Unmarked, Unnoticed, Austerly Simple And Open Grave Of Aurangzeb Alamgeer — Last Great Mughal Emperor

Simple and austere grave of Aurangzeb

Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgeer was many things to many people but who was he? While all of Aurangzeb’s forefathers had grand resting places, he chose a bare minimum one and even decided to pay for it from his own personal expenses. Why did he choose to do that? It is hard to describe how simple the grave is. There’s hardly anything around it. There’s a simple grave with a plant at the center surrounded by mud which is covered with a white cloth lead through a non-descript lane you have to walk via dusty other lanes with nothing, no structure worth noting on the way to it — the whole journey to his grave perplexes your brain.

I had never before given the last great Mughal’s final resting place a thought, probably because nobody spoke of it. The emperor was not so much known for aesthetic sense as for orthodoxy, ruthlessness and puritanism, in stark contrast with the sybaritic tastes, connoisseurship and liberalism of his forefathers. No wonder they were entombed in such stately mausoleums by which they are still remembered. The first Mughal, Babur, was buried in a garden named after himself in Afghanistan. Akbar constructed the tomb of his father, Humayun, in Delhi, and it is the first of the grand dynastic mausoleums that came to symbolize the magnificence and elegance of…