The town Ahmednagar was founded in 1494 by
Ahmad Nizam Shah I on the site of a more ancient city,
Bhingar. The establishment of the city is described in major contemporary historical works. One account, from Sayyid ‘Ali b. ‘Aziz Allah Tabataba’i's Burhān-i ma’āsir, notes the planned nature of the construction: An auspicious day was selected, and the surveyors, architects and builders obeyed the king’s commands, and laid out and began to build the city in with its palaces, houses, squares and shops, and laid around it fair gardens. Another chronicler, Muhammad Qasim Hindushah Astarabadi, known as Firishta, discusses the founding in his Tārīkh-i Firishta. His work suggests the design, particularly the inclusion of gardens with palaces and pavilions both inside and outside the city walls, followed the conventions of a post-Timurid city. Firishta describes: “In 900, he laid the foundation of a city in the vicinity of the Sina river, to which he gave the name of Ahmadnagar. So great exertions were made in erecting buildings by the king and his dependents, that in the short space of two years the new city rivalled Baghdad and Cairo in splendour.” It was one of the
Deccan sultanates, which lasted until its conquest by
Mughal emperor
Shah Jahan in 1636.
Aurangzeb, the last Mughal emperor, who spent the latter years of his reign, 1681–1707, in the
Deccan, died in Ahmednagar and is buried at
Khuldabad, near Aurangabad in 1707, with a small monument marking the site. In 1759, the
Peshwa of the
Marathas obtained possession of the place from
Nizam of Hyderabad and in 1795 it was ceded by the Peshwa to the Maratha chief
Daulat Rao Sindhia. In 1803 Ahmednagar was besieged by a British force under
Richard Wellesley and captured. During the
First World War, Ahmednagar was the site of a camp for Prisoners of War, mainly for
German and
Austrian civilian internees and the captured crews of German ships, but also some
Turkish soldiers captured in
Mesopotamia. On 31 May 2023,
Eknath Shinde (the
chief minister of Maharashtra) announced that Ahmednagar would be renamed "Ahilya Nagar", in honour of
Ahilyabai Holkar who was
Rani of
Indore, within the
Maratha Confederacy in the late 18th-century. Deputy chief minister
Devendra Fadnavis spoke at the same meeting, referring to Shinde's government as "pro-
Hindutva", and asked Shinde to rename the district "Ahilyanagar"; Shinde replied: "The state government has accepted your demand to rename Ahmednagar as Ahilyadevi Holkar Nagar". The
BJP demanded that Ahmednagar be renamed.
Rais Shaikh (group leader of the
Samajwadi Party in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly) said that "The
Maha Yuti government is implementing the 'Yogi pattern' of creating an illusion of development by changing the names of cities without doing anything for development" On 13 March 2024, the Maharashtra state cabinet announced that they had approved the renaming of Ahmednagar at the same time as they announced the renaming of seven railway stations in
Mumbai. ==Military base==