Maratha Empire: Shivaji

Shivaji saw that control of the Konkan coast required sea power. He began building a navy in 1657 or 1659 by purchasing twenty galivats from the Portuguese shipyards at Bassein, and recruited crews from coastal communities long familiar with the sea, Muslim mercenaries and some Portuguese sailors. He also fortified the coast, and his first marine fort, Sindhudurg, built from 1664 on an island off Malvan with the help of Portuguese engineers from Goa, became the headquarters of the fleet. His great maritime rivals were the Siddis of Janjira, Abyssinian-descended chiefs who allied with the Mughals. Shivaji reduced their power on the coast, but his naval actions against Janjira, including the skirmish of 1675, failed to dislodge them, and Sambhaji's siege of 1682 also failed. Janjira remained in Siddi hands.

In 1660 Aurangzeb, at Bijapur's request, sent his maternal uncle Shaista Khan with a large army and artillery into Maharashtra. He occupied Pune, took the nearby fort of Chakan and settled into Shivaji's home territory. On the night of 5 April 1663 Shivaji, with about 400 men, broke into the Khan's mansion and wounded him; Shaista Khan lost three fingers, and one of his sons and several attendants were killed. The emperor, embarrassed by the episode, punished his uncle with a transfer to Bengal. The raid, followed by the sack of Surat in 1664, provoked Aurangzeb into sending Jai Singh, which led to the Treaty of Purandar. The other commanders in the options belong to later phases of the Mughal-Maratha conflict.

By the late 1650s Shivaji's seizure of forts and of the Javali valley had made him the chief threat to Bijapur in the western Deccan. Ali Adil Shah II was a minor, and the decision to send the veteran Afzal Khan against Shivaji was most probably taken by his mother, the de facto regent (called Badi Begum or Badi Sahiba). Shivaji withdrew to the hill fort of Pratapgad; the Bijapuri cavalry could not take it without siege equipment, so a private meeting was arranged in a hut at the foot of the fort on 10 November 1659, each side allowed a sword and one follower. Afzal Khan was killed in the encounter, and in the Battle of Pratapgarh that followed the Marathas routed his army. The captured officers and soldiers were not executed: after a grand review below Pratapgarh they were set free and sent home, a detail the sources stress as part of Shivaji's treatment of defeated enemies.

Under the Treaty of Purandar Shivaji agreed to visit the emperor, and in 1666 he went to Agra with his nine-year-old son Sambhaji. At the darbar on 12 May he was made to stand among nobles of relatively low rank, took offence and left in anger, after which he was confined. His custody was the responsibility of Ram Singh, the son of Jai Singh, who had given guarantees for his safety. Shivaji later asked Ram Singh to withdraw these guarantees, feigned illness, sent out baskets of sweets as charity, and on 17 August 1666 escaped, by tradition hidden in one of the baskets, returning to the Deccan. Aurangzeb blamed Ram Singh and demoted him. Jai Singh himself was then in the Deccan, fighting Bijapur.

In the last years of his reign Shivaji looked south. In 1677 he marched into Karnataka with about 30,000 cavalry and 40,000 infantry, backed by Golconda artillery and funding, at a time when Bijapur was weakened by a civil war between its Deccani and Afghan factions. He seized Gingee and Vellore and gained a large territory in the Madras Carnatic and the Mysore plateau, containing about a hundred forts. Negotiations with his half-brother Venkoji (Ekoji I), Shahaji's son by Tukabai who ruled Thanjavur, failed, and on 26 November 1677 Shivaji defeated Venkoji's army and took most of his possessions on the Mysore plateau. Gingee proved important later: Rajaram made it his base when Aurangzeb overran Maharashtra after 1689.

Shivaji was born at Shivneri near Junnar in 1630. Shahaji, serving Bijapur, held a jagir around Pune, and Dadoji Kondadeo looked after it and the young Shivaji until his death in 1647. In 1656 Shivaji killed Chandrarao More, a fellow feudatory of Bijapur, and took the Javali valley near Mahabaleshwar, which opened the way to the Konkan. The episode in option (a) is real but its attribution is wrong. After Pratapgarh, Bijapur sent Siddi Jauhar in 1660, in concert with a Mughal advance in the north, and he besieged Shivaji in Panhala. Shivaji slipped out at night towards Vishalgad, and Baji Prabhu Deshpande with about 300 men held the pursuing Bijapuri cavalry at Ghod Khind, later renamed Pavan Khind, until the guns of Vishalgad signalled that Shivaji was safe. The Panhala siege was a Bijapuri operation; Shaista Khan was at that time occupying Pune and Chakan.

Ramchandra Pant Amatya (about 1650-1716) was the youngest of Shivaji's ministers at the coronation, holding the finance portfolio (Majumdar, renamed Amatya). After Shivaji's death he served as a regent-like figure through the crisis years: in 1689 he helped arrange Rajaram's flight to Jinji and held the Maratha territories in Maharashtra while the king was in the south. Later, at the request of Sambhaji II of Kolhapur, Shivaji's grandson, he wrote the Adnyapatra, a work of about 7,000 words in Modi Marathi. Its first part narrates the achievements of Shivaji and his sons; the second sets out principles of rule, treating among other things the king's duties, the treasury and, at length, forts and their protection, construction and reconstruction. Writers often compare it to the Arthashastra, and Shivaji's state was, in Amatya's own phrase, created from forts.

Shivaji had won lands and forts but was still, in law, a Mughal zamindar or the son of a Bijapuri jagirdar; a formal kingship would give him legal standing above other Maratha chiefs. Court Brahmins objected that kingship belonged to the Kshatriya varna, so the scholar Gaga Bhatt of Varanasi was brought in. On 28 May Shivaji did penance for his ancestors' lapse in Kshatriya rites and was invested with the sacred thread, and on 6 June 1674 he was crowned at Raigad as Chhatrapati. After his mother Jijabai died that month, the Tantric priest Nischal Puri Goswami declared the first ceremony inauspicious, and a second, Tantric coronation followed later in 1674. A new era (the Rajyabhishek era) was proclaimed and coins were struck. Statement 4 reverses the facts: Shahaji and Jijabai had Persian seals, but Shivaji used a Sanskrit seal from the very beginning. Three statements are correct.