Aurangabad

Aurangabad is the city you come to for what lies around it. Within a hundred kilometres of this Deccan hub sit two of the most extraordinary achievements in the history of world art — the painted Buddhist caves of Ajanta and the rock-cut temples of Ellora — and between them they are reason enough for the journey. Both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, both were carved by hand out of solid basalt cliffs over centuries, and neither has any real equal anywhere on earth. If you have room in an India itinerary for just one dose of ancient rock-cut architecture, this is where to spend it.

The city itself sits on the Deccan plateau in north-central Maharashtra, roughly 330 kilometres northeast of Mumbai and about 230 kilometres from Pune. In 2023 it was officially renamed Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar — after Sambhaji, the second Chhatrapati of the Maratha Empire — though "Aurangabad" remains in wide everyday use, on railway boards, and in the airport and station codes. You will hear and see both names; they refer to the same place. The older name recalls the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, who made the city his Deccan headquarters in the late 17th century and is buried, in a deliberately austere grave, at nearby Khuldabad.

That layered history is the city's second great asset. Aurangabad wears its Mughal, Nizam and Maratha pasts openly: the Bibi Ka Maqbara, a marble mausoleum modelled closely on the Taj Mahal and often called the "Taj of the Deccan"; the formidable hill-fortress of Daulatabad, once briefly the capital of a sultan who tried to move all of Delhi here; the medieval watermill at Panchakki; and its own set of Buddhist caves on a ridge above town. It was historically known as a "City of Gates" for the many fortified gateways that ringed it, several of which still stand astride the roads.

The emotional high point, for most visitors, is Ajanta. To stand in a lamp-lit chaitya hall carved fifteen hundred years ago and see, by torch-glow, murals of the Bodhisattva Padmapani that have kept their colour and their compassion across the centuries, is one of the genuinely transporting experiences of travel in India. Ellora answers with sheer scale — above all the Kailasa Temple, a full-size Hindu temple complex chiselled top-down out of a single hillside, the largest monolithic structure of its kind in the world. The two sites are complementary rather than repetitive: Ajanta is about painting and quiet devotion, Ellora about engineering and the meeting of three faiths.

Practically, Aurangabad is a two-to-three-day destination that rewards a little planning. The caves are the anchor, but they demand attention to their closing days — Ajanta is shut on Mondays, Ellora on Tuesdays — and they lie in opposite directions from the city, so they cannot sensibly be combined into a single day. Build the trip around that, give each cave complex an unhurried half-to-full day, and use the city's own monuments to fill the gaps, and you will come away with one of the richest heritage experiences the subcontinent offers.