Shivaji Maharaj: Power, Principle, and the Making of Swarajya

Mera rang de basanti chola…
Jis chole ko pehan Shivaji khele apni jaan pe…

The song that Ram Prasad Bismil and his comrades sang in jail was not an act of nostalgia. It was a recognition. In moments of supreme political courage, Indian revolutionaries instinctively reached for one name—Shivaji—because his life had already fused resistance, statecraft, sacrifice, and moral authority into a single legend.

Born around 19 February 1630 at Shivneri Fort, Shivaji grew up amid fractured sovereignties. The Deccan was contested by the sultanates of Bijapur, Ahmednagar, and Golconda, while the Mughal Empire pressed relentlessly from the north. His father Shahji Bhonsle served these powers as a general; his mother Jijabai shaped his ethical and political imagination. From her, he inherited not only piety but an unyielding sense of justice.

By his mid-teens, Shivaji was already acting with remarkable autonomy. At sixteen, he seized Torna Fort, exploiting instability in the Bijapur court. This was not youthful adventurism; it was the beginning of a long experiment in building power without legitimacy, authority without a crown.

Shivaji’s genius lay in recognising early that conventional warfare would fail against Mughal cavalry and artillery. Instead, he evolved Ganimi Kava—a form of guerrilla warfare that transformed terrain into a weapon. Hills, forests, narrow passes, and monsoon-fed rivers became allies. He avoided pitched battles, targeted supply lines, and forced larger armies to exhaust themselves in hostile geography.

His strength rested on people rather than mercenaries. Maratha peasants and Kunbis formed the backbone of his forces. Forts—nearly 240 to 280 of them—were not symbols of prestige but nodes of mobility, intelligence, and survival. From Raigad Fort to Purandar and Kondhana, forts were seized, rebuilt, and networked into a living military system.

Equally forward-looking was his maritime vision. Beginning around 1657, Shivaji purchased vessels from Portuguese yards at Bassein and built India’s first indigenous defensive navy. Sindhudurg Fort became its headquarters. With Muslim admirals like Darya Sarang and Goan and Portuguese sailors, his navy protected trade and coastline alike—an extraordinary innovation in an age when Indian rulers still looked inward.

Shivaji’s revolution was not only military. He dismantled the Persian monopoly over administration and replaced it with Marathi and Sanskrit. His seal bore a Sanskrit legend; his officials compiled the Rajavyavaharkosha (1677) to substitute Persian–Arabic bureaucratic terms with indigenous equivalents. Language became an instrument of sovereignty.

Yet for all his territorial success, Shivaji lacked formal legitimacy. To rivals, he remained, technically, a jagirdar’s son or a Mughal zamindar. The coronation of 1674 at Raigad—performed with waters from seven sacred rivers and Vedic mantras—was therefore a political necessity. He emerged as Chhatrapati, Kshatriya Kulavantas, and ruler of Hindavi Swarajya. His mother Jijabai witnessed this moment; she died shortly thereafter, as if her life’s purpose had been fulfilled.

Shivaji’s career unfolded largely in conflict with Islamic sultanates and the Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb. Inevitably, his politics acquired a Hindu coloration. Yet to reduce him to a sectarian ruler is to misread him entirely. He protected temples and Hindu customs, but he also employed Muslims at the highest levels of command, endowed mosques, and formed alliances across religious lines. He urged Aurangzeb to rule like Akbar. His army included Pathan units; Muslims led his navy. Pragmatism, not dogma, governed his choices.

He neither joined the Rajputs against the Mughals nor hesitated to ally with Muslim states when circumstances demanded. His tolerance was not rhetorical—it was administrative.

The last years of Shivaji’s life were troubled. His elder son defected to the Mughals before being brought back; ministers quarrelled; enemies multiplied. Governing was as exhausting as fighting. He died in April 1680 at Raigad, worn down by illness and relentless strain. He had ruled as crowned king for barely six years.

Yet what he left behind was far greater than his lifespan. Under Bajirao I, the Maratha state expanded across the subcontinent, reducing the Mughal emperor to a nominal figure by the mid-eighteenth century. The architecture of that expansion—mobility, decentralised command, fiscal realism—was Shivaji’s creation.

From Sabhasad Bakhar to 91 Kalmi Bakhar, early chroniclers elevated Shivaji almost to divinity. Colonial-era thinkers reinterpreted him again: Jyotirao Phule cast him as a hero of the shudras; Bal Gangadhar Tilak as an opponent of oppression; M. G. Ranade as the founder of modern nation-building. Jadunath Sarkar gave him scholarly permanence.

Each generation found its own Shivaji. That is both his power and his peril.

To see him whole is to recognise a ruler who fought tyranny without becoming tyrannical; who upheld faith without persecuting others; who empowered peasants and marginalised castes; who understood that language, administration, and dignity matter as much as swords.

The alternative is to shrink him into a narrow, chauvinistic emblem—and in doing so betray the very Swarajya he imagined.

When freedom fighters sang of the basanti chola, they were not invoking a sectarian past but a shared ethical inheritance. Shivaji stands there still—not as a weapon for the present, but as a measure against which the present must be judged.

Companion Box | Reading Shivaji Beyond the Slogans (Optional)

Shivaji Maharaj is among the most invoked—and most misunderstood—figures in Indian public life. His name is often reduced to a slogan, stripping it of historical depth. Shivaji fought not for dominance but for Swarajya—self-rule rooted in dignity, accountability, and local consent. His wars targeted imperial extraction, not communities. His governance was inclusive: Muslims served in senior commands; peasants were protected from arbitrary taxation; women were safeguarded even in conquest. To invoke Shivaji without his restraint and institutional vision is to hollow him out. He endures because he governed with principle, not merely because he conquered.

Author: Harish Jain
Designation: Historian