Place · sea fort · India
Murud-Janjira
A fort filling an island in a Konkan bay, with nineteen bastions and a wall rising straight out of the water, held by Siddi rulers of Abyssinian descent who kept it against the Marathas, the Mughals, the Portuguese and the English alike and never lost it. Shivaji and Sambhaji both failed to take it.
- Date
- 15th century onward
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Patron dynasty
- Maratha
- Tradition
- Deccan archaeology and Maratha history
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.300, 72.970
Worth knowing
The fort has two large freshwater tanks inside it, surrounded by sea on every side, which is why no blockade ever worked. Its gun Kalal Bangdi, cast in a five-metal alloy, is among the largest in India. The Siddis were Habshi soldiers and sailors who became a ruling house, which is the western coast's least-told political history.
Connections (4)
- Architectural modelNaldurg, Osmanabad
Naldurg's Pani Mahal — a chamber built inside the masonry of a dam so that the court could sit with the river going over the roof — and Murud-Janjira's island fort with its freshwater tanks inside a sea wall are the two most ingenious pieces of Deccan hydraulic architecture. Both were built by sultanate-period engineers for whom water was a defensive and a ceremonial material at once, which is a way of building that the Mughals did not practise.
- Alternative toVijaydurg
Janjira and Vijaydurg are eighty kilometres apart on the same coast and were never held by the same power. The Siddis of Janjira, of Abyssinian descent and nominally Mughal admirals, held their rock against every Maratha attempt; Shivaji and then the Angres built the Maratha navy from Vijaydurg and levied passes on European shipping. Two maritime states inside one sixty-mile stretch of Konkan.
- CampaignSindhudurg
Shivaji built Sindhudurg on a rock off Malvan in 1664 and tried repeatedly to take Janjira sixty kilometres north, and never did; nor did Sambhaji. The Siddis held their island against the Marathas, the Mughals, the Portuguese and the English for three centuries, which is why the Konkan's maritime history is not a single story about one power.
- AnalogueA.C. Guards
The two ends of what African arrival in India could become. At Janjira the Siddis took the fort and then the state, ruling a Konkan principality in their own name and keeping it against the Marathas, the Mughals, the Portuguese and the English until 1947. At A.C. Guards the Siddis remained a regiment — trusted, housed, salaried and never sovereign. Same origin, same ocean, and the difference is simply whether the community acquired a territory or a barracks.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Murud-Janjira”. Bombay Presidency Gazetteer, vol. XI: Kolaba and Janjira (1883); Shanti Sadiq Ali, The African Dispersal in the Deccan (1996).
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