Place · Nizam Shahi star fort · India
Ahmadnagar Fort
Also known as Ahmednagar Fort, Ahmednagar, Nizam Shahi capital
The Nizam Shahi capital's fort, raised in 1490 by Malik Ahmad on a star-shaped plan with twenty-two bastions and a wet ditch — among the earliest examples of that form anywhere in India. It was annexed by Shah Jahan in 1636, and Aurangzeb died in camp outside it in 1707 at the end of his Deccan war.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 19.090, 74.760
Worth knowing
Nehru wrote The Discovery of India in this fort between 1942 and 1945, imprisoned here with twelve other Congress Working Committee members after the Quit India resolution; the rooms they used are kept as a memorial. Malik Ambar, born in Ethiopia and sold into slavery, ran the same sultanate as its regent a century earlier.
Connections (3)
- Successor capital ofBijapur (Vijayapura)
Ahmadnagar and Bijapur were two of the five states the Bahmani sultanate broke into, and they fought each other as readily as they fought Vijayanagara or Delhi. Ahmadnagar's fort is where Chand Bibi held out against Akbar's armies in 1595 and where Malik Ambar, an Ethiopian-born minister who had arrived in India as a slave, later ran the state and kept the Mughals out of the Deccan for two decades.
- CampaignAurangzeb's Tomb, Khuldabad
Ahmednagar was the first of the five sultanates to be annexed, by Shah Jahan in 1636, and the last place Aurangzeb slept: he died in camp outside it on 3 March 1707 and was carried to Khuldabad. The Mughal Deccan project begins and ends within sight of the same fort, seventy-one years apart.
- Life routeChand Bibi
Chand Bibi is the queen of Ahmadnagar Fort in 1595. She rode its walls in armour against Akbar’s son Murad’s Mughal army and negotiated the surrender of Berar in place of a full capitulation, buying Ahmadnagar three more years. She was killed inside the fort in 1600 during a second siege, and the fort is the one place where every phase of her regency is documented.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Ahmednagar Fort”. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946), preface; Radhey Shyam, The Kingdom of Ahmadnagar (1966).
Open Ahmadnagar Fort in the repository →