A boy at Shivneri, a mother in Pune

Read along

Namaskar. Welcome to the first sitting of our series on Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.

Over six episodes we will hear how a boy from the Pune hills grew into a king, and how he built a state that people still speak of with love, more than three hundred years later. We will stay close to the record. Where a story comes from tradition rather than documents, I will tell you so. Both have their place.

**

Let us begin with a hill.

About ninety kilometres north of Pune, near the town of Junnar, a fort sits on a steep rock. It is called **Shivneri**. Inside the fort there is a small shrine to a goddess, Shivai Devi. Many people say the child born here was named after her. That is the tradition, and it is a lovely one.

The child's father was **Shahaji Bhosale**, a Maratha nobleman and a skilled commander. In those years the Deccan was divided among large kingdoms: the Nizam Shahi of Ahmadnagar, the Adil Shahi of Bijapur, and, pushing in from the north, the Mughal empire. Nobles like Shahaji served one court or another, and their fortunes rose and fell with those courts.

The child's mother was **Jijabai**, daughter of Lakhuji Jadhav of Sindkhed, a powerful family in their own right.

When exactly was the child born? The date most widely accepted today is **19 February 1630**. It comes from an old Marathi chronology called the Jedhe Shakavali, and the Government of Maharashtra celebrates Shiv Jayanti on that day. Some older historians worked with the year 1627, and many families also celebrate by the Hindu calendar, on the tithi, so the date moves each year. I tell you this so that if you hear different dates, you know why. It does not change the story.

**

Now think of the times. Armies moved across the Deccan often. Villages were burned or abandoned. A farmer could sow a field and never see the harvest. For a child growing up then, the question "who will keep us safe?" was not a line in a book. It was the question at every village well.

Shahaji was away much of the time, serving far to the south, around Bangalore. So it was Jijabai who raised the boy. And here the story moves to **Pune**.

Pune in those years was not the city you know. It was a small town that had been badly damaged. The record says that an earlier army had ruined it and, as a sign that no one should live there again, had a plough drawn across the ground. People had left.

Shahaji held Pune and the land around it as his jagir, his estate. In the years that followed, Jijabai came to live there with young Shivaji. The estate was managed by an administrator named **Dadoji Kondadev**.

**

Here is the part that people in Maharashtra tell with great love. It is told that Jijabai had the ground of Pune ploughed again, some say with a plough of gold. Whether the plough was gold or iron, the meaning was clear to every farmer who heard of it. The ground was not cursed. It was safe to come back. Come home, sow your fields, we will stand with you.

Slowly, people did come back. Land was measured, rents were set so that farmers could bear them, and loans of seed and bullocks were given to those who had nothing. Historians give much of the credit for this careful work to Dadoji Kondadev. How far he shaped the boy himself is a question historians still discuss, and we will not settle it here. What we can say is that Shivaji grew up watching a broken place being rebuilt, field by field. He saw what good administration looks like from the ground up.

A house was built for the family in Pune, called the **Lal Mahal**, the red palace. The building you can visit today is a modern reconstruction on the old site.

**

What did Jijabai teach him?

The sources describe her as a woman of strong faith and strong will. She told him the stories of the **Ramayana** and the **Mahabharata**, as mothers across India still do. But think about which stories a boy in that valley would remember. Rama leaving a throne to keep his father's word. Bharata refusing a crown that was not his. The Pandavas, who lost everything and still refused to give up what was right.

These were not only stories of gods and heroes. They were stories about how a king should behave. A king keeps his word. A king protects those who cannot protect themselves. A king does not take what belongs to others.

In the Pune estate, disputes between villages came up for settlement: over a boundary, a well, a share of the harvest. Tradition says young Shivaji sat in on these hearings and watched how both sides were heard before any decision was made. Later in life, his letters show a ruler who cared about exactly these small matters: a farmer's grain, a village's water, a soldier who took what was not his.

**

There was one more teacher: the land itself.

West of Pune lie the valleys of the **Maval**, deep green in the monsoon, cut by streams and ringed by the hills of the Sahyadri. The young men of these valleys were farmers, hardy and loyal, who knew every path and every ridge. They were called the **Mavale**. Shivaji grew up among them, walking the hills, learning the forts, sharing their food.

Picture a monsoon evening in such a valley. Rain on a thatched roof, a fire in the corner, a pot of bhakri and onion shared among a few boys, and talk of which hill has a spring near the top and which path the cattle use. That is the school where a great deal of Shivaji's later skill was learned.

Many of his lifelong companions came from these families. They were not princes. They were sons of farmers and village headmen. Years later, they would be the backbone of everything he built. A leader who knows his people by name, who has walked their fields, is a different kind of leader.

While still a boy, Shivaji travelled with his mother to meet his father in Bangalore. There he saw a large court, with its learning, its poets and its ceremony. Shahaji sent capable officers back with him to Pune. Shahaji, too, was shaping the future in his own way.

**

Let us gather what we heard today.

Shivaji was born at Shivneri, near Junnar, most likely on 19 February 1630. His father Shahaji served the great Deccan courts and was often far away. His mother Jijabai raised him in Pune, a town that was being brought back to life, with the ground ploughed again as a promise to its farmers. She gave him the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the idea that power is for protecting ordinary people. And the young men of the Maval valleys became his friends before they became his soldiers.

**One thing to take with you.** Jijabai's plough was a message: it is safe to begin again. This week, think of one person near you who may need to hear that. A small word of support, a hand with some task. Offer it without fuss.

In the next episode, we climb to Raireshwar, where tradition says a group of young men took an oath, and we hear what the word "Swarajya" meant to them.

*[Wind. Silence 2 seconds.]*

**Credits (read out):** Written by the DharmikStudio team from Jadunath Sarkar's Shivaji and His Times, G.S. Sardesai's New History of the Marathas, the Jedhe Shakavali, the Shivabharat and the Sabhasad Bakhar. Narrated with an AI voice. If you hear a mistake, please use "Report a mistake" on this episode.

Keep going

• Listen: A boy at Shivneri, a mother in Pune
• Next: The oath of Swarajya
• हिन्दी में पढ़ें
• All episodes of Shivaji Maharaj: the story of Swarajya