Aurangzeb spent the last twenty-five years of his reign in the Deccan, annexing the Muslim sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda and attempting to destroy the Maratha polity founded by Shivaji; he captured and executed Shivaji's son Sambhaji in 1689 but, as Britannica notes, even after nearly two decades of struggle he failed to subdue the Marathas. The war was fought as a series of sieges and scorched-earth raids across a wide plateau, with both sides living off the country; contemporary chroniclers describe deserted villages, abandoned cultivation and famine, and a severe famine and plague in the Deccan in the opening years of the eighteenth century that court chronicle attributes with a death toll around two million — a figure from a single chronicle tradition that cannot be verified. Aurangzeb also reversed his predecessors' policy towards non-Muslims, reimposing the jizya in 1679, prohibiting the building and repair of Hindu temples and ordering demolitions. His religious policy is the subject of sharp modern dispute: it is central to Hindu nationalist accounts of Mughal rule, while historians including Audrey Truschke argue that temple destruction was targeted and political rather than systematic, a reading that is itself contested. The demographic cost of the Deccan wars has never been reconstructed.
Aurangzeb moved the Mughal court and army to the Deccan for a quarter-century, annexing Bijapur and Golconda and campaigning against the Marathas, at enormous cost to the region's population
Shireen Moosvi's reconstruction from the Ain-i-Akbari puts Mughal India at roughly 145 million around 1600, and Maddison's series gives about 165 million for the subcontinent in 1700, but neither can be disaggregated to Bijapur, Golconda and the Maratha country with any confidence, and no revenue survey of the newly annexed Deccan comparable to the northern Mughal records survives for the war years. Contemporary accounts describe famine and heavy mortality in the Deccan in the 1690s and 1700s without giving numbers.
No defensible total. Contemporary chroniclers report famine and plague in the Deccan in the early 1700s killing on the order of two million, but the figure comes from court chronicle rather than any count and cannot be tested; deaths in the sieges, raids and reprisals of the quarter-century war were never recorded systematically by either side.
The execution of Sambhaji in 1689, the devastation of the countryside by both armies, and the orders to demolish Hindu temples and schools are recorded in Mughal court chronicles and imperial orders and summarised in the Britannica account.
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