Raigad, Shivaji's Capital of About 300 Stone Houses, Fell in May 1818 After a Two-Week British Siege, and Only One Granary Was Found Untouched

Lieutenant-Colonel Prother, commanding a force fitted out by the Government of Bombay, took possession of Raigad on 10 May 1818. Lieutenant-Colonel Valentine Blacker, quartermaster-general of the Madras army, wrote in his 1821 memoir of the war that the siege took fourteen days and that “every building, one granary excepted, had been reduced to ashes by the bombardment.”

Our profile of Shivaji covers the coronation held on this hill in 1674 and the sources for it. This piece covers the buildings, the 1818 siege and the repairs since. Raigad is one of the twelve forts in the 2025 UNESCO inscription.

A capital furnished with palaces, a mint and a market

The Bombay Gazetteer of 1883 puts Raigad 2,851 feet above the sea, sixteen miles north of Mahad. The Sabhasad Bakhar, a Marathi chronicle that Jadunath Sarkar says was written in 1697, has Shivaji find the fort “ten times as high as Daulatabad,” with cliffs that looked scraped vertical, and decide it should be the seat of his throne.

The 1964 Maharashtra Gazetteer says Shivaji captured the hill from the Mores of Javli in 1656. It adds that in 1662 he renamed it from Rairi to Raygad and ordered Abaji Sondev, the governor of Kalyan, to furnish it with royal and public buildings. The same Gazetteer notes that another authority, S. V. Avalaskar, dates the choice of the capital to 1672. ICOMOS, the advisers to UNESCO, gives 1662 in its 2025 evaluation.

The Gazetteers list what was built. They say the hilltop was said to hold 300 stone houses: palaces, mansions, offices, a mint, granaries, magazines, quarters for a garrison of 2,000, a market nearly a mile long, and rock-cut and masonry cisterns. The Sabhasad Bakhar names state rooms, a separate mansion for the eighteen departments, quarters for the queens, a bazaar, and stables for elephants, horses and camels, all in lime plaster and hewn stone.

The English embassy of Henry Oxinden spent May to July 1674 on the hill. As the 1883 Gazetteer retells Fryer’s account, the visitors counted about 300 houses, among them the court and the ministers’ houses. They put the hilltop at two and a half miles long, where the Gazetteer’s survey measured a mile and a half by a mile.

What a visitor passed on the way up

The 1883 survey, made in the ruins and printed in the Gazetteer, describes a single route up from the village of Wadi on the west side. The first gate, the Nana Darwaja, has two arches and seventeen steps. Higher up the Maha Darwaja is reached by thirty-two steps between two bastions, 75 and 65 feet high, with a curtain wall and a deep ditch along the north-west face. Lieutenant Remon, who commanded the engineers in 1818, recorded stretches of road only five or six feet wide, under a cliff from which thrown stones would land on it.

The citadel, the Balekilla, measures about 300 yards by 150 and is entered by the Palki Darwaja, up thirty-one steps. Inside, a path runs between the ruins of seven large mansions that formed the women’s quarters of the palace and a row of rooms for guards and servants. The royal court, which the ropeway operator’s guide calls the Raj Sabha, was a walled space about 120 by 50 feet with a mound marking the throne, granaries on each side, two treasure rooms and twelve arched windows in the front wall. In 1883 the Gazetteer wrote that Marathas still took off their shoes before stepping on the throne platform.

Facing the court stood the Nagarkhana, the drum gate, about fifty feet high with twenty-nine steps to the drum-room. The district administration’s page says the court was acoustically designed so that sound carries from the gate to the throne. The ropeway operator’s guide says the palace, the Raj Bhavan, stood on a double plinth with wooden columns.

About 200 paces north of the citadel lay the market, two rows of twenty-two shops with a forty-foot street between. Half a mile north-east, in a walled enclosure, stood the Mahadev temple, now called Jagadishwar, with a three-foot image of Maruti outside its west entrance. The 1964 Gazetteer says the temple carries a Sanskrit inscription bearing the date of the coronation, which names a Hiroji, printed there as Etalkar, as its builder on Shivaji’s orders.

At the western end of the hill is the Hirkani bastion. The 1883 Gazetteer gives the local account: a milk-seller named Hirkani, shut in when the gates closed, climbed down the cliff to reach her infant, and Shivaji had a bastion built there and named after her.

The siege of 25 April to 10 May 1818

Raigad had changed hands before that spring. The 1964 Gazetteer dates its surrender to the Mughal force of Itikad Khan to October 1689 and says it was renamed Islamgad. Maratha forces recovered it from the Sidis in 1735, the 1883 Gazetteer says, and Nana Phadnavis had it repaired in 1796. In 1817 the British demanded Raigad, Sinhagad and Purandhar as a pledge under the Treaty of Poona and returned Raigad to the Peshwa in August. In November the Peshwa, Baji Rao II, sent his wife, Varanasibai, there with much property.

Blacker writes that the fort was “represented as one of the strongest in India,” with a thousand men inside, many of them Arabs. Prother reached Mahad on 23 April, and on the 24th Major Hall of the 89th Regiment drove in the first enemy post. On the 25th the camp was set up as close as the ground allowed and the foot of the hill was invested. A mortar battery went up on ridge ground so narrow that the guns stood in each other’s line of fire. Six companies of the 67th Foot, sent by the Government of Bombay, arrived on 4 May, a detachment of the 89th came from Malvan, and a second battery was built on the far side of the mountain.

On the afternoon of 6 May, the Gazetteer says, a shell from the right battery started a great fire in the fort. Blacker gives the 7th for the fire, and Grant Duff, in the 1921 annotated edition, has the surrender on the 7th. Talks began at Wadi on the morning after the fire. The Arab commandant, Shaikh Abud, came down on the 8th, and after haggling until three o’clock on the 9th terms were agreed. The Gazetteer lists them: the garrison of about a hundred Arabs and eight hundred Sindhians, Marathas, Pathans and Gosavis walked out with arms, families and property, and the commandant and five followers could live in Poona. Blacker counts the garrison at a thousand.

Varanasibai had been offered a passport and refused it. A shell burned the building she lived in, and Blacker and the Gazetteer both report that the commandant then agreed to treat. The Gazetteer adds that “it was said” he did so on her persuasion. Blacker found her “among the embers,” under a hut. The sources differ on where she went. Blacker and the Gazetteer send her to Poona, and Grant Duff says she was allowed to go to Wai, near Satara, for nine or ten months. The Gazetteer records five lakh rupees in coin found in the fort.

What the shells hit, and what had already gone

The 1883 Gazetteer states that when Prother went up the hill on 10 May, Shivaji’s palace “was entirely consumed,” only one house, a granary, was untouched and the garrison lived in huts. Long streets, regular buildings, temples and the tomb, it says, “could be traced, and only traced.” It says the powder magazines, ninety feet long with walls three and a half feet thick, were destroyed by shells fired from the Kalkai ridge.

Decay came first. Blacker wrote that the palace and religious buildings of Shivaji’s day “had been allowed many years since to decay” and that the tomb was scarcely and doubtfully visible. The 1883 Gazetteer writes that the damage was not all caused by the siege, since the place had been left to fall into ruin for fifty years. The 1964 edition says it was largely the siege’s doing, though the fort had also been neglected.

The gates, bastions and stone walls of the court were still standing when the 1883 survey was made. By the 1964 edition the upper part of the Nagarkhana had come down. None of the sources opened for this piece describes a later order to demolish buildings at Raigad. They record the shelling and fire of 1818 and the years of decay on either side of it.

The tomb, a Governor’s order and a committee

The 1883 Gazetteer is unsure of the tomb, which it says is generally believed to be the small building beside the Mahadev temple, and describes an eight-sided stone plinth where Shivaji’s body is said to have been burned. James Douglas, writing in 1893, described the mausoleum as a mass of weeds with trees growing through the floor of the shelter beside it. He reported that no one subscribed a rupee to repair it, and added in a footnote that Lord Reay, soon after coming out as Governor of Bombay in 1885, ordered the tomb repaired and “which was done.” The 1964 Gazetteer tells it differently. It says a visit in 1885 by Sir Richard Temple, Governor of Bombay, to the decaying samadhi first drew public attention to Raigad, so the two accounts name different governors for that year.

In 1895, according to the Shri Shivaji Raigad Smarak Mandal, Bal Gangadhar Tilak founded the Shri Shivaji Fund Committee to raise money for rebuilding the samadhi, asked for donations through his newspaper Kesari and published the receipts. A page on the same site dates the Mandal itself to 1886. The Mandal says the Shiv Punya Tithi, the anniversary of Shivaji’s death, was observed at Raigad in 1896. Our profile of Tilak and the Shivaji festival covers the movement in Pune.

The 1964 Gazetteer adds that Laxmanrav Raje Bhosle of Nagpur took the lead in reviving the movement in 1926 and that a bust of Shivaji was set on the samadhi that year. It also records that Jijabai’s memorial at Pachad, almost in ruins until 1943, was then rebuilt by the former chief of Phaltan, with a compound wall added in 1948, and is protected by the Archaeological Department of the Government of India. The district administration says a replica of the throne now stands in the court.

Excavation, the ropeway and the 2025 listing

The Raigad Ropeway was built between November 1994 and March 1996 and opened on 3 April 1996. Its operator says the ride takes four minutes where the climb on foot is about 1,450 steps. ICOMOS, in March 2025, recommended a heritage impact assessment of the ropeway with a view to alternative access in future.

DNA reported on 8 August 2018 that the Archaeological Survey of India and Deccan College, Pune, were running the first wide-ranging excavation at a Maharashtra fort. Vasant Shinde, the college’s vice-chancellor, said there were references to settlement in the Yadava period, the eleventh and twelfth centuries. From an old wada, a palace-like structure, the Survey recovered Shivrai coins, pottery, glass, gold beads, iron nails, sickles, arrows and lead pellets. DNA reported a Maharashtra government plan of Rs 606 crore to conserve the fort.

The overarching management plan for the World Heritage property says the Survey has carried out recent excavations that revealed several new structures and that the Raigad Development Authority is conserving several structures, including the gateways and water bodies. UNESCO lists Raigad among eight of the twelve forts that the Survey protects under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958. The World Heritage Committee inscribed the series on 11 July 2025, according to the Ministry of Culture. ICOMOS’s evaluation says the fort “holds strong archaeological potential, but it has not been systematically explored yet.”