Place · Mughal & Nizami city · India
Aurangabad / Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar
Also known as Aurangabad, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Sambhajinagar, Khadki
The Deccan Mughal capital that Aurangzeb used as his base through his twenty-six years of Deccan campaigning, 1681 to 1707, and the Nizam of Hyderabad's first capital from 1724 to 1763 before Hyderabad proper. The city sits at the junction of five of the subcontinent's most consequential sacred-and-political landscapes within thirty kilometres: Ajanta, Ellora, Daulatabad, Khuldabad and Grishneshwar. The 2022 name-change to Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar — after Shivaji's son executed by Aurangzeb at nearby Vadhu Budruk in 1689 — makes the renaming a direct Maratha-Mughal counter-naming at this historically layered site. The city was founded as Khadki in 1610 by Malik Ambar, the Abyssinian commander of the Nizam Shahi state of Ahmednagar.
- Date
- 1610–None
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Nizam Shahi · Mughal · Asaf Jahi
- Tradition
- Standard reference; INTACH, ASI and municipal records; institutional histories.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 19.876, 75.343
Connections (9)
- Site withinAjantā caves
The Ajanta Caves sit 99 kilometres north of Aurangabad on the Waghora river gorge, within Aurangabad district and under the ASI's Aurangabad circle. The city's Mughal and Nizami administrators from the seventeenth century treated the caves as part of the Aurangabad hinterland, and the ASI office in the city still runs the Ajanta conservation and visitor programme. The caves are reached from Aurangabad as the regional base.
- Site withinEllorā
The Ellora Caves sit 29 kilometres northwest of Aurangabad on the Deccan trade road from the Konkan ports — within Aurangabad district and administered from the city. Ellora's thirty-four Buddhist, Hindu and Jain rock-cut excavations and the Kailasa monolithic temple are the single largest heritage draw of the Aurangabad region, and the city serves as the base for pilgrimage and visitors to the whole Ellora-Khuldabad-Grishneshwar cluster.
- Site withinDaulatabad
Daulatabad — the Yadava-and-Khilji hill-fort that Muhammad bin Tughlaq moved Delhi's population to in 1327 and then abandoned three years later — sits 16 kilometres northwest of Aurangabad in Aurangabad district. The Nizam Shahi-era Chand Minar and the Mughal-era fortifications are all within the city's wider administrative orbit, and the fort has been administered as part of Aurangabad district since the eighteenth century.
- Site withinBibi ka Maqbara
Bibi ka Maqbara — built by Aurangzeb's son Azam Shah between 1660 and 1670 as a tomb for his mother Dilras Banu Begum — sits in Aurangabad proper, within the modern city limits about three kilometres north of the walled core. The 'half-Taj' is Aurangabad's single most-visited Mughal monument and has defined the city's visual identity since the seventeenth century.
- Site withinKhuldābād
Khuldabad — the Chishti Sufi necropolis holding Aurangzeb himself in an open plain grave, and the first Nizam's family — sits 24 kilometres northwest of Aurangabad on the ridge above Ellora. The town is historically part of the Aurangabad administrative district and is one of the city's defining sacred-and-political sub-sites, with the Mughal Deccan's beginning and end both buried a few hundred metres apart within it.
- Site withinGrishneshvara / Ghushmesha
Grishneshwar — the smallest and last of the twelve Shiva Jyotirlingas, at Verul beside the Ellora caves — sits 29 kilometres northwest of Aurangabad in Aurangabad district. Verul is also the ancestral village of the Bhonsle Maratha dynasty, whose jagir at Verul predated Shivaji by three generations. The jyotirlinga is one of the Aurangabad district sacred sites in continuous worship for over a thousand years.
- Site withinAurangabad Caves
The Aurangabad Caves — twelve rock-cut Buddhist caves of the sixth and seventh centuries — sit within the modern city limits, two kilometres north of the Bibi ka Maqbara. The caves are a Vakataka-period extension of the Ajanta-Ellora rock-cut Buddhist tradition and are administered under the Aurangabad ASI circle. They are the only major rock-cut site within the Aurangabad city boundary.
- Site withinPitalkhora Caves
Pitalkhora — an early Buddhist cave complex — sits 40 kilometres northwest of Aurangabad in Aurangabad district within the Satmala range. The caves are among the oldest Buddhist excavations in the Deccan and are administered from the Aurangabad ASI office alongside Ajanta and Ellora. Project Bharatam records the specific site and the city together.
- Site withinPanchakki, Aurangabad
Panchakki — the Nizam-era 1744 watermill fed by an underground aqueduct from the Harsul hills within Baba Shah Musafir's dargah — sits in Aurangabad proper, three kilometres north of the walled core. The aqueduct draws on the earlier Nahr-i-Ambari system that Malik Ambar built to supply Khadki in the 1610s, so Panchakki's engineering spans Nizam Shahi, Mughal and Nizami Aurangabad in one working piece of hydraulic architecture.