Why it looks like this

Nagpur was founded in the early 1700s by the Gond king Bakht Buland Shah and became the Maratha Bhonsle capital; the old city's dense bazaars still crowd around the Mahal quarter. The British made it capital of the Central Provinces and laid their civil lines, railway and cantonment to the west.

Because the city sat near the geographic heart of colonial India, the Great Trigonometrical Survey placed its 'Zero Mile' stone here, a symbolic centre of the subcontinent. Today the orange-trading city is also the second capital of Maharashtra, and a major junction where India's north–south and east–west corridors cross.