There is a moment I keep coming back to.
I am standing on a ghat beside a river that has held civilization on its banks for longer than most countries have existed. The light is extraordinary. The history is crushing in the best possible way. A city of impossible antiquity is going about its morning behind me. And nobody, not one person is offering me a heritage walking tour, a curated riverside dinner, or a thoughtfully designed museum explaining what I am actually looking at.
Then I think about Prague.
I think about standing on the Charles Bridge at dawn, the Vltava river below catching the first pale light, the castle district silhouetted above and the feeling immediate, effortless, delivered to me by a city that had clearly practised this, I was somewhere the world had decided mattered. By nine in the morning, that bridge would be heaving with tourists from six continents. The restaurants around the Old Town Square were booked weeks in advance. The city’s Astronomical Clock drew crowds every hour on the hour as though it were a ticketed performance. Because in Prague, it essentially is.
I think about Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, the queue for tickets, the gilded state rooms, the café in the palace gardens serving apple strudel to tourists in eight languages, the Gloriette arch at the top of the hill framing the city like a painting. I think about how Vienna took an old Ferris wheel in a public park built in 1897, not remotely thrilling by modern standards and turned it into one of the most visited attractions in Central Europe simply by deciding it was significant and telling the world so, repeatedly, for a hundred years.
And then I think about Patna. About Delhi. About Mumbai.
And I ask myself the question that has been sitting with me ever since: why?
The History Gap That Isn’t Really a Gap
Let us get one thing out of the way immediately, because it is the fact that we should change everything and somehow change nothing.
Indian cities are not young. They are not historically thin. They are not lacking in material.
Patna known anciently as Pataliputra was one of the largest cities in the world at its peak. The Mauryan Empire, which Chandragupta built and Ashoka expanded into one of the greatest empires in human history, was administered from this city. Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador, visited Pataliputra in the 4th century BC and wrote about a city so vast and so organised that it rivalled anything in the known world. Alexander the Great’s generals sent back reports about a kingdom on the Gangetic plain so powerful that even Alexander hesitated to advance. The city that stopped a Macedonian conqueror in his tracks is today a congested, under-touristed state capital that most international travellers fly over without a second thought.
Delhi contains within its boundaries the ruins of not one, not two, but seven distinct historical cities. Seven civilisations, each building on the rubble of the last. Qutub Minar, begun in 1193, predates most of Prague’s famous architecture. Humayun’s Tomb which directly inspired the Taj Mahal is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that receives a fraction of the visitors that Vienna’s Schönbrunn does in the same period. Mehrauli, one of the oldest continuously inhabited urban settlements in the world, sits in South Delhi surrounded by encroachments, neglected signage, and the general sense that nobody in charge has decided it deserves better.
Mumbai is a different case, a colonial-era city rather than an ancient one, its significant architecture largely Victorian and Art Deco but it is globally significant nonetheless. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the most extraordinary pieces of Victorian Gothic architecture in the world. The Marine Drive seafront is one of the most iconic urban promenades on earth. And yet Mumbai’s tourism infrastructure exists largely to serve business travellers, not leisure tourists, because nobody has ever seriously tried to position it as a destination in the way that, say, Barcelona — another modern, port-city, architecturally eclectic metropolis — has been positioned for the past three decades.
Prague was founded in the 9th century. Vienna on the 10th. Budapest became a unified city only in 1873. Patna’s history begins before 600 BC. Delhi has been continuously inhabited for over three millennia. These are not comparable histories. India wins, on paper, by an enormous margin.
And yet the tourists go to Prague.
The Aesthetic Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here is where the conversation gets uncomfortable, and where honesty matters more than defensiveness.
Indian cities have a problem that no amount of historical significance can paper over: they are, in large parts, very difficult to experience as a leisure tourist.
Patna’s ancient glories are largely invisible. Pataliputra exists in museum cases and archaeological imagination, not in walkable streets or preserved ruins. What greets the visitor today is dense traffic, crumbling buildings beside concrete blocks, and civic neglect that makes it nearly impossible to connect the present city to the extraordinary civilisation it once housed.
Delhi is more complex. The monuments exist and are often magnificent. But they sit inside a city that has never fully decided how to present itself. The streets around Old Delhi’s Mughal-era structures, the lanes behind Jama Masjid and the approach to the Red Fort are chaotic in ways that most international tourists find alienating rather than charming. This is not a comment on the people or the culture. It is a comment on infrastructure: on civic maintenance, on the absence of pedestrian planning, on the complete lack of interpretive signage that might help a visitor from Seoul or São Paulo understand what they are walking through.
Mumbai has pockets of real aesthetic ambition: the art deco buildings of Marine Lines, the Gothic campus of the University of Mumbai. But these exist as islands in a sea of urban chaos, unconnected by any tourist trail and largely invisible to the international visitor who has been given no reason to look for them.
Compare this to Prague’s Old Town, where every cobblestone feels deliberate, every café front leans into the Gothic aesthetic, and the entire historic district is pedestrianised so you can wander without the anxiety of traffic. Or Vienna’s first district, where the boulevards, the cleanliness, the signage, the tram lines everything coheres into an experience that feels designed, because it was. The Ringstrasse was planned by Emperor Franz Joseph as an explicit statement of urban intention. It remains one of the most satisfying streets in the world to simply walk down.
Cleanliness, walkability, and aesthetic coherence are not superficial concerns. They are the fundamental conditions under which leisure tourism becomes possible. A tourist who cannot walk comfortably, who cannot find clear signage, who cannot move from monument to café without navigating chaos, will not stay an extra day. And they will not come back.
What Europe Got Right That We Keep Getting Wrong
Budapest built its tourism identity on thermal baths that the Romans and Ottomans had used before, simply by restoring them beautifully, pricing them accessibly, and marketing them relentlessly. The Széchenyi baths are not a modern invention; the hot springs beneath Budapest have been known for millennia. What changed is that Budapest decided to make the experience of visiting them excellent: the architecture is grand, the water is clean, the facilities work, the entry process is smooth, and the whole thing has been positioned as one of those non-negotiable bucket-list experiences that fills up travel blogs and Instagram feeds and, ultimately, plane seats.
Then there are the Danube cruises. The river that runs through Budapest is not, by any geographical measure, the most impressive waterway in the world. But Budapest illuminated its bridges the Chain Bridge, the Elizabeth Bridge, the Liberty Bridge and put glass-roofed riverboats on the water, and turned an evening on the Danube into one of the most Instagrammed travel experiences in Europe. You sit inside a heated boat, wine in hand, watching the Hungarian Parliament building glow gold against the night sky, and you feel effortlessly, without trying that you are somewhere extraordinary. The city engineered that feeling. It did not happen by accident.
Vienna made a Ferris wheel into a symbol of itself. Prague made a medieval clock into a scheduled daily performance. None of these are expensive or complicated ideas. All of them required only the decision made at some official level, and then sustained that these things were worth maintaining, worth marketing, and worth making easy for a stranger to enjoy.
India’s equivalent assets exist. The ghats of Varanasi at dawn are more dramatic than anything on the Danube. The scale of the Red Fort is more impressive than anything in Prague’s castle district. The Ellora caves in Maharashtra represent one of the greatest feats of human artistic ambition in history: 34 monasteries and temples carved directly into a basalt cliff face over five centuries. The temples of Madurai, the ruins of Hampi, the stepwells of Gujarat, the haveli lanes of Rajasthan these are world-class attractions by any objective measure of historical and aesthetic significance.
What they are not with a few partial exceptions is world-class in terms of the experience of visiting them. The approach roads, the ticketing systems, the maintenance, the interpretive material, the surrounding hospitality infrastructure, the overall sense that someone has thought carefully about what it feels like to arrive as a stranger and leave having understood something are the gaps. And they are significant.
What India lacks
Prague, Vienna, and Budapest are planned tourist destinations in a way that Indian cities, with rare exceptions, are not.
This is not entirely India’s fault. Europe’s tourist cities benefited from a particular historical moment post-war reconstruction, EU funding and cheap continental air travel that concentrated investment in urban heritage in ways India has never fully replicated. UNESCO listing in Europe comes with tourism infrastructure. In India, it often comes with a fence and an entry ticket and not much else.
But it is also a question of priority. Vienna’s tourism board produces content in fifteen languages. Their signage is designed for the non-native speaker. Their metro connects every major tourist site. The entire city has been engineered, over decades, to make being a tourist there as frictionless as possible.
Indian cities have largely grown around their monuments rather than with them. The Red Fort sits in Old Delhi not as the anchor of a curated heritage district, but as an island that tourists visit and then leave because there is no coherent reason to stay in its surroundings. The streets around it offer no guided walking routes, no interpretive signage in multiple languages, no cluster of thoughtfully restored buildings that creates a sense of immersion in Mughal-era district. The Aga Khan Trust’s restoration of Humayun’s Tomb is genuinely world-class but it remains an exception rather than a template applied across the city’s dozens of other significant structures. India’s archaeological institutions are underfunded, fragmented across central and state bodies and rarely connected to the commercial ecosystems that make heritage sites self-sustaining the way they are in Florence or Seville.
Mumbai’s Marine Drive, one of the most spectacular urban seafronts in the world has no continuous pedestrian promenade comparable to what Budapest has built along the Danube. The view exists. The infrastructure for experiencing it as a leisure tourist does not.
What Needs to Change
The answers are not complicated. They are only expensive and require political will that has historically gone elsewhere.
Indian cities need pedestrianised heritage zones not sanitised theme parks, but real historic neighbourhoods where streets are walkable, facades maintained, signage clear. Old Delhi could be this. Patna’s Kumhrar archaeological site could be this. Mumbai’s Fort area is already partially this and deserves serious investment to become fully so.
They need interpretive infrastructure museums that tell stories rather than display objects, working audio guides, multilingual signage, trained guides who are historians rather than touts. The Archaeological Survey of India maintains hundreds of monuments. Most are under-explained to the point of invisibility for anyone who didn’t already know what they were looking at.
They need their rivers. The Ganga, the Yamuna, the Brahmaputra these are not just waterways, they are the organising principle of Indian civilisation. Almost none have been developed into the curated riverfront experience that the Danube and the Vltava have become. A designed evening cruise on the Yamuna, passing the Red Fort, with local food and music and storytelling, would be unlike anything else in Asia. It does not exist.
And they need a story. Not a tourism board tagline, a real, emotionally coherent narrative about what these cities are and why they matter. Prague sold a feeling. Vienna sold an empire. Indian cities have stories that make both look modest. They simply haven’t committed to telling them yet.
“Indian cities have largely grown around their monuments rather than with them.”
The Irony That Should Keep Us Up at Night
The deepest irony in all of this is that the cities the world flocks to in Central Europe are, in many ways, selling a curated, embellished, sometimes partly invented version of their past. The “old town” atmosphere of Prague exists partly because the city decided to preserve it, pedestrianise it, and fill it with amber shops and trdelník stalls. The imperial grandeur of Vienna is a performance as much as a reality. The empire is long gone, but the city keeps the sets standing and the café culture running because it understood, early, that nostalgia is a product.
Indian cities have the real thing. Patna stands on the actual bones of Pataliputra. Delhi is genuinely, not metaphorically, built on the ruins of seven civilisations. Mumbai’s chaos is not a performance, it is the authentic, unmediated reality of a city of twenty million people in motion. Guwahati sits on a river older than recorded history, watched over by a goddess whose temple has stood since before Rome was an empire.
History is not the problem. History is the greatest asset any city could possess.
The problem is that nobody has yet fully committed to the idea that it deserves to be presented, maintained, explained, made walkable, made legible, made beautiful in a way that the world can receive.
When that commitment finally arrives, and it will, Indian cities will not merely compete with Prague and Vienna.
They will make them look like the newcomers they actually are.
(The author is content executive at On Record India.)
