The commercial success of Chhaava, a drama about the life of the Maratha ruler Sambhaji, seems to have fuelled many political and historical flames. People scrambled to dig up Asirgarh Fort since the film claimed it had buried treasure. The film also depicts Sambhaji’s brutal death at the hands of the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb, possibly leading Right-wing vigilantes in Nagpur to demand the destruction of Aurangzeb’s tomb. High-ranking politicians have called for “Babri Masjid-type” action there. Amid a precarious on-ground situation in Nagpur, let’s take a step back to understand all this. As it turns out, Aurangzeb is buried in one of the most important centres of India’s religious history — and it’s important for a reason you might not expect.
Where is Aurangzeb’s tomb?
The last powerful Mughal emperor is buried in a once-unmarked grave in Khuldabad, a Sufi centre near the Ellora caves. It’s a striking departure from the tombs of earlier Mughals: no towering domes of marble and sandstone, no expansive gardens, no tragic love story. Just a grave, covered with a little marble. How did Aurangzeb Alamgir — arguably one of the 18th-century world’s most powerful men — end up here?
The fact is that, as historian Pushkar Sohoni has argued, Khuldabad is Ellora. To be precise, the area around Ellora is one of the most consistently sacred sites in human history: it is home to over two thousand years of sacred architecture, from every pan-Indian religion. Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Islam all dominated it. While the religious inclination of its rulers changed over the centuries, Ellora itself, situated at a sacred waterfall near a trade route, was considered holy. Various religious orders, mercantile groups, court factions, and military grandees made gifts there over the centuries.
How this came to be is a long story, writes historian Sam Dalrymple. Basically, by the 10th century, Ellora was studded with rock-cut shrines, the most impressive of which was the Kailasanatha Temple, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Not all were regularly maintained, though, as the focus of economic activity had moved to the nearby city of Devagiri, conquered by the Delhi Sultanate in the late 1200s. Soon after, Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq ordered a chunk of Delhi’s Muslim intelligentsia to relocate there.
Tughlaq’s move was extremely unpopular. Delhi’s Chisti Sufis, at the time led by the famous Nizamuddin Auliya, were ordered to disperse into the Deccan to bring converts to the Tughlaq banner. Historian Carl W Ernst, in Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Centre, studied this phenomenon using contemporaneous Sufi writings. The Chistis resisted being turned into officials of the state, nor were they interested in “conversion”. At the same time, many of their initiates had personal ties to Tughlaq officials, and so, in small groups, they began to arrive in the Deccan. Ellora, as a holy site separate from Devagiri/Daulatabad, was the ideal base for Sufi masters — and, eventually, for their tombs.
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Aurangzeb (and his rivals) buried at Khuldabad
In the centuries after, the Sufi complex at Ellora mushroomed, receiving patronage from all the regional Deccan Sultanates. These regional Sultanates, it should be emphasised, were very different from today’s political image of Indian Muslim power: their courts were multilingual and multiethnic, and Deccan Sultans routinely used Marathi and Telugu, adopting titles like “Son of Saraswati”, after the goddess of learning.
Under their rule, Sufi masters continued to immigrate to Ellora from North India, Central Asia and beyond. So great was Sufi Ellora’s fame that many Sultans chose to be buried here, particularly the Nizam Shahis, who claimed to be descendants of Brahmins. These Deccan Muslims were also great admirers of Ellora; as the Bijapuri historian Rafi-al Din Shirazi wrote in awe in the mid-1500s: “So many beautiful and well-wrought things are in those buildings and courtyards that, if one wished to explain them all, he would fail… the listener should prepare for fatigue of the brain!”
Unfortunately, a few decades later, the Deccan became the target of Mughal aggression. As was typical for Indian kings, the Mughals tried to muscle into the sacred site at Ellora, taking over the patronage of some Sufi tombs there. However, from the newly-established town of Khadki nearby, a Deccani Ethiopian general, Malik Ambar, carried out decades of guerrilla wars against the Mughals before his death in 1626 — after which he was buried in a tomb at Sufi Ellora. Khadki, now renamed Aurangabad, became the base of a Mughal prince: Aurangzeb.
One would expect, given Aurangzeb’s depiction in Right-wing media today, that he immediately set out to destroy the ancient shrines of Ellora (and there is clear evidence he did so at various North Indian centres over his career). Surprisingly, though, amid his general religious inflexibility, a letter from Aurangzeb has this to say about the Kailasanatha temple at Ellora, from the Kalimat-i-Taiyibat: “[It is] one of the wonders of the work of the true transcendent Artisan [God]”. Aurangzeb visited the Sufis there often, though he spent most of his life trying to conquer the Deccan (at a terrible cost in blood and fire). Evidently, the site’s sanctified aura could calm the most grim and relentless of warlords: as the Mughal empire began to implode, Aurangzeb’s will requested that “this sinner drenched in sins” should be buried near the tomb of Zayn al-din Shirazi, one of the early Sufis who migrated to Ellora. The Maratha ruler Shahuji, grandson of Shivaji and son of Sambhaji — visited this tomb soon after his release from Mughal captivity around 1708.
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The repetition of wrongs
I am not questioning Aurangzeb’s historically-attested temple destructions in North India here; nor is this the place to fact-check collective memories and records about his persecutions. The reality is that today, Aurangzeb has come to represent all Mughals, and the Mughals are held to represent all Indian Muslims: Our history is presented as a story of eternal bigotry and religious rivalry. As such, we are meant to believe that the destruction of a dead man’s tomb is about Hindu pride — prodded and riled up by filmmakers and politicians. Importantly, it’s also about sending a message to minorities: many reports claim that the Nagpur violence began with the burning of the Quran, though the situation has since deteriorated.
Instead, I want to ask: does Khuldabad belong to Aurangzeb alone? We know from Mughal court documents, studied by historian Abhishek Kaicker, that Hindus in the 18th century did not revile Aurangzeb as the 21st century far-Right does. We have already noted the Maratha king Shahuji’s activities there; court documents also show that Hindu pilgrims, both male and female, visited the tomb to eat at its kitchens and to pray for children. We also know of generations of Deccan Muslim teachers, scholars, and rulers who were buried at Khuldabad before and after Aurangzeb, who had nothing to do with his wars and intolerance. They admired and respected this site. Should the saint Zayn-al Din Shirazi’s tomb, of which Aurangzeb’s grave is part, be destroyed too? Should our response to a dead man’s temple destruction be even more destruction?
A vigilante attack on Khuldabad, if it comes, will certainly endanger millennia of Indian Muslim history, both immigrant and local. We cannot simply tear out any aspect of the past we dislike, and whitewash the aspects that we do like. By all means despise Aurangzeb, but these high-pitched attacks on historical monuments do not right a historic wrong, nor do they solve contemporary challenges. How much of our past must be sacrificed on the altar of weekly publicity points?
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. Views are personal.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)