchy, but one can make some educated guesses based on the built remains available to us. The stone traditionally used for building large monumental structures in Delhi was mined from the Aravallis. This very hard and brittle metamorphosed rock, known as Delhi quartz, cannot be carved due to its brittle nature. But due to its easy availability, it was Delhi quartz that was the basic building material throughout the Pre-Sultanate, Sultanate, and early Mughal periods. There is only one large structure belonging to the 10th century that survives to this day, the Suraj Kund, and that too is built with Delhi Quartz. The walls of the so-called Qila Rai Pithora have also been built with Delhi Quartz.  

Other large structures built during the entire Sultanate period — the slave, Khilji, Tughlaq, and Lodi Dynasties show almost exclusive use of Delhi Quartz with four notable exceptions — the sandstone and marble cladding on the Qutub Minar and the Ala’-ud-din Khilji-built Alai Darwaza, the sandstone cladding on the arched screens of the Jami Masjid built by Aibak and older than all these, the sandstone pillars from 24 Jain temples that were cannibalised by Qutb-ud-Din Aibak and reused in the Jami Masjid. It is these four structures that give us one clue to the processes that contributed to the urbanisation of Mehrauli or the first Delhi.

Because Delhi Quartz cannot be carved, one would assume that the stone masons of Delhi were not very good stone carvers. They were required merely to cut the stone in large slabs, which they did rather competently, but they perhaps knew little about the fine art of stone carving. The pillars from the Jain temples that were reused in the Qutub mosque are covered with motifs and symbols that are distinguishing features of Jain temples — garlands, bells, chains, twisted ropes, coiled serpents, Kalash shapes, and grotesque demon faces. One also finds two panels of erotic couples, one badly effaced and the other not so much, that have survived in the broken enclosures behind the arched screens.  

The motifs and designs seen on these pillars have echoes of Jain temple art from central India and the sandstone used in these pillars and in some parts of the arched screens stone looks like much of the stone commonly used at Khajuraho. It was perhaps the import of softer, carvable sedimentary rock from central India and the movement of masons skilled at carving delicate designs and figures that perhaps brought the technique of fine stone carving to Delhi. A couple of centuries later, the progeny of these migrants from central India were to, perhaps, carve Quranic verses embellished with thousands of lotus buds in red and buff-coloured sandstone from the Aravallis in Rajasthan in structures built by Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, Shams-ud-Din Altamash and Al’a-ud-Din Khilji. And it is this coming together of the stone and stone carvers from central India with the architects and different building techniques from Turkey and Central Asia that contributed to turning Mehrauli into a location for the coming together of diverse cultural and linguistic traditions to enrich the urban character of the first Delhi.   

The author is a historian and organises the Delhi Heritage Walk for children and adults.