Shivaji: The Escape From Aurangzeb’s Agra and the Crown at Raigad

Agra, August 1666. For days, porters have carried huge baskets out of a guarded mansion outside the city walls. Each basket hangs from a pole on two men’s shoulders. Each is full of sweets. They are gifts from a sick prisoner to Brahmins, holy men and courtiers. He is asking the gods to make him well.

At first the guards searched every basket. Now they wave them through.

One evening, the old chronicles say, two of the baskets held no sweets. In one crouched Shivaji Bhonsle. He was the Maratha chief who had defied both the sultan of Bijapur and the Mughal empire. In the other sat his son Sambhaji, nine years old. Back in the house, a half-brother lay in Shivaji’s bed under a quilt. One arm stuck out. On it was Shivaji’s gold bracelet.

By the time the guards understood, the prisoner had a day’s start.

That is the story Maharashtra grew up with. It comes from Maratha and Mughal writers who set it down decades later. No record from the time describes the baskets. But some things are certain. In May 1666 Shivaji walked into the court of Aurangzeb, the Mughal emperor, as his vassal, a ruler who served him. In August he got out. Eight years later he was crowned king at Raigad, a fort in the Sahyadri hills. Even that crowning was argued over.

Here is how he got there. We tell it from both sides, and we mark the legends.

Shivaji was born around 1630 at Shivneri, a hill fort near Junnar in today’s Pune district. Scholars disagree on the exact date. The Maharashtra government marks his birthday, Shivaji Jayanti, on 19 February.

His father, Shahaji Bhonsle, was a Maratha general. He served the sultans of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur, and for a time the Mughals. In 1636 Bijapur gave him Pune as a jagir, an estate whose taxes paid for his troops. Then it sent him south to Karnataka. His wife Jijabai stayed in Pune with their son.

Maratha tradition gives Jijabai the credit for raising a boy who would not bow. The American scholar James Laine writes that she filled him with a dream: to build a Hindu kingdom again.

In the mid-1640s Bijapur’s sultan, Muhammad Adil Shah, fell badly ill, and his court lost its grip. Torna was a fort on a high ridge south-west of Pune. Shivaji’s men tricked its Bijapuri commander into handing it over. Jadunath Sarkar, whose Shivaji and His Times (1919) is still the standard life, puts this in 1646. He admits the date is a guess. Shivaji was about sixteen. Inside, Sarkar says, his men found 2 lakh hun of government treasure. The hun was the gold coin of the Deccan. With it Shivaji built a new fort a few kilometres away. It was Rajgad, his capital for years to come.

Kondana, Purandar and Chakan came next. Some he won with bribes, some with tricks. In 1656 he killed Chandrarao More, a fellow Maratha chief in Bijapur’s service, and took the forested valley of Javli. Maratha writers saw a conquest that had to happen. Sarkar called it murder, and was attacked for saying so.

Bijapur jailed Shahaji for a year to rein in his son. Later Shahaji disowned the rebel. Bijapur, he said, could do what it liked with him.

In 1659 Bijapur sent its best general. Afzal Khan was a noble of the highest rank who had fought in the wars in Karnataka. Sources from the time, an English letter among them, give him about 10,000 men. The Maratha chronicles give more. At court, Sarkar says, he boasted that he would bring the rebel back without once getting off his horse.

On the way he struck at what Shivaji held holiest. Maratha sources say his men broke the image of the goddess Bhavani at Tuljapur, the Bhonsle family’s own goddess. They say his men also defiled the temple at Pandharpur. The English, Dutch and Portuguese records of the time do not mention it. If it happened, historians think, the aim was to draw Shivaji out of the hills.

Shivaji fell back to Pratapgad, a new fort in the forests near Mahabaleshwar. Afzal Khan sent an envoy with a friendly offer. Come and meet me, it said, and I will get you pardoned. Krishnaji Anant Sabhasad, a courtier of Shivaji’s, wrote a chronicle in the 1690s, the Sabhasad bakhar. He says Shivaji’s own envoy, Gopinath Pant, bribed Afzal’s officers. From them he learned the Khan’s plan: to seize Shivaji at the meeting.

The East India Company had a trading post, then called a factory, at Rajapur. An English letter from there, written soon afterwards, says Bijapur’s queen mother had given the general the same advice.

she counselled him to pretend friendship with his enemy, which he did.English East India Company factors at Rajapur, 1659, as quoted by Jadunath Sarkar

Shivaji laid his own trap. He had a path cut through the forest for the Khan’s army. In the valleys he hid troops. The two men agreed to meet in a richly furnished tent on a ridge below Pratapgad. Each would bring two guards and an envoy.

Shivaji came ready. Under his tunic he wore chain mail. Under his turban was a steel cap. On his left hand he wore bagh nakh, steel tiger claws held on by rings on his fingers. Up his right sleeve was a bichwa, a thin dagger. His mother, the chronicles say, blessed him on the way down.

Almost all we know of what happened in the tent comes from one side. Sarkar followed the Maratha account. In it, the tall Khan hugged the short, slim Shivaji. Then he locked Shivaji’s neck under one arm and stabbed at his side. The chain mail stopped the blade. Shivaji ripped open the Khan’s belly with the claws and drove in the dagger. Afzal’s swordsman, Sayyid Banda, attacked. Shivaji’s bodyguard, Jiva Mahala, cut him down. Marathi still has a saying for it: Hota Jiva mhanun vachla Shiva, Shiva lived because Jiva was there. The wounded Khan was carried off in his palanquin. As he went, another of Shivaji’s men, Sambhaji Kavji, cut off his head.

A cannon was fired from the fort. The hidden Maratha troops fell on the Bijapuri camp. The English report put the dead at about 3,000. Sarkar’s list of what was captured includes 65 elephants and 4,000 horses. Sabhasad says prisoners were sent home with money and food. The date usually given is 10 November 1659.

In 1660 Bijapur trapped him in Panhala, near Kolhapur. He slipped out by night. Maratha tradition says his officer Baji Prabhu Deshpande held a mountain pass behind him. He held it until cannon fire from Vishalgad told him his master was safe. It cost him his life.

Then came the Mughals. Aurangzeb had seized his father’s throne in 1658. He sent his mother’s brother, Shaista Khan, south with a large army. In 1660 Shaista Khan took Pune. He moved into Lal Mahal, the very house where Shivaji had grown up.

On the night of 5 April 1663, Shivaji came home. It was Ramzan. The household had eaten its late meal and gone to sleep. Sarkar used an English letter that passed on Shivaji’s own account. By it, about 400 picked men got into the huge camp by pretending to be Deccani soldiers of the emperor’s army. Popular retellings have them slipping in behind a wedding procession. Shivaji knew every corner of the house. His men knocked a hole through a bricked-up door into the women’s rooms. Then they hacked through the cloth screens to the Khan’s bedroom.

Someone put out the lamps. In the dark, Shivaji’s sword cut off part of Shaista Khan’s hand. Sarkar says it was his thumb. Most later tellings say three fingers. Slave girls carried the Khan to safety. His son Abul Fath was killed, with dozens of servants. By the English count, the raiders lost six men.

Maharaja Jaswant Singh was camped nearby with 10,000 men. He did nothing. The next morning, Sarkar says, Shaista Khan told him he had thought Jaswant must be dead already, fighting the raiders. A furious Aurangzeb sent his uncle off to Bengal.

People began to say Shivaji had magic powers, Sarkar writes. Aurangzeb and his generals had a ruder name for him: the mountain rat. In 1664 the rat bit the empire where it hurt most. He sacked Surat, its richest port. Modern estimates put the loot at more than one crore rupees.

Now Aurangzeb sent a Rajput, Mirza Raja Jai Singh of Amber. Jai Singh did not chase Shivaji through the hills. He laid siege to his forts, burned his country and bribed his commanders to change sides.

In 1665 he laid siege to Purandar. The families of Shivaji’s officers were sheltering inside. Its commander, Murar Baji Prabhu, charged out with 700 men against the Afghan general Dilir Khan. Sabhasad says Dilir Khan admired his courage and offered him his life and a high post. Murar Baji refused. He was shot down with an arrow.

By June, five towers of the lower fort had fallen. On 11 June 1665 Shivaji came to Jai Singh’s tent at the foot of Purandar. He came in a palanquin, with a handful of Brahmin aides. Jai Singh hugged him and sat him at his side. Armed Rajputs stood close, in case the killer of Afzal Khan tried anything. Then Jai Singh gave a signal. In full view of the tent, his troops stormed another part of the walls. Shivaji offered to give up the fort.

They bargained until midnight. Under the Treaty of Purandar, Shivaji handed 23 forts to the Mughals. He kept 12, Rajgad among them, as the emperor’s servant. His son Sambhaji, aged eight, was made a mansabdar, a Mughal officer with a fixed rank. His rank was commander of 5,000 horse. Shivaji also offered 40 lakh hun if the emperor let him take Bijapur’s lands. Jai Singh liked that deal. It would turn Shivaji against Bijapur.

Shivaji’s letters to Aurangzeb that year are so humble they grovel. In one he calls himself the meanest of slaves. The emperor sent a pardon and a robe of honour. In the treaty, Shivaji had asked not to have to go to court in person. Jai Singh used “a thousand devices” to make him go anyway. He said so again and again in his reports.

In March 1666 Shivaji set out from Rajgad with Sambhaji, a few officers and an escort. He left Jijabai as regent, to rule in his place, with ministers in charge. The state would run even if he never came back. Jai Singh swore solemn oaths that Shivaji would be safe. His son Ram Singh, at court, gave his word too.

On the road a letter from the emperor caught up with him. It was dated Agra, 5 April. Come quickly, it said. After receiving my favours, you will be allowed to return home.

He reached the edge of Agra on 9 May. Only two junior officers came out to meet him. On 12 May, Aurangzeb’s fiftieth birthday by the lunar calendar, Ram Singh led him into the Diwan-i-Am. This was the hall of public audience in Agra Fort. It was packed with nobles in their finest robes. Shivaji’s gifts of 1,500 gold coins were laid before the throne. He bowed three times. Then he was led back to stand among the commanders of 5,000. The ceremony moved on without him.

He was furious. In Sarkar’s sources he asks who is standing in front of him. He is told it is Rai Singh, one of Jai Singh’s junior men. Shivaji protested. His little son had been made a 5,000 without even coming to court. His own servant, Netaji Palkar, was a 5,000. Was that all he was worth? The Maratha chronicles say the man in front was Jaswant Singh. Shivaji sneered that his soldiers had seen Jaswant’s back, as he ran from them. Sarkar thought that unlikely. Jaswant held a higher rank and would have stood two rows ahead.

He raised his voice. In the most formal court in Asia, that broke every rule. Then he fainted. The emperor asked what was the matter. Ram Singh had an answer ready.

The tiger is a wild beast of the forest. He feels oppressed by heat in a place like this and has been taken ill.Ram Singh to Aurangzeb, 12 May 1666, as given by Jadunath Sarkar from the Mughal accounts

Aurangzeb had him sprinkled with rose water and sent to his rooms. The Alamgirnama, the official Mughal history, says Shivaji made “unreasonable and foolish complaints”. An English letter from Surat said his spirit could not bear to wait with the other nobles, hands folded, “like mutes”. The gifts the emperor had meant for him were held back.

Ram Singh was ordered to keep Shivaji in Jaipur House, his family’s mansion outside the city walls. If Shivaji got away, Ram Singh would answer for it. Shivaji was barred from court. Today the site of his prison is placed at Kothi Meena Bazar in Agra. It was not, as some once claimed, a cellar in Agra Fort. The historian Raj Kishore Raje spoke to ThePrint in 2023. The Archaeological Survey of India, he said, had told him there was no evidence for the Agra Fort story.

The court argued about what to do with him. Aurangzeb talked of sending him far away to the north-west. A rumour went round that he would be killed on the way. Jai Singh had pledged his honour for Shivaji’s safety. Killing him would gain nothing, he wrote, since his state could run without him. He urged his son to keep Shivaji alive.

Shivaji offered to conquer Bijapur and Golconda for the emperor if he was sent back south. Aurangzeb wrote on the request: wait a little, and I shall do what you ask. A private meeting with the emperor was refused. Sabhasad says Shaista Khan warned the court that Shivaji could leap forty yards onto his victim.

Then Fulad Khan, the police chief of Agra, put a ring of soldiers and guns around the house. Sabhasad says Shivaji held Sambhaji to his chest and wept. So three months went by.

Shivaji changed his game. He acted afraid and sorry. He begged courtier after courtier to plead for him. He got permission to send his escort home, and his officers left in small groups. Then he fell ill, or said he had.

From here on, the story comes mainly from two men. Sabhasad wrote about thirty years later, for Shivaji’s younger son. The Mughal historian Khafi Khan wrote a generation after that. The official Mughal history gives the escape a single sentence. Every evening, the chroniclers say, sweets went out of the house in big bamboo baskets slung on poles. At first the guards opened one or two. They found sweets, and soon stopped looking.

Sabhasad’s Marathi word for what was in the baskets can mean fruit or sweets. A note in Surendranath Sen’s 1920 translation points this out. That may be why some tellings speak of fruit baskets.

On the chosen evening, Shivaji and Sambhaji climbed into two of them. Hiroji Farzand lay in Shivaji’s bed under a quilt. One hand showed, with Shivaji’s gold wristlet on it. A boy massaged his feet. Outside the city, at a lonely spot, the baskets were set down and the porters sent away. Father and son walked to a village. There Niraji Ravji waited with horses.

Hiroji lay there all night and into the next afternoon. Then he walked out with the boy. He told the sentries to keep the noise down: Shivaji was ill. Hours later the guards noticed how quiet the house was. They went in. The bed was empty.

Whether he flew into the sky or disappeared into the earth, is not known, nor what magical trick he has played.Fulad Khan, police chief of Agra, to Aurangzeb, as given by Jadunath Sarkar

Aurangzeb did not believe in magic. Fast riders raced down the roads to the Deccan. His men arrested Shivaji’s Brahmin officers wherever they found them. But Shivaji had gone the other way.

At Mathura the boy was worn out. Three Deccani Brahmin brothers lived there: Krishnaji, Kashi and Visaji. They were related by marriage to Shivaji’s minister Moro Trimbak Pingle. At the risk of their lives, they agreed to hide him. Shivaji shaved his beard, smeared himself with ash and became a wandering holy man. Khafi Khan says gems and gold coins were packed into a hollow staff and sewn into his servants’ clothes.

There are many tales of the road, and they are hard to check. Khafi Khan says a Mughal officer arrested the party, then let them go for a diamond and a ruby. He also tells of a young Brahmin at Benares. Before dawn a stranger handed him a fistful of jewels and told him to rush through the bathing rites. The stranger vanished just as the emperor’s men arrived.

A late tradition says a holy man came to Jijabai’s gate and she did not know him. Then he put his head in her lap. Shivaji let it be known that Sambhaji had died, and went into mourning. Months later the Mathura brothers brought the boy home, passing him off as a Brahmin relative. A suspicious Mughal officer stopped them. Sarkar says the brothers ate with the boy to prove he was one of their own. Shivaji gave them the title Vishwasrao, lords of fidelity: men who could be trusted.

Somebody had to take the blame. Three of Shivaji’s Brahmin officers were caught in Agra. Under questioning, probably under torture, they said Ram Singh had helped. Ram Singh was barred from court and stripped of his rank. Nothing was proved. The historian Stewart Gordon doubts the basket story altogether. No evidence from the time supports it, he says. He thinks Shivaji most likely bribed his guards.

Jai Singh’s invasion of Bijapur had already failed. Now the escape ruined him. In a letter Sarkar found, he even proposed luring Shivaji with a false marriage offer and having him killed on the road. He died in 1667.

For three years there was an uneasy peace. Aurangzeb even gave Shivaji the title of Raja. In 1670 war came back. In February Tanaji Malusare’s men climbed the walls of Kondana, also called Sinhagad, on rope ladders. They took the fort, but Tanaji was killed. Tradition has Shivaji saying: the fort is taken, but the lion is gone. Later that year Surat was sacked again.

Aurangzeb never forgot Agra. A will said to be his, translated by Sarkar, gives his heirs twelve rules for ruling. The last rule is about always knowing what is going on.

The escape of the wretch Shiva took place through [my] carelessness, and I have to labour hard [against the Marathas] to the end of my life.Aurangzeb, in the will attributed to him, trans. Jadunath Sarkar, Anecdotes of Aurangzib (1917)

By the early 1670s Shivaji ruled a real state. He had forts, a navy and a standing army. On paper he was still a rebel. To Aurangzeb he was a zamindar, a landholder. To Bijapur he was a jagirdar’s son. Maratha families who had once been the Bhonsles’ equals sneered at him as an upstart. A coronation would settle that.

There was a snag. By the scriptures, only a Kshatriya, of the warrior varna or class, could be made king with holy rites. The Bhonsles were remembered as farming headmen. Many Brahmins did not count them as Kshatriyas, or as any other twice-born caste, the upper castes who wear the sacred thread. Shivaji had never had a sacred thread ceremony.

The answer came from Varanasi. Vishweshwar Bhatt, known as Gaga Bhatt, was one of the most respected Sanskrit scholars of the age. He had met Shivaji before, in 1664, when he led a gathering of pandits at Rajapur. Now he accepted a family tree that traced the Bhonsles to the Sisodia Ranas of Mewar, the Rajput royal house of Udaipur. Through them it went back to Rama and the solar line, the family of the sun.

Was it true? Sarkar wrote that Shivaji’s secretary, Balaji Avji, made the family tree up, and that Gaga Bhatt was paid a huge fee. The historians Surendranath Sen and V.K. Rajwade also rejected the Sisodia link. Others point out that Shivaji’s grandfather Maloji already claimed Sisodia ancestors. The Columbia scholar Allison Busch has shown how the court poet Bhushan turned the claim into verse. True or not, it did its job.

The rituals began. On 28 May 1674 Shivaji did penance because his ancestors had not kept Kshatriya rites. Then Gaga Bhatt gave him the sacred thread. But the gathered Brahmins objected again, says a Dutch report Sarkar used. No true Kshatriyas were left in this age, they said. They would not chant the Vedic verses for him. Gaga Bhatt gave way and used a changed rite.

Next day Shivaji was weighed against seven metals, from gold to iron, and against camphor, salt, spices and sugar. All of it went to the Brahmins, with a lakh of hun on top. Then two learned men raised a new point. His raids had burned towns and caused the deaths of Brahmins, cows, women and children. The Dutch report says the price of washing away that sin was 8,000 rupees. He paid. Sarkar admired Shivaji greatly, but not his priests. He summed it up in one line: “All his disqualifications having been thus removed with gold, the actual coronation was now begun.”

Raigad is a great flat-topped hill near Mahad. It had been rebuilt as the capital. Sarkar counts 11,000 Brahmins there, 50,000 people with their families. The king fed them all for four months. Henry Oxenden, an English envoy from Bombay, had come to agree a treaty. He grumbled that he could hardly get a meeting, because the Raja was so busy with rituals and weddings.

Early on 6 June Shivaji bathed, worshipped his household gods and dressed in white. He sat on a gold-plated stool. His queen, Soyarabai, sat beside him, and Sambhaji just behind. His eight ministers stood at the eight points of the compass. From gold jugs they poured water from the Ganges and other holy rivers over them. Then, in a scarlet robe embroidered with gold, he climbed to a throne Oxenden called “rich and stately”. At the chosen moment the guns of every fort in the kingdom fired. Gaga Bhatt held the royal umbrella over his head. He hailed him as Shiva Chhatrapati, lord of the umbrella: a king above all other kings.

He took other titles too. One was Haindava Dharmoddharak, protector of the Hindu faith. Another was Shakakarta, founder of an era. His ministers’ Persian titles gave way to Sanskrit ones. At about eight in the morning Oxenden was brought forward with a diamond ring, the English Company’s gift.

What did it all cost? It depends whom you ask. Sabhasad gives a figure Sarkar calls unbelievable: one crore 42 lakh hun. A Dutch merchant writing months later heard 150,000 pagodas, as Europeans called the hun. Sarkar’s own estimate was no more than 10 lakh hun, about 50 lakh rupees. Either way the treasury was drained. Within weeks Maratha horsemen were raiding the Mughal camp at Pedgaon to fill it again.

Jijabai, about 76, lived to see her son crowned. Within two weeks she was dead. Then a tantric priest, Nischal Puri, declared that the first ceremony had been held under bad stars. So a second, less disputed coronation followed on 24 September 1674.

In 1677 Shivaji marched south. He made an alliance with the sultan of Golconda and took Gingee and Vellore in the Tamil country. Gingee would one day save his kingdom.

At home, his heir was a worry. In 1678 Shivaji confined Sambhaji, then about 21. Accounts accuse the prince of a wild, immoral life, or of violating a Brahmin woman. In December Sambhaji escaped and went over to the Mughal general Dilir Khan. He fought for the Mughals at Bhupalgad. Then he came home, not sorry at all.

In late March 1680, at Raigad, Shivaji fell ill with fever and dysentery. He died in the first days of April. The date usually given is 3 April; Sarkar’s reckoning gives 5 April. He was 50. English records say he died of a bloody flux, as they called it, after twelve days’ illness. People whispered that Soyarabai had poisoned him to put her own son on the throne. Sarkar thought that almost certainly false.

Soyarabai did put her ten-year-old son, Rajaram, on the throne. But that June Sambhaji seized Raigad. He was enthroned in July 1680. Soyarabai was executed for plotting against him.

Aurangzeb came south himself in the early 1680s. He never went back. In 1689 Mughal troops caught Sambhaji at Sangameshwar. He and his adviser Kavi Kalash were paraded in clown’s clothes and blinded. On 11 March 1689 they were executed at Tulapur, on the Bhima river near Pune. Mughal accounts say Sambhaji was asked to give up his forts and treasure, and insulted the emperor and the Prophet. In Maratha memory he died defiant. The 2025 film Chhaava carried that version to a vast audience.

Raigad fell the same year. Rajaram escaped south to Gingee. The Marathas fought on without a capital, first under him and then under his widow Tarabai. Aurangzeb died in the Deccan in 1707, and the war Shivaji began was still not over. Within decades Maratha armies were riding into Delhi, and on to the disaster of Panipat in 1761.

A year after the coronation, on 11 November 1675, Aurangzeb had the ninth Sikh Guru beheaded in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk. That story is told in <a href="/news/guru-tegh-bahadur-1675-full-story">Guru Tegh Bahadur: The Quiet Guru, the Cage to Delhi and the Head That Came Home</a>.

Every age has made its own Shivaji. Mughal writers called him plain Shiva, without the respectful -ji. When he died, one wrote that the infidel had gone to hell. Yet Khafi Khan, no friend of his, praised how he treated enemies and women. The French traveller François Bernier recorded that at Surat he spared the house of a Capuchin friar, a Catholic monk.

In 1869 the reformer Jyotirao Phule wrote a ballad about him. It made him a hero of the shudras, the lowest of the four varnas, and of the poor. In 1895 Bal Gangadhar Tilak started a public festival in his name, with an edge aimed at the British. Today the Shiv Sena claims him; the party was founded in 1966 and named after him. Hindu nationalists claim him too, as a Hindu king who fought Muslim rule. Others point to different facts. His army raised a Pathan unit as early as 1656. His admiral, Darya Sarang, was a Muslim. And he made alliances with Muslim sultans against Hindu rivals.

Writing about him can still be dangerous. In 2003 the American scholar James Laine published Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. Activists of the Sambhaji Brigade then attacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, where he had done his research. Maharashtra banned the book. The Bombay High Court lifted the ban, and in 2010 the Supreme Court upheld that ruling.

The old quarrels keep coming back. On 10 November 2022, the anniversary of the meeting at Pratapgad, Satara officials pulled down buildings around Afzal Khan’s tomb below the fort. They called them illegal and cited court orders. In 2024 London’s Victoria and Albert Museum lent a wagh nakh, a set of tiger claws, to Satara. It went on show as the weapon that killed Afzal Khan. The historian Indrajit Sawant said the museum had told him there was no evidence it was Shivaji’s. In March 2025 a protest demanded the removal of Aurangzeb’s tomb at Khuldabad, and rioting in Nagpur followed. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis told the Assembly he was not blaming any film. But, he said, Chhaava had brought Sambhaji’s true history before people.

In August 2024 a 35-foot statue of Shivaji at Rajkot fort in Malvan fell down in strong winds. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had unveiled it only months before. Modi apologised in public. In Agra, Uttar Pradesh announced plans in 2023 for a statue and museum at Kothi Meena Bazar, the site named as his prison. But the land is tied up in a court case.

In July 2025 UNESCO put twelve forts on its World Heritage List as the Maratha Military Landscapes of India. Raigad, Rajgad, Pratapgad, Shivneri and Gingee are among them. Every June crowds climb Raigad for Shivrajyabhishek, coronation day. In 2023 Maharashtra’s government marked the 350th anniversary there on 2 June, the date by the Hindu calendar.

On Raigad today the wooden palace is gone. Only stone bases remain. A copy of the throne stands where he was crowned, facing the Nagarkhana gate. Near the Jagdishwar temple is his samadhi, his memorial. Beside it stands the statue of a dog nobody can prove he owned. Somehow, that suits him. His life was so large it has never stopped gathering stories.