Shivaji Bhosale – A Life

So, the more that I think about this, the more I begin to realize how daunting a project this is, because Shivaji’s life is basically an action movie.  The pseudo-founder of what would later be known as the Maratha Confederacy, Shivaji remains one of the most famous and heralded figures of Indian history.  Part of the difficulty is separating the myth and cult of personality that has now developed around Shivaji from the historical man.  Part of the distortion of Shivaji’s image is due to the Hindu Nationalist movement (hence, why I decided to talk about the Hindu Nationalists on Sunday), as he was the first Hindu ruler of any importance on the Indian subcontinent since the fall of the Vijayanagara Empire over a century before.  Shivaji’s conquests protected a Hindu faith that had come under increasing amounts of persecution under the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, and he used the “moral high ground” as a major weapon in his war against the Mughals.

Shivaji was born in Pune in either 1627 or 1630.  Not real important which.  It is important to note, that Pune District remains one of the strongest bastions of the Hindu Nationalist movement to this day.  Nathuram Godse, the man who murdered Mahatma Gandhi, was, fun fact, also from Pune.  So when Shivaji was pretty young, in 1645, he apparently bribed a local official from the Bijapuri Sultanate (a minor state in the Deccan, in central India) to hand over a fort to him.  Now, you might not think this is a big deal, but explain to me how a minor 17th Century Indian monarch is supposed to conquer this…

Tornar Fort

Because that’s what Shivaji got.  Before long, another fort had pledged allegiance to him, and he had bribed a second commander out of his fort.  The Bijapuri Sultanate was not large enough to ignore something like this for long, because this was not the first time that the Maratha had been problematic.

It’s important to understand that around this time, Hindu philosophy was really taking off.  Unlike most religions, there’s no single figure that really founds it.  It is, rather, an accumulated set of beliefs and traditions that have been practiced in India for thousands of years beyond memory, and although there remained (and still do remain) substantial differences among Hindus, there was a certain common identity, and this gave people something to rally around.  At this time, Indian, and particularly Northern Indian, politics had been almost entirely dominated by Muslims for about 600 years, but the Muslims only made up an estimated 8% of the population at the time (it’s a little more now).  However, the “Hindus” never really thought of it as a religious war.  They viewed it as mostly an ethnic conflict with the invading Turks, but because they wrote so little about what they thought about the whole thing (or at least, almost none of it survives; a notable exception here is the Ardhakathanak by Banarsidas; it’s a pretty easy read and worth reading), we have little means to understand how the Muslims were understood.

What Shivaji brought to this was a military aspect.  He never phrased it in terms of a Hindu holy war but more as a Hindu/Maratha war of liberation.  He was strongly against forced conversion of Muslims, and he vehemently opposed slavery (although the Hindu caste system doesn’t seem so different from slavery to me).

So, like I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, the Bijapuri sultan sent around 30,000, maybe 40,000 guys against Shivaji under the Afghan general Afzal Khan.  Shivaji had managed to scrape together around 13,000 by way of comparison, and he had no muskets, compared to Afzal Khan’s 1500.  The pair of them met at Pratapgad, and since Shivaji held this fortified position…

The Fort at Pratapgad

Afzal Khan decided he would negotiate with him.  What followed was a classic “Han shot first” argument.  Some claim that Afzal struck first, while others claim that Shivaji (who, one way or another, definitely brought a dagger to a no-weapons parley, which is more than a little shady) attacked Afzal.  One way or another, Shivaji lived (if he hadn’t, this would be a very anti-climactic story), and he and his army routed the now leaderless Bijapuris.  By 1660, the Bijapuris had forged an alliance with the Mughals against Shivaji.  One of the issues with subduing the Maratha, however, was the terrain.  You saw the two forts that I showed above.  Dotting the entire rocky, hilly landscape of Maharastra are forts just like or similar to these, and since Shivaji held them with full garrisons of men, he was a nightmare to subdue.  It didn’t matter how many people the Mughals sent, manpower was not what was needed.  What was needed was better artillery than existed on the Indian subcontinent, or anywhere, for that matter.

Shivaji would never be powerful enough to challenge the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb directly, and after eluding him for years, Shivaji was captured in 1666 and taken to Agra.  The details of this part are a little shaky, because the guy either seduced the Emperor’s wife with nothing but the hungry eyes (I’m guessing not), or he just disguised himself and found his way out of Agra. Shivaji’s army had taken a tough hit from clashing directly with the Mughals, but the notion of independence had taken root in the hill country of Maharastra (that’s where the Maratha live and where they speak Marathi).

As he got his army back on its feet, Shivaji made a few raids against the British in Bombay (which at the time was rather small, compared to the 20 million person metro population it has today), but for the most part he was pretty quiet.  Suddenly, in 1674, when most of the Indian Subcontinent seems to have believed that Shivaji was out of the picture, Shivaji scored a large victory at the Battle of Nesari against the Bijapuris after the Mughals had withdrawn, and Bijapuri power was effectively broken in Maharastra.  Worsening relations between Bijapur and Aurangzeb would eventually result in the latter conquering the Bijapuri Sultanate in 1686.

With his lands secured, Shivaji was crowned Chhatrapati of the Maratha Realm later in 1674, and over the next century, the Maratha would become the most powerful empire on the Indian Subcontinent, only being subdued by the surge of British military presence in the early 19th Century.  For the last several years of his life, Shivaji fought to secure a stable inheritance for his sons, and that would mean not provoking the Mughal Empire, so instead of attacking the Mughals, he moved south, acquiring additional lands there and surrounding the lucrative Portuguese trading port of Goa, giving him an essential trading partner.  Unlike many great military men, Shivaji ensured that his sons would be able to do what he never was – directly challenge the Mughal Empire rather than simply defy it, as he had.  This (kind of grainy) map shows the extent of his realm at the end of his life:

So when you look at the size of what Shivaji created, you probably think “Oooooh… what big empire…” but the importance of Shivaji lies not with what his end accomplishments were.  Of all these countries you see on the map (and others existed elsewhere) Shivaji was the only Hindu ruler, despite the fact that around 90% of India was Hindu at this time, and, as I mentioned, that gives him considerable cultural significance to this day.  Not to mention, he’s notorious for all kinds of badassery that I didn’t really have time to go into here (I mean, ripping a general open with a knife and escaping prison is cool and all, but catching arrows mid-flight is way cooler).  He’s the kind of guy who spends almost three decades (1645-1674) of his life either holed up in forts or on the run in the Maharastra countryside, eluding powerful emperors and sultans the whole time.  His life was an action movie, and honestly, Hollywood should pick it up (although Bollywood’s already done a few decent jobs on it).

The New World Monarchy

So, this post will in theory be a little shorter than the two previous, but since I do some stream of consciousness-type writing on my blog, only pausing to do fact checking, I can’t say for sure right now.  We’ll start in Portugal, which held what is now Portugal and Uruguay in the new world, as well as a handful of important colonies around the world.  Portugal had never been particularly militarily powerful, but in the 16th Century they had been the wealthiest country in Europe and possessed one of the fastest-developing colonial empires in the world.  By the late 18th Century, however, Portugal had become a footnote in European politics behind the Englands, Prussias, and Frances of the world.

One of the main issues for Portugal was that the House of Braganza was producing heirs who were either possibly mentally handicapped or definitely insane.  Such was the case with Queen Maria, who became queen in 1777 (given that Maria married her uncle, I can’t imagine what practice within the House of Braganza might have been producing these issues).  Despite her handicaps, Maria seems to have worked through some sort of multiple personality disorder, even allegedly making vague allusions to her own limitations.  For fifteen years, Maria reigned mostly without help.  Her husband-uncle, Pedro, would act as unofficial regent when Maria was not well, but with his death in 1786, Maria became increasingly incapable.  In 1791, with the deaths of her confessor and her eldest son, she became bed-ridden and almost entirely incoherent.  Beginning around 1794, visitors to the palace would complain of the screams echoing through the halls.

In place of his mother, Maria’s son João became operating king of Portugal.  Despite almost never leaving her bed, Maria would live for twenty-five years after her final nervous breakdown in 1791 – more than twice as long as João would rule in his own right.  The outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars made Portugal’s position increasingly precarious, and despite João’s best efforts, Portugal was invaded, and in a matter of weeks, all resistance had failed.   Most of Portugal’s population did not, however, live in the homeland, so João was faced with a choice.  He could stay in Portugal and surrender, or he could flee to the New World and try to keep the empire together from Rio de Janerio.

João chose the latter, taking his raving mother with him.  Some French officers reported that they could hear her screams from the shore as the Portuguese fleet departed for the New World.  Maria became the first of two reigning European monarchs to visit their colonies in the New World (João VI, her son, would be the other).  She would never return to Portugal and died in Rio in 1816.

By the time Maria died, Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo, and the Portuguese throne had, in theory, been returned to the House of Braganza.  The reality was quite different, however, because the people weren’t too pleased with the royals.  To their minds, the Braganzas had simply skipped out when the going got tough, leaving the Portuguese people to be subjected to French occupation, and rising liberal sentiment threatened revolution.

Their complaints were not entirely unfounded, either.  While the Braganzas had been in Rio, they had molded the city to become a proper European imperial capital.  Factories, schools, newspapers, hospitals, and even military academies were established over the course of eight years.  Moreover, João had attempted to create a cultural and economic center in Rio, building an Opera House, the National Bank, botanical gardens, and an art galllery.  What João had actually done, however, was enable Brazil’s independence.  After all, if Brazil had everything Portugal had and more, what gave the trans-Atlantic power any right to rule over its larger and more sophisticated colony?

With the breakout of open revolution in Portugal, however, João decided to return home for the first time in thirteen years, leaving his son Pedro in charge in Brazil.   João arrived in Portugal to find that this revolution was not a revolt he could simply crush.  It was too far along by the time he had made the journey across the ocean.  As a result, he agreed to establish a constitution for Portugal, limiting his own problem.  The problem was, across the Atlantic in Rio, Pedro had no intention of accepting the constitution.  In fact, he had no intention of accepting his father’s authority.  Over the course of 1821 to 1822, Pedro used increasingly controversial language to describe his own authority and routinely ignored emissaries from his father.  On September 7, 1822, Pedro officially declared Brazil’s independence, and he and his father entered into a cold war.  Pedro’s new position was hardly secure enough for him to fend off a full-fledged Portuguese invasion, but João had just greatly limited his power and was now testing out the new boundaries.

An 1825 treaty officially recognized Brazil as independent in exchange for hefty reparations, but before the reparations could be paid, João died, and Pedro inherited the Portuguese throne.  Pedro believed, most likely correctly, that reunifying Portugal and Brazil would be abhorrent to the peoples of both nations, so Pedro rushed to abdicate the Portuguese throne in favor of his seven-year-old daughter, who became Queen Maria II (because Maria went so well the first time) on May 2, 1826.  In order to secure her position in Portugal, Pedro had Maria marry her uncle Miguel (classic Braganza move), in hopes that he would be able to help her rule.  As it turned out, Miguel was willing to do more than help – he wanted the crown for himself.

I never thought I would write this sentence, but in 1828, Miguel deposed his nine-year-old niece-wife, showing his true colors to Pedro.  Four of Pedro’s five sisters also defected to Miguel’s camp, and Pedro’s mind turned from establishing the new Brazilian state to avenging himself and his daughter upon his factionalist brother.  Miguel suspended the constitution of 1820, which caused rumors to arise regarding his role in his father’s death.  These have never been confirmed, but Pedro seems to have believed them, and in 1831, he abdicated the Brazilian throne to travel to the Azores, where his daughter was holed up with her loyalists.  With British and French support, Pedro deposed Miguel in 1834 after the so-called Liberal Wars.  The constitutional monarchy was restored, and Maria’s marriage to Miguel was annulled.  Shortly after his and Maria’s victory in the Liberal Wars, Pedro died of tuberculosis he contracted while on campaign.  He never returned to Brazil, instead leaving it in the hands of his son, also named Pedro.

The Brazilian Empire would last until 1889 under Pedro II’s authoritarian rulership, whereupon he abdicated to allow for the First Brazilian Republic.  One of the odder things about the whole story, however, are the bizarre relationships shared by the Braganza family.  Pedro and his father clearly had their issues, but they refused to fight one another.  Pedro loved his daughter – he died for her – but he was also willing to throw her into a pit of jackals at the Portuguese court to maintain his own court.  This isn’t even counting all the incest and backstabbing.  Ultimately, for most of the world, this is not deemed all that important of an episode in history, but it is difficult to imagine what Brazil would be today without this piece of its formative history.