Forts on the hills, ships on the sea
Episode 3 of 6 in Shivaji Maharaj: the story of Swarajya.
Narrated with an AI voice.
- Reading time
- 6 min
- Listening time
- 9 min
- By
- DharmikStudio Originals
- Narration
- AI voice
Read along
Namaskar. Last time we stood at Raireshwar with the young companions who promised Swarajya, and we saw that promise find its first home at Torna and Rajgad. Today we look at two things Shivaji built with great care: forts on the hills, and ships on the sea.
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Let us start with the land. The **Sahyadri**, the Western Ghats, run down the length of Maharashtra like a wall. The rock is dark basalt. The hills rise steeply, with flat tops and sheer sides. In the monsoon, rain falls in sheets for months, streams become rivers, and paths vanish in cloud.
For a small state with limited money and soldiers, these hills were a gift. A fort on such a hilltop, with water tanks cut into the rock and grain stored inside, could be held by a few hundred people for a long time. Around the fort, the villages knew they had a place of safety close by.
About a generation after Shivaji, his minister's family produced a Marathi book on statecraft, the **Ajnapatra**, written in 1716 by Ramchandrapant Amatya. Its chapter on forts says, in substance, that the whole kingdom rests on its forts; without them, the land is like open ground that anyone can walk across. That was the lesson of Shivaji's life, written down by those who had served him.
By the end of his life, the accounts list a very large number of forts under Swarajya, counting those he took, repaired and built. The exact count differs from one account to another.
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But a fort is only as good as the people who run it. And here Shivaji thought like a careful head of a household.
Sabhasad describes how each fort had three main officers. The **havaldar** was in command. He kept the keys, and the gates were closed at sunset and opened at sunrise in his presence. The **sabnis** kept the muster roll and the accounts: who was on duty, who was paid, what was spent. The **karkhanis** looked after the stores: grain, fodder, gunpowder, building material.
Here is the wise part. These three were, as a rule, chosen from different backgrounds and families, so that they did not all belong to one group and could not easily combine against the state. Each watched the others. No one person held the fort in his fist. And the soldiers were paid from the treasury, not by the local commander, so their loyalty ran to Swarajya rather than to one man. We will hear more about this in the next episode.
There were rules for night watches, for checking the walls after each monsoon, for how much grain had to be kept in store. It sounds ordinary. It was the ordinary work that kept people safe.
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Some forts Shivaji built new. One of them was **Pratapgad**, raised around 1656 on a ridge above the Konkan, with the minister Moropant Pingle overseeing the work. In 1659 a meeting below Pratapgad with the Bijapur general Afzal Khan turned into a struggle, and Shivaji came through it; the Bijapur army soon withdrew. What is less often told is what came next. Afzal Khan was buried at that place, and his tomb still stands below the fort. Whatever had happened, the dead were to be treated with respect.
Another fort was **Raigad**. It was then called Rairi and was taken over in 1656. Shivaji chose it to be his capital, and it was rebuilt on a grand scale. The builder in charge was **Hiroji Indulkar**.
There is a lovely tradition about him. When the work was finished, Shivaji asked what reward he wanted. Hiroji asked for no land and no gold. He asked only that his name be carved on a step of the temple of Jagadishwar, on the fort, where the king would walk every day. An inscription with his name is still shown to visitors there. Whether the conversation happened just so or not, the story says something true about that state: service itself was the honour.
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Now let us go down the hills to the sea.
Below the Sahyadri lies the **Konkan**, a long, narrow coast of creeks, rivers and small ports. In Shivaji's time, the sea off this coast was busy. The Portuguese held Goa and other places. The English had come to Bombay. The Dutch traded along the coast. And the **Siddis of Janjira**, based in an island fortress just off the shore, were a strong sea power who served the Adil Shahi court and later the Mughals.
The land rulers of the Deccan had mostly left the sea to others. Shivaji saw that this was a mistake. If you hold the coast but not the water in front of it, then the salt, the rice, the timber and the trade of your own people move only by someone else's leave. Pilgrims and merchants sailing from your ports are unprotected.
So around **1657 to 1659**, at Kalyan and Bhiwandi, near today's Thane, Shivaji began building ships. At first he engaged Portuguese shipwrights, who knew the craft. Over the years the fleet grew. There were larger ships called **gurabs**, and many smaller, fast **galbats**, which could be rowed or sailed and could slip into the shallow creeks of the Konkan.
The sailors came largely from the coastal communities, Koli, Bhandari and others, who had known the sea all their lives. Among the commanders the sources name are **Mainak Bhandari** and **Daulat Khan**. The navy was a place where skill mattered more than background.
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Then came the sea forts.
On **25 November 1664**, on a small rocky island called Kurte, off Malvan in the southern Konkan, the foundation of **Sindhudurg** was laid. Sindhu means the sea; durg, a fort. The work is said to have taken about three years, with thousands of workers, and the foundations were strengthened with lead. Inside, the tradition shows impressions of a hand and a foot pressed into lime, remembered as Shivaji's own. Families still live inside the fort walls, and fishing boats still go out from the shore beside it.
Other sea forts were strengthened or built: **Vijaydurg**, **Suvarnadurg**, **Padmadurg** near Janjira, and late in his life **Khanderi**, off Bombay. With them, Swarajya could watch its coast.
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Let us gather what we heard today.
The hills of the Sahyadri gave Shivaji natural strongholds, and a later book written by his minister's family said the kingdom rests on its forts. Each fort was run by three officers, the havaldar, the sabnis and the karkhanis, chosen so that no one person held all the power, with soldiers paid by the state. Raigad became the capital, and tradition remembers its builder Hiroji Indulkar asking only for his name on a step. And Shivaji turned to the sea, building ships from around 1657 and founding Sindhudurg in 1664, to protect his people's coast and trade.
**One thing to take with you.** A fort stayed safe because someone closed the gate every evening and checked the grain every week. Choose one small routine in your home, the kind nobody notices, and do it carefully this week. Quiet care is a kind of protection.
In the next episode we come down from the forts into the fields and offices, to see how Shivaji Maharaj ran his state: how he paid his people, how he protected farmers, and how he treated every faith.
*[Waves. Silence 2 seconds.]*
**Credits (read out):** Written by the DharmikStudio team from the Sabhasad Bakhar, the Ajnapatra, Jadunath Sarkar's Shivaji and His Times, G.S. Sardesai's New History of the Marathas and Surendra Nath Sen's The Military System of the Marathas. Narrated with an AI voice. If you hear a mistake, please use "Report a mistake" on this episode.