Aurangabad

• 1. Introduction

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  Aurangabad sits in the Deccan Traps, a landscape of ancient lava flows, and carries more names than almost any city in India. For most of its modern life it was Aurangabad, named for a Mughal emperor. Before that it was Fatehnagar, then Khadki. In 2023 it was officially renamed Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, after the second Chhatrapati of the Maratha Empire. Beneath all those names runs a single thread: a city that powerful rulers kept claiming, renaming, and moving their courts to, and then, just as often, abandoning.

  Today it is home to more than a million people and is the largest city in the Marathwada region. It hosts two UNESCO World Heritage Sites on its outskirts and carries the nickname the City of Gates. How did a village called Khadki become a Mughal capital, a Hyderabadi showpiece, and eventually a hub of automobile manufacturing? The answer reaches back to an Ethiopian military leader brought to India as a slave, to an emperor who moved an entire capital city by royal decree, and to a poet who is credited with writing the very first established works in the Urdu language.

• 2. From Khadki to Mughal Capital

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  Malik Ambar arrived in India as a slave and died one of the most consequential figures in the Deccan's history. Born in Ethiopia, he rose to become the prime minister of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate under Sultan Murtaza Nizam Shah II. In 1610, he established a new city called Khadki at the location of what is now Aurangabad, making it the Ahmadnagar capital. Within a decade, the source records, Khadki had grown into a populous and imposing city. Malik Ambar died in 1626.

  His son Fateh Khan inherited power and changed the city's name to Fatehnagar. That name, too, did not last. In 1633, Mughal imperial forces captured Devagiri Fort, and the Nizam Shahi dominions, including Fatehnagar, passed to the Mughals. Twenty years earlier, in 1308, this same region had been annexed by the Delhi Sultanate under Sultan Alauddin Khalji, and in 1327 Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq had attempted to move the Delhi Sultanate's capital from Delhi itself to Daulatabad, in what is present-day Aurangabad. He ordered the mass relocation of Delhi's population to accomplish this. By 1334, he had reversed course and moved the capital back to Delhi. That episode was only a dress rehearsal. When Mughal prince Aurangzeb was appointed Viceroy of the Deccan for the second time in 1653, he renamed Fatehnagar after himself and made it his capital. The city would be called Aurangabad for nearly four centuries afterward. Chroniclers of Aurangzeb's reign sometimes called it by another name: Khujista Bunyad.

• 3. Silk, Walls, and the Mughal Moment

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  In 1681, after his coronation as emperor, Aurangzeb moved his entire court from Delhi to Aurangabad in order to direct his Deccan campaigns. The arrival of Mughal elites reshaped the city physically. Around 1683, a city wall was built encircling Aurangabad, a direct response to Maratha raids. Several of those gates still stand today, including the Delhi Gate. The city ultimately accumulated 52 gates, earning the nickname that still attaches to it.

  Aurangzeb chose not to reside in the city after 1684, yet Aurangabad remained the primary military outpost of the Mughal Deccan. That status drew wealth and trade. The manufacture of embroidered silks emerged during this period, and that craft is still practiced in Aurangabad today. A finer detail of the textile tradition traces to an even earlier moment: Himroo fabric, a blend of silk with locally grown cotton, is associated with Muhammad Tughluq, who ruled in the 14th century, though the source notes the fabric's Persian origins are not conclusively proved. At its Mughal peak, the city is estimated to have held a population of around 200,000 people living in 54 suburbs. Mughal Aurangabad was also an important center of Persian and Urdu literature, a cultural weight that would outlast the empire itself.

• 4. The Birth of Urdu Poetry

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  Wali Dakhni, also known as Wali Aurangabadi, was born in 1667 and died between 1731 and 1743. He is identified in the source as the first established poet to have composed in the Urdu language. Aurangabad, then at its cultural height under Mughal and then Nizam patronage, was his home ground, and his influence spread well beyond it. Prominent poets including Shah Hatem, Shah Abro, Mir Taqi Mir, Zauq, and Sauda counted themselves among his admirers.

  Other literary figures from Aurangabad include Siraj Aurangabadi and Azad Bilgrami, both of the 18th century. The city's literary character was shaped partly by the prevalence of Dakhni Urdu, the Hyderabadi dialect of the language spoken in Aurangabad's old city. Another figure connected to the city by birth was Abul Ala Maududi, born in Aurangabad in 1903. His father, Maulana Ahmad Hasan, was a lawyer who was described as having descended from the Chishti line of saints. Maududi went on to become a prominent Muslim scholar and theologian, and founded Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islamic revivalist party. He died in 1979.

• 5. Decline, Cantonment, and Industry

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  When Nizam Ali Khan Asaf Jah II transferred the capital of his dynasty from Aurangabad to Hyderabad in 1763, the city's long era of political centrality ended. The loss of that privileged position triggered a period of economic decline. By the beginning of the 19th century, Aurangabad had become notably underpopulated, its administration had weakened, and its buildings were in decay. It continued to matter as the second city of the Nizam's dominions, but the momentum had shifted south.

  In 1816, the British established a cantonment outside Aurangabad. The Nizam's officials discouraged them from entering the city proper, and because Hyderabad State was a quasi-autonomous princely state under British suzerainty, Aurangabad's culture remained relatively free of direct colonial influence. Industrialization came slowly. The city's first cotton mill opened in 1889. The population in 1881 was 30,000, growing to 36,000 over the following two decades. Deccan famines struck hard in 1899-1900, 1918, and 1920, causing surges in crime. When the Hyderabad-Godavari Valley Railways opened in 1900, several ginning factories followed. After Aurangabad joined Maharashtra state in 1960, the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation began acquiring land and setting up industrial estates. The Waluj and Chikalthana Industrial Areas were among the results, and were quickly taken up. By the 1990s, land near Shendra village on the Aurangabad-Jalna route was purchased for further industrial expansion.

• 6. World Heritage on the Doorstep

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  Two of India's most visited archaeological sites lie on the outskirts of Aurangabad. The Ajanta and Ellora caves were both designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1983. Their presence draws significant tourism to the city, which sits surrounded by the Ajanta mountain range in all directions.

  Within the city itself, the Aurangabad Caves are a cluster of 12 Buddhist caves dating back to the 3rd century CE, situated about 5 kilometers from the city center and notable for their Tantric influences in iconography and architectural design. Bibi Ka Maqbara, the burial mausoleum of Emperor Aurangzeb's wife Dilras Banu Begum (also known as Rabia-ud-Daurani), was designed in imitation of the Taj Mahal at Agra and is popularly called the Taj of the Deccan. It sits about 3 kilometers from the city center. Panchakki, a 17th-century watermill, is powered by an underground water channel that runs more than 8 kilometers from nearby hills, culminating in an artificial waterfall. The Kachner Jain Temple, dedicated to Parshvanath, is approximately 250 years old. Salim Ali Lake in the northern part of the city was known during the Mughal period as Khiziri Talab, and was later renamed after the ornithologist and naturalist Salim Ali. In 2019, the Aurangabad Industrial City (AURIC) became the first greenfield industrial smart city in India under the country's flagship Smart Cities Mission.

• 7. A Renaming and a New Identity

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  The political push to rename Aurangabad began formally in 1988, when Bal Thackeray proposed calling it Sambhajinagar. The city's own Corporation passed a resolution on the name change in 1995. On the 29th of June 2022, the Shiv Sena-led Maharashtra cabinet approved renaming the city to Sambhaji Nagar, after Sambhaji Bhosale, the second Chhatrapati of the Maratha Empire. The official rename to Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar was completed in 2023.

  The city today has a population of 1,175,116 per the 2011 census, of which 609,206 were male and 565,910 were female. Hindus make up 51% of the population, Muslims 30%, and Buddhists 15.2%. The Buddhist community follows the Navayana tradition and consists mostly of scheduled castes. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University anchors higher education, with 101 affiliated colleges in Aurangabad. Maharashtra National Law University was established here in 2017, the third institution set up under the Maharashtra National Law University Act of 2014. Major manufacturers operating in and around the city include BMW, Audi India, Skoda Auto, Bajaj Auto, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and the Russian steelmaker NLMK, which has a plant in the DMIC Shendra phase. The city's municipal corporation reported total revenue receipts of 758 crore rupees and total expenditure of 769 crore rupees in the 2022-23 financial year, with tax revenue accounting for about 14.4% of total revenue.