“Right now, we’re waiting for the pollution levels to ease,” says Gurugram-based numismatist and storyteller Shah Umair (@sikkawala), opening this year’s walking season with an honesty Delhiites know too well. High AQI does not just haze the skyline; it halts the very culture of walking that winter usually ushers in. Heritage walks, he explains, are pointless when “the air makes it hard to enjoy anything,” and organisers can only begin once the city becomes breathable again.
Still, winter remains the moment when Delhi’s walking calendar stretches awake. As the smog thins, Shah is preparing several new trails.
Among them is a route to Sultan Ghari Mausoleum in Vasant Vihar, “a site that rarely gets the attention it deserves,” and one that reframes the city’s earliest architectural imagination. Also on the horizon is a Purana Qila walk, and soon after, one through Lalkot, the first of Delhi’s many cities, where fragments of the earliest settlement still cling to the ridge. This season, he is also stepping beyond Delhi’s familiar routes.
Having already opened with Farrukh Nagar in collaboration with the Archaeology Department of Haryana — a walk that turned out to be “surprisingly engaging” for participants — he now plans to extend his calendar to Jhajjar, Narnaul, and locations across western Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. It is an expansion that mirrors a rising interest in regional, interconnected histories of the capital.
Digging through queer history If mainstream heritage walks are widening their lens, queer-led heritage tours in Delhi are rewriting the very gaze through which its history is read. Delhi Queer Heritage Walk, founded by Batool Ali in 2021, has launched a set of new routes that shift attention from canonical emperors to the people whose contributions often sit unacknowledged.
One of these is the Jorbagh–Safdarjung Queer Heritage Walk, which opens with the tumultuous era of the 12th and 13th Mughal emperors. This period is often marked as the beginning of the empire’s decline, but Batool uses it to ask deeper questions about gendered power structures of the time — particularly the rise of khwajsaras, trans-feminine figures we know today as hijras. The route also explores a Shia mourning space built by Qudsia Begam — “often considered an outsider” — and how the space continues to be used by Delhi’s Shia community.
For Batool, who is herself a Shia Muslim trans woman and a third-generation resident of Old Delhi, the walk is both historical and personal, a layering of lived memory on top of archival silence. At Humayun’s Tomb, Batool’s team introduces another overlooked narrative: the transgender contribution to Mughal architecture. Participants encounter the arched gateway of a historic bazaar supported by Maham Agha, a khwajsara serving under Emperor Jahangir.
The aim, she says, is not sensationalism but reclamation — to “rediscover our history and reclaim it to assert our dignity and rights. ” Their Red Fort Queer Heritage Walk dives deeper still. Here, Batool recounts the presence of a hijra community within the fort complex since the 1640s and charts their gradual rise in the later Mughal period.
The experience extends into Old Delhi — Sunehri Masjid, Nawab Bahadur Javed Khan’s legacy, and the dargah of the queer Sufi mystic Hazrat Sarmad, remembered for his love for a Hindu boy. “This is a slap on the faces of those people who call us a Western import,” Batool says, pointing to the centuries-old trail laid bare on these walks. The group is also expanding its Queer Food Walks, adding Safdarjung, Humayunpur Village, Munirka and Jungpura to existing routes in Qasabpura, Jama Masjid and Shaheen Bagh.
These gatherings bring local queer residents to the forefront, sharing “tender and honest” stories of belonging, memory and survival through food. Thrills and chills In parallel, historian Eric Chopra, founder of Itihāsology, is designing a new set of thematic walks tied to his debut book Ghosted: Delhi’s Haunted Monuments. Since 2019, his public history work has spanned Mehrauli Archaeological Park, Jamali-Kamali, Humayun’s Tomb, the Red Fort, and museum trails on satire, desire, and the history of emotions.
But one question keeps recurring: is history haunted? That curiosity led to Ghosted, a study of five sites — Jamali-Kamali, Firoz Shah Kotla, Khooni Darwaza, the Mutiny Memorial, and Malcha Mahal — each read through its social and political contexts. Starting January, Eric will run walks to the book’s sites (excluding Malcha Mahal, which remains closed), with additional visits to connected locations such as Sultan Ghari’s tomb, Adam Khan’s tomb, the Ashokan pillar on the Northern Ridge, and Pir Gaib.
The Ridge, he points out, comes with its own lore, including a headless British phantom “who asks for a light for his cigarette, but he is headless so this is perplexing. ” Participants can also pick up personalised, signed copies of the book. Eric is also experimenting with heritage in cultural spaces — intimate baithaks at Lodhi Gardens and Rahim Khan-i-Khanan’s tomb, a film screening at Greenr-Strangr in Greater Kailash, in collaboration with Out of Sequence, a series of events in Delhi that combines cinema, music, and art, and performances with qawwali group Rehmat-e-Nusrat where stories of Khusro and Nizamuddin unfold through narration and music.
New perspectives Not all the season’s offerings are strictly on foot. November marked the debut of Dilli with Debashish, a two-day experience crafted by Debashish Kar and his partner Anubhuti (who also helms Lucknow with Anubhuti).
Modelled on their hospitality-led weekends in Lucknow, the Delhi edition unfolded entirely via public transport — metros and rickshaws — linking Qutub, Red Fort, Humayun’s Tomb and Nizamuddin with surprising ease. “Ridership on the weekend is relatively low and with our early morning starts, we take care of their comfort and overall experience,” Debashish says.
The food walks ranged from Mughalai and Baniya food in the old city to immigrant cuisines in Lajpat Nagar, Humayunpur and Dilli Haat, as well as Punjabi and Muslim food. The idea, they explain, is to unravel some layers of this magnificent yet much maligned city.
Following the successful November launch, additional editions are planned for January and mid-February. The city’s culinary maps are shifting too.
“Food walks today are closer to a walk through a living museum than a casual food crawl,” says chef and author Sadaf Hussain, whose tours frame taste within memory and urban anthropology. On December 6, as part of The Locavore’s Local Food Club, he leads a walk through Shaheen Bagh (₹1,800 per person), exploring kebabs, samosas, nihari, chai, and the stories of families who rebuilt their food traditions after displacement. “Every time I take a group into Androon Delhi,” he says, “they’re amazed by what they’ve been missing.
” And for those who turn to nature as archive, Women and Wilderness — founded by Rama Lakshmi Dhavala and Nidhi Batra — continues its women-only nature appreciation walks in and around Delhi, which they started early this year, with their latest walk held in October. Their early-morning weekend trails highlight the city’s fragile but resilient ecosystem, with the next planned for the second week of December. Winter, then, remains Delhi’s most generous season — not because the weather softens, but because the city opens.