From Delhi with Love: The Fort Bada Darwaza and Turning Towards the Homegrown
August 2026
Dear Reader,
I don’t usually refer to myself as a Delhiite. Having only lived there for a few years, I guess the label just didn’t really fit. But now, revisiting Delhi after nearly a year in London, it feels awfully familiar. Familiar enough that the idea of returning to London had (surprisingly) become somewhat anxiety inducing? And yet, dear reader, I am about to tell you about my experience as a tourist in Delhi.
There is a fort in the middle of Delhi
that most Delhiites have spent their whole lives driving past. Purana Qila sits in the heart of the city the way old things do in India; enormous, unhurried, entirely unbothered by the traffic moving around it. Sixteen centuries on the surface, three thousand years underneath. I had done the same, driven past it a hundred times without really looking, until I left Delhi. Now back for the summer, one evening the heat finally broke enough to do something about it.
The fort at night, newly lit as part of a long-overdue push toward UNESCO World Heritage status, is a completely different space from the fort in the sunlight. While in the broad daylight you see every beautiful sign of aging, in the warm lights of the evening, there's something royal about it.
The Bada Darwaza is not subtle in daylight and it was never meant to be, but at night the gate does something else entirely: it frames the sky. You pass through it and the city, for a moment, disappears. The noise, the heat, the particular relentlessness of a Delhi summer evening, all of it falls away, and what's left is history and light. Plus the unsettling feeling that you are very young in this place that is very old.
The more you explore inside, the further you go from what feels canonically Delhi. The lawns stretch out and people move through them slowly, which is not something Delhiites do as a rule. Something about the scale of the place enforces it. Standing within those stonewalls might not feel like the urban chaos that is Delhi, yet, I don’t think anyone could imagine the city skyline without this permanent fixture.
I've been thinking about that instinct—toward the homegrown, the already-here—walking back out through the Bada Darwaza, the city returning all at once. In relation to what is quietly happening across Delhi's restaurant scene, it turns out the fort is not the only thing the city has been undervaluing.
For a long time, a certain kind of Delhi dining operated on the premise that sophistication meant distance from India. The interiors gestured westward. The menus followed. There was a whole generation of places built on the idea that restaurants were where you went to be somewhere else.
Something is different now. There is a new confidence moving through kitchens. A willingness to treat Indian food as the destination rather than the default, to give it the lighting and the linen and the intention it always deserved. Delhi is remembering, slowly (and deliciously) that the rest of the world has been obsessed with its food for decades. It just wasn't doing it for them.
I suppose the real reason why no one wants to eat Indian outside of their homes is because no one will do it better than someone’s Naani (maternal grandmother). No restaurant, however considered, has cracked that particular code yet. Outside, Purana Qila stands in its new light, the same as it always was. Delhi is the one catching up.
A Traveller Returning Home
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