Excerpt: Shahjahanabad: Mapping a Mughal City by Swapna Liddle
The Mughal emperor Shahjahan founded the city of Shahjahanabad in the mid-seventeenth century as his capital. The city was located close to a cluster of older sites, at Delhi. There were several reasons for the selection of Delhi as the capital. To begin with, there was an imperial aura, a long history of the city as a capital of empires. This dated from the earliest conquest of Delhi by the Turks, in the late twelfth century, and the subsequent establishment of the Delhi Sultanate. The early Mughal emperors, Humayun…