AURANGABAD

The story of the city begins not with a sultan but with an extraordinary slave. Malik Ambar was born around 1548 in the Hararghe highlands of Ethiopia, named Chapu, sold first to an Arab trader at Mocha, then to a Baghdadi merchant who taught him Arabic and finance, and finally — by way of the slave market at Bijapur — to the Nizam Shahi state of Ahmadnagar. By 1600 he was a free man, the chief commander of its Habshi (Abyssinian) cavalry; by 1602 he was its peshwa, prime minister; and from 1607 until his death in 1626 he was, in effect, sovereign of what remained of the kingdom — running it on behalf of three child-sultans and successfully holding off the Mughal armies of Akbar and Jahangir for a generation.

In 1610, with the old capital of Ahmadnagar exposed and indefensible, Malik Ambar moved his court to a fertile plain in the lee of the Sahyadri foothills, on the small village of Khadki (also spelt Khirki, "the window"). He laid out a planned city of orthogonal quarters, dug a system of underground stone aqueducts — the Nahr-e-Ambari — that brought water from the Harsul stream, and built a modest court and a handful of mosques. The plan was, like the man, sober, careful and exact. After his death in 1626 his son Fateh Khan briefly renamed the city Fatehnagar; the Nizam Shahis lost it to the Mughals only seven years later, in 1633.

Malik Ambar was buried at Khuldabad, twenty kilometres west — and so today, in the same compound, the founder of Aurangabad and the emperor who renamed it lie within a stone's throw of each other.

Of all the monuments of Aurangabad the one that has fixed the city in the imagination is the Bibi ka Maqbara — "the tomb of the lady" — a near-replica of the Taj Mahal raised over the grave of Dilras Banu Begum, principal wife of Aurangzeb and mother of his eldest son Muhammad Azam Shah. She had died in 1657, four days after the birth of her sixth child, and was buried first at Daulatabad. In 1660, on the orders of the prince and (it is said) at his own emotional insistence, work began on a new mausoleum within the eastern garden of Aurangabad. It was completed in 1661 — though the marble cladding continued for decades.

The architect was Ata-ullah, son of the Ustad Ahmad Lahori who had designed the Taj. The plan is the same: a four-iwan mausoleum on a square chabutra, four minarets at the corners, a great central dome on a tall drum, set within a charbagh of running channels. The dimensions are smaller — about two-thirds the height of the original — and the construction shows the empire's tightening finances: only the lower five metres are clad in true marble, the upper bulk is faced in fine plaster polished to a marble sheen, the inlays are sparser and the floral relief is in stucco rather than pietra dura. The accounts famously record the total cost as Rs 7,00,000, against the Rs 32 million that the Taj had absorbed thirty years earlier.

For all that — perhaps because of it — the Bibi ka Maqbara has a tenderness the Taj lacks. The proportions are slightly compressed, the dome a little flatter, the gardens more intimate; the moulding is in the local Deccan idiom, the calligraphy is by a Bijapuri hand, the gates open onto orchards rather than river-front. It was, and remains, a private grief made monumental — a son's offering rather than an emperor's. Hyderabadis still call it the Dakkhani Taj.

Sixteen kilometres west of Aurangabad rises the conical hill of Devgiri — a single basalt plug six hundred metres high, scarped to a vertical cliff on three sides — which has been a fortress without interruption since at least the ninth century. Under the Yadavas of Devagiri (1187–1317) it was the richest city of the western Deccan, controlling the trade between Gujarat and the Krishna delta. Alauddin Khalji sacked it in 1294 and again in 1308. Muhammad bin Tughluq, finding the site so naturally defensible, refounded it in 1327 as Daulatabad ("city of fortune") and ordered the entire population of Delhi marched there to make it the new imperial capital — an experiment in compulsory urbanism that lasted a generation and ended in famine and abandonment.

The fort itself is a cumulative work. The Yadavas cut its scarp and dug its great moat — fifteen metres wide, partly flooded, partly populated (it is said) with crocodiles. The Tughluqs added a second concentric circuit of walls, the Bahmanis a third, and built the surviving Chand Minar in 1435 — a cylindrical victory tower thirty metres high with three balconies, the second-tallest pre-Mughal minaret in India. The pitch-black tunnel ("the dark passage") that wraps around the citadel's last approach, with its single-file staircase that can be choked by closing one iron grille, has never been forced by any besieging army.

Aurangzeb made Daulatabad his treasure-house and prison; Sambhaji, son of Shivaji, was held here in 1689 before being executed. After 1707 it passed into Asaf Jahi hands, whose first sovereign Nizam-ul-Mulk used it as the strongest place of his realm before settling on Hyderabad.

No account of Aurangabad is complete without its older inheritance. Within a hundred kilometres of the city are three of the great rock-cut complexes of the world.

The Ajanta Caves, a hundred kilometres north-east, are twenty-nine Buddhist excavations carved into a horseshoe of basalt above the Waghora river between roughly 200 BCE and 480 CE. They were lost to memory until 1819, when a young British officer named John Smith, hunting tigers, walked his horse onto the rim of the gorge and saw the chaitya-hall of cave 10 framed in vegetation. Their wall-paintings — Bodhisattva Padmapani, the Mahajanaka Jataka, the four-tusked elephant of cave 17 — are the largest surviving body of Indian wall-painting before the Mughal period.

The Ellora Caves, only thirty kilometres west of Aurangabad, are a continuous twenty-nine-kilometre cliff with thirty-four cut-temples carved between the sixth and the tenth centuries CE. They are unique in housing Buddhist (caves 1–12), Hindu (13–29) and Jain (30–34) shrines side by side, the eclectic patronage of the Rashtrakuta dynasty. The Kailasa Temple (cave 16), commissioned by Krishna I around 760, is a single freestanding multi-storey temple cut downwards from the parent cliff — the largest monolithic excavation in the world, with two hundred thousand tonnes of basalt removed by hand.

The Aurangabad Caves themselves, on the hill above the Bibi ka Maqbara, are nine Mahayana Buddhist excavations of the sixth and seventh centuries, modest in scale but with a celebrated frieze of musicians and dancers in cave 7. They were already silent before Malik Ambar laid out the city beneath them.