सूड व प्रतिसूड

When Aurangzeb learned that Shivaji had slipped out of Agra and made his way back to the Deccan unscathed, his fury knew no bounds. Here, at last, he had met one adversary in the whole world who had humiliated him utterly — as the Marathi phrase of the day put it, Shivaji had 'cut off his nose.' The Badshah resolved in his heart that he would avenge this humiliation upon Hindu religion itself. He had come to regard Mirza Raja Jai Singh, Jaswant Singh, and indeed all the Hindu Rajput princes of his empire as untrustworthy traitors, and he determined to crush them. Beyond the open war he now declared on them, he moved, on the 9th of April 1669, to institutionalize his religious vengeance: he created an entirely new department of state whose sole charge was to demolish Hindu temples, confiscate the wealth attached to them, and convert people to Islam. Officers were specially appointed for this work, and standing orders required them to submit, every month, a detailed account of how many temples had been razed, how many idols broken, and how many people brought into the fold of Islam. Underlying this fury was a deep personal dread as well. Aurangzeb suspected that just as he himself had dealt with his own brothers in his rise to the throne, so too might his own sons one day deal with him — and he feared that in any such bid they would readily find support among the Rajputs. It seemed to him, therefore, that the Rajputs themselves had to be broken first. Mirza Raja Jai Singh, fortunately for him, died about this time, sparing the Badshah that particular anxiety; how Aurangzeb subsequently dealt with Jaswant Singh is a matter recorded elsewhere in history. The order for the destruction of temples was carried out without delay.

मंदिरांची विटंबना

News that the great Vishwanath temple of Kashi had been pulled down reached the Badshah on the 4th of September 1669. In its place rose a vast mosque, which stands to this day, itself a silent witness recounting to all who see it the history of that act. A few months later, in January 1670, the celebrated Keshavrai temple of Mathura was likewise razed to the ground. It would serve no purpose to catalogue every such outrage individually — they were numerous, and this was the spirit of the age. Yet Shivaji's own reading of the situation was not mistaken: he had calculated that this Mughal empire needed only a firm push to come crashing down, and for that push he required the cooperation of the Rajputs of the north. It was not an impossible design. Sambhaji would in fact put this very strategy to the test some years later, when Aurangzeb's own son Akbar, in revolt against his father, came and threw in his lot with him.

सिंहगडाची स्वारी — तानाजी मालुसरे

News of the Badshah's high-handed measures in the north reached the Deccan in due course, and it filled both Shivaji and Jijabai with intense indignation. Jijabai in particular pressed her son hard for revenge, insisting at the very least that Sinhagad — which remained in Mughal hands — be wrested back without delay. Acting on her insistence, Shivaji set Tanaji Malusare to the task. Climbing the fort's sheer rock face by a rope with the help of a trained ghorpad (monitor lizard), Tanaji recaptured Sinhagad on the 4th of February 1670. That story of how Shivaji took the fort a second time is told on the lips of every Maharashtrian, young and old, and needs no retelling here. Udebhan Rathod, Aurangzeb's loyal and capable commander who held the fort, gave up his life in that engagement. It is said that Jijabai had warned Shivaji that if he failed to take this fort she would lay a curse upon his kingdom — the true weight of that warning is best measured against everything that followed. In quick succession thereafter, Shivaji recovered Purandar and most of the other forts that had been surrendered to Jai Singh under the earlier treaty. Once more, in October of that same year, 1670, he sent his forces raiding into Surat and carried off a very substantial plunder — fitting retribution, in his reckoning, for the Badshah's provocations.

राज्यविस्तार व साथीदार

From this point onward Shivaji's dominion and the reach of his power kept steadily growing. He freed the whole stretch of Maharashtra from Karwar in the south to the Tapi river in the north and brought it under his own authority — a process too extensive to narrate in detail here. Many capable helpers rose to prominence in the service of this expanding kingdom: Pratap Rao Gujar, Hambirrao Mohite, Moropant Pingle, and Anaji Datto, among others. Khandesh and Varhad (Berar), fertile and prosperous provinces of the Badshah, also passed into Shivaji's hands, and with their acquisition he became master of the whole of Maharashtra. To hold this position he fought a great two-year war with the Mughals at Salher, a campaign that further burnished his reputation and displayed his own personal skill in the art of war to the whole country. Panhala, the Bijapur fort, too came once again under his control. This third decade of Shivaji's career, the years 1664 to 1674, thus shows his life on a rising arc of achievement; the three decades before it, 1644 to 1664, are already well known and need no further comment here. A note on the Salher campaign: much of the credit for leading that battle belongs to the Peshwa, Moropant Pingle, and a contemporary ballad commemorates him thus — 'Where Shivaji roars from the caves of Pune, there dwells the valiant Peshwa; just as Arjuna once crushed the Kauravas, so did the Peshwa crush the Mughals.'

चौथाई व सरदेशमुखीची नवी योजना

The journey to Agra and back had, in a real sense, transformed Shivaji's own outlook. Once his operations began ranging across such a wide belt of territory — Surat, Burhanpur, Bidar, Bidnur, Karanja and more — the narrow, confined experience of his early days in the Maval hills no longer sufficed. In the beginning, within his small Maval jagir and the Konkan coastal strip, he had appointed his own officers and built a compact, well-run administration. But now, returning from the north, the larger possibility of a Hindavi Swarajya — a Hindu Pad Padshahi, a paramount Hindu sovereignty — had begun to take shape before his eyes. Guided by that vision, he understood that unless he put in place some clear system of governance for these newly won outer territories, his enterprise could hardly be called a true kingdom at all, since these distant tracts were not yet wholly and securely his own possession. Day by day his enterprise was growing, and it seemed likely to spread across the whole of Hindustan. To assert his claim over these outer regions he devised a new mechanism. The territory under his own direct rule he called Swarajya — his own kingdom proper — while beyond it lay tracts that fell within his reach but were not directly his; over these he now imposed two new levies, chauthai and sardeshmukhi. Under this arrangement, Shivaji undertook to protect such territories, and in return their inhabitants paid him one-quarter of the assessed revenue as chauthai — thus if a district's assessment stood at 100 rupees, 25 rupees became payable as chauth — on the understanding that the Marathas would refrain from raiding or plundering it further. To collect this levy he appointed an officer titled deshmukh, and over and above the chauthai he further claimed an additional ten percent as sardeshmukhi, a right he reserved exclusively to himself as Chhatrapati, marking his own overlordship. In this way the twin principles of chauthai and sardeshmukhi took root in the Maratha state, and it was precisely this mechanism that later allowed Maratha power to spread across the length and breadth of the country — the first faint outline of the idea of Hindu Pad Padshahi. This scheme of a wider dominion did not remain a secret. Little by little, it became visible to the Badshah's own officers as well.