Foundation
Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq was a frontier commander of the Khalji sultans who had held the north-west marches against the Mongols. In 1320 he overthrew Khusrau Khan, the usurper who had killed the last Khalji, and took the throne at Delhi. He began a new capital almost at once, on an outcrop of the Aravalli ridge a few kilometres east of the older city at Mehrauli. It was the third of the medieval cities of Delhi, after the Rajput and early sultanate settlement around the Qutb and Alauddin Khalji's Siri.
The site was chosen for defence. The walls follow the edge of the rock, and the builders used the local quartzite in huge roughly dressed blocks, with bastions that batter sharply inward as they rise. Inside, the city was divided into three parts: a citadel on the highest ground, a palace area beside it, and a larger enclosure for the town, laid out in a grid of streets. Large tanks and underground chambers were cut into the rock.
The tomb
The best-preserved building is Ghiyath al-Din's own tomb, which stood outside the walls in an artificial lake and was joined to the fort by a raised causeway. Its walls of red sandstone slope inward, its dome is faced in white marble, and the whole stands inside a small pentagonal fortified enclosure of its own. The sloping walls echo the fort and became a mark of Tughluq building. The sultan was buried here with his wife and his son, Muhammad bin Tughluq.
The sultan's death
In 1325 Ghiyath al-Din returned from a campaign in Bengal. His son Muhammad, then called Ulugh Khan, received him at a wooden pavilion built for the occasion at Afghanpur, near Delhi, and the pavilion collapsed, killing the sultan. The traveller Ibn Battuta, who reached Delhi about a decade later, reported that the pavilion had been built to fall and that Muhammad had planned it. Other writers of the period treat it as an accident, or as a lightning strike. Historians have not settled the question.
Abandonment
Muhammad bin Tughluq did not stay at Tughlaqabad. He built a smaller fort, Adilabad, on the hill to the south, and in 1327 ordered much of Delhi's elite to move to Daulatabad in the Deccan, a scheme later reversed. Tughlaqabad was never fully occupied again. The usual practical explanation is water: the site depended on stored rainwater and was hard to supply. By the time Firuz Shah Tughluq built his own city, Firozabad, on the Yamuna in the 1350s, the ridge fort was largely empty.
A popular story attributes its fate to the Sufi Nizamuddin Auliya, who is said to have quarrelled with the sultan over labourers taken from his own building works, and to have predicted that the city would be deserted or left to herders. A second saying, that "Delhi is still far off", is attached to the sultan's last journey home. Both are later traditions, recorded long after the events.
The site today
The walls, gates and tomb survive, along with the outline of the citadel and many underground rooms. The interior is largely ruined, and part of the old town enclosure has been built over by modern settlement. The Archaeological Survey of India protects the site.
Further reading
- Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
See also
- Delhi — Delhi is the capital of India and one of the longest continuously inhabited urban regions in the subcontinent, having served as the seat of power for successive dynasties across more than a millennium.
- Tughlaq dynasty — The Tughlaqs ruled Delhi from 1320 to 1414, took the Sultanate to its greatest extent under Muhammad bin Tughlaq, and lost most of it again within his own reign.
- Muhammad bin Tughluq — Muhammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–1351) was the second sultan of the Tughluq dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate, remembered for an unusually ambitious and disruptive program of administrative experiments, including relocating the capital to Daulatabad and introducing a token currency.
- Delhi Sultanate — The Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE) was a series of five Turkic and Afghan Muslim dynasties that ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent from Delhi, beginning with the Mamluk dynasty founded by Qutb-ud-din Aibak.
- Khalji dynasty — The Khalji dynasty was a Turko-Afghan ruling house that governed the Delhi Sultanate from 1290 to 1320, ending Mamluk (Slave dynasty) rule and expanding Delhi's power further into the Deccan and south India than any predecessor.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.