“Delhi was home to a body of people who felt that they had very little opportunity in what is today modern-day Afghanistan,” said Sunil Kumar, a professor of history at the University of Delhi.

Indeed, between 1206 and 1526, a string of rulers ― Mamluk, Khilji, Tughlaq, Sayyid, and the Lodi dynasties ― with Central Asian roots ruled Delhi and formed what is now known, in historical parlance, as the Delhi Sultanate.

Delhi, Kumar explains, wasn’t merely a refugee city. It was a haven ― a sanctuary of Islam ― when the Mongol hordes were ravaging kingdom after kingdom.

Afghans make up just a fraction of the massive overall refugee population in Delhi. After the partition of India in 1947, some 10 million people moved from India to Pakistan, or vice-versa, partaking in the largest human migration in recorded history. A million died trying to make it across their respective borders.

In the six decades since independence, these men and women have rebuilt their lives, some more successfully than others. Kumar’s colleague at the University of Delhi’s history department is Upinder Singh; her father, Manmohan Singh, is a Sikh who left his home in Pakistan’s Punjab for India as the British exited the subcontinent -- and he’s also India’s prime minister.

Today, Delhi once again finds itself at the heart of refugee movements in South Asia. But in the din of India’s celebrated economic rise and its efforts to bring millions of its citizens out of poverty, its urban refugee population has been largely forgotten.

At stake are the lives of Gul Din Khan and about 30,000 others, by most conservative estimates. There are 23,500 refugees and asylum seekers in Delhi registered with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), consisting of more than 11,000 from Burma, 9,000 Afghans, and the 7,000 Tibetans that the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile estimates live in Delhi.

With continued threats to their lives and livelihoods back home, the refugees that live here struggle to make a living in a hostile metropolis.

***

There are few who took a more difficult path here than Gul Din Khan.

The Russian invasion in 1979 brought a Soviet-backed Afghan government in direct conflict with Mujahedeen rebels, trapping locals in the middle.

“I had to flee. My brother had to leave home, too,” he said. “But I have no news of him, or of my parents. I don’t know if my sisters got married. I don’t even know if any of them are alive.”

Khan hasn’t returned to Afghanistan since he left 25 years ago with a little more than the $80 that his father gave him to find a way out. It wasn’t enough to buy a ride out of Afghanistan on a car or a bus, so much of his journey was on foot and donkey-back.

Khan’s journey took him through the mountains between Paktika and Waziristan, then down half the length of Pakistan’s Indus highway to Karachi. After that, he spent time in Pakistan’s Hyderabad region, and finally went by camel into western India’s Gujarat province. It is a path that is nearly impossible to take today -- the border between India and Pakistan is now heavily militarized.