A rough journey across the forbidding mountains on India’s frontier was made 600 years ago by Zahiruddin Babar. This man was no ordinary mortal, but one who had descended from two ferocious Asian conquerors, Timur the Lame and Genghis Khan. The mighty dynasty Babar established would rule over India for centuries, bestowing it with a composite culture of which today we are the proud inheritors.

In Aurangabad lies buried the man who brought that dynasty to its end. Mohammed Aurangzeb, Babar’s sixth descendant, was the most able commander and son of his father, Shah Jehan. But he was also his most wronged son, kept far away from the seat of empire in Delhi to battle the feisty Marathas in the heat of the Deccan Plateau. A dusty little village called Khirki was given to the prince to serve as his capital, later rechristened Aurangabad. Even after becoming Emperor, Aurangzeb would spend most of his life in the Deccan, fighting Shivaji’s son Sambhaji, and the fiefs of Golconda, Ahmednagar and Bijapur. He succeeded in subduing the last three, but in the battles against the former lay the seeds of Mughal destruction.

The Maratha successors of Shivaji played a game that even the formidable Mughal Army just could not master. They swooped down every so often from the high reaches of the ghats, extracted their pound of Mughal flesh and just as quickly, disappeared again into the distant hills. Aurangzeb was flummoxed, but it was not in his nature to give up. He kept trying and, with his back turned on Delhi, his empire began to collapse. He died with the Marathas still occupying the ghats of Maharashtra, died trying to make it back to his beloved Aurangabad when he knew his end was near.

He only reached as far as Ahmednagar, where he breathed his last. For all purposes, historians agree, in that last breath lay the ashes of an empire.

Ancient Aurangabad
Aurangabad’s history goes much further back than when the Mughal standard soared high in India. To its south lies a city once visited by Greek traders before the birth of Christ. To its north are caves carved out of the Satmala Hills by Buddhist monks in the 2nd century BC. To the west lies the grandiose folly of a pre-Mughal Delhi Sultan. And to the east is a crater full of water — the third-largest salt-water lake on Earth — created by an extra-terrestrial force 50,000 years ago.

You can finish your exploration of Aurangabad’s core in a day. But to cover all the World Heritage sites in its vicinity you will need many, many weekends. Surely those who can say they’ve truly understood the Importance of Being Aurangabad are very few, and very lucky indeed.