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What We Walk Over: India's Buried Cities

What We Walk Over: India's Buried Cities

Written by: Dev Surolia
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The cities we walk over were once among the greatest on Earth. This is what happened to them — and what we did.

What We Walk Over is a narrative history podcast that tells the story of India through its cities — the ones that were, for a time, among the largest and richest places on the planet, and are now ruins, riverbanks, or ordinary streets we cross without a second thought.

Each episode reconstructs a single city at its height, then follows it down to what remains today. Vijayanagara, larger than the London of its day, reduced to scrub and boulders. Delhi, built and unbuilt seven times over. Pataliputra, the seat of empires, now buried beneath a working modern city. These are not lectures. They are attempts to stand inside a place, hear it, and reckon honestly with how it was lost — and with what its loss says about us.

Told first-person, by someone walking the ground rather than teaching from a podium, the show draws on primary sources, historians across the ideological spectrum, and the slow, cinematic storytelling of long-form audio.

 Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Delhi: The City That Survives By Fogetting

    Delhi: The City That Survives By Fogetting
    Sep 17 2026

    Delhi has been a seat of power for longer than most cities have existed. It has been built, destroyed, abandoned, and rebuilt more times than its own historians agree on. Every dynasty that came to rule India came first to Delhi — and almost none of them survived it.

    This is the story of how a city learns to forget in order to survive.

    Episode 1 of What We Walk Over: India's Buried Cities traces Delhi across centuries — from the iron pillar of Chandragupta II to the last Mughal emperor writing poetry in a prison cell in Rangoon. It is a story about what a city carries, what it buries, and what it cannot bring itself to let go.

    What We Walk Over: India's Buried Cities is a narrative history podcast about the cities of India that have been built over, erased, diminished, forgotten, or quietly written out of the version of the past we chose to remember. Each episode is a city. Each city belongs to one of five archetypes. Delhi is a palimpsest — a city where every era built on top of the last, and none of it fully disappeared. Written and narrated by Dev Surolia.

    Original music, sound design, mixing and editing: Ambar Bhartiya.

    Show Logo: Sudip Bhattacharya.
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    1 hr and 36 mins
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