The Emperor’s Redoubt

RAIGAD FORT, IT is said, was referred to by early European travellers as the “Gibraltar of the East”. Whether or not that is true, you can see why a traveller may feel the urge to use such a descrip­tion. As you take a step back to accommodate the size of the hill from the base, Raigad rises, vast and imposing, like an impregnable prehis­toric rock. The Maratha king Shivaji is believed to have chosen this fort as the location of his capital because of just how impenetrable it was. Today, how­ever, you can catch a ropeway to reach the top of the hill in mere minutes.

We have lined up at the village of Pachad, which is at the base and dotted with restaurants and homestays, in a makeshift passageway that zigzags its way to the entrance of the ropeway. The air is thick with humidity, and many tiny fans whir and rattle above our heads. This being a weekend, there is an ever-growing queue to catch the ropeway. And every few minutes, someone will shout “Jai Bhavani”, either in anticipa­tion of their trip or probably just to drive the boredom away, and the rest will join in enthusiastically with “Jai Shivaji”. But as time stretches on, and very little of the queue ahead seems to move, even these invocations are met with tepid responses.

In the meantime, one staffer at the ropeway has given to calling me “Twopeople”. I had nodded to his query whether there were two people in our group as our turn to the ropeway entrance neared, and now he was calling me Twopeople everywhere: “Twopeo­ple, show me your ticket.” “Twopeople, come this way.” “No, Two people, not this way. That way.” “Twopeople, sit there.” His instructions came thick and fast, in a mix of Hindi and English, and sometimes Marathi, the only constant being my new name. He leads us with these sets of instructions, out from the queue and into a tiny museum charting the history of the fort, and then into an­other screening a short film on Shivaji, before guiding us into a trolley that will transport us to the top of the hill.

The fort stands some 2,851 feet above sea level. And the ropeway covers this elevation in less than five minutes. Its climb is rapid, and watching from below, the trol­leys can look like tiny toys being pulled up by some unseen giant hand. We have only just settled ourselves, and begun to worry about our precipitous climb, when somewhere from behind, someone shouts “Jai Bha­vani” and before anyone can complete the invocation, the rope tugs and we creep up into the sky.

Raigad translates to “royal fort”, but was originally called Rairi. It may be considered impregnable, but histori­cally, it changed hands several times. The Imperial Gazetteer of India mentions that it belonged to a family of petty Maratha chiefs in the 12th century, who by the 14th century were acknowledging the Vijayanagara princes as their overlords. From then on it passed through several hands, to a Bahmani ruler in the mid- 15th century, to the Nizam Shahi Sultans of Ahmadnagar later in that century, to the Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur later, and was being held by Chandrarao More, the head of a power­ful clan under the Adil Shahi Sultanate, when it was captured by Shivaji in 1656.

To Shivaji, Raigad had many attri­butes. Not only did its geography make it difficult for enemies to plan an attack, it also gave him easy communication with the Deccan and access to the sea.

Shivaji gave the fort a new formal name—Raigad—and he went about fur­ther fortifying the place and construct­ing a large number of houses, offices, marketplaces and other structures. He made it the seat of his capital, and in 1674, in a ceremony marked with much splendour, crowned himself the king of the Maratha empire.

We arrive at the top of the hill today, close to the southern entry point of the fort, where the Mena Darwaja, the door through which the royal ladies would enter, still stands. Much of what remains of the fort today is in ruins, but there are still some structures, some intact gates and doorways, and the remains of watch­towers and the plinths upon which palaces and durbars stood that give us a hint of the splendour that it must have once been.

WE HAVE AN account of the fort in its heyday by an East India Company of­ficial named Henry Oxenden, who had visited it during Shivaji’s corona­tion. He writes of Shivaji seated upon a magnificent throne in his court; of the many emblems of the new government, often made of gold, hanging on gilded lances on the sides of the thrones; and of encountering two elephants and two horses with “gold bridles” and “rich furniture” upon them at the palace gate which made Oxenden wonder how these animals had been brought up the hill. At one point, he writes of the fort, as quoted in Vaibhav Purandare’s book Shivaji: India’s Great Warrior King, that it was “fortified by nature more than art, being of very difficult access, and [it has] but one advance to it, which is guarded by two narrow gates, and fortified with a strong high wall and bastions thereto. All the other part of the mountains is a direct precipice, so that it is impregnable except [if] the treachery of some in it betrays it.”

According to the The Imperial Gazet­teer of India, there were around 300 royal and public buildings that included palac­es, mansions, houses, offices, granaries, a mint, quarters for a garrison, and much more. One such impressive structure is a marketplace, Bazarpeth, about a mile long, where a complex of shops exists on two sides of the road, where it is said individuals could buy things without once stepping down from their horses. Another is the Raj Bhavan, or the royal court, of which only its main entrance, a huge structure known as Nagarkhana, stands today.

A lot of the structures are in ruins, possibly because of the bombardment it was subjected to in 1818. After Shivaji’s death in 1680, the fort remained with the Marathas till it was lost to the Mughals in 1689, and then regained sometime in the next century, before it was bom­barded into submission by the British in 1818. The Imperial Gazetteer of India men­tions that the bombardment, carried out by cannons placed in the nearby hill of Kalkai, lasted 14 days.

Monsoon has arrived ahead of sched­ule in Raigad this year, and today there is a film of green everywhere the eye can cast itself. Above us, dark clouds have gathered, and for much of the day, they hang above, leaking fat drops, but never really bursting out in rain.

We walk through the ruins, into the six palaces for six different queens, and into structures that some have identi­fied as homes belonging to warriors. Every time we encounter toilets, most of them attached to the queen’s palaces and today filled with plastic water bottles, tourists titter in amusement. The provision of toilets, some academ­ics have noted, was rare for medieval times. We move this way and that until we arrive at the structure marked out as the residence of Shivaji.

SHIVAJI OF COURSE isn’t just a historical figure in Maharashtra, and Raigad is as much a tourist destination as a pilgrimage spot. The evidence of the reverence in which he is held is visible everywhere today. Slip­pers and shoes are left behind when trav­ellers approach a statue of his (although there are no instructions asking anyone to do so), guides function as much as balladeers singing the king’s praises, and at some spots, such as the one where Shivaji is believed to have breathed his last, I saw many middle-aged women climb up to that spot with bare feet, touch their heads to the ground in reverence, and scoop up some of that earth to carry it home. In Maharashtra, many communities attach their legacies to that of Shivaji, even though some of this maybe charting contested history. In Raigad, this has played out controver­sially in the form a statue of a dog called Waghya, which some claim belonged to Shivaji, and some others say is entirely fictional. According to one account, the dog is believed to have been so grief-stricken at Shivaji’s death that it jumped into his funeral pyre.

What is known is that the statue of the dog came up a few years after the Shivaji memorial at the fort was restored in 1926. This restoration, at the spot Shivaji was cremated, was completed after a considerable financial contribu­tion had been made by Tukoji Rao Holkar, who belonged to the Holkar clan of the Maratha empire, and who are said to hail from the shepherd community of Dhan­gars in Maharashtra. Many have over the years sought to get the statue of the dog removed, describing it as an insult to the memory of the king, but many from the Dhangar community have objected.

Matters came to a boil in 2011, when members of a Maratha group called Sambhaji Brigade removed the statute, and, according to reports, threw it into the valley below, but the memorial was reinstalled again after protests by Dhan­gars. Things seemed to be escalating once again earlier this year, when a current descendant of Shivaji, Sambhajiraje Chhatrapati, who serves as a Rajya Sabha member, urged Maharash­tra’s Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to get the statue removed, but the matter has since then simmered down again.

We walk today, away from the spot where Shivaji’s court once stood, across a large ground and the ruins of the Bazarpeth marketplace, and follow the trail where a large structure can be seen a fair distance away.

This is the complex that houses the Jagdishwar temple, an ancient Shiva temple that was built during the time of Shivaji’s reign, and to the east of which lies Shivaji’s memorial.

The memorial is crowded today, as groups of people take turns praying and clicking pictures at the spot. Just beside the memorial stands the statue of the dog, watching the proceedings forlornly. The way to this statue has been barricaded, and the statue itself has been fenced in, with a policeman kept on guard. Many seem to be confused by the dog’s presence, and they ask what it means, but nobody seems to be aware of its contested story.

We move out of the complex, and then follow the directions given by some local women who sell buttermilk at the fort, picking our way through a narrow path across some fields. We are headed towards a place known as Tak Mak Tok, a point at the fort, from where prisoners sentenced to death were said to have been flung out. The way to this place moves out from the fields and becomes more difficult, until you reach a place where all that remains is the path, with a deep cliff on both sides. This pathway gets narrower and narrower, and ulti­mately culminates several metres away into a sharp point.

A prisoner walking to his death cannot possibly be persuaded to enjoy the view, but there are certainly worse ways to go. The Sahyadris rise up all around you like jagged ends of an upturned comb. As far as your eye can see, everything that was only weeks ago brown and desolate, has now turned a rich green. We spend several minutes here, buffeted by strong winds, before making our way out of the fort, and through the ropeway, back down to the village at the base of the hill.

We are among the last to make our way down, and stepping out of the trol­ley, I can hear a familiar voice.

“Twopeople,” someone is calling out. “How was it?”

And then he answers the question himself.

“Number one, haina [right].”

Chhatrapati ShivajiMaharashtraRaigad FortTravel Issue 2025