Journey
The Maratha military landscape
Shivaji's state was built on about three hundred and fifty forts rather than on a capital: hill forts on the Sahyadri scarps that cannot be taken by siege because there is nowhere to site a gun, and sea forts on rocks offshore. The strategy is the geography, and it is why the Mughals spent twenty-seven years failing to finish the war.
Stops (9)
- Shivneri Fort · Shivneri — the birth, 1630
A hill fort north of Pune where Shivaji was born, with seven successive gates on the approach and cisterns cut into the rock. His mother Jijabai held it while his father served the Bijapur sultanate, which is the position the whole family began from: Maratha officers inside a Deccan sultanate's service.
- Torna Fort · Torna — the first fort taken, 1646
Captured at sixteen, and the beginning of the state. He is said to have found buried treasure in it and used the money to build Rajgad nearby. Taking a hill fort from a sultanate garrison with a few hundred men is the template for the next thirty years.
- Raigad · Raigad — the capital and the coronation, 1674
A plateau eight hundred metres up reached by one approach, where Shivaji was crowned Chhatrapati in 1674 in a ceremony that required importing a Banaras pandit to certify a kshatriya lineage. The market street on the summit and the court platform survive; he died here in 1680.
- Panhala Fort · Panhala — the escape
The largest fort in the Deccan, where Shivaji was besieged by Bijapur's army in 1660 and broke out at night for Vishalgad. It later became the Kolhapur branch's seat, and the fort's granaries are large enough to hold a garrison through a long siege, which is what they were built for.
- Vishalgad Fort · Vishalgad — Baji Prabhu at the pass
The fort Shivaji was making for, and the Ghod Khind below it where Bājī Prabhu Deshpande held a narrow defile with a few hundred men until the signal guns sounded from the fort, and died doing it. The pass was renamed Pāvan Khind, the sacred pass, afterwards.
- Sindhudurg · Sindhudurg — the navy
A sea fort built in 1664 on a rock off the Malvan coast, with walls following the rock's outline and a foundation of lead poured into the base. Shivaji built a fleet because the Siddis and the Portuguese held the coast, which no previous Deccan power had thought necessary.
- Vijaydurg · Vijaydurg — the fleet's base
An older fort rebuilt and extended, with three lines of wall and an underwater barrier across the approach to hole any ship that came in without a pilot. It was Kanhoji Angre's base, from which the Maratha navy took toll on European shipping for thirty years.
- Murud-Janjira · Murud-Janjira — the one that never fell
The Siddi fortress on an island in Murud bay, which the Marathas besieged repeatedly and never took, including an attempt to build a causeway to it. It is the standing exception in the whole landscape and the reason Shivaji built a navy in the first place.
- Gingee Fort · Gingee — the Maratha fort in the Tamil country
Three hills joined by walls in Villupuram district, held by Shivaji's half-brother's line and then by his son Rajaram, who ran the Maratha resistance from here for eight years while Aurangzeb's armies besieged it. It is the furthest south the Maratha state reached and the hardest fort in India to describe as anything but unreasonable.