Delhi's name may mean threshold, a gateway to the Gangetic Plain
Delhi has a crowded shelf of origin stories for its own name. A king called Dhillu, a Prakrit word for loose linked to a wobbly iron pillar, an old Hindi word for eminence, and Hindustani terms for a doorway have all been proposed, the last casting the city as the entrance to the Gangetic Plain.
The Dhillu legend dates his city to 50 BCE. The loose theory claims the Tomaras used dhili because the iron pillar stood on a weak foundation and had to be relocated. Panjab Notes and Queries held that the city was dilpat under King Prithviraj, from dil, eminence, and Alexander Cunningham, once head of the Archaeological Survey of India, traced how dilli became dehli. Others point to Tomara coins called dehliwal, or to the Bhavishya Purana, where a king of Indraprastha names a gateway fort dehali. Purana Qila beside the Yamuna matches the epic Mahabharata's description of Indraprastha, but digs there have found no ancient buildings.
From the early 1200s to the mid-1800s the city was the seat of the Delhi Sultanate and then the Mughal Empire, and its three World Heritage monuments, the Qutub Minar, Humayun's Tomb and the Red Fort, all come from that span. It was an early centre of Sufism and qawwali, bound up with Nizamuddin Auliya and Amir Khusrau, and its Khariboli speech fed into Urdu literature and later modern Hindi; Mir Taqi Mir and Mirza Ghalib wrote here. The city was a focal point of the 1857 rebellion.
In 1911 New Delhi, in the south of the city, became capital of British India, and it remained capital of the dominion after 1947 and the republic after 1950. Partition remade the population: two-thirds of Delhi's Muslims left, partly under pressure from Hindu and Sikh refugees arriving from western Punjab, turning a Mughal city into a Punjabi one.
Delhi became a union territory in 1956 and the National Capital Territory in 1995, with a legislature, high court and chief minister much like a state. The territory covers 1,484 square kilometres and held about 16.8 million people in 2011; with satellites such as Gurgaon, Noida and Ghaziabad the agglomeration exceeds 28 million, India's largest and the world's fourth. Its income per head is second only to Goa's. It hosted the first Asian Games in 1951 and the G20 summit in 2023.
Source: Delhi
