Place · Peshwa capital city · India
Pune/ Poona
/puɳeː/
Pune is a city on the Deccan plateau in western Maharashtra at the confluence of the Mula and Mutha rivers, roughly 150 kilometres southeast of Mumbai. It served as the political capital of the Maratha Peshwas from 1730 to 1818, when it fell to the British after the Battle of Khadki. Through the 19th and 20th centuries it became a centre of Marathi social reform, Sanskrit and Marathi scholarship, and later of Indian defence, education and information technology.
- Date
- c. 758 CE onward (first attestation)
- Periods
- Regional Flourishing, Islamic Age and Bhakti Traditions, Early Modern Age, British Colonial Age, Republic and Living Practice
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.520, 73.857
Worth knowing
Chattrapathi Shivaji spent his childhood at Lal Mahal in Kasba Pune, and his mother Jijabai raised him there. The city's Ganesh Utsav, made a public festival by Tilak in 1893, became a template for mass mobilisation later adapted across India. Pune housed Gandhi under detention at the Aga Khan Palace in 1942 to 1944, where Kasturba Gandhi and Mahadev Desai died. The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute holds the critical edition of the Mahabharata completed after 47 years of scholarship in 1966.
Connections (13)
- PatronageBhīmashankara
Pune, roughly 110 kilometres southeast, is Bhimashankar's principal urban gateway. The city's Shaiva households have patronised the temple across centuries. Nana Phadnavis, the Peshwa-era statesman, is credited with major additions to the Bhimashankar temple in the late 18th century, including the shikhara and sabhamandapa. His patronage aligns Bhimashankar with the wider Peshwa restoration of Shaiva shrines in the Deccan and links it to the Maratha administrative capital at Pune.
- Imperial administration ofMādhavrāo I Peshwa
Pune was the Peshwa capital and Mādhavrāo governed the Maratha confederacy from Shaniwarwada for eleven years, recovering after Panipat what most observers thought lost. The Aṣṭavināyaka shrines lie within a day's ride of that city, which is not a coincidence about their prominence. Grant Duff wrote that the loss of Panipat was less ruinous to the Maratha empire than Mādhavrāo's early death, which is a considerable claim about a man of twenty-seven.
- CampaignB. R. Ambedkar
The Poona Pact was signed at Yerwada jail in September 1932, after Gandhi began a fast unto death against separate electorates for untouchables. Reserved seats in joint electorates is the arrangement Indian legislatures still use, and it is the outcome of that week in Poona. Ambedkar wrote afterwards that he had been made to choose between a man's life and his people's political independence, and that he never forgave the way the choice was put.
- CampaignPandita Ramabai
Pandita Ramabai founded Sharada Sadan in Bombay and then Mukti at Kedgaon near Pune, taking in child widows, famine orphans and women with nowhere else to go, at a time when remarriage was socially impossible in her own community. She lost most of her Hindu support when she converted, and most of her missionary support when she refused to run the institution on Anglican terms.
- Site withinPune
Pune/ Poona lies within Pune — the two sites sit about 0 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Pune/ Poona is one of the specific sites that give Pune its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
- Site withinShaniwarwada, Pune
Shaniwarwada, the Peshwa fortress-palace built by Bajirao I in 1732, sits within central Pune and served as the administrative centre of the Maratha confederacy from 1732 to 1818. The 950-metre perimeter wall and the seven-storey palace were the political heart of 18-century Maratha India; the 1828 fire that destroyed the palace buildings has left the stone outer walls and the Delhi Darwaza as the surviving landmarks in modern Pune's old-city grid.
- Site withinChintamani, Pune
The Chintamani Ganesha temple at Theur sits within Pune district, Maharashtra, 25 kilometres from Pune city centre — one of the Ashtavinayak Ganesha temples. The temple's foundation legend and the Peshwa Madhavrao I samadhi within the garbagriha (he died at Theur in 1772) tie the shrine directly to the Peshwa court's religious patronage from Pune and make Theur part of the broader Pune-district Ashtavinayak pilgrimage circuit.
- Site withinSinhagad, Pune
Sinhagad Fort sits within Pune district, Maharashtra, 30 kilometres from the Pune city centre. The 760-metre hill fort (formerly Kondhana), site of Tanaji Malusare's 4 February 1670 assault that gave the fort its name 'Lion Fort', is historically and administratively part of the Pune district. The fort's position overlooking the Pune valley and its proximity to the Peshwa capital made it central to the Maratha fortification network radiating from Pune.
- Site withinAga Khan Palace, Pune
The Aga Khan Palace at Yerwada sits within Pune, Maharashtra, 7 kilometres from the Pune city centre. The 1892 Italianate palace was Gandhi's detention site from 9 August 1942 to 6 May 1944 during the Quit India Movement, where Kasturba Gandhi died on 22 February 1944 and Mahadev Desai died on 15 August 1942. The 1969 National Monument designation ties the palace to Pune's broader colonial-era civic heritage.
- Site withinLal Mahal, Pune
Lal Mahal, the 17-century Peshwa-era residence at Kasba Peth in central Pune, Maharashtra, was built by Shahaji Bhonsle for his wife Jijabai and young son Shivaji in 1630 and became Shivaji's childhood home. The 1663 incident in which Shivaji escaped Shaista Khan's assassination attempt by cutting off three of the Mughal general's fingers took place at Lal Mahal. The modern reconstructed palace (1988 Pune Municipal Corporation rebuild) remains a Pune heritage landmark.
- CampaignUmaji Naik
Umaji Naik's 1826-1832 Ramoshi uprising against the British East India Company operated across the Pune district Sahyadri hills. He was publicly hanged at the Khadki parade ground, Pune on 3 February 1832 as a warning to the Deccan population. His birthplace Bhivdi village is 25 kilometres from Pune city centre.
- CampaignVasudev Balwant Phadke
Vasudev Balwant Phadke's 1879 Western Maharashtra peasant uprising against the British East India Company was launched from Pune city — the political centre of former Peshwa rule and the base of Phadke's early career as a government clerk. His 1879 Ramoshi-Koli recruitment campaign across Pune district made him the pioneer of post-1857 Deccan armed anti-colonial resistance.
- CampaignChapekar brothers
The Chapekar brothers' 22 June 1897 assassination of Plague Commissioner W.C. Rand and Lt C.E. Ayerst at Ganeshkhind Road, Pune, was in response to the brutal British plague-control measures across Pune city during the 1897 Bubonic Plague outbreak. The Chapekar brothers were Chitpavan Brahmins from the Pune Chitpavan community and their 1897 action radicalised a generation of Deccan nationalists.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pune”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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