Tomb of Malik Ambar, Khuldabad

On the 14^th of May 1626, at the grand old age of 80, Malik Ambar, the man who turned the little village of Khadki into the city we now know as Aurangabad, halted Mughal ambitions in the Deccan with an entirely new kind of warfare, and almost single-handedly saved the Nizam Shahi Dynasty of Ahmadnagar from obliteration, breathed his last. An eyewitness of Deccan affairs over many years, the author Bhim Sen wrote in his Nushka-i-Dilkusha, “although Malik Ambar was dead, but his sweet fragrance still remained behind”. He was a man so remarkable that even Mu'tamad Khan, Mughal Emperor Jehangir’s biographer, who had no love for him, was forced to acknowledge, “in warfare, in command, in sound judgement, and in administration, he had no equal or rival”. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Malik Ambar was the fact that this Indian king, was in fact, not Indian, but African.

 

The Gates of Aurangabad

If Calcutta is the city of joy and Paris is the city of love then Aurangabad in the Indian state of Maharashtra is the city of gates. The city owes its existence to an Ethiopian by the name of Malik Ambar. Sold as a slave in childhood, he would eventually rise to become the regent of the Nizamshahi Dynasty of Ahmednagar (which later shifted its capital to Hyderabad). He turned the small village of Khadki into a modern city and equipped it with waterworks and other municipal conveniences. Khadki would eventually come to be ruled by the Mughals and Aurangzeb made it his capital when he was the appointed the viceroy of the Deccan in 1653 and it is after him that the city is named.