Pearls, Prayers & Parathas — An Old Delhi Walk through Chandni Chowk

This is not a food crawl or a rickshaw dash through Chandni Chowk; it is a slow reading of Shahjahanabad, the walled city Shah Jahan built in the seventeenth century, through the prayers, trades and recipes that still run its lanes.

We begin beneath Jama Masjid, the Masjid-i-Jahan-Numa, completed in 1656 on the highest ground of the city. Below its red sandstone steps, the food street wakes to slow-cooked nihari and kebabs over coal. From here we walk into Dariba Kalan, the silver street whose name comes from the Persian dur-e-be-baha, the “unparalleled pearl”, and slip into Kinari Bazaar, where gota, zari and tinsel are sold for every wedding season in north India.

Off Kinari Bazaar lies Naughara, a lane of nine eighteenth-century Jain havelis with carved doorways, ending at a Shwetambar Jain temple whose gilded walls and glass mosaics tell the life of Mahavira. A few turns away, Paranthe Wali Gali has fried its vegetarian parathas since the 1870s, without onion or garlic, for a neighbourhood of Brahmin and Jain families. At the mouth of Dariba Kalan, a jalebi counter frying in desi ghee since 1884 gives the walk its sweetest pause.

On Chandni Chowk itself, the avenue Princess Jahanara laid out in 1650 around a canal that once held the moon, we stand at Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib, where Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru, was martyred in 1675. The walk ends in Khari Baoli, named after a saline stepwell of the 1550s and often called Asia’s largest wholesale spice market, where the air itself tastes of chilli. A mosque, a temple and a gurdwara within a short walk of one another: Old Delhi still lives as a city of neighbours.