Bringing Delhi's history to life, online

Giving the capital’s history an interactive twist, Delhi- based interaction engineer Tapan Babbar has created a timeline of the city charting its history from the Tomaras (736 AD - 1180 AD) to Tughlaq (1320 AD - 1413 AD) and finally to the British (1857 AD - 1947 AD).

It all began when 26-year-old Babbar was re-reading the history of Delhi, connecting the dots, and co-relating the facts with the famous monuments he has been seeing since childhood. “The more I read, the more I got fascinated with the number of events that occurred at the same place where millions today casually go about their daily lives. I wanted to stop each one of them, look excitedly in their eyes and share my newly found enlightenment,” he says.

He tells Metrolife that at first he had thought of writing a blog, but then realised that the information has always been available in books and encyclopaedias, and he won’t be sharing anything new.

“What I could add was the experience, and so I decided to target the audience who aren’t history buffs. I asked myself, what it is for which people across demographics share their love, and the answer was photographs, stories and more photographs. And so Delhi-timeline happened,” he says.

The timeline, which provides details of the then ruling clan or dynasty, mentions its rulers, the capital and the monuments built during their regime along with their locations on a map. All that users have to do is to click on the ‘Explore History’ option on the site.

With the Archaeological Survey of India and Wikipedia as his source of information, Babbar says he used to roam around the city during the weekends and design/code late nights. Overall, it took him around six months to bring this to life.

“This project was divided into three phases – taking pictures, creating a website, and writing the content. I tried to merge the little I knew about each of these fields into something useful, and at the same time, likeable,” he says.

While admitting that he was residing in a city which is a paradise for history-lovers, Babbar says that he came across his share of challenges as well. “The major challenge was to showcase the entire information in a constrained screen window. I was hell-bent on a single pager, and thus the idea of subsections came to me. To successfully implement each subsection, keeping in mind the screen resolution, browser compatibility, and the loading time, was the most time consuming task during the entire duration of the project,” he says.

Interestingly, says Babbar, that during the first few weeks he had expected majority of the traffic coming from India, but to his surprise, the website was being viewed across the globe. “I am still trying to figure out the reason, but Russia had surpassed India in terms of the visits on the website in the first week. I hope this boosts the tourism in the
capital,” he says.