Ajanta or Ajantha is a village in

Aurangabad district, Maharashtra Aurangabad district (Marathi pronunciation: Help:IPA/Marathi, �u̯ɾəŋɡaːbaːd̪, officially known as Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district, is one of the 36 Districts of Maharashtra, districts of the state of Maharashtra in western India. ...

, on the road between

Jalgaon Jalgaon () is a city in the state of Maharashtra, India. The city is located in North Maharashtra in the subregion of Khandesh, and serves as the administrative headquarters of its namesake district, the Jalgaon district. In the subregion of ...

and

Aurangabad Aurangabad (), officially renamed as Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar in 2023, is a city in the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the administrative headquarters of Aurangabad district and is the largest city in the Marathwada region. Located on a ...

near the

Ajanta Caves The Ajanta Caves are 30 rock-cut architecture, rock-cut Buddhist caves in India, Buddhist cave monuments dating from the second century Common Era, BCE to about 480 CE in Aurangabad district, Maharashtra, Aurangabad district of Maharashtra sta ...

Geography

It has an average elevation of .

History

The

were discovered in 1819 by John Smith during his hunting party in the region, but the village is much more ancient. It has been ruled by many rulers including

Nizam Shahi The Ahmadnagar Sultanate was a medieval Marathi Muslim kingdom located in the northwestern Deccan, between the sultanates of Gujarat and Bijapur, ruled by the Nizam Shahi dynasty. It was established when Malik Ahmed, the Bahmani governor of ...

Mughals The Mughal Empire was an early modern empire in South Asia. At its peak, the empire stretched from the outer fringes of the Indus River Basin in the west, northern Afghanistan in the northwest, and Kashmir in the north, to the highlands of pre ...

Rajput Rājpūt (, from Sanskrit ''rājaputra'' meaning "son of a king"), also called Thākur (), is a large multi-component cluster of castes, kin bodies, and local groups, sharing social status and ideology of genealogical descent originating fro ...

and

Maratha The Marathi people (; Marathi: , ''Marāṭhī lōk'') or Marathis (Marathi: मराठी, ''Marāṭhī'') are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group who are native to Maharashtra in western India. They natively speak Marathi, an Indo-A ...

. It is believed that the village came into existence at the end of 3rd century under the Vakataka Empire

Vakataka dynasty The Vakataka dynasty () was an ancient Indian dynasty that originated from the Deccan in the mid-3rd century CE. Their state is believed to have extended from the southern edges of Malwa and Gujarat in the north to the Tungabhadra River in t ...

and was a Buddhist dynasty based on Archeological evidence. Ajanta became a prominent village for the

after the victory of

Shah Jahan Shah Jahan I, (Shahab-ud-Din Muhammad Khurram; 5 January 1592 – 22 January 1666), also called Shah Jahan the Magnificent, was the Emperor of Hindustan from 1628 until his deposition in 1658. As the fifth Mughal emperor, his reign marked the ...

in the Siege of Daulatabad Fort in 1632. After the successful campaign, Shah Jahan granted Ajanta village, Vetalwadi and Janjala fort to the

Sardar Nathu Singh son of Maharawal BHIM SINGH of

Jaisalmer Jaisalmer , nicknamed ''The Golden city'', is a city in the north-western Indian state of Rajasthan, located west of the state capital Jaipur, in the heart of the Thar Desert. It serves as the administrative headquarters of Jaisalmer district ...

for his bravery in the war.

References

Villages in Aurangabad district, Maharashtra {{Maharashtra-geo-stub