In 1681 the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb moved south with his court and his army, and spent the last twenty-six years of his reign in the Deccan. He never returned to Delhi. The immediate object was to destroy the Maratha state founded by Shivaji, who had died in 1680; the wider one was to bring the Deccan sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda under direct Mughal rule.
Both sultanates were annexed — Bijapur in 1686, Golconda in 1687 — which extended Mughal administration to the peninsula’s eastern and western coasts and gave the empire its greatest territorial extent. The Marathas were not destroyed. After Shivaji’s son Sambhaji was captured and executed in 1689, the Maratha resistance continued under Rajaram and then under Tarabai, and the Mughal armies found that defeating a Maratha field force did not remove the state that had produced it.
The wars were ruinously expensive, and the cost fell on the rest of the empire. Revenue demands rose across the north to fund the Deccan campaigns, and the jagir system — which allocated land revenue to military commanders in return for troops — was strained by the shortage of assignable land. The far-flung conquests were held by governors who were hard to control once the emperor’s attention was fixed in the south, and the imperial army itself became a standing force tied to one theatre rather than a set of contingents that dispersed after each campaign.
The Deccan wars are commonly read as the point at which the Mughal state reached its widest extent while beginning the military and fiscal exhaustion that its successors inherited. Aurangzeb died at Ahmadnagar in 1707, and the Maratha state that his campaigns were meant to end expanded across central and northern India within a generation of his death.
