The Marathas, Part 4 - The Wars of Svarajya

Pratapgad

10 November 1659 — Afzal Khan and the hour that changed the Deccan

Bijapur decided to finish him. The commission went to Afzal Khan, a general of enormous physical size and long experience, who had earlier been responsible for the death of Shivaji's elder brother Sambhaji at Kanakgiri. He marched out in the summer of 1659 with an army the sources put at some twelve thousand cavalry, ten thousand foot, fifteen hundred musketeers, eighty to ninety guns, eighty-five elephants and twelve hundred camels.

And on the march he did something calculated. He turned aside to Tuljapur and desecrated the image of Bhavānī — the family goddess of the Bhonsles, the deity to whom Shivaji's own devotion was well known — and then to Pandharpur, where he defiled the shrine of Viṭṭhala, the heart of the Vārkarī tradition and of Marathi devotion itself. Settled This is recorded in the Sabhāsad chronicle and in the Śivakāvya. It was not incidental vandalism; it was an attempt to enrage Shivaji into coming down from the hills to fight a pitched battle on open ground, where numbers and artillery would settle the matter in an afternoon.

Shivaji did not come down. He withdrew into the forest below Pratapgad — country so thick that a large army could not deploy in it and could barely move — and opened negotiations, proposing a personal meeting. Afzal Khan, believing he was dealing with a frightened young man, agreed to meet in a canopy at the foot of the fort, each attended by one armed man.

Shivaji came to that meeting wearing chain mail beneath his robe and a steel cap beneath his turban, with a bichvā dagger in his sleeve and the wagh nakh — the tiger claws, four curved steel blades on a bar concealed in a closed fist — on his left hand. Afzal Khan, a very large man, drew him into an embrace and struck at his back with a dagger. The mail held. Shivaji's left hand came up under the ribs and opened him with the claws; the bichvā finished it. Afzal's attendant Sayyid Banda struck at Shivaji and had his arm taken off by Jiva Mahala — hōtā jīvā mhaṇūn vāchalā śivā, "because there was Jiva, Shiva lived," is still a proverb in Maharashtra. Contested

Every element of that encounter had been prepared. The site was chosen by Shivaji: a spur below the fort reached by a path so narrow that Afzal Khan's escort could not accompany him in strength, in forest so dense that the Bijapuri army waiting below could see nothing. The canopy was erected by Maratha hands. The terms — one armed attendant each — were proposed by Shivaji through his envoy Pantājī Gopīnāth, who had spent weeks in Afzal Khan's camp assessing the man and reported that he intended treachery. Shivaji's own commanders had been positioned during the night: Netājī Pālkar's cavalry on the flank at Wai, Kānhojī Jedhe and Moropant Piṅgaḷe on the escape routes, the Māvaḷā infantry hidden in the ravines within earshot of the fort's guns.

He also, characteristically, made provision for failure. Before descending he named his succession, gave instructions for the defence of the forts if he did not return, and took leave of Jijābāī. The man who walked down that path had calculated the odds precisely and had arranged that his death would not end the enterprise.

The moment the deed was done, five cannon fired from Pratapgad — the prearranged signal — and the Māvaḷā infantry, hidden all night in the forest, came down on an army that could not form line in that ground. Netaji Palkar's cavalry took them in the flank; Kanhoji Jedhe and Moropant Pingle closed the escape routes. The Bijapuri force was annihilated: some five thousand dead, five thousand wounded, three thousand prisoners, the entire artillery train captured, against Maratha losses of about seventeen hundred. Shivaji at once pushed on to take Panhala and swept the Konkan.

Pratapgad transformed everything. A jāgīrdār's son had destroyed a sultanate field army and killed its commander with his own hand. The Deccan understood, from that day, that this was no longer a rebellion.

Pāvan Khiṇḍ

13 July 1660 — the pass that was bought

Bijapur came again, this time with the Mughals in concert. Siddi Jauhar besieged Shivaji in Panhala through the summer of 1660 with a large force and the siege held for four months. On the night of 12 July, in heavy monsoon rain, Shivaji broke out with about six hundred Māvaḷās, making for Vishalgad some sixty kilometres away. A decoy palanquin drew part of the pursuit. The rest came on.

At a narrow defile called Ghod Khind, Bājī Prabhu Deshpande — a Deshastha Brahmin who had come to Shivaji's service from the Mores of Javali, and who had become one of his most trusted commanders — took three hundred men and held the pass so that his king could reach the fort. The agreement was that Shivaji would fire the guns of Vishalgad when he was safe, and that Bājī Prabhu would hold until he heard them.

He held for hours against overwhelming numbers, fighting with a dāṇḍpaṭṭā in each hand, wounded repeatedly, and by the tradition of Maharashtra he refused to fall until the cannon of Vishalgad sounded across the hills. When they did, he died. The pass was renamed Pāvan Khiṇḍ — the sacred pass — and it is called that on the maps to this day. Smrti

Striking the Empire

Shaista Khan, Surat, Purandar

Aurangzeb, now emperor, sent his maternal uncle Shaista Khan to the Deccan in 1660 with an enormous force. Shaista Khan took Pune, Chakan and much of the north Konkan, and — with deliberate insult — established his residence in the Lal Mahal, the very house in which Shivaji had grown up with Jijābāī. For nearly three years he sat there and the Maratha position steadily worsened.

On the night of 5 April 1663, during a wedding procession that gave cover for men to be moving in the city, Shivaji entered Pune with about four hundred men, many of them disguised as part of the wedding party. He knew the house. He had the kitchen wall breached and went in with a small band directly to the harem quarters where Shaista Khan slept. In the fighting in the dark the Khan escaped through a window — leaving three fingers of his right hand behind him under Shivaji's sword. His son Abul Fath was killed, along with several of his officers and wives.

The military result was modest; the psychological result was enormous. The emperor's own uncle, in the middle of a fortified city, guarded by an imperial army, had been maimed in his bedroom. Aurangzeb recalled him in disgrace and transferred him to Bengal. Settled

Then, in January 1664, Shivaji rode north and sacked Surat — the richest port of the Mughal empire and the point of embarkation for the Hajj. He took an immense treasure in four days. The governor shut himself in the fort. And here again the conduct is the point: he ordered that women, children, mosques and the poor were not to be touched, spared the Dutch and English factories that defended themselves, and famously spared the house of Mohandas Parekh, a Hindu broker known for his charity, and the property of a Muslim merchant known for the same. He was not looting a city; he was taxing an empire that had refused to acknowledge him, and he was doing it by rules. A second raid followed in 1670.

The conduct at Surat repays attention because it was noticed at the time by hostile witnesses. The English and Dutch factories, which armed themselves and refused to pay, were left alone — he did not want a war with Europe while fighting Delhi. The house of Mohandās Pārekh, a Hindu broker of the Dutch who had died shortly before and was remembered for his charity to the poor, was placed under guard and not touched. So was the property of a Muslim merchant known for the same. The Capuchin mission of Father Ambrose was spared on Shivaji's express order because the priest was known to care for the sick. Women were not molested; the poor were not robbed; mosques were untouched. What he took, he took from the Mughal treasury and from the great merchants who financed the empire.

This was not softness and it was not public relations. It was the application of the same principle that governed everything else he did: that a state which behaved like its enemies would become its enemies, and that Svarājya had to be recognisably better to be worth founding at all. It also had a hard strategic edge — a countryside that knew Shivaji's army would not burn it gave him intelligence, supplies and recruits, while Mughal armies moved through a population that hid from them.

Purandar, 1665

Aurangzeb's answer was to send the ablest general in his service: Mirzā Rājā Jai Singh of Amber, with Dilir Khan and an army of some hundred thousand. Jai Singh did not chase; he did what none of his predecessors had done — he besieged the forts systematically, bought off the Deccan nobility, threatened the countryside, and cut Shivaji's revenue at the root. At Purandar the outwork of Vajragad fell and the fort's commander Murārbājī Deshpande died leading a suicidal sortie against Dilir Khan's lines, refusing the offer of service in the Mughal army with the reply that he was Shivaji's man.

Shivaji read the position and came to terms rather than lose everything. By the Treaty of Purandar (11 June 1665) he surrendered twenty-three of his thirty-five forts, accepted Mughal service, and agreed that his nine-year-old son Sambhaji would hold a mansab in the imperial system. It was a severe defeat. It was also a decision to preserve the state and the man, and to fight another day — and every one of those forts would be taken back within five years.

Agra

1666 — the most audacious escape in Indian history

Jai Singh persuaded him to go to Agra for an imperial audience, with guarantees. On 12 May 1666, at the durbar celebrating Aurangzeb's fiftieth birthday, Shivaji was placed among the panj-hazārī — the five-thousand rank — standing behind men he regarded as his inferiors, and behind Jaswant Singh whose troops he had beaten. He protested aloud in open court, turned his back on the Emperor of Hindustan and walked out. Settled He was placed under house arrest in the mansion of Ram Singh, Jai Singh's son, with the intention that he would be killed or immured.

He was fifteen hundred kilometres from his own country, in the enemy's capital, with his nine-year-old son. What he did next is worth telling exactly.

He began, ostentatiously, to fall ill. Then, as an act of piety for his recovery, he started sending out great baskets of sweets and fruit daily as alms to Brahmins and faqirs across the city — enormous covered baskets, carried on poles by porters. For weeks the guards searched them. Then, as the routine wore on and the searches slackened, they stopped searching. On 17 August 1666, Shivaji and Sambhaji went out through the gate inside two of those baskets. His attendant Hirojī Farzand lay in the bed wearing his master's ring and bracelet, with a servant massaging his legs, so that the guards looking through the door saw the invalid sleeping; Madari Mehtar kept the appearance up. By the time the deception was discovered they had a day and more.

The escape is usually told as an adventure. Its political dimensions are more interesting. Shivaji had spent weeks before it cultivating Ram Singh, whose father had guaranteed his safety and whose honour was engaged; he had dismissed most of his own retinue southward in stages, so that the household in Agra shrank gradually and unremarkably; and he had contrived that a substantial part of the escort should be Brahmins and mendicants whose comings and goings were unremarkable in a city of pilgrims. The basket alms were not merely a device but a genuinely conducted charity over many weeks, which is why they became invisible.

The return: eleven hundred miles as a bairāgī

The escape from the mansion was the easy half. What followed is almost never told properly, and it is the more remarkable achievement.

He was now the most wanted man in Hindustan, with every road south watched, every ferry and pass under orders, and a nine-year-old boy with him. He did not run for the Deccan. He went east — the direction nobody would search — and he changed what he was. He and his companions put on the ochre of bairāgīs, wandering mendicants, with ash on the body, begging bowls and staffs; and in that character they walked through an empire that was looking for a king.

It was the perfect disguise for exactly the reason it was available: north India in 1666 was full of religious travellers moving constantly between tīrthas, fed and lodged by householders as a matter of dharma, questioned by nobody, and beneath the notice of soldiers hunting a Maratha chieftain with an escort. A party of ascetics could cross a province without leaving a trace in any record. The tradition also holds that he moved for part of the way among the baskets and litters of a genuine pilgrim company. Smrti

At Mathurā he made the hardest decision of the journey. Sambhaji, nine years old, could not be carried at the pace required, and a child was the detail that would make the party memorable. He left the boy with the Brahmin family of Viśvāsrāo, Kṛṣṇājī and Kāśī Paṇḍit — who kept him at the risk of everything, and afterwards gave out that he had died, so that the search for him would stop. Settled He then continued east and south by way of Prayāg and Kāśī, through the Bundelkhand and Gondwana country, keeping to the pilgrim routes, and came into the Deccan through Golconda territory. He reached Raigad on 12 September 1666, having covered something over eleven hundred miles in roughly twenty-five days.

Sambhaji was brought south separately some months later, moved in stages by trusted men. The Mughal court, when it finally understood, was reduced to searching for a boy reported dead. Aurangzeb, who had beaten every opponent he ever faced, never recovered from the humiliation, and never again got Shivaji within reach.

Sinhagad and Salher

1670–1672 — the reconquest, and the first pitched victory

He spent three years rebuilding, and then in 1670 he took everything back. The emblem of that campaign is Kondana, the fort above Pune, held for the Mughals by the Rajput Udaybhan Rathod.

On the night of 4 February 1670, Tānājī Malusare — Shivaji's boyhood companion from the Māval, who had left his own son's wedding preparations to answer the summons — scaled the sheer western face of Kondana in the dark with a small party, using ropes, and opened the gate for the main body. In the fighting inside he was killed. His brother Sūryājī took command and carried the fort. The tradition holds that when Shivaji was told of the victory and the cost he said, gaḍ ālā paṇ siṃha gelā — "the fort is won, but the lion is gone" — and renamed the place Sinhagad, the Lion's Fort. Smrti Within a few months Purandar, Lohagad, Mahuli, Karnala and the rest were back. The second sack of Surat followed in October 1670, and at Vani-Dindori he destroyed the Mughal force sent to intercept his return.

The Konkan and the Siddi

Behind the famous campaigns ran a war that never ended and was never won: the struggle for the coast against the Siddis of Janjira. The Siddis — Abyssinian admirals holding a sea-fort on a rock in Murud bay, in Mughal service and supplied from the Mughal treasury — controlled the Konkan shipping lanes and raided the coastal villages of the Svarājya at will. Janjira was the one fortress Shivaji could never take: rising sheer from the water, unapproachable by land, provisioned by sea.

He tried repeatedly and with increasing ingenuity from the 1660s — naval assault, blockade, an attempt at a causeway, and finally the fortification of Padmadurg directly opposite to strangle it. None of it succeeded, and the failure is instructive: it was the precise limit of what light ships and Māvaḷā infantry could do against a stone fort with deep-water resupply, and it is why he built the fleet and the sea-forts at Sindhudurg and Vijaydurg. Sambhaji would spend much of his own reign on the same problem.

The Konkan campaigns also brought him against the English at Bombay and the Portuguese at Chaul and Bassein, and he handled both with calculated restraint — extracting recognition and trade terms while avoiding a general war with any European power while the Mughals were on his eastern frontier. It was the same instinct that spared the factories at Surat: fight one enemy at a time.

The reconquest completed

Between 1670 and 1674 he took back everything ceded at Purandar and much more: Purandar itself, Lohagad, Mahuli, Karnala, Rohida, Kalyan, Bhiwandi and the north Konkan; Panhala retaken in 1673; the Kolhapur country cleared; the southern Maratha country secured. Bijapur, exhausted and in factional collapse, could no longer hold the line of the Krishna. He raided into Khandesh and Berar. And he built Sindhudurg on its rock off Malvan — three years' work, lead poured into the foundations — as the base of the western fleet.

Then came the battle that changed the military reckoning. At Salher in early 1672, against a Mughal army under Ikhlas Khan and Bahlol Khan reckoned at some forty thousand, the Marathas under Prataprao Gujar and Moropant Pingle fought and won a pitched battle in the open field — not a raid, not an ambush, not a night attack, but a conventional engagement of the kind Maratha arms were said to be incapable of. The Mughal force was broken with heavy loss and enormous booty taken. Settled Salher demolished the assumption on which every enemy had operated: that these men could harass but could not stand.

By 1673 the Konkan was his, Panhala was retaken, the north Sahyādri was cleared, and the Bijapuri and Mughal positions in Maharashtra had both been rolled back. He held a country, an army, a navy, a revenue system and some three hundred forts. What he did not yet hold was a crown — and that, as the next part of this series takes up, was not a vanity but the last necessary act of construction.