Quotes of the Day

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, there was one thing that astounded all visitors to New Delhi: the ruins. For miles in every direction, half-collapsed and overgrown, robbed and reoccupied, and neglected by all, lay the remains of 600 years of trans-Indian imperium. Hammams (steam baths) and palaces, thousand-pillared halls and mighty tomb towers, empty temples and half-deserted Sufi shrines—there seemed to be no end to the litter of the ages. "The prospect towards Delhi, as far as the eye can reach, is covered with the crumbling remains of gardens, pavilions, and burying places," wrote British traveler William Franklin in 1795. "The environs of this once magnificent and celebrated city appear now nothing more than a shapeless heap of ruins."

As late as the early 1960s, you could still take a tonga (a horse-drawn cab) from Connaught Place and pass out of the city in minutes into this ruin-strewn countryside. Today, of course, things are different. In the past century, New Delhi's population has grown from some 200,000 to over 15 million, and the fate of those ruins is most uncertain in a city where one-quarter of the populace live in slums and one-third have no sanitation; city officials, understandably, have other priorities. Already, most of the ruins seen by Franklin have disappeared. Those that remain stand not in open countryside, but atop roundabouts or tucked in beside the high-rises and flyovers of South Delhi. They obscure the fairways of golf courses, provide a destination for joggers in the Lodi Garden, and serve as urinals or night shelters for landless Biharis and Afghan refugees in the Nizamuddin slum.

I have lived in New Delhi on and off for nearly 20 years and it continues to be my favorite capital: as diverse and complex as it is beautiful. Above all, it is the city's relationship with its past that fascinates me: of the great cities of the world, only Rome and Cairo can even begin to rival New Delhi for the sheer volume and density of historic remains; yet in New Delhi, familiarity has bred not pride but contempt. Every year, more ruins vanish, victims of unscrupulous property developers or unthinking bureaucrats. Sometimes no other great city seems less loved or cared for. Occasionally there is an outcry as the tomb of the Mughal poet Zauq is discovered to have disappeared under a municipal urinal or the haveli courtyard house of his great rival Ghalib is revealed to have been turned into a coal store; but most of the losses go unrecorded. I find it heartbreaking: every time I revisit one of my favorite monuments, it has either been overrun by a slum, unsympathetically restored by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), or simply demolished. By now, almost all the havelis of Old Delhi have been destroyed. According to historian Pavan Varma, the majority of the buildings he recorded in his book Mansions at Dusk 13 years ago no longer exist.

Moreover, the losses are accelerating. In 1991 the Municipal Corporation of Delhi tore down much of the outer wall of Qila Rai Pithora, one of the city's last surviving pre-Islamic structures. Shah Jahan's great Shalimar Garden, where Aurangzeb was crowned, now has a municipal housing colony on its land. This March, there was an attempt to concrete over the sultanate-period Hauz-i-Shamsi in Mehrauli.

Part of the problem is that there is little effective legislation protecting ancient monuments, and while archaeological sites are granted nominal guardianship by the ASI, there is no system of architectural listing, and India's rich heritage of late Mughal and colonial domestic architecture is mostly unprotected by law. In the competition between development and heritage, the latter inevitably gives way.

Already, one of the most beautiful legacies of India's colonial past—the bungalows in New Delhi designed by the great Edwin Lutyens—are fast disappearing: all those in private hands were demolished between 1980 and 2000. Last autumn, India's Central Public Works Department announced that the same fate now awaits the Lutyens bungalows owned by the government—despite the fact that the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage is currently proposing that Lutyens' New Delhi be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The destruction of probably the world's greatest colonial townscape would be an act of cultural vandalism comparable to the bulldozing of Bath or Washington, D.C. Yet in New Delhi there has been remarkably little outcry.

India has its eyes firmly fixed on the future. Everywhere there is a profound hope that its rising international status will somehow compensate for a past often perceived as one long succession of invasions and defeats by foreign powers. Perhaps there is also a cultural factor in this striking neglect of the past: as one conservationist recently told me, "You must understand that we Hindus burn our dead." Whatever the reasons, future generations will look back at New Delhi's conservation failures with deep sadness at all that has been lost.

• William Dalrymple
• Much of what made New Delhi special is disappearing