The Marathas, Part 5 - Chhatrapati

Why a Crown Was Necessary

The problem of legitimacy in a world of sultans

By 1673 Shivaji Maharaj held more territory, more forts and more revenue than several recognised kings of his day. He had beaten Bijapur in the field, maimed the Mughal viceroy in his own bedchamber, escaped the imperial capital, retaken every fort he had ceded, and won a pitched battle at Salher. And yet in the legal imagination of seventeenth-century India he remained what his enemies called him: a bhonsla, a jāgīrdār's son, a rebel zamindar in arms. His treaties had no standing. His grants could be repudiated. His officers held rank by his personal favour and nothing more. The moment he died, the whole structure could be argued out of existence.

The problem was not vanity; it was constitutional. In that world sovereignty was conferred either by the Mughal emperor — which meant vassalage — or by the sacral order, which for a Hindu state meant a proper rājyābhiṣeka performed according to śāstra. There had been no such consecration of an independent sovereign in the Deccan for three hundred and fifty-six years, since Devagiri fell. The rite had, as a matter of practice, lapsed. So had the institutional memory of how to perform it.

There was a further difficulty, and it should be stated plainly rather than skirted. Sections of the orthodox establishment questioned whether the Bhonsles could be consecrated as Kṣatriyas at all, the family having no recent documented royal genealogy. Shivaji met this the way he met everything: with evidence and with expertise. His secretary Bālājī Āvjī Prabhu assembled the genealogy tracing the Bhonsles to the Sisodias of Mewar, the purest of the Rajput lines; embassies gathered precedent from Mewar and Amber on the correct form of the rite; and a body of learned men went through the Sanskrit texts and the Smṛtis to reconstruct a procedure that had fallen out of use.

And to preside he brought Gāgā Bhaṭṭa — Viśveśvara Bhaṭṭa of Vārāṇasī, master of the four Vedas, the six darśanas and the whole body of śāstra, the most eminent authority of his generation. That a Kāśī paṇḍit of that standing travelled the length of India to consecrate a Deccan king is itself the historical statement: the tradition's own custodians had judged the enterprise legitimate. Settled

6 June 1674

Raigad — the Rajyabhisheka

The site was Raigad, the fort he had made his capital: a flat-topped mountain in the Sahyādri approached by a single stair of some fourteen hundred steps, with sheer falls on every side, chosen precisely because it could not be stormed.

The preparations ran for weeks. He undertook prāyaścitta and was invested with the sacred thread, the yajñopavīta; he was remarried to his queens by Vedic rite; he made pilgrimage to the great temples of his country. Water was fetched from the seven sacred rivers — Gaṅgā, Yamunā, Sindhu, Godāvarī, Narmadā, Kṛṣṇā and Kāverī — and carried up to the fort. Some fifty thousand people gathered on the mountain. Learned men, envoys and merchants came from across India; the English factor Henry Oxinden attended on behalf of Bombay, and his account survives.

On the morning of 6 June 1674 Shivaji rose early, worshipped, and took his seat on a gold-plated stool with Soyarābāī to his left and the crown prince Sambhaji behind him. His ministers poured the sacred waters over his head from golden vessels while the mantras were chanted; Gāgā Bhaṭṭa held above him a vessel pierced with holes through which the water fell continuously. Brahmin women waved lamps around his head. He changed into scarlet, put on the ornaments of kingship, worshipped his weapons, and — before anything else — went to Jijābāī and touched her feet. She had raised him for this and she died twelve days later.

He then took his seat on a throne of gold under the white umbrella, the chatra, and was proclaimed Kṣatriya-kulāvataṃsa Śrī Rājā Śiva Chhatrapati. He then insisted on a second and far more remarkable rite, and it is the single most significant fact about the whole ceremony.

The Indrābhiṣeka is the great consecration described in the Brāhmaṇa literature — the rite by which a king is made not merely a rājā of his own country but a sovereign in the likeness of Indra, lord of the gods, with all that implies of paramountcy over other kings. It belongs to the same family of imperial rituals as the rājasūya and the aśvamedha, and it is not something a local ruler performs. It had fallen entirely out of use in India since about the ninth century — that is, for some eight hundred years, through the entire period of the sultanates and the Mughal empire, no Indian sovereign had been consecrated by it, because there had been no Hindu sovereign in a position to claim what it claims. Settled

Shivaji had it performed. The learned men had to reconstruct the procedure from the texts because there was no living memory of it. And the meaning of that insistence is unmistakable: he was not asking to be recognised as a successful chieftain, or as a king by the courtesy of his neighbours, or as a Mughal vassal with a grand title. He was reaching over the whole intervening age of subjection — over the Mughals, over the sultanates, over the fall of Devagiri, back past Talikota and Hemu to the last period in which this land had crowned its own emperors — and taking up the rite exactly where it had been set down. It was a claim of continuity: that the interruption, however long, had been an interruption and not an ending, and that the line of Hindu sovereignty was being resumed rather than invented. A second ceremony followed on 24 September 1674 in the Bengali Tantric rite, performed by Nischal Puri Gosavi.

What was proclaimed with it

The apparatus of sovereignty was declared at the same moment, and each element was a deliberate act of independence. A new era was inaugurated — the Rājyābhiṣeka Śaka, dated from that day, so that Maharashtra's public documents no longer counted years by the Hijri or by an emperor's regnal year. New coinage was struck in his own name: the gold hoṇ and the copper Śivarāī. And the Rājamudrā, the royal seal, was cut in Sanskrit — the seal he had in fact used since his teens:

प्रतिपच्चन्द्रलेखेव वर्धिष्णुर्विश्ववन्दिता । शाहसूनोः शिवस्यैषा मुद्रा भद्राय राजते ॥

"Like the crescent of the first day, ever-waxing, revered by the world — this seal of Śiva, son of Shāha, shines for the welfare of the people."

Note what that verse claims and what it does not. It does not boast of conquest. It says the kingdom will grow like the new moon and that its purpose is bhadra — the welfare of the people. And it is in Sanskrit, in a Deccan whose chanceries had conducted their business in Persian for three and a half centuries. He also commissioned the *Rājavyavahārakośa*, a lexicon compiled by Raghunāth Paṇḍit replacing some fourteen hundred Persian and Arabic administrative terms with Sanskrit equivalents — a deliberate act of linguistic decolonisation two hundred and fifty years before the phrase existed. Settled

"This kingdom is the will of the Divine." — Shivaji Maharaj's own words in a letter of his youth, and the entire political programme of his life in a single line.

What Hindavī Svarājya Meant

The idea, precisely stated

The phrase is often used loosely. It repays being taken apart.

Svarājya — sva, one's own; rājya, rule — is self-rule: government of this land by its own people, under its own law, answerable to no external sovereign. Not autonomy granted by a superior. Not a favourable settlement within someone else's empire. Sovereignty, held in one's own right, defended by one's own arms.

Hindavī locates that self-rule: of the people of Hind, of this land and its dharma. It is the assertion that the natural and rightful government of Bharata is that of its own civilisation — the position that three and a half centuries of sultanate and imperial rule had denied by force.

The practical content of the idea, as he actually implemented it, had four parts:

First, sovereignty must be real and legally complete — hence the coronation, the era, the coinage, the seal, the Sanskrit chancery. A state that dates its documents by another man's calendar is not free.

Second, the state exists for the ryot. The Rājamudrā says bhadrāya, for welfare. His revenue system, examined below, was built on that premise and it is the most under-appreciated part of his achievement.

Third, the sacred order is to be protected and restored. He repaired and endowed temples that had been thrown down, gave land grants to shrines, maṭhas and schools, restored the Vārkarī sites his enemies had defiled, abolished pilgrimage taxes, and honoured Tukārām and Samartha Rāmdās. He also performed śuddhi — bringing back into the fold those who had been converted by force — in a period when the orthodox view was that this could not be done. He had his own brother-in-law Bajaji Nimbalkar reconverted and then married his daughter into the family, staking his personal prestige on the principle. Netaji Palkar, forcibly converted after being taken by the Mughals, was likewise received back. Settled

The restoration was concrete, not rhetorical. He rebuilt and endowed the temple at Tuljapur after Afzal Khan's desecration, and the Bhavānī there remained the family deity of the house. He restored Pandharpur and confirmed the Vārkarī endowments. He gave grants to the Śṛṅgerī and other maṭhas, to Brahmin settlements, to Sanskrit schools and to the maṭhas of Samartha Rāmdās — to whom he is said to have offered his kingdom, and who returned it with the instruction to govern it as a trust. He built the Jagadīśvara temple on Raigad within the fort itself. He abolished the pilgrimage tax that had been levied at tīrthas under sultanate rule, and he ended the practice of forced labour on state works.

Fourth, and decisively, dharma governs the conduct of the state itself. Svarājya was not defined as revenge. He forbade the harming of women and non-combatants, protected mosques and churches, forbade the destruction of the Qur'an, and employed Muslims at every level including the command of his artillery and his navy. This is what distinguishes the Maratha enterprise from a mere counter-conquest, and it is why it deserves the name of a civilisational restoration rather than a reprisal.

The Machinery of the State

Ashta Pradhan, revenue, and the abolition of the jagir

He formalised at the coronation a council of eight ministers, the Aṣṭapradhān, each holding a department and each answerable directly to him:

Peśvā (Mukhya Pradhān) — general administration and finance, first among the ministers; Amātya (Majumdār) — accounts and audit; Sacīv (Surnīs) — correspondence and royal records; Mantrī (Vāqenavīs) — the king's person, intelligence and daily record; Senāpati (Sar-i-Naubat) — command of the army; Sumant (Ḍabīr) — foreign affairs; Nyāyādhīś — justice; Paṇḍitrāo — religious affairs, charities and endowments.

The Sanskrit designations were themselves a statement. Every neighbouring administration — Bijapuri, Golconda, Mughal — conducted its business in Persian, with Persian titles: vazīr, mīr bakhshī, dīwān, qāzī. Shivaji replaced the entire vocabulary. The Peśvā was the Mukhya Pradhān; the Ḍabīr became the Sumant; the Nyāyādhīś displaced the qāzī in the state's own courts. The Rājavyavahārakośa extended this across the whole administrative language, and it is worth noting what a deliberate and difficult undertaking that was: a working government does not change its technical vocabulary casually, and doing so in the middle of a war of survival tells one exactly how central the point was held to be.

The crucial features are structural, and they are what make this a state rather than a war-band. No office was hereditary. Ministers were appointed on merit, transferred frequently, and dismissed at need. Six of the eight were expected to take the field in war. And the whole council was advisory — the Chhatrapati was not bound by it. Against the hereditary, patrimonial, faction-ridden nobility of every neighbouring power, this was a bureaucracy in embryo. Settled

The revenue settlement

Here lies the reform that mattered most to the largest number of people. Shivaji abolished the jāgīrdārī system wherever he could impose his will, and paid his officers and soldiers in cash from the treasury. The significance is hard to overstate: under jāgīrdārī, a commander was assigned a district and extracted his own pay from its peasants, which guaranteed extortion, guaranteed local warlordism, and guaranteed that the state's servants had a private territorial interest. Cutting that link made the army an instrument of the state rather than a confederation of squeezing landlords.

In its place came a ryotwārī settlement: the government dealt directly with the cultivator. Land was surveyed with the measuring rod, the kāṭhī, on a system adapted from Malik Ambar's Deccan reforms. The state's share was fixed at a defined proportion of the produce — around thirty per cent initially, later raised — and the cultivator could pay in cash or in kind, and in instalments. The powers of the hereditary deśmukhs, deśpāṇḍes, pāṭils and kulkarṇīs were curbed and their accounts audited. In famine or natural calamity, the state advanced loans, seed and cattle to the peasantry, recoverable in easy instalments. Oppressive levies including the pilgrimage tax and forced labour were abolished. Settled

Outside Svarājya proper, in territory he could raid but not administer, he levied cauth (a quarter of the assessed revenue) and sardeśmukhī (a further tenth, claimed on the legal fiction that he was hereditary chief deśmukh). Historians dispute their character — Ranade held cauth to be a payment for protection against third parties, comparable in function to a subsidiary alliance; Jadunath Sarkar held it to be simply the price of not being raided. Contested Either way it was the fiscal instrument that funded the state and, later, the empire.

How He Actually Governed

Justice, language, society, and the daily texture of Svarajya

The institutions are documented; what they felt like from below is harder to recover, but the surviving orders give a good deal.

On justice. The Nyāyādhīś administered a system based on Hindu law with the village pañcāyat retained as the court of first instance, so that most disputes were settled locally by men the parties knew. Appeals ran upward to the district and to the Chhatrapati himself, who heard cases in person. The penalties were severe by modern standards and applied without reference to rank — the mutilation of the Patil of Ranza in 1645 for rape was inflicted on a hereditary village headman, which was the point of it. Bribery of officials was punished heavily. Judicial office was not hereditary and not for sale.

On the army. Pay was in cash, monthly, from the treasury, and Shivaji's orders on campaign conduct were read to the troops. No woman was to be taken or touched. No cultivator was to be robbed. Nothing was to be requisitioned without payment in the Svarājya's own territory. Plunder taken from the enemy belonged to the state and was accounted for; a soldier who concealed loot was punished. Officers were forbidden to keep women in camp. Troops were dispersed to their villages in the monsoon, when campaigning stopped, and drew reduced pay — a system that kept the army rooted in the countryside it defended rather than becoming a separate predatory caste. Settled

On merit and society. His commanders came from every community of the Deccan — Māvaḷā cultivators like Tānājī and Yesājī, Deshastha and Chitpāvan Brahmins like Bājī Prabhu, Murārbājī, Moropant Piṅgaḷe and Aṇṇājī Datto, Prabhus like Bālājī Āvjī and Murārbājī, Bhaṇḍārīs and Kolis in the fleet, Muslims like Siddi Ibrāhīm, Daulat Khan and Ibrāhīm Khān. Promotion followed ability and no office was inherited. This is not a modern gloss on the record; it is what the record shows, and it was the sharpest possible contrast with the hereditary, faction-ridden nobilities of Bijapur, Golconda and Agra, where birth and court intrigue decided everything.

On the countryside. The most telling single fact about his rule is the one contemporaries noticed with surprise: the Deccan countryside under Shivaji filled up. Villages that had been abandoned during the sultanate wars were resettled; cultivation extended; the population of the Svarājya rose. Peasants moved into his territory from Bijapuri and Mughal districts because a cultivator there kept a defined share of his own crop, dealt with the state directly rather than through a revenue-farmer, was not subject to forced labour, would be lent seed and cattle in a bad year, and knew his village would not be burned by his own side. That is what Hindavī Svarājya meant to the overwhelming majority of the people who lived in it.

Forts and the Sea

Three hundred and seventy strongholds, and the founding of an Indian navy

His military system rested on two pillars, and both were unconventional.

The first was the fort. At his height he controlled some three hundred and seventy — a number no other Indian power approached — built, rebuilt or captured, and organised into a defensive lattice covering the Sahyādri, the Konkan and the ghats. Each was held under a deliberately divided command: a havāldār, a sabnīs and a sarnobat, of different backgrounds, each reporting separately, so that no single officer could sell a fort. Garrisons were paid in cash, provisioned for long sieges, and equipped with the enormous rock-cut water cisterns that are still the most impressive thing about Raigad, Rajgad and Sinhagad. In July 2025, twelve of these forts were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The system was graded. Giri-durga were hill forts — Raigad, Rajgad, Pratapgad, Sinhagad, Torna, Panhala — sited on scarps and reached by a single defensible approach. Jala-durga were sea forts, built on rock islands offshore. Vana-durga were forest strongholds, and bhūmi-durga plains forts. Each had its own cisterns, granaries, magazines and, at the larger ones, a mint, a court and a treasury. Raigad had a market street with covered shops, a durbar hall with an acoustic design still remarked on, and a rope-way for hauling supplies up the cliff.

The regulations survive and they are the least romantic and most revealing documents of the reign. Garrison commanders were forbidden to admit anyone after dark. Supplies were to be bought at market rates from the surrounding villages, never requisitioned. Firewood was to be cut only from designated areas so that the fort's cover was not stripped. Fresh grain was to be laid in before the monsoon and the old stock issued first. A commander who lost a fort by negligence lost his family's property; a commander who held one was rewarded from the treasury. He built the forts to be held by men who had no reason to sell them and every reason not to.

The second was the navy — and here he stands alone among Indian rulers of his age. Every other power treated the sea as someone else's element and left it to the Portuguese, the English, the Dutch and the Siddis. Shivaji began building warships in the creeks at Kalyan and Bhiwandi around 1654, and a Portuguese despatch of that period reports with alarm that "a son of Shahji, rebel captain" was constructing ships of war at Bhiwandi, Kalyan and Panvel — the earliest reference to the Maratha fleet, and it comes from a frightened rival. Settled

He built to a doctrine he stated himself: jalameva yasya, balameva tasya — "he who commands the sea commands all." His fleet grew to some two hundred vessels: fast, shallow-draught grābs and gallivats that could not trade broadsides with a European man-of-war and were never intended to, designed instead to swarm, board and vanish into creeks no deep-keeled ship could follow — gaṇimī kāvā carried onto the water. He raised sea-forts at Sindhudurg, Vijaydurg, Suvarnadurg and Padmadurg, and manned his ships largely with Koli and Bhaṇḍārī fishermen who had known that coast from childhood. His admirals included Māynāk Bhaṇḍārī, Daulat Khan and Daryāsāraṅg. He is rightly called the father of the Indian navy.

Samartha Rāmdās

The Brahma-tejas behind the Kshatra-tejas

No account of Hindavī Svarājya is complete without the man who gave it its vocabulary, and he is usually reduced to a single line as "Shivaji's guru," which does justice to neither of them.

Nārāyaṇ Thōsar was born in 1608 at Jamb near present-day Aurangabad, a Deshastha Brahmin boy who lost his father at seven and turned inward. The tradition holds that at twelve, seated before his bride at his own wedding, he heard the words sāvadhāna — "be alert" — spoken in the ceremony, took them as addressed to himself, and walked out. Smrti He spent twelve years at Panchavati on the Godavari in austerity and japa of the Rāma mantra, then twelve more walking the length of Bharata — to Rameshwaram, to Kashi, to Badrinath, to the Indus — and what he saw on that walk made him what he became. He travelled a country whose temples were broken, whose people were taxed for their faith, and whose sacred places were held by others. He came back and stopped being a solitary.

What he built

His answer was organisation. He founded maṭhas and Hanumān temples across Maharashtra and into Karnataka and the Tamil country — the tradition counts them in the high hundreds and up to eleven hundred, with eleven principal seats of Māruti established as a deliberate network. The choice of Hanumān as the emblem was itself the doctrine: strength, discipline, physical culture and absolute service placed at the disposal of dharma. His maṭhas taught wrestling and exercise alongside recitation. He appointed disciples to run them, including women — Veṇābāī was made head of the maṭha at Miraj — which in the seventeenth century was not a small thing.

His works are the intellectual charter of the Maratha revival. The Dāsbodh, composed largely in the cave at Shivthar and completed at Sajjangad, is a dāśaka-by-dāśaka dialogue between guru and disciple running to some seven and a half thousand verses; and its distinguishing quality is that it refuses the split between the spiritual and the worldly. It teaches Advaita and it also teaches how to organise, how to judge men, how to speak in public, how to keep accounts, why laziness produces only ephemeral pleasure and effort produces lasting good. The Manace Ślok are two hundred and five verses addressed to one's own mind, still recited daily in Maharashtrian households. And the Ānandavana-bhuvana is frankly political — a vision of the land restored, the temples standing, the people free, written while none of that was true. Settled

The meeting, and what it was and was not

Here the record requires care, because the relationship has been both exaggerated and dismissed. The two met in 1649 — and 1649 is after the oath at Raireshwar, after Torna and Rajgad, after Shivaji had already taken his first forts and declared his purpose. Rāmdās did not create Shivaji; the man and the project were formed before they met, chiefly by Jijābāī. Contested What Rāmdās did was something else and arguably larger: he supplied the enterprise with a public philosophy, a network of institutions across the countryside that carried it, and the moral authority of the tradition's own teacher.

Shivaji took him as rājaguru, visited him for counsel throughout his life, and gave him the fort of Parali — renamed Sajjangad, the fort of the virtuous — as his permanent seat, together with land for the maṭhas.

And there is the episode that Maharashtra has never let go of. The tradition holds that Shivaji, in the fullness of his devotion, wrote out a deed making over his entire kingdom to his guru and sent it to him. Rāmdās read it and returned it, saying that it is not for a sannyāsī to rule a kingdom — take it back and govern it. Then he tore a strip of saffron cloth from his own robe and gave it to Shivaji: take this as your banner, and uphold dharma. From that came the bhagavā jheṅḍā, the saffron standard of the Marathas. And from it came the constitutional idea that governed the rest of the reign — that Shivaji ruled not as owner of the kingdom but as trustee of it, its real sovereignty lying with the dharma he served. He is said to have placed his guru's sandals on the throne and reigned as regent under them. Smrti

Rāmdās outlived him by two years. On Shivaji's death he wrote to Sambhaji a letter of counsel that is still read as a small masterpiece of political instruction — telling the new Chhatrapati to hold together the men his father had gathered, to remember what had been built and at what cost, and to keep the work rather than the grief. He took samādhi at Sajjangad in 1682, with the Rāma mantra on his lips.

The other great presence should be named beside him. Tukārām of Dehu, the Vārkarī poet, was of an entirely different temper — no organisation, no politics, no maṭhas, only the abhaṅgas and an uncompromising devotion. Shivaji honoured him and is said to have sent him gifts, which he refused. Between them the two saints covered the whole ground: Rāmdās gave the movement its organisation and its call to action, Tukārām gave the people the interior life that made them worth organising. The Svarājya stood on both.

In His Own Words

The letters, the orders, and the mind behind the state

He wrote a great deal, and what survives is the best evidence there is for how he thought. The corpus — letters, sanads, campaign orders, revenue instructions — is administrative rather than literary, and that is precisely what makes it valuable: it is a man talking to his own officers about how the thing is actually to be done.

The earliest statement

The letter written in his teens to Dādojī Koṇḍadev contains the sentence that is now inscribed on the memory of Maharashtra: that this kingdom should come to be is the will of the Divine — hē rājya vhāvē hī śrīñcī icchā. It is worth registering what an extraordinary thing that is for a boy of fifteen or sixteen in a Bijapuri jāgīr to write down. It is not a wish and not a boast. It is a claim about legitimacy: that sovereignty here is not the Sultan's to grant, and its restoration is a religious obligation rather than a personal ambition. Everything he did for the next thirty-five years follows from that sentence. Settled

The letter on the jizya

When Aurangzeb reimposed the jizya on non-Muslims in 1679, Shivaji wrote to him about it. The letter survives and is among the most remarkable documents of the century.

Its method is the thing to notice. It opens in the elaborate courtesy of the age — the writer describes himself as a well-wisher rendering thanks for the emperor's favour — and then proceeds to take Aurangzeb apart on his own ground. It points out that the treasury has been emptied by the war in the Deccan and that the tax is therefore a confession of failure, not an act of piety. It observes that Akbar, Jāhāngīr and Shāh Jahān ruled long and prosperously without it, and that their tolerance was the foundation of the empire's strength. It argues from within Islam that God is the Lord of all mankind, not of Muslims alone, and that the mosque and the temple alike are raised to His name. And it says that to levy the tax on the poorest — on cultivators and the destitute — is not piety but extortion, and would disgrace the name of the house of Timur. Settled

Some scholars have questioned the attribution and the transmission of the text, and that should be recorded honestly. Contested But the argument in it is entirely of a piece with the conduct documented everywhere else in his reign, and no one has produced a better candidate for its authorship.

The orders

The administrative letters are blunter and, in some ways, more revealing. On campaign conduct: no woman is to be harmed or taken, on pain of severe punishment; the Qur'ān if found is to be handed to a Muslim with respect; mosques and churches are not to be touched; cultivators are not to be robbed; supplies in the Svarājya's own territory are to be paid for at market rate. On the forts: the commander who admits anyone after dark, or who allows the garrison's grain to spoil, or who cuts the cover from the hillside, is answerable. On the monsoon: troops disperse to their villages, draw reduced pay, and return when the ghats open.

And there is the famous instruction on fire and the stores, written to a fort commander: that grass and fodder are to be kept well away from the buildings, because a single spark carried by the wind in the dry season can destroy in an hour what a year has gathered — a letter about haystacks that reads, at a distance of three hundred and fifty years, like a man who has thought about everything.

Taken together the corpus shows a mind that is religious without being sentimental, exact about money and grain, unsparing about the conduct of his own men, and entirely clear about what the enterprise was for. He did not write philosophy. He wrote instructions, and the instructions contain the philosophy.

The Southern Campaign, and the End

1677–1680

In 1677 he undertook the last great enterprise of his life: the Dakṣiṇa Digvijaya, the campaign into the Karnataka and the Tamil country. He marched south with a large force, visited Śrīśailam where he performed austerities, met the Golconda court and secured an alliance, and took Jinji (Gingee), Vellore and a broad belt of territory in the Karnataka and the Tamil country. It was in part a family matter — his half-brother Vyankoji held Tanjore from Shahaji's southern jāgīr — but it was chiefly strategic, and its foresight was extraordinary. Jinji, fortified on his orders, would become the refuge from which his son Rājārām kept the Maratha state alive for nine years after Raigad fell. He built the fallback position for a catastrophe he did not live to see. Settled

He returned in 1678. His last years were shadowed: his elder son Sambhaji, estranged and briefly defecting to the Mughals under Diler Khan before returning, was confined at Panhala; the court divided into factions around Sambhaji and around Soyarābāī's son Rājārām.

He died at Raigad on 3 April 1680, aged fifty, after a short fever. He had reigned as Chhatrapati for less than six years.

Consider what stood when he died, measured against what stood when he was born. In 1630 there had been no sovereign Hindu power in the Deccan for three centuries, no Hindu coinage, no Hindu chancery, no Hindu fleet, no crowned Hindu king. In 1680 there was a consecrated Chhatrapati with his own era and his own coin; a bureaucracy of eight departments with no hereditary office; a revenue system that dealt directly with the cultivator and lent him seed in famine; some three hundred and seventy forts; a navy of two hundred sail with sea-forts of its own; a Sanskrit administrative vocabulary replacing the Persian; temples restored and the converted brought home; and a body of doctrine, plainly stated, that the land should be governed by its own people under its own dharma for the welfare of its own peasants.

And there was one thing more, which turned out to matter most. He had built a state that did not depend on him. Every previous Hindu resistance in this history — Devagiri, Vijayanagara, Hemu at Panipat — had collapsed with the fall of one man. What Aurangzeb was about to discover, at the cost of twenty-seven years, his treasury, his army and his life, was that this one would not.