Place · Chishti burial town · India
Khuldābād
The Deccan Chishti burial town, four kilometres from the Grishneshwar jyotirlinga and from Ellora's caves, holding the graves of Burhanuddin Gharib, Zainuddin Shirazi and a line of shaikhs who carried the order south out of Delhi in the fourteenth century.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Chishti silsila; Deccan Sultanate history
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 20.006, 75.190
Worth knowing
Aurangzeb is buried here in an open grave with no dome over it, paid for out of the money he earned copying Qurans and sewing caps, on his own instruction. His son Azam Shah and the first Nizam's family are in the same town, so the Mughal Deccan's beginning and end lie a few hundred metres apart.
Connections (5)
- Site adjacencyGrishneshvara / Ghushmesha
Khuldabad, 5 kilometres from Grishneshwar, houses Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's simple tomb and the dargah of the Chishti Sufi Zainuddin Shirazi. The proximity of Aurangzeb's grave to the Jyotirlinga he is said to have damaged creates one of Indian sacred geography's most striking spatial juxtapositions of iconoclast and shrine within a single kilometre-scale landscape.
- Tomb in townAurangzeb's Tomb, Khuldabad
Aurangzeb chose burial at Khuldabad in a plain open grave beside the Chishti saints he venerated, paid for from money he had earned copying the Quran, with no dome over it. The town sits four kilometres from the Grishneshwar jyotirlinga and from Ellora's Buddhist, Hindu and Jain caves — so the emperor most associated with religious severity lies within a short walk of the most thoroughly shared sacred landscape in the Deccan.
- Samadhi atMalik Ambar
Malik Ambar is buried at Khuldabad, the Chishti shrine town, a few kilometres from the city he founded and from Aurangzeb's own open grave — so an Ethiopian-born regent who spent his life keeping the Mughals out of the Deccan lies within a short walk of the emperor who finally took it. Khuldabad also holds the tombs of Nizam Shahi and Asaf Jahi figures, which makes it the Deccan's political cemetery.
- Site adjacencyEllorā
Khuldabad's Chishti necropolis, the Grishneshwar jyotirlinga and Ellora's Buddhist, Hindu and Jain caves lie within a few kilometres of each other, and Daulatabad's fort closes the same valley. Four kinds of sacred and political claim in one small landscape is the ordinary condition of Indian geography rather than an exception, and this valley is where it is most compressed.
- Site withinAurangabad / Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar
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.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Khuldabad”. Carl Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (1992); Archaeological Survey of India, Aurangabad circle records.
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