Person · Mughal emperor · India
Aurangzeb
Also known as Aurangzeb, Muhi-ud-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb, Alamgir I, Alamgir
Sixth Mughal emperor, 1658 to 1707 — the longest reign in Mughal history and the empire's maximum territorial extent, which stretched into Thanjavur in the south. He imprisoned his father Shah Jahan at Agra Fort, executed his brother Dara Shikoh, and spent the last twenty-six years of his reign campaigning in the Deccan against the Marathas, the Bijapur and Golconda sultanates and the deteriorating Mughal fiscal position. He reimposed the jizya in 1679. He is buried in a plain earthen grave at Khuldabad near Aurangabad, as he instructed.
- Date
- 1618–1707
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Mughal
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; contemporary chronicles and institutional records as applicable.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
His personal austerity — copying the Quran for sale and sewing caps for income, famously — stood against the architectural extravagance of his father's reign; he built almost nothing of monumental scale except the Badshahi Mosque at Lahore and the Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad, which was intended as his wife's Taj but is a smaller echo. His 1669 destruction of the Kashi Vishwanath and Krishna Janmabhoomi temples at Varanasi and Mathura are the two most-cited acts of iconoclasm of his reign; Ahilyabai Holkar rebuilt the Vishwanath in 1780.
About the place
Placed at Khuldabad (his tomb) and the Deccan where he spent his last decades.
Connections (7)
- Buried atAurangzeb's Tomb, Khuldabad
Aurangzeb was buried at the Chishti dargah of Zainuddin Shirazi at Khuldabad, about twenty-five kilometres northwest of Aurangabad, as he had instructed — in a plain earthen grave open to the sky, financed by caps he had sewn himself and copies of the Quran he had made for sale. The deliberate humility of the burial stands against the architectural extravagance of his father's reign; the dargah's walled compound is the Chishti silsila's Deccan anchor.
- Won battle atSamugarh
Aurangzeb defeated his elder brother Dara Shikoh at Samugarh on 29 May 1658, in the central battle of the Mughal war of succession, after which he imprisoned his father Shah Jahan at Agra Fort and had Dara executed on apostasy charges in 1659. The Mughal state's direction — from the syncretic court of Dara and Shah Jahan toward Aurangzeb's orthodox and Deccan-focused reign — turned on this battle, and the empire's subsequent trajectory was shaped by it as much as by any single event.
- Son ofShah Jahan
Aurangzeb was Shah Jahan's third son and defeated his father in the 1657–58 civil war, imprisoning Shah Jahan at Agra Fort until his death in 1666. The war began when Shah Jahan fell ill and Aurangzeb concluded his elder brother Dara Shikoh — Shah Jahan's chosen heir — would ruin the empire with his religious syncretism. Aurangzeb's own ascetic Islamic orthodoxy was in part a rhetorical frame against Dara's Upanishad translation and Majma-ul-Bahrain.
- KilledDara Shikoh
Aurangzeb had Dara Shikoh executed at Delhi in August 1659, four months after capturing him in the Bolan Pass fleeing toward Persia. The judicial process — a public trial for apostasy conducted by the Mughal qazis and ulama — was engineered to justify fratricide as orthodox duty rather than political murder, since Dara had claimed Islamic cover for his Upanishad translations and his Majma-ul-Bahrain. Dara is buried in Humayun's Tomb complex.
- BuiltBadshahi Mosque, Lahore
Aurangzeb built the Badshahi Mosque at Lahore between 1671 and 1673, opposite the Lahore Fort across the Hazuri Bagh, by his foster brother Fidai Khan Koka. Red sandstone carried up from Rajasthan, marble inlay, three marble domes and a courtyard that holds something near a hundred thousand people — at completion the largest mosque in the world. It is the last of the great Mughal congregational mosques, and the most austere; after it the dynasty built nothing on this scale again.
- DestroyedKāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras
Aurangzeb destroyed the Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi in 1669 and built the Gyanvapi Mosque on its platform — the most-cited single act of iconoclasm of his reign, and one that fixed Varanasi in Hindu memory as the city of a wound repeatedly reopened. Ahilyabai Holkar rebuilt the Vishwanath temple beside the mosque in 1780, and the two buildings have shared the site since. The 1669 destruction was recorded in Mustaid Khan's Maasir-i-Alamgiri as a general order against Hindu temples in Benaras district.
- Ancestor ofBibi ka Maqbara
Aurangzeb's son Azam Shah built the Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad between 1660 and 1670 as a tomb for his mother Dilras Banu Begum, Aurangzeb's chief wife — a half-scale echo of the Taj Mahal that his great-great-grandfather Shah Jahan had built for his own wife at Agra. The reduced marble and plaster of the Bibi ka Maqbara show the Mughal state's reduced architectural budgets under Aurangzeb's austere reign. The tomb is in the same Mughal garden tradition that began at Humayun's Tomb a century earlier.