Aurangabad–

Mughals, Marathas and Mayhem

I have seen it all.

From the time Malik Ambar first laid my foundations as Khadki to when the great Aurangzeb made me Aurangabad, and now—oh, the irony—I sit in Maharashtra, where his tomb has become a site of modern outrage. Nagpur burns, debates rage, and I, the city, chuckle at the predictability of human nature. We have a knack for picking at old wounds, don’t we?

Let’s get one thing straight—Aurangzeb was not particularly sentimental about me. He was too busy fighting the Marathas, those lions who neither bowed nor broke. He died a tired old man, and his tomb? A modest structure in Khuldabad, left unmolested by the very people he fought so hard to subdue. Why? Because the Marathas had nothing to prove by desecrating a dead man’s grave. As the old saying goes, a lion does not eat dead meat.

Yet here we are, centuries later, arguing over legacies while forgetting that history is a many-headed beast. Aurangzeb’s legacy? A vast, overstretched empire that crumbled under its own weight, an obsession with religious orthodoxy that alienated many, and an exhaustion that left his successors squabbling like stray cats over a fishbone. The Maratha legacy? A decentralized but powerful empire that expanded from Pune to Peshawar, a confederacy of leaders who valued strategy over brute force, and, above all, a spirit of resilience that still echoes in Maharashtra’s cultural identity.

Politics aside, let’s talk about the social legacy. The Marathas did something remarkable—they allowed social mobility in an era when most were bound by caste and birth. Brahmin Peshwas rose to power, shepherds became kings, and merit spoke louder than lineage. They abolished sati, encouraged women’s education, and created an economic system that supported their vast military machine. And yet, their story, like all stories, ended with a fall—the British eventually outmaneuvered them, and the Maratha lions found themselves caged by colonial rule.

But here’s the funny thing about history: it refuses to stay buried. Every so often, people dig up old ghosts, hoping to settle scores their ancestors never asked them to fight. What does Aurangzeb care if his tomb is erased from memory? His time is done. What do the Marathas gain from another round of performative outrage? Their legacy is already written, living on in Maharashtra’s ethos, in every story of resilience and defiance against oppression.

So let them rest. Let the tomb stand—not as a shrine to a ruler’s orthodoxy, nor as a rallying point for misplaced anger, but as a simple reminder: history belongs to the living, but the dead deserve their peace.