Though, Aurangabad had gained its importance since the time of Malik Ambar, up to 1700 AD the literary achievements of that city in regard to the Urdu language are not traceable.
Sultan Alauddin Khalji (1296–1316) was the first Muslim ruler who sent a large military expedition to the Deccan in the beginning of the 14th century.
There it was influenced by regional dialects of the South and came to be known as Deccani (Dakhani) and adopted the Persian script.
Philologically speaking there always remained a good deal of difference in the Deccan and northern India's Urdu.
It was in the Deccan that Urdu had its first literary efflorescence In the courts of Golconda and Bijapur after the fall of the Bahmani Kingdom in the 16th century.
So he borrowed enormous amount of vocabulary from Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and other local languages for his Urdu verse.
In the late 17th century, the Urdu in the North came to have direct contact with Dakhani after the completion of the Mughal conquest in the Deccan (Golconda and Bijapur), under Aurangzeb.
The intellectual elite of Golconda and Bijapur migrated to Aurangabad, the secondary capital during the second half of his reign.
Aurangabad became the meeting-place, and the habitat, for the merger of north Indian and Dakhani Urdu, towards the end of the 17th century.
But after that, he adopted the language of the North, the Urdu-e-Mu'alla and he became a link between the old Dakhni and the new, rising, northern school of Urdu poetry, based in Delhi.
Apart from the historical role he played, he is a consummate artist in verse and a master of the ghazal style, which was soon imitated by the poets of Delhi.
The first great leader of Chishtiya order, Khwaja Moinuddin Hasan Ajmeri (1143–1237) reached the subcontinent around 1200.
Nizamuddin Aulia of Delhi, the fourth saint of the Chishtiya order helped in popularizing this language.
[2] Under the influence of Wali Aurangabadi’s progressive trends in the Ghazal form; some of the poets of Aurangabad also attempted it.
Some of the contemporaries of Wali, viz., Mirza Dawood, Muhammad Mah Mehram and others belonged to Aurangabad.
In one of his Ghazals, he has mentioned some of the poets of Aurangabad such as Zia, Jaffer, Yakdam, Syed, Raza and others.
A poet named Shahid (1178 AH) who hailed from Ahmedabad had settled at Aurangabad, and led the life of a Sufi.
Zaka, son of Azad Bilgrami, a well-known learned man was also a top ranking poet of Aurangabad.
Tamanna has compiled one Tazkira, Gul-i-Ajaib in 1194 A. H. The poet Qazi Muhammed Karan Bakhsh of Parbhani district was trained by Zaka.
So far as Urdu prose is concerned, after 1150 A. H. several books on history, and of Tazkiras could be traced which have been written by the writers of Aurangabad.
The author of this Tazkira is Khwaja Khan Hamid and the date of its compilation is 1165 A. H. In the same year a Tazkira Nikat-ush-Shaura was compiled by Mir Taqi Mir in which he mentioned Wali as Aurangabadi while Khwaja Khan who belonged to Aurangabad had mentioned Wali as Gujarati.
The name of the Tazkira is Riyaz-i-Hasni and the date of compilation is 1168 A. H. After 1184 A. H. there appeared slackness in the literary activities of Aurangabad.
The Nawabs, Mansabdars and the other high-ranking officers who were men of letters themselves and great patrons and lovers of art and literature, gradually left for Hyderabad as it was given the status of the capital of the Nizam's State.
Shafiq was born in 1157 A. H. His father Mansaram and he held high posts in the Asaf Jahi regime.
Shafiq had the rare distinction to be trained by Ghulam Ali Azad Bilgrami.
Some of his other works, viz., Maasir-i-Asifi, Maasir-i-Hyderi, Bisat-ul-Ghatnaim, Mirat-ul-Hind, Nakhlistan, Tazkira-i-Guru Nanak, etc., are in prose.
Shafiq's brother Lala Roop Narain Zahin also was one of the good poets of this period.
Waheed Akhtar (1934 — 1996) an Urdu poet, writer, critic, distinguished orator, scholar and philosopher was also from Aurangabad.
Later Maulvi Abdul Haqq moved the offices of Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu from Aurangabad (Deccan) to Delhi in 1938.
The Court language was Urdu even after abolition of erstwhile Hyderabad State and this continued till 1956.