Aurangabad

The city takes its name from Aurangzeb, who governed the Deccan from here and is buried, by his own wish, in a plain open-air grave at Khuldabad up the road. Since 2023 it has officially been Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar; you will hear both names, often in the same sentence. Before the Mughals, Muhammad bin Tughlaq tried to move the capital of all Hindustan to the hill fort at Daulatabad in 1327, marching Delhi south with him. It lasted a few years.

But the real reason anyone comes is older and lies outside town. For roughly a thousand years, monks, kings and craftsmen cut temples and monasteries into the basalt of the Sahyadri foothills — first at Ajanta, in a horseshoe gorge, then at Ellora, along a long escarpment. Aurangabad is simply the place where you sleep between them.

Ajanta is about colour: Buddhist murals from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE, the faces of bodhisattvas still legible in the half-light. Ellora is about mass. Its thirty-four caves are Buddhist, Hindu and Jain side by side, and Cave 16, the Kailasa temple, was cut from the top of a single rock downward in the eighth century — a full two-storey temple, carved in place, with nothing added and nothing that could be put back.

The city itself is courtly Deccani. Bibi Ka Maqbara, built in the 1660s by Aurangzeb's son for his mother, is a deliberate echo of the Taj, smaller and less perfect, and more touching for it. Himroo and Paithani weavers still work on handlooms here. Eat naan qalia — a mutton stew with flatbread, a dish the town traces back to Tughlaq's soldiers — or tahri, the spiced rice, and finish at a bakery with a plate of shirmal.

Ajanta closes on Mondays and Ellora on Tuesdays — the single most common way to lose a day here. At Ellora, start at the Jain caves at the far northern end and walk back towards Kailasa, against the flow of tour groups. Then climb the path above Kailasa and look down into it; only from the top do you understand that it was excavated, not built. At Ajanta, carry a small torch and patience — the murals reveal themselves slowly, and the guards are right to limit light.

The paintings at Ajanta have survived fifteen centuries and are now threatened mainly by breath, sweat and flash. Never touch the walls, keep the flash off, and go in smaller groups. Buy Himroo or Paithani from weavers' cooperatives rather than showrooms, and dress for temples at Grishneshwar, which is a living shrine, not a stop on a tour.

The road west leads to Nashik, four hours away — the Godavari's sacred ghats, its own two-thousand-year-old Buddhist caves at Pandavleni, and the Trimbakeshwar Jyotirlinga, which completes the pilgrimage Grishneshwar begins.