Shivaji: founder of the Maratha kingdom, coronation and administration

A Maratha chief in a divided Deccan

Shivaji was born at Shivneri fort, the son of Shahaji Bhonsle, a Maratha general who served the Deccan sultanates, and Jijabai. The date is uncertain: Britannica gives April 1627 or 19 February 1630, and school texts usually use 1630. He grew up in a Deccan divided between the Mughals in the north and the Muslim sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda in the south, and he came to see himself as the instrument of Hindu freedom from what he regarded as oppressive rule.

From the mid-1650s he began seizing weak Bijapur outposts with a small band of followers, using the steep hill country of the Western Ghats as his base. Forts were the key to his strategy: each captured fort gave him a defensible stronghold, a treasury and a rallying point, and by the end of the decade he had become a serious regional power rather than a local rebel.

Afzal Khan, Surat and the Mughal confrontation

The turning point came in 1659, when Bijapur sent an army of about 20,000 men under Afzal Khan to destroy him. Shivaji, pretending to be intimidated, drew the force deep into broken mountain terrain, killed Afzal Khan at a meeting arranged under a flag of truce, and let his hidden troops fall on the unprepared Bijapur army. Overnight he held its horses, guns and ammunition, and his reputation spread across the Deccan.

The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb could not ignore him. Shivaji answered a Mughal expedition with a daring midnight raid on the viceroy's own camp, in which the viceroy lost fingers from one hand, and then sacked Surat, the rich Mughal port, in 1664. Aurangzeb's general Jai Singh then forced him to sue for peace under the Treaty of Purandar in 1665, surrendering many forts and agreeing to attend the Mughal court at Agra, where he and his son Sambhaji were placed under house arrest.

The Agra escape and the road to Raigad

The Agra episode became one of the most famous escapes in Indian history. Feigning illness and claiming to perform penance, Shivaji began sending out huge baskets of sweets for distribution to the poor, and on 17 August 1666 he and Sambhaji were carried past their guards hidden inside them. Within two years of his return he had recovered all the territory he had surrendered and expanded further, collecting tribute from Mughal districts and rebuilding his army and fleet.

He had learned from the European traders on the west coast, and he built a naval force to protect his coastline and trade, the first Indian ruler of his time to use sea power systematically for both defence and commerce. He also reorganised his army on a disciplined footing, with soldiers largely paid in cash rather than living off plunder, which set his forces apart from many of his contemporaries.

Coronation, administration and tolerance

In the summer of 1674 Shivaji was enthroned at Raigad with great ceremony as an independent sovereign, taking the title Chhatrapati. The coronation formally marked the beginning of the Maratha Empire: he was no longer a rebel chief but a king in his own right, and the Hindu population of the Deccan rallied to him as their leader.

He ruled through a council of eight ministers, the Ashtapradhan, covering the prime ministership, finance, the secretariat, home affairs, the army, foreign affairs, justice and religious matters, with each minister answerable directly to him. Revenue rested on measured land assessment, on chauth, a quarter of the revenue demanded from neighbouring territories in return for protection, and on sardeshmukhi, an additional tenth claimed as a hereditary right. A devout Hindu who called his cause Hindavi Swarajya, or self-rule, he nevertheless protected the places of worship of Muslims and Christians and employed Muslims in his service, and Britannica's verdict is that he was one of the few rulers of his time who practised true religious tolerance. He died after an illness at Raigad on 3 April 1680, and his sons Sambhaji and Rajaram carried on the struggle against the Mughals after him.

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