भोसले व जाधव घराणी

At the time of Shivaji's birth, his parents were living in a state of extreme hardship. Their family surname was Bhosale; this Bhosale family had made its home in Maharashtra for many generations, earning its living by the soldier's trade — and, naturally enough, this soldiering had to be carried out in the service of Muslim rulers. Shivaji's father was Shahaji, and his grandfather was Maloji. At Ahmednagar there ruled a Muslim sovereign known as the Nizamshah, and it was in his army that both Maloji and Shahaji rose to prominence, all the while never abandoning their Kshatriya bearing. Just as with the Bhosales, another distinguished sardar in the Nizamshah's service was Lakhuji — also known as Lukhoji — Jadhav, who had his seat at Sindkhed. After the Muslims extinguished the kingdom of the Yadavs, that dynasty's descendants scattered and took up whatever employment they could find, wherever they could find it. The Bhosales settled at Verul, while nearby, at Sindkhed, the Jadhavs made their home. For a time, Maloji Bhosale took service under Lukhoji Jadhavrao at Sindkhed, and it was in the course of this that a marriage came to be arranged between Lukhoji's daughter Jijabai and Maloji's son Shahaji. At the time, Shahaji was about ten or twelve years old, and Jijabai about eight. The story of how this match came to be made is a charming one.

शहाजी-जिजाबाईंच्या विवाहाची कथा

While Maloji Bhosale was still in Lukhoji Jadhav's service, the festival of Rangapanchami came around, and on that occasion Lukhoji invited Maloji to the festivities of color. Lukhoji's daughter Jijabai sat beside her father, and Maloji's son Shahaji, too, had come along with his father to the gathering — both of them still small children. As the adults fell to playing with colored powder, Shahaji and Jijabai, in their childish way, began throwing colors at one another as well. Jadhavrao, charmed by this innocent play, remarked lightly, "What a fine-looking pair these two make, don't they!" No sooner had the words left his lips than Maloji rose and declared before the whole gathering, "Mark this, everyone — Jadhavrao has just now proposed to give his daughter to my son!" What was spoken in that moment came true in time: Maloji pressed his advantage and secured Jadhavrao's daughter for his son Shahaji. The two men thus became kinsmen by marriage. Jijabai was not a woman of great beauty, but whatever she lacked in looks was more than compensated for by the strength of her character. She was proud-spirited, and, conducting herself always with true Kshatriya dignity, was utterly devoted in her service to her husband. Pride in her Yadav lineage burned fiercely within her, for she belonged to that very line of Devagiri Yadavs whom Lord Krishna himself had once blessed; and even though the family's kingdom was long lost and reduced to poverty, this pride never left her heart. That the Muslims persecuted the Hindus filled her with deep resentment; she held that Hindus, through valor, were in no way inferior to Muslims, and that were such valor only exercised, the kingdoms once lost could be won back again. True Kshatriya blood coursed through her veins. Shahajiraje, for his part, was equally brave and valorous, and especially skilled in the conduct of statecraft; he served the Nizamshah with unwavering loyalty and won great renown by it. In the course of time, once Shahaji and Jijabai had come of age, six sons were born to them, one after another, like a constellation of stars — yet of these only two survived to grow into manhood: the elder, Sambhaji, and the younger, Shivaji. The rest died in infancy, as recorded by the poet Paramanand, who lived in close association with the family.

मोगल सत्तेचा विस्तार व दख्खनचा दुर्गम प्रदेश

The years of Shahaji and Jijabai's married life fell in an especially turbulent period. Small Muslim kingdoms held sway within Maharashtra itself, while at Delhi the Mughal emperors — Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan — were laboring to establish a single, unchallenged authority over the whole country. Just as, in ancient times, mighty Hindu emperors such as Ashoka, Samudragupta, and Harshavardhan had done, these Mughals now pressed their ambition to establish sovereign rule over the entire land. Rana Sanga, Rana Pratap Singh, and several others had offered fierce resistance to this ambition, but none of them met with success in their own day. It was left to Shivaji, later, finally to put a check upon this Muslim advance — and it is for this above all that his name resounds so greatly. Running roughly through the middle of the Indian subcontinent is the river Narmada, flowing from east to west to meet the sea, and by its course nature herself has divided this land into two distinct regions, north and south. The northern portion is for the most part flat and open, whereas the southern region, wherever one goes, is broken by rivers, mountains, ravines, and forests, making the terrain difficult for any power to seize and hold. During the four months of the monsoon, moreover, the whole tract becomes nearly impassable even for those travelling on foot. In earlier times the Deccan had no roads at all, so that goods had to be transported by pack-bullocks. Because of this difference in terrain, the Muslims were able to penetrate the north swiftly, but could never do the same in Maharashtra. From Akbar down to Aurangzeb, every one of these powerful emperors exerted his utmost strength, yet the Deccan never fell wholly and unchallenged into their grip. It was in this rugged, inaccessible tract of Maharashtra that Shivaji's own childhood was spent. He himself roamed on foot over the entire hill country of the Maval region and turned this very terrain to his advantage in building his enterprise: the hill forts one finds scattered everywhere across Maharashtra are found nowhere else in like abundance, and most of them are, in fact, of Shivaji's own construction. It is in this coming-together of history and geography that we must look to understand how Shivaji's life took the shape it did.

जिजाबाईचे कष्टमय जीवन व शिवनेरीची जहागीर

Jijabai's elder son, Sambhaji, gradually grew up and began to assist his father in his work. Circumstances themselves prevented the bond of affection between Shahaji and Jijabai from growing especially close: political affairs kept them apart for most of the time, and even their meetings with one another were rare. Jijabai had no part to play in her husband's military life, and so her time passed either at her parental home or upon some solitary, isolated fort; as a result, news of her husband and his doings did not reach her promptly, even in matters of great moment. After Maloji's death, the Bhosale jagir passed to Shahaji. In the Deccan of that era, four contending powers were, in effect, churning Maharashtra into constant turmoil — the kingdoms of Nizamshahi, Adilshahi, and Qutbshahi, together with the Mughal armies that had come to conquer this land — and amid this incessant upheaval Shahaji was preoccupied day and night simply with the question of how to survive. When even the ordinary routines of eating and sleeping could not be reliably maintained, what room was left to think of a wife? Thus the first thirty or forty years of Jijabai's life passed in what amounted to a kind of exile. It was only later, once Shivaji had grown older, that she took him and went to live at Pune. The rugged, mountainous tract on the eastern slope of the Sahyadri range, stretching from Junnar to Wai, was precisely the region that had been granted to this Bhosale family as jagir under the Nizamshahi. Shivaji was born at the fort of Shivneri, adjoining Junnar, and the whole of his childhood was spent wandering through this Maval region. Even before his birth, armies from Delhi had marched down to conquer the kingdom of Ahmednagar. In that difficult period, a Muslim statesman of the Siddi community named Malik Ambar had administered the Nizamshahi kingdom for some twenty-five years; through every manner of stratagem, and by enlisting the Marathas and other local peoples to his cause, he defended that kingdom and would not yield an inch even to so formidable an adversary as the Mughals.