The Marathas, Part 6 - Dharmavira

Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj

The scholar-king the sources have maligned

He was born at Purandar on 14 May 1657, and lost his mother Saibai at two. At nine he was made a Mughal mansabdar under the Treaty of Purandar and taken to Agra as a hostage in all but name — where he shared his father's house arrest and his escape in the baskets, and was then hidden with Brahmin families at Mathura for months, a small boy left behind enemy lines while the fate of the state rode south without him. That childhood explains a great deal about the man.

He is the most slandered figure in this history, and the slander has a source. The Mughal chroniclers had every reason to blacken him; later colonial and some modern accounts took those chronicles at face value; and a court faction at Raigad that had backed his half-brother Rājārām had its own interest in the story. What the record actually shows is a formidable man. He was fluent in Sanskrit, Persian, Marathi, Hindi and Portuguese. At about fourteen he composed the *Budhabhūṣaṇam, a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft and polity drawing on Śukranīti and the Rājanīti tradition, together with works in Braj — Nāyikābheda, Nakhaśikha, Saṭaka*. A king who writes Sanskrit political theory in his teens is not the dissolute of the Mughal accounts. Settled

He was crowned at Raigad on 16 January 1681, having first put down the faction that tried to place Rājārām on the throne. He inherited a state whose founder had been dead nine months, a divided court, and the undivided attention of the most powerful ruler on earth.

Burhanpur, and the Emperor Comes South

1681–1687 — nine years of unbroken war

He opened his reign by striking at the empire's wealth. In 1681 the Marathas fell on Burhanpur, one of the richest commercial cities in Mughal India. Hambīrrāo Mohite reached the forests outside with fifteen thousand horse; when the Mughal commander Kakar Khan came out at midnight to attack him, Sambhaji himself charged from the old trenches with four thousand cavalry and routed the garrison. The city's wealthiest suburb, Bahadurpura, was taken and stripped. Aurangabad was raided after it.

Then he did the thing that decided the next quarter-century: he gave asylum to Prince Muhammad Akbar, Aurangzeb's own rebel son. It was a calculated provocation of the highest order — a Maratha king sheltering the Mughal heir — and it worked exactly as intended. In 1681 the Emperor of Hindustan moved his entire court, treasury and army from the north to the Deccan, and never went back. He would die there twenty-six years later.

What followed was war on four fronts at once, and Sambhaji held all four. Against the Mughals, an unbroken defensive campaign in the ghats. Against the Siddis of Janjira, repeated assaults on the one fortress he could never take — he came close enough to build a causeway toward it. Against the Portuguese, who had allied with Aurangzeb and given the Mughals passage: he invaded Goa in 1683, took Chaul and much of the Portuguese Konkan, and came within an ace of ending their Indian presence altogether — the Viceroy was reduced to taking the relics of St Francis Xavier out in procession — before a Mughal army under Shah Alam forced his withdrawal. And against the English at Bombay, whom he checked at Khanderi.

The Goa campaign of 1683 deserves more than the sentence it usually gets. The Portuguese had allowed Mughal forces passage through their territory and had supplied the Siddis; Sambhaji answered by invading in November 1683, storming Fonda, taking Chaul and the northern Konkan possessions, and driving on the capital itself. The Viceroy, Francisco de Távora, in a state of open panic, had the coffin of St Francis Xavier opened and the relics carried in procession through the streets while he laid his own staff of office on the corpse and begged the saint's intercession. It is one of the strangest scenes in the history of European India and it is recorded by the Portuguese themselves. Sambhaji was within reach of ending the Portuguese presence in India altogether — and was pulled back only because a Mughal army under Shah Alam crossed into the Konkan behind him, forcing him to break off. Settled Had the Mughals not been at his back, the history of the western coast would have been different.

Ramsej: a hill fort holds for five years

The emblem of the whole period is Ramsej, a modest fort near Nashik that Aurangzeb expected to take in a matter of weeks. Its garrison — a few hundred Marathas under a commander whose name the Mughal chroniclers did not trouble to record accurately — held it against the imperial army, with siege guns, mines, and wooden siege towers, for five years. Settled The Mughals eventually got it by bribery, not assault. If one wants to understand why the greatest empire on earth broke itself in the Deccan, Ramsej is the answer in a single hill.

Aurangzeb, meanwhile, dealt with the Sultanates that had failed to crush the Marathas for him: Bijapur fell in 1686, Golconda in 1687. In destroying them he removed the buffer between himself and Maharashtra — and inherited their unpaid, disaffected soldiery, thousands of whom would drift into Maratha service. He had solved a problem by creating a much larger one.

Sangameshwar and Tulapur

February–March 1689 — the price of refusal

The blow, when it came, came from inside. In early 1689 Sambhaji was at Sangameshwar in the Konkan with a small escort and his closest counsellor, the poet Kavi Kalaś. His position was betrayed to the Mughals — the sources name Gaṇojī Śirke, his own brother-in-law, aggrieved over a property dispute — and Muqarrab Khan's cavalry fell on the town without warning. Sambhaji and some twenty-five of his companions were taken.

They were carried to Bahadurgad and paraded before the army dressed as clowns, in the caps and bells of buffoons, mounted on camels, to be jeered at by the imperial soldiery. Settled Then the terms were put to him. Aurangzeb offered his life on three conditions: surrender the forts, surrender the treasure, and accept Islam.

He refused. The tradition of Maharashtra holds his answer to have been that he would not convert though the Emperor offered him his own daughter. What is beyond dispute is that the offer was made, that it was repeated, and that it was refused for as long as he was able to speak. Settled

What was then done to him over some three weeks — from mid-February to 11 March 1689 — is recorded in the Mughal sources themselves, in Maasir-i-Alamgiri and by Khafi Khan and Ishwar Das, who had no motive to invent atrocities against their own emperor. His eyes were put out. His tongue was cut out — the tongue of the man who had written Sanskrit at fourteen — when he would not stop speaking. His nails were drawn, his skin flayed in strips, his limbs severed one by one. Kavi Kalaś was tortured beside him and died with him. On the day of Phālguna Amāvāsyā, at the confluence of the Bhīmā and Indrāyaṇī at Tulapur, he was beheaded, and his body was cut into pieces and thrown to dogs. His head was carried through the Deccan on a spear and displayed at the gates of the towns.

Two details from the Mughal record deserve to be set beside the torture, because they establish what it was about. First, the offer of conversion was repeated — it was not made once and abandoned but held open throughout, which means the Emperor wanted the apostasy more than he wanted the death. Second, the mutilations began with the organs of speech and sight, which is the signature of a punishment intended to break a man's will rather than end his life: Aurangzeb wanted him to yield first. He did not. He was killed on Phālguna Amāvāsyā because he would not say a sentence.

His widow Yesūbāī and the poet's family were taken. His body was denied rites; villagers of Vadhu Budruk, at the risk of their own lives, are remembered as having gathered the pieces and performed the cremation, and the Shivale family of that village keeps the memory still. Smrti

Aurangzeb had made a catastrophic miscalculation. He had expected the Marathas to be broken by terror. What he had actually done was to hand them a martyr of a kind no political settlement could ever undo. The villages of Maharashtra, which had been fighting for a state, began fighting for something else entirely. The peasantry rose. Deshmukhs who had wavered came in. The war stopped being a war of kings and became a war of a people, and from that moment the Mughal empire could not win it. Settled

Raigad fell in November 1689, betrayed by Suryaji Pisal. Sambhaji's widow Yesūbāī and their seven-year-old son Śāhū were taken and would remain Mughal prisoners for eighteen years. Yesūbāī's decision in that hour — to send her brother-in-law Rājārām out of the fort to safety while she stayed behind with the child, ensuring the line survived by sacrificing her own liberty — is one of the great acts of statesmanship in this history and is almost never named as such.

The Reign in Full

Nine years, four fronts, and a hundred and twenty engagements

The received picture of Sambhaji Maharaj — the intemperate son who squandered his father's inheritance — is a Mughal invention repeated by people who did not check it. Set beside the actual record it collapses.

He came to the throne in January 1681 with the founder nine months dead, a court split by the Soyarābāī faction that had tried to crown his half-brother, the treasury depleted, and the sardars uncertain. Within a year he had secured the state, put down the conspiracy, sacked Burhanpur, and provoked the Emperor of Hindustan into moving his entire court south. Over the following eight years he fought, by the count kept in the Maratha records, something on the order of a hundred and twenty engagements, and lost none of them decisively. He never surrendered a fort by defeat in the field. Contested

Consider what he was holding simultaneously. To the east and north, the full weight of the Mughal empire under Aurangzeb in person, with Bijapur and Golconda swallowed in 1686 and 1687 and their armies added to his enemy's. To the west, the Siddis of Janjira, whom he attacked season after season, once coming close enough to build a causeway toward the fort before the monsoon and a Mughal diversion forced him off. To the south-west, the Portuguese, whom he invaded in 1683 and nearly destroyed. To the south, the English at Bombay, checked at Khanderi. And inside, a nobility that had to be held together by force of personality.

He also did what his father would have done: he kept building. The forts were strengthened and provisioned; Ramsej was made ready to hold for years and did; the fleet was maintained; and the revenue system continued to function through nine years of continuous war, which is itself an administrative achievement of a high order.

Budhabhūṣaṇam

And he wrote. The Budhabhūṣaṇam — "the ornament of the wise" — is a Sanskrit treatise on polity in three chapters, composed when he was about fourteen, drawing on the Śukranīti, the Pañcatantra and the wider Rājanīti tradition. It treats the duties of a king, the choice and testing of ministers, the conduct of war and peace, the management of the treasury, and the moral obligations of sovereignty. It opens with a salutation to his father, whom it praises as the protector of dharma.

He wrote three further works in Braj — the Nāyikābheda, the Nakhaśikha and the Saṭaka — and was fluent, by the accounts, in Sanskrit, Marathi, Hindi, Persian and Portuguese. He maintained the scholar Kavi Kalaś, a Kanyakubja Brahmin of Varanasi and a Sanskrit poet of ability, as his closest counsellor; the two were tortured and killed together.

The measure of the slander is this: the man the Mughal chronicles present as a drunkard incapable of governing was writing Sanskrit political theory at fourteen, held four fronts simultaneously for nine years against the greatest empire on earth, and died refusing to purchase his life with his dharma. The chronicles were written by his enemies. The Budhabhūṣaṇam was written by him. Settled