Arms and the Emperor

ON AN OVERCAST DAY in Satara, Maharashtra government’s three big leaders—Chief Minis­ter Eknath Shinde, and his deputies Ajit Pawar and Devendra Fadnavis—arrive at the city’s Shri Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum, standing on an open-top vehi­cle. This is July 19, the day the wagh nakh (tiger claws)—the weapon Shivaji is claimed to have used to kill Afzal Khan of the Bijapur Sultanate in 1659—is to be unveiled to the Indian public, and the museum has been transformed into something like a medieval fortress. There are small groups of men, dressed in the colourful clothes of attendants of the old Maratha court, blowing the tutari and banging drums. Inside, there are more men in these costumes, standing at corners and holding spears, brightly coloured canopies, and ancient fans.

After some time has passed, and the delegation has made its way inside, Shinde stands beside a large saffron curtain that stands as a partition between the viewer and the wagh nakh. For days now, Marathi language news channels and newspapers have been reporting breathlessly about the arrival of the wagh nakh—one chan­nel even chasing the truck transporting the item from Mumbai to Satara. Now, it stands just a curtain away. And so, with slight gentle tugs at the ropes, and amid loud chants of ‘Chattrapati Maharaj ki jai’, Shinde pulls the curtain open.

The wagh nakh is a small and nonde­script weapon—the very reason why, if the story about this particular item is true, Shivaji chose to smuggle it into his meet­ing with Afzal Khan. Its effectiveness lies in the ability to conceal it. Set along with its red case in a glass box at a slight distance, the item’s claw depth measures just 9.5cm and length 8.6cm.

“It is a matter of great pride to Maharashtra and India,” Shinde would tell the assembled journalists. “People had been waiting for this moment to see the wagh nakh and now they can.” Brought on a three-year loan from the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London with much fanfare, the item will now remain in exhibition in Satara for seven months, before it is exhibited in Nagpur, Kolhapur, and finally, Mumbai.

Whether this item was used by Shivaji to kill Afzal Khan is however far from an established fact. Neither is it the first time someone from India has sought to bring back—either on loan or to be returned entirely—one of Shivaji’s weapons from the UK, where some are believed to be lodged. Three hundred and fifty years after his coronation as the king of the Marathas, just like the figure of Shivaji himself, the weapons he is believed to have used continue to exercise a vast sway on the imagination of Indians. By bringing, or seeking to bring one such item back, Shinde and his government are just the latest in a long line of leaders who have sought to tap into the legacy of the emperor.

This debate over whether this wagh nakh was the one Shivaji used to kill Afzal Khan centres around the figure of James Grant Duff. (There are of course varied accounts about the weapons used to kill Khan, even those involving Shivaji using a dagger along with the wagh nakh, and of one of the men ac­companying Shivaji beheading Khan.) Grant Duff, an East India Company of­ficer, was appointed Resident (or politi­cal agent) of the Satara state after the last Peshwa of the Marathas, Baji Rao II, had surrendered to the British in 1818. It is claimed someone—either one of the Peshwa’s officials, Raja Pratap Singh, or a member of the Satara court—gifted this weapon to him. Grant Duff then carried this item along with him when he re­turned to his home in Scotland in 1823, after which it appears it remained with the family, until a descendant, Adrian Grant Duff, gifted it to the V&A Museum in 1971.

While the Shinde government and the state’s Cultural Affairs Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar have categori­cally declared it as a weapon belonging to Shivaji, the V&A Museum displays none of that certainty. “It is not possible to verify whether these tiger claws are the ones used by the celebrated Maratha ruler nearly 160 years before the weapon was gifted to Grant Duff, particularly as other claws with such a provenance were recorded in the royal collections at Satara long after the Resident’s return to Britain. The circum­stances of the gift also remain unclear,” the museum declares in the description accom­panying the piece on the its website.

The sword’s prominence rose slowly, Andrew Halladay writes, evolving from a sword of Kolhapur to a sword of Shivaji, to the Bhavani Talvar itself. When the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward (the future Edward VII), visited India in 1875, this sword was handed over as a ‘gift’ by a young Shivaji VI

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The weapon comes with a fitted case, inscribed with the words ‘The Wagnuck of Sivajee With Which He Killed the Moghul General. This Relic was given to Mr. James Grant-Duff of Eden When he was Resident at Sattara By the Prime Minister of the Peishwa of the Mah­rattas’, but the case was made long af­ter Grant Duff returned to Scotland, and, according to Indrajit Sawant, a historian and researcher in Kolhapur, who has spent several years studying and writing about the weapons that were owned by Shivaji, riddled with errors that it cannot be taken seriously. He points out, for instance, that the word ‘Peshwa’ means prime minister, so there could not be a ‘Prime Minister of the Peishwa’.

There are also multiple references in several books written by individuals visit­ing the Satara court long after Grant Duff left that suggest the item never left the royal household. “There is no evidence that supports the claim that these be­longed to Shivaji. What the government has displayed is a replica,” says Sawant. When members of the Maharashtra government first began speaking about bringing the item from the V&A Museum last year, Sawant, who was aware that this item was in all probability a replica, began reaching out to members of the government for an explanation, he says, and then when no replies were forthcoming, began corresponding with the museum, which admitted that there was no evidence to claim it once belonged to Shivaji.

Sawant cites several sources, from the writings of Mountstuart Elphinstone, the lieutenant governor of Bombay then, who wrote about his visit to Satara in 1826, about a year after Grant Duff had re­turned to the UK, and mentions seeing the original tiger claws and being gifted a rep­lica; to those of Amelia Cary—the wife of Lucius Cary, better known as Lord Falkland, the governor of Bombay be­tween 1848 and 1853—who recounts seeing several varieties of “wagnuks”, including the one used by Shivaji to attack Khan, when she accompanied her husband for a trip to Satara in 1848. Another of those sources is Grant Duff’s own son, Mountstuart Elphinstone (ME) Grant Duff, several years after the senior Grant Duff left India. ME Grant Duff, who served as an MP in the British parliament and was appointed the under-secretary of state for India between 1868 and 1874, wrote a book called Notes of an Indian Journey, where he describes being shown Shivaji’s “Bhowanee” sword and two “wagnuks” on a visit to Satara. In the book, he describes how the sword is respected and treated like a goddess, and while those who show him these items claim that Shivaji had used two wagh nakhs ‘on a critical occasion’, ME Grant Duff writes, “My father makes him use only one, plus a crooked dagger, but ‘Bhowanee’ guardians say, he used two, which is improbable”.

The wagh nakh is a small weapon—the reason Shivaji chose to smuggle it into his meeting with Afzal Khan. Its effectiveness lies in the ability to conceal it. Set along with its red case in a glass box at a slight distance, the item’s claw depth
measures just 9.5cm and length 8.6cm

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“There are multiple records like these over the years, right up to 1944, including a photograph from Satara [published in Modern Review magazine in 1907, along with the Bhavani sword], that show the item continued to remain here,” Sawant says. According to Sawant, the item on display currently is most likely the rep­lica of Elphinstone, the lieutenant gov­ernor of Bombay who wrote about being gifted such an item during his 1826 visit to Satara. “What seems to have happened is that James Grant Duff never received such a gift [the original wagh nakh or its replica]. He wrote about his experiences in India, and despite extensively covering the his­tory and culture of Marathas in his book [A History of the Mahrattas], he never once mentioned being gifted such an item,” Sawant says. “My theory, or rather what the documented evidence seems to suggest, is that the replica James Grant Duff’s son ME Grant Duff mentions in his book is the one Mountstuart Elphinstone probably gave to him,” he says. Sawant suggests that the two, James Grant Duff and Mountstu­art Elphinstone, were close, with the for­mer naming his son after the latter, and Elphinstone considering the junior Grant Duff as his godson. “In the 1896 book Elphinstone wrote [Rulers of India], at least in the third edition that I have seen, in the pages where he writes about being gifted the wagh nakh, the footnotes there clearly say that the item is now in the possession of ME Grant Duff. So, it becomes clear that what ME Grant Duff, and later his descen­dants, had in their possession was not the original, but the replica that had been gift­ed to Mountstuart Elphinstone,” he says.

What probably further complicates the debate is the mention of several wagh nakhs in many of these accounts of visits to the Satara royal family, suggesting that the Maratha court had many of them, and probably even made replicas of important ones like the one used to attack Khan, and gifted them to dignitaries.

THE WAGH NAKH OF course is not the only object of Shiv­aji’s that has been a subject of such interest. Historians and leaders, from the colonial era to the pres­ent times, have trained their focus even more on Shivaji’s sword—or swords. Ac­cording to most accounts now, Shivaji had at least three different swords named Bhavani, Jagdamba, and Tulja. While some researchers claim that these swords always carried three different names, other schol­ars have suggested that although these names have referred to Shivaji’s sword or swords at various times, it has not always been consistent, and different names have sometimes denoted the same object. “The London sword [now often referred to as the Jagadamba sword, and believed to be in the collection of Saint James’ Palace in London], for instance, has been referred to as the ‘Jagadamba Bhavani sword’ by a British official (Geoffrey de Bellaigue to Amol Desai…) and the sword purportedly given to Shivaji by the Sawant clan… has been called the ‘Tulja Bhawani’… Much of the confusion stems from the fact that these names each refer to the mother goddess and can be un­derstood as aspects of the same deity. The goddess Jagdamba, for instance, is often equated with Bhavani, especially in Maharash­tra, where the names Bhavani and Tulja can be used interchangeably or even in conjunction with one another (i.e. ‘Tulja Bhavani’),” writes Andrew Halladay, from the Department of History at Johns Hop­kins University in the US, in his paper ‘The many swords of Shivaji: Searching for a weapon, finding a nation’, published earlier this year in Modern Asian Studies.

The wagh nakh is not the only object of Shivaji’s that has been a subject of such interest. Historians and leaders, from the colonial era to present times, have trained their focus even more on Shivaji’s sword—or swords. According to most accounts, Shivaji had at least three different swords

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Of these swords, if there indeed were multiple swords, the Bhavani sword is the one that has been most mythologised. Although there are variations to the tale, it is often ascribed to a divine origin, with the goddess Bhavani presenting the sword to Shivaji. The reality is of course duller, and researchers have pointed out that Shivaji probably acquired the sword from the chief of a local clan, the Sawants, who in turn had acquired it, some writers add, as part of a booty from a Portuguese commander sometime around 1510.

The sword now most routinely referred to as the Bhavani is believed to be in the possession of the royal family in Satara today. According to James Grant Duff’s account, which he weaves from multiple sources, after Shivaji’s death, the Bhavani sword fell to his elder son, Sambhaji, and after Sambhaji’s imprisonment and execu­tion by Aurangzeb, the Mughal emperor later returned the sword to Sambhaji’s son Shahu, whom he had also impris­oned earlier. By comparison, the sword that is today most frequently identified as the Jagdamba, and believed to be at Saint James’ Palace in London, can be traced to the Kolhapur royal family. “By the end of the nineteenth century Kolhapur would become associated with a rival sword that its proponents claimed had been in that city since some time shortly after Shivaji’s death,” Halladay writes in his paper. This was the time the Satara court’s fortunes were in decline and those of its junior in Kolhapur were rising. “Kolhapur’s social and political ascent was a slow, negotiated process between the Indian public and the colonial state: the former had long held Shivaji’s junior line through his grand­son Shivaji II in high esteem—especially in and around the Bombay presidency— but it was only after Satara’s princely sta­tus was rescinded that Kolhapur’s real po­litical relevance emerged,” Halladay goes on. The sword’s prominence rose slowly, Halladay writes, evolving in popular discourse from a sword of Kolhapur, to a sword of Shivaji, to the Bhavani Talvar itself. When the Prince of Wales Albert Ed­ward (the future Edward VII) visited India in 1875, this sword was handed over as a ‘gift’ by a young Shivaji VI. There have been many demands for the return of this sword, right from the colonial era by the likes of Lokmanya Tilak, to those after Inde­pendence, from leaders as varied as AR Antulay and Yashwantrao Chavan, both Maharashtra chief ministers, to even Narendra Modi when he was Gujarat’s chief minister in 2007. Last year, before the Maharashtra government began talk­ing about getting the wagh nakh on a loan, Mungantiwar had mentioned the state was working towards getting this sword to India for a brief period. He recently told journalists that the government is still working to get it back.

According to Sawant, the evidence backing this sword as one owned by Shivaji is much stronger compared to the wagh nakh currently on display, and the government should have worked towards bringing that to India in­stead of the wagh nakh. To Halladay, this sword has held more sway over the public imagination than the other swords claimed to have belonged to Shivaji because of what it repre­sents. “The London sword has functioned more effectively than the other two as a metonym for the loss and potential recovery of the Indian nation, a quality that has maximized its champions’ ability to orient Shivaji’s legacy towards their goals,” he writes.

Apart from these, a third sword alleged­ly belonging to Shivaji emerged sometime in the early decades of the 20th century. Owned by a Parsi businessman, Bomonjee Pudumjee, who claimed to have bought it in an auction, the traces of that sword have since disappeared from public knowledge. Another sword often linked to Shivaji and that is still visible today to the public is the one seen at Shiv Rajeshwar temple at Sind­hudurg Fort in Maharashtra. The temple, it is claimed, was constructed by Shivaji’s son Rajaram Bhonsle I in his father’s mem­ory, and contains Shivaji’s idol, along with a crown and the sword.

“It is called the Tulja Sword,” Sawant says. Back in 2011, the sword was in bad shape, and the salinity in the air had led to rust formation. The sword was restored by Sawant, and it is today placed in a glass box. So, was this sword once owned by Shivaji? Like many other things associated with Shivaji, this item is probably too old and the query too complex to answer. But irre­spective of the evidence backing its claim, over the centuries, a rich tradition centred around Shivaji has developed in the fort.

“[In historical research] there is some­thing called documented evidence and what you call factual evidence,” Sawant says. “There is a temple there, and you can tell it is very old. There is an idol of Shivaji, his crown, and the sword. And even today, there are pujas and rituals, and people treat the place like Shivaji Maharaj is present there.”

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Lhendup G Bhutia

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