Qutub Minar
Qutb Minar
A 72-metre victory tower of fluted sandstone, begun the year Delhi changed hands for good.
The Minar is the oldest thing in Delhi that still dominates its own skyline. Qutb-ud-din Aibak laid the first storey in 1199; Iltutmish added three more; a lightning strike and a fourteenth-century repair account for the marble at the top. Each storey tapers, and each carries a different rhythm of flutes — angular, rounded, alternating — so the tower reads as five separate arguments stacked into one.
It does not stand alone. Around its base is the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, built quickly from the carved stone of temples that stood here before, so that lotus medallions and bell-and-chain motifs surface in the colonnade like a language spoken under another. In the courtyard stands the Iron Pillar, four centuries older than the mosque and famously unrusted, and to the south the Alai Darwaza, a small gateway of 1311 that is arguably the most refined single building of the Sultanate.
- 01The Iron PillarA fourth-century Gupta column that has resisted corrosion for sixteen hundred years and still puzzles metallurgists.
- 02Alai DarwazaAlauddin Khalji's gateway of 1311 — true arches, marble inlay, and the first fully confident Islamic architecture in India.
- 03Alai MinarThe stump of a tower meant to be twice the Qutub's height, abandoned at 25 metres when its patron died.
Go early; the low sun rakes across the flutes and the carved bands become legible. The tower itself has been closed to climbing since 1981.