#   Old Capital, New Capital: Urban Construction during the Nizams of Hyderabad, 1724-1774 

 



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Map of India with Aurangabad and Hyderabad marked in blue (Map data @2025 Google)

This project examines the relationship between two distinct cities that served as the capital of the Nizams of Hyderabad in the eighteenth century: Aurangabad and Hyderabad. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Asaf Jah I (d. 1748) became the head of a dynasty whose rulers would call themselves the Nizams of Hyderabad.1 Asaf Jah I governed from Aurangabad and transformed the city through the patronage of significant building projects. A few decades later, his descendants moved the dynasty’s capital to Hyderabad, and Aurangabad was largely abandoned as a seat of governance. Hyderabad became the illustrious capital of one of the few princely states that would resist British colonial rule, and Aurangabad—though retaining some symbolic status—was largely diminished to a provincial outpost.

While Hyderabad’s urban history during the later Nizam period has been the subject of sustained study, little scholarly attention has been paid to this early transitional moment or to Hyderabad’s relationship to Aurangabad.2 This project investigates the processes that went into the decision to move the Nizam’s capital, and examines the role that architecture and urbanism played in making this move meaningful. To better understand how the Nizams conceptualized a sense of their past, present, and future through the construction of their capitals, I have begun to map eighteenth-century Nizam construction projects in both cities, as well as the cities’ preexisting architectural footprints. Because Aurangabad and Hyderabad were used as capitals for multiple polities before the establishment of the Nizam, new architectural construction in both cities had to contend with different preexisting cityscapes. Adding to the complexity of these urban landscapes was the recent introduction of new architectural forms from northern India.

In spite of this, much of the construction patronized by the Nizams and their subjects conformed to a specific architectural style and spatial pattern. I will compare construction in both cities to reveal the ways architecture was used to create a spatial vocabulary that connected the Nizams to their political predecessors. This urban strategy was carried out in both cities, and would ultimately help create a cohesive state out of a highly cosmopolitan and multi-linguistic territory. Let us begin with Aurangabad. In a map made by the Aurangabad chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), the city is divided into multiple sections, three of which correspond with the three rulers who governed from the city in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Malik Ambar, Alamgir, and Asaf Jah I.3 One of these sections shows the area of the city developed by the prime minister of the Ahmednagar Sultanate, Malik Ambar (d.1626), who was responsible for laying the foundations of the early modern city beginning in 1610. Most of his architectural patronage was directed at the area just south of the Kham River; today, Indian National Highway 753F runs through the area where many of these buildings are located. Among the notable buildings constructed during his reign include a palace, a congregational mosque, several smaller mosques, and city gates.4 His construction project of greatest consequence, however, was an underground system built to deliver water to the new city.

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Map of Aurangabad with sultanate construction marked in yellow and Mughal construction marked in red (Map data @2025 Google)

Aurangabad expanded beyond the footprint created by Malik Ambar when it was made first a provincial capital of the Mughal Empire and then an imperial one. Most of the construction occurred when the emperor Alamgir (d. 1707) reigned from the city as governor and emperor, and was concentrated in the area of the city just north of where Malik Ambar had predominantly built. Alamgir’s walls also expanded farther south, enveloping the earlier city. A new palace was built, as well as a large garden, a lake, rest houses, a monumental tomb, notable shrines, and city gates. More water infrastructure was added.5

These are among the different urban layers that constituted Aurangabad by the time Asaf Jah I began to govern the city in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The INTACH map notes that the majority of the building construction patronized during the Nizam period inaugurated by Asaf Jah I occurred east of the area built by Malik Ambar and south of the area built during Alamgir’s rule.6 But while the map largely divides the city into discrete sections based on individual rulers, it is important to note the places where their construction overlapped. It is significant, for example, that Asaf Jah I was buried less than two hundred meters away from the Mughal emperor Alamgir in Aurangabad’s satellite town of Khuldabad. In a similar vein, the most important shrine in Aurangabad, Panchakki, received architectural patronage in the 1680s under the Mughals before undergoing significant further development in the second quarter of the eighteenth century under Asaf Jah I.7 This trend would continue even decades later, when one of Asaf Jah I’s descendants dedicated a mosque to a monumental tomb complex whose patronage is often attributed to the Mughal emperor Alamgir. This event is even more striking given that the tomb already had a mosque in place. Clearly there was a sense of political continuity between the Mughals and the Nizams that the latter were keen to emphasize. At the same time, Asaf Jah I is believed to have taken his title as Nizam not at the new Mughal palace, but at Naukhanda, the earlier sultanate palace built by Malik Ambar. Asaf Jah I also patronized several additions to the palace. His involvement at a significant sultanate site suggests that he was interested in drawing on multiple forms of authority, rather than the power of one polity alone.

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Map of Aurangabad with sultanate construction marked in yellow, Mughal construction marked in red, and Nizam construction marked in blue (Map data @2025 Google)

But it is also true that even as the Nizams declared themselves the inheritors of earlier political power through this layering of architectural construction, they were also interested in urban expansion beyond the footprints of these earlier cities. They built a new major mosque in the city known as the Shah Ganj Mosque, as well as an elaborate building known as Damri Mahal and numerous residential buildings.8 Khuldabad was not the only satellite town in which they built; a resthouse and mosque were also constructed in Ajanta, a village near the famed Ajanta caves.

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Map of Hyderabad with pre-Nizam construction marked in red and Nizam construction marked in blue (Map data @2025 Google)

Many of these observations hold true in Hyderabad as well. Although the Mughal emperor Alamgir did not build nearly as extensively in Hyderabad as he had in Aurangabad, the polity that had ruled the city before the Mughals annexed it—the Golconda Sultanate—patronized several important buildings near which the Nizams constructed their own. One example is Golconda Fort, whose walls the Nizams extended.9 The Nizams built their new palace in the vicinity of another architectural display of sultanate power, the Char Minar, and the four monumental arches, or Char Kaman, that surround it. They also restored the sultanate-period Ashoorkhana, which had been turned into a stable by the Mughal emperor Alamgir in 1764-65.10 Thus, as at Aurangabad, the Nizams linked their architectural program to the power of a polity that had come before them. Further mirroring their urban development in Aurangabad, the Nizams also expanded Hyderabad and carried out additional infrastructural projects. Overall, symbolic continuity and urban expansion seemed to be the priority at both capitals.

In the following century, significant additional construction would be undertaken, integrating forms associated with sultanate, Mughal, and European architecture. The Nizams would fully break off from the Mughals and become their own state. And yet they would maintain ties to Aurangabad through the similarities in their early urban construction choices and their annual pilgrimages to the grave of Alamgir in the satellite town of Khuldabad. All of this would contribute to their conceptualization of the State of Hyderabad, a coherent geopolitical region that extended from Aurangabad nearly to the Bay of Bengal and included the present-day states of Maharashtra, Telangana, and Karnataka. Continued mapping and comparisons of their construction efforts—notably with other Mughal successor states, such as Awadh and Bengal—would be particularly fruitful in shedding further light on the role of architecture and urbanism in the lives of empires, especially as they transitioned out of the hands of one dynasty into another.

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Map of the State of Hyderabad in 1909 (From the *Imperial Gazetteer of India*, 1909, Wikimedia Commons)

Researcher: Rachel Hirsch