Everyone from my generation, and many before it, has grown up with this story, or with some half-remembered version of it. It lives uneasily at the intersection of history and folklore. On certain nights, the elders say, on a full moon, or on a moonless one, if you stand close to the Narayan Darwaza of Shaniwar Wada, you can still hear a voice cut through the darkness: high, terrified, unmistakably young.

काका, मला वाचवा (Kaka, mala vachva)
Uncle, save (protect) me.

This is the story of Narayanrao Peshwa.

He ascended the Peshwa gaddi in November 1772, at the age of seventeen. He ruled for barely nine months. And on a heavy August afternoon in 1773, he was butchered inside his own palace, not by invading armies or foreign conspirators, but by men who ate at his court, guarded his doors, and shared his blood.

It is a story dense with intrigue, but heavier still with silence. And like all true tragedies, it is less about villains than about people who hesitated when courage was required.

The Quiet Unravelling

From a distance of two centuries, the death of Peshwa Madhavrao I appears deceptively uneventful. There was no battlefield defeat, no sudden collapse of power. The Maratha state continued to function, revenues were collected, armies marched.

And yet something fundamental had gone.

For decades, Poona had been the undisputed heart of Maratha authority. The Peshwa was not merely a minister but the axis on which the state turned, legitimate, obeyed, feared when necessary. Madhavrao had embodied that authority effortlessly, combining restraint with resolve.

With his death in 1772, the architecture of power remained, but the confidence that animated it drained away.

What followed was not chaos but fragility. Authority no longer flowed naturally from the gaddi; it had to be negotiated, explained, defended. Ministers ruled by consensus rather than command. Factions learned patience. Silence became a political posture.

Later generations would give this period a name that fits it perfectly: Sunset over Maharashtra.

The dusk began with Narayanrao.

A Boy Inherits a Burden

Narayanrao was seventeen when he became Peshwa.

He was not ignorant of governance. He had accompanied his brother on campaigns, suffered a wound in battle, and received the customary training in administration and scripture. But preparation is not maturity, and power magnifies temperament faster than it teaches restraint.

Those around him noticed the flaws immediately. He was quick to anger, prone to petty humiliations, easily swayed by whispers. A court observer wrote with brutal candour: “The tiger is gone. Now the jackals remain.”

Madhavrao had foreseen this. On his deathbed, he left clear instructions: Sakharam Bapu and Nana Phadnis were to guide the young Peshwa; Raghunathrao, their ambitious uncle, was to remain confined.

The declaration was solemn, witnessed by the family deity itself.

Raghunathrao offered no open protest.

But acquiescence is not acceptance.

A Palace Guarded by Men Who Were Owed

Narayanrao inherited not only a crown, but an empty treasury.

Years of illness had slowed Madhavrao’s revenue machinery, and debts had been cleared at the expense of reserves. The immediate consequence was unrest among the palace guards, the Gardis.

These were professional soldiers: Rajputs, Pathans, Arabs, Abyssinians. Disciplined, experienced, and crucially detached. They served for pay, not loyalty. Their wages were in arrears, their patience thinning.

Narayanrao failed to grasp the danger of this arrangement.

Externally, the subcontinent seemed momentarily still. Haidar Ali waited. The Nizam watched. The British observed from the edges. The real threat lay not beyond Maharashtra, but inside the walls of Shaniwar Wada.

Small Decisions, Lasting Resentments

Narayanrao struggled to perform authority without earning it.

He dismissed Visajipant Lele against counsel. He undermined powerful sardars. Most disastrously, he intervened clumsily in caste disputes, stripping the Prabhu community of their claimed status through coercion and humiliation. What he saw as orthodoxy, others experienced as insult.

At the same time, restrictions on Raghunathrao tightened.

His movements were curtailed. His expenses reduced. Even his religious practices were regulated. To forbid a man the act of standing in sunlight during prayer is not merely discipline, it is erasure.

Madhavrao had restrained his uncle with care. Narayanrao did so with irritation.

The court began to withdraw from him, not in open rebellion, but in cautious distance. Ministers hesitated. Advice softened into silence.

And silence, in a court, is rarely neutral.

The Waiting Room of History

By the summer of 1773, Shaniwar Wada had become a place where people waited.

They waited for Narayanrao to change.
They waited for Raghunathrao to break.
They waited for someone else to act first.

The Nagpur succession dispute merely crystallised what was already present. Narayanrao’s decision to support Sabaji Bhosle was read not as policy but as provocation. Mudhoji’s agents, Vyankatrao and Lakshman Kashi, arrived in Poona and stayed on, listening carefully, noting grievances.

They found a court full of wounded pride.

Raghunathrao did not yet speak of murder. But confinement had turned his thoughts inward, and inward thought, when nourished by humiliation, rarely leads to moderation. Survival itself began to feel like justification.

History, once it takes that turn, seldom pauses.

When Intention Slipped into Momentum

It is worth stating plainly: the conspiracy did not begin with murder in mind.

It began with a shared conviction that Narayanrao could no longer be allowed to rule as he did, and that no lawful mechanism remained to restrain him. Ministers hesitated, paralysed by precedent. Intervention felt improper. Silence felt safer.

Narayanrao sensed hostility but misjudged its depth. He had grown up watching power exercised without challenge. He believed resentment would remain verbal, that blood would restrain violence.

Raghunathrao crossed a quieter threshold. Confinement hollowed him. Humiliation hardened into fatalism. He began to see events not as choices, but as inevitabilities.

Tulaji Pawar did not think in such terms.

A personal servant of long standing, he understood timing. He moved through the palace freely, carrying messages others dared not voice. He approached the Gardi chiefs not with ideology, but certainty, and with money.

Three lakh rupees made possibility tangible.

The written order said “seize.”
The alteration to “slay” merely acknowledged what everyone already feared.

No one tore the paper up.
No one raised the alarm.

In that silence, the fate of Narayanrao was sealed.

The Half Hour That Broke the Spell

The morning of 30 August 1773 passed without omen.

Narayanrao rode out into Poona. Raghuji Angre warned him, carefully, almost apologetically. Narayanrao listened, unsettled but not transformed. He breakfasted at Parvati, spoke of rumours as though naming them might dissolve them.

When Haripant Phadke promised to act after lunch, Narayanrao accepted it. Authority had taught him patience where urgency was required.

Shortly after one o’clock, patience ran out.

Five hundred Gardis entered Shaniwar Wada through a rear gate. Guards were cut down. Clerks pleaded and fell. A cow was slaughtered alongside a man who had mistaken sacredness for safety.

Narayanrao ran.

Barefoot. Unarmed. No longer Peshwa, only seventeen.

He fled through corridors that had once felt permanent. When he reached Parvatibai, she did not hesitate. She pointed him onward, to the last bond that might still hold.

Raghunathrao was at prayer when Narayanrao reached him.

The plea that followed was not political. It was instinctive, terrified, human.

काका, मला वाचवा! (Kaka, mala vachva!)

He offered everything, the throne, the future. He asked only for life.

The Gardis arrived before an answer could be formed.

Tulaji Pawar seized him.
Sumersinh struck.

Servants who tried to shield him died beside him. Women who screamed were silenced.

The killing took minutes.

The meaning of it has not ended.

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After the Blood

No one emerged victorious.

Raghunathrao sat among drawn swords, already a hostage to the violence that had elevated him. The Gardis looted because reflection felt dangerous. Outside, Haripant Phadke waited with cannon he dared not fire.

Ram Shastri’s inquiry did not reveal new truths, it gave language to what everyone already knew. This murder had been allowed.

When he told Raghunathrao, calmly and publicly, that he deserved death, it was the last moment of moral clarity Poona would see for years. The judge was dismissed. The verdict endured.

Gangabai’s grief stripped the event of politics entirely. Having lost three sons, to war, illness, and murder, she abandoned comfort and begged in the streets, refusing to participate in a world that had failed so completely.

Justice arrived late, unevenly. Conspirators fled, were sheltered, betrayed, tortured, executed. Raghunathrao wandered through alliances until confession came too late to redeem anything.

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Why the Cry Remains

Narayanrao was not blameless. He was impatient, often cruel, careless with power.

But he was seventeen.

And until the final moment, he believed that kinship would restrain violence. That someone, anyone, would intervene.

No one did.

What died at Shaniwar Wada was not merely a boy-Peshwa, but the belief that authority could survive without courage, that silence was safer than action.

When people say they hear a cry near the Narayan Darwaza, it is not a ghost asking for pity.

It is history, refusing to let us forget what hesitation costs.

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To most Punekars, Ghorpade Ghat is little more than scenery glimpsed from a vehicle, an anonymous, timeworn silhouette of stone that sits on the left bank of the Mutha, just beside the ever-throbbing Shivaji Bridge. Every day, tens of thousands pass it in a blur: commuters heading towards the old city, buses rumbling in the opposite direction, the thrum of the new metro rising nearby. Amid this din, the ghat quietly endures, ignored, littered upon, used at night by inebriated wanderers seeking temporary refuge, and reclaimed every dawn by stray dogs, cattle, and the occasional river bird.

Yet this unassuming site holds a story that loops back two centuries, to a time when Pune was still defined by its riverbanks, its temples, and the steady rhythms of ritual.

This is the story of Ghorpade Ghat, a forgotten fortlet of stone, memory, and neglect.

Built by the Last Descendants of a Warrior Lineage

The ghat was built in February 1831, commissioned by Daulatrao Ghorpade, a descendant of the Peshwa-era Sardar Yashwantrao Ghorpade, and, according to inscriptions recorded by historian Datto Vaman Potdar, co-built with Pirajirao Ghorpade.

Potdar visited the site in 1925 and noted an inscription carved in Devanagari, which, once translated, marked the date as 10 February 1831. Though the stone itself has vanished, the record survives, in his writings.

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The name Ghorpade Ghat, therefore, is no mystery. It carries the lineage of the same clan as Senapati Santaji Ghorpade, the Maratha general so feared that even Aurangzeb tread cautiously when his name was spoken.

But the land itself has a longer tale. Before the ghat, the area, was a part of Bhamburda village. The British, in the early 19th century, granted Daulatrao eight acres and forty knots here as a reward, and the garden even housed a mausoleum for his mother, Bayabai Ghorpade, possibly one of the now-ruined chhatris whose origins remain uncertain.

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The Architecture: A River Fort in Miniature

Seen from Shivaji Bridge, the structure appears almost militaristic:
four bastions, arranged parallel to the river, tied together by thick walls.

Between these bastions, terraced stone steps descend gracefully towards the water. Behind them lie the ruins of two small rooms that once formed part of the fortified wall.

Embedded in the earth and rubble are the foundations of two temples:

• one a Mahadeva Temple,

• the other unconfirmed but very likely the Trimbakeshwar Temple mentioned in records from 1773–1810.

Old residents of Bhamburda faintly recall a Trimbakeshwar shrine here, once active and known as a site for Nagbali pooja. Yet, without surviving inscriptions, the identification remains suspended between memory and conjecture.

There were once chhatris recorded on the Pune Tehsil survey map as well, small domed memorials, but their dedicatees are lost to time.

When the River Rose: The Flood of 1961

A large portion of the ghat’s original structure was destroyed during the catastrophic Panshet Flood of 1961. When the earthen dam, poorly reinforced due to shortages of steel, collapsed on 12 July, more than 1,000 people died downstream in Pune.

Whole blocks of stone from Ghorpade Ghat were torn from their foundations and hurled aside. A once-famous stone lamp, mentioned in older records, disappeared entirely, washed away or buried under silt.

The ghat that remains today is therefore a fractured version of its former self: displaced floors, broken masonry, foundations jutting out like exposed ribs.

Bhamburda: The Village Beneath the City

It is difficult to imagine, but the bustling artery of Shivaji Nagar was once the sleepy village of Bhamburda, with forests and riverine land stretching around it. Ghats, Omkareshwar, Nene, Amruteshwar, and Ghorpade, served the essential daily flow of people who relied on the river for water, rituals, and livelihood.

By the Peshwa era, Bhamburda housed only two Shiva shrines: Vruddheshwar and Trimbakeshwar, one of which almost certainly stood on the foundations seen today.

Yet Bhamburda the village exists now only in surveys, memories, and in the dilapidated stones of Ghorpade Ghat.

The Irony of Proximity

Despite its significance, the ghat today is suffocating under garbage, encroached upon by vegetation, and even partially blocked by a Sulabh Shauchalaya, which cuts off access from Shivaji Bridge.

If there were an award for Pune’s most neglected heritage structure, Ghorpade Ghat would be a serious contender.

It is barely 500 metres from Shaniwar Wada, the crown jewel of Pune’s heritage circuit, and barely 300 metres from the Pune Municipal Corporation, yet it remains invisible in plain sight.

It has survived two centuries, the floods of 1961, and the chaos of metro construction. But its future is now threatened not by neglect alone, but by the sweeping ambitions of the Pune Riverfront Development Project, which remains ambiguous about the fate of heritage structures lining the Mutha.

Perhaps, as it has throughout its history, the ghat will endure.
Perhaps not.

But one hopes, at the very least, that if it must fade, it should fade by the slow, honest hand of time, and not by the impulsive strokes of urban development claiming to beautify the river while erasing its past.

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Walk with intention. From the eastern entrance of Burger King, turn right, let the aroma guide you, pass the bustle of the Suzuki dealership, slip into the alley beside it, and continue until the chatter thins. Ahead, like an apparition rising from stone and memory, stands a structure with a protruding jharokha, a lonely sentinel of the past.
You have arrived at the surviving skin of the old Ghashiram Kotwal Wada.

You cannot enter. The main entrance and much of the property lie locked behind Army-controlled land, requiring permissions few ever obtain. Yet even from this alley, crowded with scooters and a signboard for Wonder Car Service Centre, you can glimpse a fragment of a world that once trembled at the name of its occupant.

Most visitors who accidentally wander here ask the same question:
Who was Ghashiram Kotwal? And why does his ruined home still seem to hold its breath after more than two centuries?

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The Rise of an Unlikely Kotwal

To lovers of Marathi theatre or readers of regional literature, the name needs no introduction. Ghashiram Kotwal, immortalized by Vijay Tendulkar in 1972 and performed ever since across stages in India and abroad, is a character who straddles history and theatre with equal notoriety. Tendulkar, drawing from an earlier account by Moroba Kanhoba (1863), wove fact and suspicion, gossip and political allegory, into a timeless satire: a study in how power is created, used, and inevitably discarded.

But behind the drama lies a real man.

Ghashiram was a Kanoja Brahmin from Aurangabad, son of Shamaldas or Savaldas, one among the many who drifted into eighteenth-century Poona seeking fortunes in a city swelling with political gravity. Contemporary accounts describe him as intelligent, pleasant in manner, sharp of mind, and striking in appearance. In a court culture governed by patronage and proximity, these were currency. Under the watchful eye of the formidable Nana Fadnavis, Ghashiram ascended rapidly.

Rumour whispered that he owed his rise to the beauty of his daughter, Lalitagauri; history remains uncertain. But by 1782, he had risen to the coveted and fearsome post of Kotwal, the head of Poona’s police.

To understand the magnitude of his power, one must first understand the system he came to command.

The Evolution of Kotwali in Poona

Before the Peshwas transformed Poona into the nerve-centre of the Maratha Empire, the region resembled any other administrative cluster, a constellation of villages governed by their patils, assisted by the village watchmen (the Mhars or Tarals) who combed the night for suspicious movement. Policing was informal, collective, and deeply local.

Everything changed when Baji Rao I made Poona his base in 1730, erecting the iconic Shaniwar Wada and drawing into its orbit the chiefs, clerks, soldiers, spies, bankers and courtesans of a rising imperial capital. Population exploded. Wealth concentrated. Crime thrived in the shadows.

By the time Madhav Rao I inherited the administrative burdens of a growing city, chaos demanded structure. In 1764, he created what was essentially Poona’s first formal police system by appointing Balaji Narayan Ketkar as Kotwal.

This was no ordinary policing job.
The Kotwal was part police chief, part magistrate, part municipal commissioner, part registrar, part sanitation officer, part intelligence operative, and part moral guardian. He supervised barbers, concubines, musicians, weights and measures; inspected markets; oversaw drainage and roads; registered deeds; tracked conspiracies; welcomed imperial envoys; and ensured order in a city that slept each night under the long shadow of palace intrigue.

By the 1770s, Poona had become a complicated beast, a city where political factions simmered behind temple walls and narrow alleys, and where the Kotwal wielded influence that could command both dread and admiration.

It was into this volatile role that Ghashiram stepped in 1777, a man of ambition appointed at a moment when ambition could be fatal.

Six Chabutras, Countless Secrets

During Ghashiram’s tenure, the city was divided into six major police stations or chabutras: Kotwal Chavdi, Somwar, Vetal, Aditwar, Narayan Peth and Shaniwar. From these outposts, sepoys, shibandis, horsemen, and watchmen fanned out across Poona’s labyrinthine lanes.

The records of 1790–91 reveal a city obsessed with fines. The police earned from widow remarriage taxes, gambling penalties, fees from musicians, stamp duties on cloth and weights, and a staggering number of moral offences.
The list of crimes from that year, 234 in total, reads like a sociological map of Poona’s anxieties: adultery (145 cases), drinking, theft, prostitution without permission, hiding caste, indecent assaults, gambling, even eating food from someone of a different caste.

Little surprise, then, that a moralistic yet authoritarian Kotwal became widely hated. And little surprise, too, that Ghashiram’s enforcement, firm, sometimes ruthless, often unpopular, became tinder awaiting a spark.

That spark struck in August 1791.

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The Night That Ended a Legacy

On a humid monsoon night, long after the Bamboora gun signalled curfew, a group of convivial Brahmins lingered too long in the streets. Thirty-four of them were detained, standard procedure. By dawn, twenty-one were dead, the rest barely breathing.

Historians insist that Ghashiram had no direct knowledge of their detention that night, yet the city, already simmering with factional rivalries, burst into fury. Whether the tragedy occurred due to overcrowding, suffocation, or negligence, the mob saw only one culprit.

The Kotwal.

Ghashiram sought refuge in the Peshwa’s palace, but palace walls were not built to withstand public rage. The Peshwa yielded.
A mob led by enraged Telinga Brahmins seized him.

What followed was an execution soaked in cruelty and theatre, dragged by a rope held by a man from the lowest tier of the untouchable castes (a symbolic humiliation of the worst order), abused, and stoned near the very tank and temple he had built as his legacy. His mangled body was left on the last day of August 1791, a scene so brutal that even hardened British officers in Poona recorded their horror.

With his death, the system he embodied also began to crack.
Within a few years, corruption worsened, the Kotwali was auctioned to the highest bidder, and by Baji Rao II’s time, law and order in Poona had descended into chaos, an empire staggering toward its eventual dissolution.

A Wada in Ruins, A Memory Fading

And now, centuries later, the last physical trace of Ghashiram Kotwal’s turbulent life sits in a dingy alley behind a motorcycle dealership, obscured by posters, garbage, and the careless dumping of modern life. The jharokha that once overlooked the arteries of a proud capital now stares blankly into a cluttered service lane.

One can only hope that the portion preserved behind Army walls is treated with more dignity, though history often suffers most in the custody of those who least understand its fragility.

Standing there, among biscuit wrappers and peeling advertisements, it is hard not to shake off a small ache. Ghashiram’s life was consumed by the machinery of power, built by it, destroyed by it, and now his home echoes that same fate.

The wada decays quietly, as if mourning its master. And Pune, in its relentless forward march, rarely pauses to remember the man, or the city, that rose and fell with him.

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That quiet act became a pilgrimage. For this palace, with its shaded walkways, flowering courtyards, and marble corridors, is not merely a monument, it is a witness.

In a city that eagerly trades its past for the promise of glass towers, the Aga Khan Palace stands as a reminder of endurance, of beauty born from compassion. Built in 1892 by Sultan Muhammad Shah, the 3rd Aga Khan, the palace was a project of mercy, commissioned to provide employment to the famine-stricken villagers around Pune. A hundred thousand workers, five years, and twelve lakhs of rupees later, an architectural marvel emerged: an Indo-Saracenic structure of arches and domes, framed by nineteen acres of manicured gardens.

After Independence, it became a school, and later, the Gandhi National Memorial, where time itself seems to slow. But what lends it the deepest weight is not architecture or designation, it is memory. For here, behind its quiet facades, Kasturba Gandhi took her last breath. Within its walls, the Mahatma faced the loss that would unmoor even his saintly calm.

It was beneath these trees, the same that shade her memorial, that I opened The Forgotten Woman and read the final chapters of her story. What follows are five episodes from that book, moments of tenderness, tension, and truth, that reveal the human contours of a partnership sanctified by history yet rooted in the ordinary acts of love.

Episode I: Lessons on a Slate

During their imprisonment at Aga Khan Palace, Mahatma and Kasturba found solace in the rhythms of learning. After decades of shared struggle, they turned once more to a long-abandoned dream: her education.

Kasturba had picked up bits of English, and could read simple Gujarati. Mahatma, with the patience of a teacher and the affection of a husband, taught her geography with an orange as the globe, shared stories from history, and guided her through the Gita, whose verses she already knew by heart.

At seventy-three, her memory often failed her. Yet she approached each lesson with childlike eagerness.

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Then, one day, a careless remark ended it all. When she asked for a notebook to practice her writing, Gandhiji, irritable and burdened with political worries, said curtly, “You’ll get one when you learn to write properly.”

The words pierced deeper than he imagined. She set her slate down, looked him squarely in the eye, and said softly, “Then I’m done with lessons for life.” She never studied again.

Later, their associate brought her a notebook, hoping to soothe her. She placed it on the Mahatma’s desk, saying, “What does an illiterate like me need a notebook for?”

That was the end of their lessons. Despite his apologies, she never picked up the slate again. The notebook, a quiet relic of remorse, remained with the Mahatma until the day he died, tucked away like an unfinished chapter of their shared life.

Episode II: The Red-Bordered Sari

On October 2, 1943, the Mahatma’s second birthday in captivity, his fellow detainees decided to celebrate. They hung bunting, lit lamps, and prepared a modest feast. Kasturba, ever spirited, longed to take part, and insisted on wearing a special sari.

It was a red-bordered cotton one, spun by Mahatma himself, the sari she had set aside for her own cremation. “I will wear it for his birthday,” she said, “while I still can.”

Letters flew to Sevagram Ashram, where the sari had been stored, but no one could find it. It was finally located thanks to her young grandniece, Manu Gandhi, who remembered exactly where it was kept. It arrived in time.

That morning, she draped herself in it, her favorite, woven with his hands, and joined the small celebration, her face glowing with joy. No one knew that it would be among her last radiant moments before illness took hold.

Episode III: Harilal’s Visit

By January 1944, Kasturba had suffered two more heart attacks. The Ayurvedic doctor provided momentary comfort, and she often sat on the verandah in a wheelchair, smiling at the gardeners who brought her flowers.

One evening, as Gandhiji held her hand, she asked, “Why must the British quit India? Can we not let them stay, but as brothers?”

“I only want them to quit as rulers,” he replied gently.

But her next question cut deeper. “Where is Harilal?” she asked, her estranged eldest son, the prodigal shadow in their family’s story.

When the authorities finally traced him, he was drunk and disheveled. On his second visit, still intoxicated, he stumbled into her room. Seeing him in that condition, Kasturba cried out, struck her forehead with her hands, and turned away in anguish. “No,” she whispered later to those around her. “My time is up.”

And somewhere within her, it truly was.

Episode IV: The Last Evening

The morning of February 22, 1944 dawned clear and bright. Outside, daffodils and marigolds shimmered in the sunlight. Inside, the air was heavy with stillness.

When a gardener asked the Mahatma, “How is my mother, Ba?” he replied softly, “There is no change, and no hope.”

By afternoon, she refused even water. “Let all medicine stop,” Gandhiji said at last. “We will leave everything in God’s hands.”

As the sun began to sink, her youngest son Devadas arrived with Ganga water. She sipped a drop, smiled faintly, and whispered, “There must be no mourning, my death should be a time for rejoicing.” Then she closed her eyes, murmured, “God, my refuge, Thy mercy I crave,” and slipped away, her head resting against Gandhiji’s shoulder.

It was 7:35 p.m. Gandhiji sat beside her through the night, holding the silence as if afraid it might shatter.

Episode V: The Fire of Farewell

When the British government asked about the funeral, the Mahatma’s reply was unwavering: “Either the whole nation attends, or no one.” And so, Kasturba Gandhi, the “Mother of the Nation,” was cremated within the walls of the Aga Khan Palace.

Her sons were denied entry; Harilal had vanished again, and Manilal was too far away. “If the people cannot pay their respects,” Gandhiji told the others, “then neither will we.”

When an official offered sandalwood for the pyre, Gandhiji declined, until he was told it had been bought by the Government for his own death during a past fast. He smiled faintly. “Then it is mine,” he said. “Let it burn for her.”

As the flames rose, he stood beside them, silent, his frail frame outlined by the light. He refused to move, even as night fell. “How can I leave her during her last moments on earth?” he said softly. “She would never forgive me if I did.”

The fire burned long into the dusk, until only embers remained, faint, like the last pulse of memory.

Epilogue: The Silence Between Two Breaths

Today, the Aga Khan Palace stands serene, its corridors washed in the gold of afternoon. To most visitors, it is a chapter from the freedom struggle, a stop on the tourist trail.

But for those who linger, who listen, it becomes something more.

The stones still remember the quiet songs sung on the veranda, the echo of a woman’s laughter, the silence of an unfinished lesson, the fire that consumed a lifetime of companionship.

In that silence between two breaths of history, you can almost hear them, Gandhiji and Kasturba, two souls bound not by perfection, but by love’s imperfect, enduring grace.

And perhaps, as the trees whisper in the warm Pune breeze, they still walk there, together.

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It begins, as most Sahyadri mornings do, in a hush heavy with mist. The trail to Korigad is slick from last night’s rain, the smell of wild basil and damp earth rising with every step. Somewhere below, the Aamby Valley glimmers faintly through the clouds. And then, as if summoned by some ancient rhythm of these hills, the dogs appear.

They are the true custodians of the Western Ghats, rangy, amber-eyed, and uncannily sure of the way. One trots ahead, pausing only to glance back, as though ensuring my obedience; another vanishes into a thicket, only to reappear on the next curve, tail wagging, eyes bright with knowledge. In Maharashtra, it is almost a covenant, every trek comes with canine company. They lead you up as if fulfilling an ancestral duty.

The path winds through a steep gorge, the old stone steps cut deep into the hill’s ribs. To the northeast, the remnants of a gateway lie collapsed in their own memory, fallen masonry, the last punctuation of an entrance once designed for elephants and armies. The climb is steady but forgiving, the fort above you patient, indulgent, allowing itself to be reached.

At the top, the land exhales. Korigad’s summit opens like a revelation, a broad plateau encircled by intact ramparts, about two kilometers around. The wind runs unrestrained here. Two large ponds mirror the sky; the temple of Koraidevi stands newly restored, her deepmala, a three-foot tower of lamps, waiting for some future Diwali. Beside her rests the great cannon Laxmi, still pointed toward Ambavane Ghat, the same direction it once commanded in war. The air smells faintly of moss and rust, the scent of things enduring.

On clear days, the view unspools in blue layers. In the monsoon, clouds drift across the parapet, swallowing visibility to a few feet. The dogs sprawl on the ramparts, content, their duty done. Around us, the walls stand like patient sentinels, their stones remembering what we have forgotten.

A Hill that Remembered Empires

Korigad, also called Koraigad, rises 3,019 feet above sea level, commanding the Ambavane Ghat between Lonavala and Pali. Its origins are obscure, likely predating 1500, but its later chapters are etched in firmer ink. In 1657, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj brought it into the swelling geography of his Swarajya, that kingdom wrested from impossible odds. For centuries, its walls held against siege, its tanks brimmed even through drought, its shrines anchored the faith of its keepers. In March 1818, after three stubborn days of bombardment, a British cannonball found its mark in the munitions store, and the fort surrendered, not in defeat, but in exhaustion.

Today, Korigad sits quietly above Aamby Valley, its gateways softened by moss, its temples still breathing incense and history. But it was once part of something far greater, a living system of stone and trust that Maharaj built with meticulous care.

A Country of Forts

Shivaji Maharaj’s genius was not only martial but architectural, he saw the mountains themselves as instruments of statecraft. The Sahyadris became a network of sinew and stone: every pass fortified, every taluka anchored by a watchful bastion. The Maratha country became a living citadel, not a chain of isolated peaks, but a web of interlocking vigilance.

It was a world where even a handful of resolute men could defy an empire. Artillery was crude, mining primitive; a steep cliff and a solid wall could resist for months what armies could not breach in years. Hunger or betrayal, not cannon, were the usual conquerors.

Inside these forts, the essentials of survival were never forgotten: tanks and wells for water, ambarkhanas for grain, darukhanas for gunpowder. Even small forts like Satara held multiple reservoirs, yielding clean water centuries after neglect. Maharaj understood the arithmetic of endurance, that a fort was not a fortress unless it could feed itself and pray within its own walls.

Triple Key: A Fortress of Men, Not Just Stone

But if the architecture was pragmatic, the administration was almost surgical in its design. No fort was ever left to the whims of a single man. Every stronghold was ruled not by one officer but by three, equal in rank, distinct in duty, bound together in mutual vigilance.

• The Havaldar, a Maratha of good family, commanded the garrison and kept the keys.

• The Sabnis, usually a Brahmin, managed accounts, rolls, and pay.

• The Karkhannis, a Prabhu, oversaw stores, grain, oil, and provisions.

Nothing could move in a fort without the consent of all three. Every expenditure required three signatures; every ration was cross-verified; even letters were written by one, recorded by another, and sealed by the third. It was a system of built-in suspicion, governance as geometry.

And beneath this arrangement was Maharaj’s subtle genius: by choosing officers from three castes traditionally distrustful of each other, he ensured that ambition could never collude unchecked. It was bureaucracy as fortress, loyalties layered like the very basalt on which these forts stood.

Vigilance as Theology

Maharaj demanded not only loyalty but ritual obedience. The law of the fort was unbending: after dusk, the gates stay shut. The Havaldar alone held the keys, and only at daybreak could he open them, no exception, no excuse, not even for the king himself.

Once, the story goes, Maharaj decided to test his commanders. Travelling by night, he approached one of his own forts and ordered the gates opened. Some Havaldars, startled and deferential, obeyed, after all, who could deny their sovereign? But when morning came, Maharaj summoned them, stripped them of rank, and rebuked them sharply: “The law that binds my men binds me too.”

Then there was the Havaldar of Panhala. When Maharaj arrived in the dead of night, pleading entry, his voice weary, claiming he was pursued by enemies, the Havaldar bowed low from the parapet and refused. “My life is yours, Sarkar,” he said, “but these gates are not mine to open till dawn.” He offered to guard his king outside the walls if need be, but the lock stayed shut. The next morning, when the sun lit the ramparts, Maharaj revealed the ruse and embraced him. The man was promoted on the spot.

That was Shivaji Maharaj’s religion of vigilance, duty not as devotion to a person, but to the code that protects the realm.

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The Machinery of Trust

Beyond discipline, there was structure. Each fort had its Tat Sarnobats, officers guarding individual ramparts, and petty captains overseeing groups of nine soldiers. The garrisons varied from a few hundred to over a thousand in larger forts. Their weapons were modest: spears, bows, matchlocks, rockets, and, when all else failed, the most reliable weapon of all, gravity. A fort under siege could repel an army simply by rolling stones down steep slopes, each boulder carrying the authority of the hill itself.

And yet Maharaj was not content with strength alone. He established funds specifically for siege provisions and another for repairs, ensuring masons and artisans were paid on time. The forts, like his soldiers, were kept alive through attention.

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No private person was permitted to build a fort or even a bastioned house; adulterine castles were demolished. Every officer served at the king’s pleasure, and no post was hereditary. It was a republic of vigilance, fragile, disciplined, alive.

The Slow Unraveling

But what Shivaji Maharaj had built with principle began, after his death, to soften with privilege. The rot set in quietly, as rot often does, in small allowances, deferred salaries, and inherited posts. The Havaldars became landlords; the forts became dowries; the garrisons, hereditary.

Under the Peshwas, the old triple system persisted in name but hollowed in practice. The once-rotating officers became darakhdars, hereditary holders. Salaries lagged; vigilance decayed; repairs turned to ritual. When the English came with their engineers and their field artillery, they found forts manned by mercenaries, not Marathas, the walls strong, the will within them gone soft.

By the time Baji Rao II fought his last desperate war, most of the old ramparts had already fallen in spirit. The very system that had once guarded Maharashtra’s freedom now stood as the melancholy architecture of its memory. What was once unity became inheritance; what was once vigilance became habit.

The Forgotten Citadel

Standing on Korigad today, you can still feel the echo of that discipline, the geometry of governance, the faith in vigilance, the stubborn decency of stone. The wind that hums through the broken gateways carries not just air but memory: of men who locked their gates against the night, of water tanks that never ran dry, of a king who trusted the law above himself.

And yet, in our time, we have let the forts slip quietly into forgetfulness. The walls still rise, but they are hollowed of meaning. The shrines are visited, but the systems they once protected are gone. We climb them for photographs, not for reflection; we read plaques, not philosophies.

It is the gentlest kind of ruin, not one of stone, but of remembrance. The dogs still climb with us, leading the way as they always have, faithful to a legacy we no longer know how to carry.

And when you reach the top, amid the ponds and the shrines, amid the wind and the silence, you realize: the forts never betrayed us.
It was we who abandoned the gates.

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I have lived long enough in Pune to know that it is a city that breathes in contradictions. The sound of jackhammers and the shrill grind of cranes now drown out the once-constant cackle of birdsong and temple bells. In the name of redevelopment, we are stripping away not just facades of brick and timber, but the very soul of the city, its pulse of memory, the texture of its stories, its slow old rhythm. Pune, once fragrant with the scent of jarul and jasmine and incense wafting from wadas, is turning into a grid of glass towers and grey cement slabs, each rising upon the bones of a forgotten courtyard.

It was on one such day, wandering from Shaniwarwada to Kasba Peth, that I stumbled upon an old survivor, a crumbling yet defiant relic from the Peshwa age, standing on the left-hand side of the road. The board above its weathered gate read “Mote Mangal Karyalay.” But to those who care to listen, it still whispers its older name — the Dixit Wada.

Among the Ruins of Memory

As I made my way from Shaniwarwada toward Kasba Peth, the road narrowed and bent as if guiding me toward memory itself. On my left stood a structure that seemed to belong to another century. Its entrance, framed by time-worn teak and ornamented with carvings, caught the light just so. Above the arched doorway, a Ganesh motif with intricate creepers and an auspicious kalash presided over the threshold. The board read “Mote Mangal Karyalay,” and yet, as I stood before it, I could almost hear the echo of its older name, Dixit Wada, whispered by the walls themselves.

This mansion, I later learned, had been built by Harbhat Patwardhan-Dixit, a vaidya from Guhagar who made Pune his home. A physician by trade, a moneylender by necessity, Harbhat established both fortune and prestige within the Peshwa capital. His family’s destiny intertwined with the rulers of the era, for it was his daughter who married Vishwasrao Peshwa, the eldest son of Nanasaheb and Gopikabai.

Vishwasrao, the heir apparent to the Peshwa throne, was born in 1742. His upanayan ceremony (also known as the sacred thread ceremony, is a Hindu ritual that marks a boy’s entry into formal education and a spiritual life) took place in 1749, and scarcely a year later, on the 2nd of May 1750, he was married to Durgabai Dixit-Patwardhan, Harbhat’s daughter, who would, after marriage, be known as Lakshmibai. Their marriage symbolized the alliance of two powerful lineages: the statesmanship of the Peshwas and the wealth of the Dixit-Patwardhans. But history, ever cruel, allowed little time for joy. Vishwasrao fell in the Battle of Panipat at just twenty, and Lakshmibai, widowed young, followed him to her pyre within a few years, dying in 1763.

Yet the wada endured. Its south-facing entrance opened into a world of symmetry and splendour. Built in the chousopi style, the mansion once enclosed four courtyards, each arranged around its purpose and its poetry. The first courtyard housed the sabhamandap, a meeting hall whose wooden ceiling bore delicate creeper designs. On its right rose the Kusari Mahal, a grand hall whose walls shimmered once with Rajasthani-style paintings and mirrored panels. The pillars, intricately carved, cypress tree-shaped wooden columns, stood like sentinels around three beautiful makhar, shrines set into the wall, where light once flickered through coloured glass.

It was here that the Ganesh festival was once celebrated with a splendour befitting a royal court. From Bhadrapad Pratipada to Panchami, and again during Maghi Ganesh Chaturthi, the air filled with the scent of incense and ghee lamps. Even the Peshwas and their Sardars would arrive for the grand feast, where twenty-one delicacies were offered to the deity before being shared among men.

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A passage led inward to the central courtyard, where the kitchen and dining hall stood, alive once with laughter and the clatter of brass plates. Beyond it, the third courtyard held the homashala, the sacred fire room, and the final courtyard, quiet and shaded, encircled a well and a Tulsi Vrindavan. Two storeys rose above these courtyards, with lofty drawing rooms, one dughai, or double-height, whose carved ceilings and arched gavaksha windows filtered the sun into golden slats of memory.

The wada, of course, has its own legends. One that survives is of Jivajipant Khasgiwale, a man of great appetite and greater pride. During one of the feasts here, the Peshwas mocked his love for food. Enraged, Jivajipant bent a half-sher (about 500 grams) silver panchpatra with his bare hands, silencing his mockers and earning himself a strange immortality in the wada’s lore.

After the fall of the Peshwas, the Dixits continued as moneylenders for generations, their wealth waxing and waning with the seasons of empire. By the seventh generation, with Sadashiv Madhav Dixit, fortune turned. Burdened by the debts of his stepbrother, Sadashiv mortgaged the house to Dattatraya Shankar Mote. In time, the family tried to salvage its dignity by converting part of the mansion into a marriage hall, hence the Mote Mangal Karyalay, but they could never reclaim the deed. Finally, in 1933, the Dixits sold the property to the Mote family for ₹45,000. The Motes added a third storey, and the house took on a new, humbler life.

Tragedy struck again in July 1961, when the Panshet flood swallowed much of Pune. The Dixit Wada was submerged, its main ornamental door torn away by the rushing water, a symbol, perhaps, of the city’s slow erasure of its own past.

In the years that followed, the Dixits moved elsewhere. The old Ganesh festival fell silent. For a while, the palkhi of Moraya Gosavi from Chinchwad to Morgaon would halt in the Kusari Mahal, a symbolic pause of devotion amid crumbling plaster. Later still, Bharat High School briefly occupied part of the building. Today, the halls are hushed, the walls faintly breathing their history.

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Even in its decay, the mansion retains traces of its former grace, a carved lintel here, a whisper of fresco there. Yet when I stand before it, I am struck not by nostalgia alone, but by the violence of forgetting. Around it rise sterile concrete towers, their facades smooth and soulless. The Dixit Wada, once resonant with music, ritual, and laughter, now stands as a wounded relic, a reminder that progress, when it devours memory, leaves only silence in its wake.

The Silence After the Song

As I left Kasba Peth that afternoon, the sun slanted low across the tiled roofs, gilding even the most broken edges of the old wada. The streets were empty, unnaturally so, as though the neighbourhood itself held its breath. Not a sound but the faint rustle of dry leaves and the groan of a distant scooter. The wada stood in silence, its walls mottled with age, its carved lintels sagging, its courtyards hollowed out by time. I paused before its door, that same doorway where once Peshwas entered and feasts were laid, and for a moment, it felt as though the house was watching me, waiting to be remembered.

It is easy to speak of heritage in the abstract, as though it were a decorative backdrop for modernity. But in Pune, our past is not a museum exhibit, it is a living organism, gasping for breath beneath scaffolding and tarpaulin. Each time we raze a wada, we are not merely demolishing old wood and stone; we are amputating memory itself, the continuity that makes this city more than a collection of buildings.

Someday, the Dixit Wada too will collapse, quietly and without protest. Perhaps a tower will rise in its place, efficient, anonymous, its glass eyes blind to history. And yet, I like to believe that some part of the old Ganesh motif above the door, chipped, weathered, but enduring, will still bless the street below, reminding those who pass that the soul of Pune, though bruised and buried, is not yet gone. It waits, patient and silent, beneath the dust of progress, for someone to listen again.

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Born on Friday, 4th May 1741, in Satara, Nana was the son of Janardan Balaji Bhanu, the hereditary Phadnavis (Deputy Auditor and Accountant) under Balaji Bajirao Peshwa, and Rakhmabai Mehendale, a woman from an ancient Brahmin family. Married at the tender age of ten to Yeshodabai Gadre, he seemed destined for a life of quiet scholarship and clerical precision, not the stormy theatre of power and politics that awaited him.

Phadnavis: The Keeper of Accounts and Order

The word Phadnavis, literally writer of sheets, described more than an accountant. It was the title of the state’s chief civil officer, the de facto minister of finance and record-keeper of empire. His job was to prepare estimates of revenue and expenditure, regulate public disbursements, issue official grants and commissions, and, above all, serve as the moral and fiscal check on power itself. In the delicate machinery of the Maratha court, the Phadnavis stood between ruler and ruin, a scribe whose pen carried the weight of a sword.

The Wada at Menavali: The Seat of Quiet Power

In 1768, the village of Menavali was bestowed upon Nana by Bhavanrao Trymbak Pant-Pratinidhi of Aundh and Raghunath Ghanshyam Mantri of Satara. A decade later, along the serene banks of the Krishna, Nana constructed a sprawling mansion, the Phadnavis Wada, a reflection of his character: fortified, austere, yet intricately ordered.

The mansion’s bastions and courtyards mirror the layered secrecy of his politics. Visitors passed through successive courtyards, first the outer one for petitioners, then an inner one for trusted guests, and finally the sanctum of his upper chamber. There, behind carved wooden arches adorned with banana flower motifs, Nana received dignitaries, dictated letters, and quietly orchestrated the affairs of a fractious empire.

Attached to this residence was his Menavali Daftar, the private archive that rivalled even the Huzur Daftar in Poona. Within its walls lay the pulse of Maratha politics, letters, sanads, treaties, and correspondences between Pune, Satara, Gwalior, and Delhi. Today, these papers form one of the most valuable surviving sources on late eighteenth-century Deccan diplomacy.

Outside the Wada, a single ancient Baobab tree, the Gorakh Chincha, still stands, its vast trunk swollen with water like a natural reservoir. Beneath its shade rises the Gorakhchincha Buruj, the bastion that once looked down upon the river. Beside it lies the Menavali Ghat, with its two temples: Vishnu’s and Meneshwar’s, Shiva’s abode.

And here, in a curious meeting of civilizations, hangs a Portuguese bell, a trophy of another age.

The Bell of Bassein: Echoes of Conquest

This bell, cast in 1707, was once rung in a Portuguese church in Bassein (Vasai), north of Mumbai. After Chimaji Appa, brother of the great Bajirao I, led a Maratha siege that wrested Vasai from the Portuguese in 1739, the victors carried back church bells as trophies of their triumphs. Some found their way to Hindu temples across the western coast.

One of these hangs still at Menavali Ghat, suspended before the Meneshwar Temple, a relic of faiths entwined, cast in an alloy of five metals and bearing a bas-relief of the Virgin and Child. It weighs nearly 650 kilograms, heavy enough to outlast empires. Its chime is the faint sound of conquest transmuted into prayer, an emblem, perhaps, of the syncretic pragmatism that defined Maratha rule.

The Making of the Maratha Machiavelli

Yet to understand Nana Phadnavis, the mind behind that quiet façade, one must return not to Menavali, but to Panipat.

The Third Battle of Panipat (1761) was more than a military disaster; it was the spiritual unmaking of a generation. The Marathas, at the height of their imperial ambition, marched north to challenge the Afghan king Ahmad Shah Abdali, and were annihilated. Of an army of nearly 100,000, few returned.

Among the survivors was a frail, scholarly youth, the young Nana. His Autobiographical Memoir, later translated by Lieutenant Colonel John Briggs, opens not in triumph, but in terror. It is the record of a boy swept from the cloisters of study into the apocalypse of war.

Excerpt: The Memoir of Nana Phadnavis

Note to Readers: While researching Mahadji Shinde and the Menavali Daftar (Phadnavis Wada), I stumbled upon an extraordinary find, an autobiographical memoir of Nana Phadnavis, translated from the original Marathi by Lieutenant Colonel John Briggs.

I had initially planned to publish it as a full standalone post, but its depth and length make it more fitting as a reference within this essay. What follows is an excerpt, a vivid first-person account of Nana’s ordeal during the Battle of Panipat (1761), his flight through the carnage, his prayers to Vishnu, the loss of his family, and the spiritual awakening that would later define his life and politics.

Before proceeding further, I highly recommend you take a moment to read this embedded excerpt in full. It offers a haunting window into the making of the man history remembers as the Maratha Machiavelli.

Excerpt From Autobiographical Memoir Of The Early Life Of Nana Fadnavis

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The Lessons of Panipat

Panipat did not merely end the Maratha dream of Delhi; it redefined Nana’s understanding of destiny. “Through the grace of Vishnu the Preserver, we were all preserved,” he writes, a refrain of survival rather than victory.

That moment of helplessness, of witnessing proud princes flee and loyal soldiers perish, burned into him a single conviction: power is transient; order is divine. When he returned to Poona years later to serve under Peshwa Madhavrao I, he carried with him not ambition, but discipline.

Panipat had taught him that courage without calculation is vanity, and empire without restraint, self-destruction.

Where others sought glory through battle, Nana sought stability through governance. He became the living embodiment of Vishnu, not creator, not destroyer, but Preserver, maintaining the fragile equilibrium of a fractured realm.

His diplomacy was not the bold gamble of generals but the steady penmanship of survival. He corresponded with kings, outwitted the British, negotiated with Hyder Ali and the Nizam, and managed to keep the Maratha Confederacy intact long after its unity had begun to crumble.

Faith and Philosophy: The Stoic of Poona

Briggs, in his commentary, marvelled at the “sublime ideas of the nature of the Deity” expressed in the memoir. But what Briggs missed was that Nana’s theology was not doctrinal but experiential. His faith was born of ordeal. The “Only One” he invoked was not the god of temples but the god of endurance, the unseen force that sustained him when reason and fortune failed.

That same philosophy guided his politics. Surrounded by rival sardars, ambitious Peshwas, and European adventurers, he mastered the art of patience, that most Indian of political virtues. He trusted few, confided in fewer, and built his power not on armies, but on alliances and archives. His statecraft was asceticism in action, an act of moral restraint amid the temptations of empire.

The Soul of the Maratha State

By the time of his death in March 1800, Nana Phadnavis had become, in Edmund Burke’s words, “the soul of the Maratha state.” Yet that soul was tempered in the furnace of defeat. The wisdom that guided him was born not in victory but in loss.

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His journey, from the dust of Panipat to the quiet dignity of Menavali, mirrors the arc of the Maratha age itself: from conquest to consolidation, from expansion to endurance. The Wada he built still stands, its silent courtyards holding the whispers of history. The Portuguese bell still rings at the temple nearby, a sound that bridges worlds, much like the man himself.

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In Nana Phadnavis, the ashes of Panipat smouldered into wisdom. From ruin, he built resilience; from chaos, order. He did not forge new empires, he preserved the remnants of one. In that act of preservation lies his true greatness.

Epilogue

As the Krishna flows past Menavali, it carries echoes of an age when clerks could be kings and silence could rule over sword. Nana Phadnavis was not the conqueror of lands, but of circumstance, the last great giant of the Maratha court, who understood that the truest power lies not in domination, but in endurance.

Where others sought to burn brightly, he chose to keep the flame alive.

And in that flickering, steady light, equal parts intellect and faith, lived the spirit of Vishnu himself, the Preserver.

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At first, the stiff cadences of English seemed a veil over something I knew. But as I read deeper, I saw a man in colonial Bombay, wrestling with an alien art form, reaching, however imperfectly, to grasp what had moved generations. And when I surrendered to Acworth’s “Ballad of Tanaji Maloosre,” my throat tightened and my eyes welled up again. It proved that some stories cannot be dulled, they leap across language, time, and empire.

This retelling is my homage: to Tanaji, to Shivaji Maharaj, to Jijabai, and to the chorus of voices, singers, scribes, and even translators, who ensured that the roar of the lion at Sinhagad was never silenced.

A disclaimer before you proceed: Powadas are not subtle. They paint the world in bold strokes—heroes and villains, lions and jackals, dharma and adharma, Hindu against Muslim, us against them. It’s how they grip the heart: by drawing clear lines of loyalty and betrayal, courage and cowardice.

I must pause here, though, and say this: I don’t see the historical characters in this story through that black-and-white lens. They were human, as complex and fallible as we are. Udaybhan was not evil incarnate, nor were the Rajputs who defended Kondhana monsters. They fought, as men do, for loyalty, honour, duty, and survival.

Note on images: The accompanying images are from Amar Chitra Katha’s classic retelling of Tanaji. For many of us, these panels were our first glimpse of the lion of Sinhagad, bright, dramatic, and larger than life. They brought history to our childhood imaginations long before we encountered it in textbooks or archives. I include them here in gratitude to those artists and storytellers who kept these legends alive in colour and ink.

A note on legend: The story that Kondhana became Sinhagad after Tanaji’s sacrifice comes from the 19th-century Marathi play Gad Ala Pan Sinh Gela, which cast him as the ‘sinh,’ the lion. The rhyme was irresistible, and the tale endured. Yet the 17th-century Shivapurkar Deshpande Bakhar reminds us that the fort bore the name Sinhagad long before, recording: “Shaka 1569… Bapuji captured Sinhagad and handed it over to Chhatrapati Shivaji.”

What makes me love this tale, then, is not its polemic, nor its embroidered legends, but its power, the way it braids love, sacrifice, grief, loyalty, the cruel beauty of courage. It is a story that can move you to tears even when you know how it ends. And at its heart lies a winter’s night, when a band of men climbed a sheer cliff under the shadow of the stars, and changed the fate of Maharashtra.

The Road to Kondhana

The year was 1670, and the Deccan simmered. Shivaji Maharaj had returned from Agra a wounded lion, caged and humiliated in Aurangzeb’s court, then escaped in a feat that already lived as legend. But though he rode once more through the Sahyadris, his inheritance was diminished. The Mughals held Kondhana and Purandar, their bastions jutting like iron teeth over the Pune plain.

To Shivaji Maharaj, these were strategic thorns; to Jijabai, his mother, they were a personal shame. One ballad imagines her standing on the ramparts of Pratapgad, ivory comb in hand, gazing east where Kondhana gleamed white in the February sun. She summoned her son to a game of dice. Three times she cast and won. When Shivaji Maharaj asked what she sought, she replied simply: “Give me Sinhagad.”

Shivaji Maharaj hesitated. Udaybhan Rathod, the fort’s commander, was a Rajput officer of Aurangzeb, renowned for his brute strength, a man who could twist iron bars as though they were twigs. To storm Kondhana was to hurl oneself at a tiger’s maw. Yet Jijabai’s words carried the weight of a mother’s curse. Shivaji Maharaj yielded, and sent for Tanaji Malusare of Umrath, his comrade since the earliest days.

The Interrupted Wedding

At Umrath, the courtyards were bright with turmeric and mango leaves. Tanaji’s son Rayaba was to be married. But as musicians struck their first notes, a courier arrived, breathless with the king’s summons. The ballad preserves the moment: Tanaji turned to his son and said, “First I must wed Kondhana. Only then shall you wed your bride.”

The omens were ill. As his palanquin left, mango boughs drooped over his path; a jay cut the sky with its cry. His uncle Shelar, eighty years old, warned him not to go. “Many have gone against Sinhagad,” he said, “none have returned.” But Tanaji laughed. “A Kshatriya fears not death, only dishonour.”

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Five hundred Mavalas, later swelled to a thousand, followed him, peasants wrapped in coarse blankets, armed with sickles, clubs, and a scattering of swords. These men, drawn from the Sahyadri valleys, were Shivaji Maharaj’s truest strength: wiry, weathered, fearless in their mountains.

The Scaling of the Cliff

On a moonless night they gathered at the base of Kondhana. Its basalt cliffs rose sheer from the dark earth, crowned by ramparts and bastions, the gate bristling with spikes. Tanaji disguised himself as a village headman and bribed the Koli sentries with betel, opium, and trinkets. They told him of a weakness, Dongri cliff, precipitous but unguarded.

There Tanaji brought forth his companion of many sieges: Yeshwanti, the great ghorpad (monitor) lizard. A rope was tied about her, and she scrambled upwards, claws anchoring into stone. At first she balked, sensing fate, but Tanaji cursed and coaxed her onward. One by one, his men followed, climbing with swords gripped between their teeth.

Tanaji was first over the wall. Fifty men gathered behind him before the rope snapped. Stranded above, they pressed forward. At the Kalyan Gate, they struck down the startled guards. Torches flared, drums rolled, and the garrison roused itself.

The Night of Battle

Kondhana’s defenders numbered twelve hundred, Rajputs, Afghans, Pathans, under Udaybhan. They poured forth with matchlocks, spears, and swords, their torches casting wild shadows. For a moment, the night seemed to blaze with fire.

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The ballad revels in grotesque detail. Udaybhan ordered out his war-elephant, drugged with opium, its tusks fitted with steel. A wrestler rode her forward, bellowing defiance. Tanaji’s sword struck, cleaving her trunk; the beast groaned and fell, the wrestler hurled into the air. Sidi Bilal, Udaybhan’s general, emerged next, slaying his own wives in a frenzy before charging. Tanaji met him in single combat and split him to the waist. Then came Udaybhan’s twelve sons, tall as demons, and one by one Tanaji’s blade cut them down.

But at last Udaybhan himself came forth. Their duel was the heart of the night.

The Lion Falls, the Fort is Won

The clash between Tanaji and Udaybhan was the storm’s centre, steel shrieking against steel. Tanaji’s shield splintered beneath the Rajput’s blows; he lifted his bare arm as shield, blood streaming, still striking with the fury of Bhavani. For a moment he seemed possessed, his blade flashing like lightning. But then Udaybhan’s massive sword fell, cleaving helm and turban, and the lion of Umrath crumpled to the stones.

A cry went up among the Mavalas. Leaderless, they staggered back toward the cliff’s edge, terror gnawing at their courage. But at that moment Suryaji, Tanaji’s brother, forced his way through the press with fresh men. Drawing his sword, he barred their retreat and shouted:

“Cowards! The ropes are cut, will you flee and leave your brother’s body to the scavenger’s pit?”

The words stung like fire. Shame turned to fury. The Mavalas beat their shields, roared “Har Har Mahadev!”, and hurled themselves forward once more. Inch by inch they pressed the Rajputs back toward the walls. Flames licked at thatched stables, sending sparks into the night sky, the signal to Shivaji Maharaj at Rajgad that the fort still lived, though soaked in blood.

Yet the battle was not done. Udaybhan, exultant over Tanaji’s fall, strode among the corpses. Then came Shelar, Tanaji’s uncle, eighty years old but blazing with youth renewed by rage. He stooped, lifted his fallen nephew’s sword, and cried:

“Turn back, Rathod! Face once more the blade of the man you have slain!”

Udaybhan turned in pride, and in that instant Shelar struck. Swift as lightning, the blow cut him down above Tanaji’s lifeless body. Both captains, the lion and the tyrant, lay dead together in the dust.

When dawn came, Kondhana was a charnel house. Corpses choked its courtyards. The Rajputs who still lived hurled themselves from the ramparts rather than yield. The saffron banner rose above the Kalyan Gate, rippling in the morning wind.

Days later, Shivaji Maharaj himself came, climbing the narrow path to the fortress his men had won. They brought him to where Tanaji lay. Seeing the place where his comrade, his childhood companion in every campaign, took his last breath, the king wept. His officers offered congratulations, but Maharaj only whispered the words that have never since left Maharashtra’s memory:

“Gad ala, pan sinh gela.”
“The fort is won, but the lion is lost.”

Epilogue

In the cold calculus of history, Sinhagad was a strategic prize, a line on the map between Maratha and Mughal power.

In the colorful powadas though, that winter night at Sinhagad is not merely a tale of battle. It is a tapestry of human emotion, of a mother’s demand, a king’s hesitation, a soldier’s sacrifice, a brother’s fury, and a people’s grief.

Painted in stark colours, Hindu against Muslim, hero against villain, it hides another truth: men, bound by loyalty, fighting for what they believed was their duty. Udaybhan, too, met death with honour, as much a lion as the foe who felled him.

That is why this story endures, not in stone, which crumbles, but in song: in powadas chanted in bazaars, in bakhars inked in fragile paper, in Acworth’s English verse, and in the lump in the throat of every child who first hears it, the lion of Sinhagad still roars.

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During one of these reading sprees, I stumbled upon a curious mention, a remnant that most of us in Pune must have passed countless times, though few know of its significance, and even fewer pause to notice it. A humble flight of old stone steps, said to be the last surviving trace of the city’s first fort.

Intrigued, I decided to see it for myself. On an overcast Saturday morning, I wound my way through the narrow lanes of the city’s oldest quarter, following faint clues through old maps and footnotes until the noise of the market thinned out and the street grew quieter. And there they were: a narrow flight of stairs, tucked between two weathered buildings opposite Shaniwarwada.

Their surface bore the unmistakable look of time, parts re-laid in concrete, others still shaped by the erosion of centuries. I didn’t touch them; I only stood there and observed. There was a rhythm to those stones, the kind that speaks of long use and long forgetting. The stairs rose gently into shadow, as though leading not merely upward, but backward in time.

In that stillness, surrounded by the hum of the waking city, it dawned on me: these were the last visible traces of Pune’s first fort, the one that once enclosed the town from which everything else began.

The Earliest Echoes

The history of Pune begins, like much of India’s, in obscurity. Copper-plate inscriptions from the eighth century, during the Rashtrakuta reign, call this region Punya Vishaya or Punaka Vishaya. Two centuries later, it appears again as Punaka Wadi, perhaps derived from something older, Punnaka or Pumaka.

Scholars have suggested that Pune may have originally meant Punyapur, “the sacred city”, a name inspired by its position at the confluence of the Mula and Mutha rivers, a meeting of waters believed to purify and sanctify.

Over time, three hamlets took root along these banks: Kasarli, Kumbharli, and Punewadi, communities of coppersmiths, potters, and cultivators. Their names still echo faintly in Kasar Ali and Kumbharwada, living fossils of the earliest city. Through centuries of dynastic shifts, Satavahanas, Chalukyas, Yadavas, these settlements persisted, humble yet resilient.

Then, in 1295, the armies of Ala-ud-din Khilji marched south and overthrew the Yadavas of Devgiri, bringing the Deccan under Delhi’s reach, and altering Pune’s fate forever.

The White Wall and the First Fort

By the mid-fifteenth century, the Bahmani kings ruled this region. An Arab commander, remembered locally as Barya Arab and likely identical to Kasam Beig Shafaat Khan, also known as Bada Arab, governed the area from his base at Chakan.

Seeing Pune’s potential, he fortified it with a structure known as Pandhari Kot, or The White Wall. Built of pale mud and brick on a stone plinth, it enclosed the growing settlement of Kasba Pune. Within its walls were stationed soldiers, scribes, and officials; outside, life spilled into the bazaars and alleys that ringed its gates.

The Bombay Gazetteer of 1885 describes the Pandhari Kot as an irregular rectangle with bastions, parapets, and three principal gates:

• the Konkan Darwaja to the west,

• the Nagar Darwaja to the east, and

• a northern gate opening toward the Mutha River.

The western gate, the Konkan Darwaja, was reached by a flight of stone steps: the very ones I now stood observing, silent and almost forgotten, their form echoing across five centuries.

The First Destruction

Pune’s first fort did not endure long. In the early seventeenth century, Moro Tandeo Honap, the local Deshpande of Pune, rose in rebellion against the Bijapur Sultanate. Murar Jagdeo, the Bijapuri general, was sent to crush the revolt.

He destroyed the fort and razed the town, ploughing its earth with an ass, a symbolic curse intended to doom the land to barrenness. For years, the area lay deserted. Crops withered, fields turned to scrub, and wolves roamed freely through what had once been a thriving town.

A Golden Plough and a New Beginning

Pune’s redemption came through Shahaji Bhonsle. In 1636, he sent his wife Jijabai and their son Shivaji to this forsaken place under the guardianship of Dadaji Konddev.

When Dadaji arrived, little remained of the fort or the settlement it once guarded. Yet he saw what others could not, the possibility of revival. He invited farmers back, offered bounties for killing wolves, and, in an act of deep symbolism, re-ploughed the cursed soil with a golden plough, reversing Murar Jagdeo’s malediction.

Under his stewardship, Pune came alive again. Temples were rebuilt, homes rose from ruin, and the rhythm of daily life returned. It was here, amid the narrow lanes of a town reborn, that young Shivaji spent his formative years, absorbing lessons that would one day shape an empire.

Dadaji built the Lal Mahal near the Kasba Ganpati temple for Jijabai and her son, shifting the town’s nucleus southward. Around it sprouted new neighbourhoods, Malkapur (Raviwar Peth), Murtazabad (Shaniwar Peth), and Shahpura (Somwar Peth), the early scaffolding of the city we know today.

The Vanishing of the Fort

A century later, Pune had become the capital of the Maratha Confederacy. When Peshwa Bajirao I assumed power in 1728, the Pandhari Kot was long outdated. He ordered its demolition, allocating the land to nobles and soldiers.

In its place, new peths and courtyards emerged. The city expanded outward, confident, unfortified, and alive. By the nineteenth century, only fragments of the old walls survived: buried plinths, stray bastions, and stairways like the one across from Shaniwarwada. Locals called it Juna Kot — “the Old Fort.”

The Stairs that Remember

Those stairs, still there today, are believed to be the remnants of the Konkan Darwaja, the western gate of Kille-e-Hissar — another name for Pune’s first fort. Though framed now by modern walls and apartments, their orientation remains faithful to the fort’s original layout.

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Standing there that overcast morning, I tried to imagine the scene centuries ago, guards at their posts, traders leading bullocks through the gate, the clatter of carts and the clang of arms. Perhaps even the young Shivaji once ran up those very steps under Dadaji Konddev’s watchful eye.

A City Built on Its Own Past

Walk through Kasba Peth today, and you are walking atop centuries. The crooked lanes trace the outline of the old White Wall, and many foundations still rest upon its buried stones. The fort may be gone, yet its geometry shapes the modern city like a ghost blueprint.

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Pune has always been a city that builds upon itself, fortified, razed, reborn. The Pandhari Kot may have vanished, but its spirit endures in the rhythm of these streets, in the way the past quietly insists on remaining part of the present.

The Past Beneath Our Feet

That morning, as clouds drifted low and the air hung still, I lingered before the stairway, just observing. It felt less like an object and more like a memory rendered in stone.

Kipling was right: history, when told as story, refuses to be forgotten. Here, amid the quiet lanes of the old city, history is not something buried, it is something visible, if only we care to look.

Most who pass these stairs see only a dead end. But if you pause and let the noise of the city fade, you begin to sense something older moving beneath it, the echo of soldiers on the White Wall, the murmur of temple bells, the faint rush of the Mutha below.

The stairs endure, silent and steadfast, a reminder that the city we inhabit is layered with the lives of those who came before. Pune still stands upon their footsteps.

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Standing here today, I know a little better. Shinde’s Chhatri isn’t an umbrella, but a memorial, part tomb, part temple, built in honour of Mahadji Shinde, one of the most remarkable Maratha leaders of the eighteenth century. It sits in Wanwadi, once a quiet hamlet on the edges of Pune, now swallowed by the city. A narrow stream, Bahiroba’s nala, still winds its way past, just as it did when Mahadji was cremated here on 12 February 1794.

The sanctity of that funeral pyre was soon enshrined in stone. His adopted son, Dawlatrao Shinde, petitioned the Peshwa for land to raise a fitting tomb. Orders were issued in 1795, and work began, though haltingly. Civil strife and the turbulence of succession brought the project to a standstill. Visitors of the early nineteenth century, such as Sir James Mackintosh, left behind descriptions of half finished walls, an improvised shrine with Zoffany’s portrait of Mahadji taking the place of a deity, and an old retainer keeping the sacred lamps burning. The grandeur intended was suspended, perhaps abandoned altogether.

Decades passed in neglect until, around 1830, Maharaja Jankoji Shinde revived construction, only to leave it incomplete upon his death. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the family, in acts of reverence and remembrance, restored the work. And much later, in 1965, Madhavrao Scindia ensured that the memorial, as we see it today, stood intact and dignified.

Yet to call it merely a tomb would be to diminish its strangeness and splendour. Shinde Chhatri is an unusual fusion of styles: Rajasthani exuberance colliding with Anglo motifs. Its sandstone pavilion, rectangular, two-storied, crowned with stained-glass windows and cusped arches, seems to straddle two worlds. Around the parapet perch twenty-seven stone sages, each frozen in meditation, watching centuries drift past. Inside, the pillars bloom with colour and ornament, and portraits of Scindia descendants gaze down from the walls. At the far end sits the statue of Mahadji himself, beneath a ceiling painted with episodes from Krishna’s life, and above him, the eternal image of Vishnu reclining on Sheshnaag. Access is restricted, but crouching low to catch glimpses of the murals felt like an act of pilgrimage in itself.

Adjoining the pavilion is the Shiva temple, older in origin yet strikingly different in style. Built the very year Mahadji died, its soaring shikhara recalls the grandeur of Khajuraho, while its black-stone sanctum is softened by stucco work. Light filters through intricate jali screens, tracing shifting patterns on the black-and-white tiled floor of the garbhagriha.

The complex is enclosed by high walls, with an iron gate on its eastern flank. A newly built Hanuman shrine stands sentinel at the entrance, while the spiral staircase outside the chhatri, its access now blocked, once led to an upper balcony overlooking the hall. Even in its silence, the place whispers of layered histories, of architectural conversations between Hindu, Rajput, and colonial forms.

But beyond the stone and stucco lies the life of the man to whom this memorial belongs. Mahadji Shinde’s rise was improbable, his survival miraculous. As a young man he fought at the ill-fated Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, where he narrowly escaped death. Pursued by an Afghan soldier, he was struck down, crippled for life, and abandoned, only to be rescued by a water carrier named Bhama Khan. That wound left him with a limp, but it did not dim his ambition.

From the ashes of Panipat, he rose to become one of the greatest Maratha statesmen after Shivaji. A shrewd general, he modernised his army along European lines, employed foreign officers like Benoît de Boigne, and extended Maratha influence deep into northern India. His victories restored the Mughal emperor to the throne of Delhi, placing the empire, in effect, under his control.

When he returned to Pune in 1792, he staged a durbar so grand that the city had never seen its like before. Even Grant Duff, the chronicler of the Marathas, marvelled at the spectacle, calling it unlike anything Pune had ever witnessed. Imperial robes, Mughal insignia, elephants and standards, the pomp was deliberate, a theatre of power. Even his rivals, like Nana Phadnavis, recognised how skillfully Mahadji was weaving himself into the fabric of Pune’s politics. And then, just two years later, he was gone, struck down not in battle, but by illness, in his Wanwadi mansion.

The empire lost its ablest statesman; Pune, its most influential courtier.

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That is why this place matters. Shinde’s Chhatri is not just an architectural oddity or a forgotten tomb. It is the story of survival, of ambition, of a man who rose from the ashes of Panipat to become master of Hindustan, only to be claimed by death far too soon. It is also the story of memory, how his descendants, decades later, chose to honour him in stone, blending styles and traditions into a structure that reflects both his Maratha roots and the world he navigated, one foot in Indian power, the other in European diplomacy.

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When I walk through the gates today, I no longer expect an umbrella. Instead, I see something far richer: a layered palimpsest of history, devotion, and artistry. And I feel, in some way, that the child who once came here chasing spiders and giant umbrellas has finally grown into the adult who can pause, look up at those stained-glass windows, and appreciate what they stand for: survival, remembrance, and the sheer improbability of history.

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Long before Pune became the restless metropolis it is today, it was a quiet mosaic of rivers and rivulets, of half-hidden shrines and sloping plains that caught the shadow of the Western Ghats. The Mutha river formed the city’s western rampart, while to the north the Mula joined its sister in a sacred embrace at the Sangam. Eastward, a lesser stream, the Bhairoba Nala, meandered through scrub and field. But it was the small, silvery Nagzhari, slipping unobtrusively across the plateau, that offered both sanctuary and sustenance.

It is on the undulating ground flanking the Nagzhari, westward to the right bank of the Mutha, that Pune’s first heartbeat can still be felt. Here lay Kasba Peth, a tangle of lanes where history seems to breathe from every brick. There are no grand chronicles of Pune’s birth, no royal edicts or poet’s verses to mark its founding. Instead, the city grew as many Indian towns did: from the soil upward, improvised and organic, villages knitting together like patchwork, Kasarli, Kumbharli, Punewadi, until a town emerged, at once humble and enduring.

Water shaped these choices. The broad Mutha, wild and prone to monsoon floods, could not be trusted. The modest Nagzhari, by contrast, offered a gentle, reliable source, its banks rising high enough to escape the river’s seasonal rage. And on the east side of this stream stood a shrine to Lord Shiva that would lend its name and spirit to the settlement: the Nageshwar Temple.

The Nageshwar Mandir is older than memory, its stone sanctum whispering of the Yadava kings and its timbered halls bearing the imprint of Peshwa patronage. Local legend tells of a reservoir once glimmering beside it, Nagatirtha, whose waters were said to cure leprosy, and where pilgrims poured sacred Ganga water before journeys to Benares. Saints of the medieval Bhakti movement walked here: Namdev sang of this very sanctum, calling it Shivakshetra, while Tukaram’s kirtans filled the courtyard with devotion and music.

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Around this sacred centre, a settlement slowly took form. In the mid-eighteenth century, when the Peshwas held sway, a small ward was carved out around the temple and given a curious name, Nahal Peth, later known as Nagesh Peth. It owed its title not to a great chieftain or saint, but to Nahal, a humble servant of Kotwal Shivram Raghunath Khasgiwale, a chief administrator in the court of Peshwa. Established around 1755, it remained modest in size and character, a largely residential quarter whose quiet lanes belied the bustle of the growing city.

Its fortunes, like so many small neighbourhoods of that era, were fragile. Records show that between 1765 and 1818 the peth lost nearly sixty percent of its houses, a slow ebb that mirrored the shifting currents of Pune’s political and economic life.

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By the early decades of the twentieth century, Nahal Peth had been divided and absorbed into neighbouring Somwar and other contiguous peths, its name surviving mainly in memory and the enduring presence of the Nageshwar shrine at its heart.

The temple itself remains a palimpsest of centuries. The entrance to the temple complex is through a stone arched gateway, atop which stands a nagarkhana structure, announcing the sanctity within. The temple’s Hemadpanthi stone core lies sunken, as though bowing to the earth, with the stone garbha griha positioned a few feet below the level of the mandap, as is common in many Shiva temples.

In front of the garbha griha sits a hall, or ‘antarala’, built in stone and capable of accommodating a dozen devotees, its ceiling richly ornate and attractively carved. Surrounding this ancient core, the Peshwa-era additions rise in quiet grandeur.

The sabhamandap, constructed with carved teak pillars and cypress-shaped columns, was funded by a city moneylender and adorned with ornate touches that became synonymous with Maratha architecture. The cypress columns, with their elaborate designs, are integrated with curved brackets that spring gracefully into intricately patterned ceilings, whose carvings marry structural strength with aesthetic flourish. These embellishments spoke not merely of wealth, but of refined taste and cultural pride, a testament to an era when devotion, artistry, and civic ambition flowed together as seamlessly as the waters of the Nagzhari itself.

Two tall deepstambhs stand sentinel, their lamps once a constellation of flame on festival nights. Within the walled compound, shrines to Vishnu, Hanuman, and Dattatreya cluster like quiet witnesses to an unbroken continuum of worship.

Even as Pune vaulted the Mutha and spread into once-wild country, the Nagzhari stream and the Nageshwar Mandir retained their quiet authority, as if reminding the city of its own beginnings. Today the temple sits hidden amid the dense fabric of old Pune, the noise of modern life fading as one steps through its gate into a courtyard of stone and shadow.

Renovations have renewed its plaster and paint, but the essence endures. Here, beneath the onion-shaped shikhara, the city’s past still murmurs: of a hamlet that grew by a modest stream, of saints who sang beneath teak beams, of waters that once healed and sustained.

To stand by the Nageshwar Temple is to feel how deeply Pune’s story is braided with the Nagzhari’s flow, a reminder that great cities often rise not from grand design, but from the quiet insistence of place, faith, and water.

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Dattatray Balwant Parasnis, a Maharashtrian historian writing in 1921, opened his book with a gentle proclamation of intent: “The keen interest now-a-days shown in historical research and old monuments by European and Indian scholars alike has encouraged me to collect information about Poona and its historical sites from all available sources. This first instalment I now venture to put before the public on the memorable occasion of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales’ visit to Poona, and I hope that my humble effort will be of some use to those who desire to know something of Poona and its early history.”

It was as if Parasnis had reached across a century, beckoning me to follow. His words drew me into a labyrinth of archival rabbit holes, and soon I found myself wandering through the city’s formative centuries, its transformation from an obscure hamlet into a pensioners’ idyll, and finally into the restless IT hub it is today. Yet beneath the shimmering veneer of a growing metropolis, Pune remains, at heart, a slumbering old town of peths, narrow alleys that weave and intersect like secret conversations.

Among these is Somwar Peth, once known as Shahpur, one of the city’s oldest quarters. Modest in size, it was once a residential enclave where castes coexisted in close quarters, a settlement of Gosavis and the stately wadas of influential sardars and bankers. Hidden deep within its crisscrossing lanes lies a gem of improbable splendour: the Trishundya (Mayureshwar) Ganpati temple, a structure that seems less built than conjured from dream and legend.

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Originally approached directly from the banks of the now-quiet Nagzhari nala (stream), the temple’s own stones whisper of patience and persistence. An inscription inside reveals that construction began on 26 August 1754 under Bhimjigiri Gosavi of Dhampur, near Indore. Sixteen slow years passed before the temple reached completion in 1770, its grey Deccan basalt heaved up onto a high platform with a small, sunlit courtyard.

What first arrests the eye is its façade, a riot of figures, animals, and mythic beings, each chisel-mark a frozen gasp of imagination. Among them is a carving both strange and arresting: a rhinoceros, shackled in iron chains, flanked by what appear to be British soldiers. Local lore interprets this as a sly reference to the British conquest of Bengal and Assam after Plassey in 1757, the rhinoceros standing as a distant emblem of Assam. It is a moment of subversive wit from the unnamed artisan, an image that collapses geography and politics into a single stone flourish.

The architecture is an intricate marriage of Rajasthani, Central, and South Indian styles. Once, a shikhara may have soared above the sanctum, though whether it was lost to time or never completed is a mystery folded into the city’s layered past.

Slip quietly to the temple’s rear, where a narrow side passage leads to a secluded courtyard and an extraordinary carving unlike any I have encountered elsewhere in India. Here unfolds the cosmic drama of the Lingodbhava, Shiva manifest as an infinite pillar of light, testing Vishnu and Brahma’s arrogance. Vishnu plunged downward as a boar to find Shiva’s feet; Brahma ascended as a swan in search of the head. Vishnu returned humbled, unable to fathom infinity. Brahma, in pride, lied that he had found the source, brandishing a ketaki flower, tulsi leaves, and even a cow (Kamadhenu, according to one version) as witnesses.

Shiva, unamused, decreed that Brahma would have no temple on Earth, while the ketaki flower and tulsi would be forever barred from his worship. The cow, too, was cursed, its mouth deemed impure for its false testimony. Even today, the ketaki remains absent from the offerings at most Shiva shrines, a quiet echo of that ancient judgement. Shiva then cursed the cow, declaring, “From this moment on, no one will ever worship you from the front; all offerings and reverence shall be made only at your tail.”

The entrance to Trishundya (Mayureshwar) is guarded by sculpted dwarpalakas, with Goddess Lakshmi enthroned above, flanked by two elephants. This portal opens into a spacious hall, then narrows into a passage that finally reveals the sanctum. Within sits an idol of Ganpati unlike any other, three trunks and six arms, poised atop a peacock. It is this form that gives the temple its name: Tri-Shundya, “three trunks,” while Mayureshwar hails the peacock mount.

Two further inscriptions enrich the sanctum’s layered story: one in Sanskrit quoting the Bhagavad Gita, the other in Persian, recording the construction of a temple dedicated to Gurudev Datta, a testament to the syncretic fabric of its age.

Beneath the temple lies what seems to be another secret: a shadowed basement that may once have served as a school for wandering ascetics of a tantric bent. As you step out, you might notice, if you look carefully, a star-shaped tantric motif carved into the doorframe, hinting rather than declaring its purpose.

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In the flooded quiet of that underground chamber lies the samadhi of a revered Gosavi. Only during Guru Purnima in July is the water cleared, allowing devotees to descend and pay homage.

Morning ablutions of the three-trunked Mayureshwar, water glints like liquid silver as priests awaken the deity in a ritual older than empire.

As you complete your own small pilgrimage and slip your shoes back on, a final glance lingers on the temple’s weathered walls. In the heart of bustling Pune, where traffic honks drown the rustle of banyan leaves, the Trishundya Mayureshwar Ganpati temple endures, half-hidden, half-remembered. It stands as a stone-bound epic: of artisans and ascetics, of myth and empire, of a city whose oldest alleys still murmur to those willing to listen.

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What is clear is that it could not have been a lavish, many-storeyed palace of marble and domes. More likely, it resembled the sturdy wadas of the Deccan: brick walls supported by timber framing, with internal courtyards that carried sound and shadow in equal measure. Less a royal palace, more the residence of a prosperous nobleman, functional, intimate, and, crucially, vulnerable. Such structures fell into ruin easily, leaving barely a trace. By the end of Peshwa rule, memory of Lal Mahal’s exact footprint was almost obliterated.

The Gazetteers later conjectured that the Peshwa’s ambarikhana, the storeroom for elephant howdahs, might have stood where the Lal Mahal once rose. But that too may have been a mistake. In an effort to keep the ground auspicious and in use, the early Peshwas allotted plots of the Lal Mahal site to various individuals so that homes could be raised upon it. It was a traditional way of ensuring sacred spaces did not become wastelands.

The Lal Mahal we see today, rebuilt by the Pune Municipal Corporation between 1984 and 1988, stands only on a fraction of that ground. It is a pale echo of the original, more a commemorative gesture than a reconstruction. Photography is not permitted inside, so I cannot show you its interiors. But what truly matters is not its current form, but how its memory still burns in stories: in powadas sung on village stages, in the Marathi prose bakhars, and above all in one extraordinary night of strategy and blood.

Background to the Storm

By the early 1660s, Shivaji Maharaj had grown restless. Having allied with the Bijapur Sultan, he felt emboldened to liberate Marathi-speaking lands from the Mughals. The spark came in May 1661, when the Mughals seized Kalyan, a town Maharaj had once taken. In retaliation, his commanders Netoji Palkar and Moro Pingle raided Mughal territories from Ahmadnagar to Aurangabad.

The chronicles, Shedgavkar Bakhar, Sabhasad Bakhar, and Shivdigvijaya Bakhar, tell us of a curious episode: Mughal officers, trembling before the Maratha cavalry, refused to send revenue to Aurangabad. Shaistekhan, the Mughal viceroy of the Deccan and Aurangzeb’s maternal uncle, mocked them with a cutting letter:

"Although you are men, you fear to meet the Marathas. I am sending you a woman who will not fear to do so."

This “woman” was none other than Rai Bagin, the wife of Udaram Deshmukh, a warrior of skill and courage. But Maharaj was merciless in his strategy. He attacked, defeated her forces, and captured her. Shortly after, he routed another Mughal contingent under a Rajput commander near Ahmadnagar. The Deccan shook under his raids.

Enraged, Aurangzeb commanded Shaistekhan to march south. With reinforcements, the Mughal governor swept into Pune and occupied none other than the Lal Mahal, Shivaji Maharaj’s childhood home. The insult could not go unanswered.

Letters of Fire

From Sinhgad, Shivaji Maharaj received a letter from Shaistekhan. In it, the Khan derided him with a Persian verse, mocking him as a monkey who could only find refuge in mountain forests.

Maharaj’s reply was as sharp as a sword drawn in moonlight. He sent back a Sanskrit couplet:

"Yes, I am a monkey. But not any monkey, I am Hanuman, son of the wind-god. Just as Hanuman burned Lanka, I shall reduce you to ashes."

The exchange was more than poetry, it was a declaration of war.

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The Night Raid on Lal Mahal

It was April 1663, and Pune slept. The air was heavy with summer heat, and in the courtyards of Lal Mahal, Mughal sentries dozed lazily, lulled into complacency by months of uneventful occupation.

From the darkness beyond the city gates came music, flutes, drums, the bright clash of cymbals. A wedding procession wound its way toward Pune: a boy dressed as a groom, musicians piping cheerfully, women carrying lamps, and behind them, attendants and guards. But beneath the saffron turbans and borrowed Mughal uniforms were Shivaji Maharaj’s most trusted men, two hundred warriors led by Tanaji Malusare, Yesaji Kank, and Maharaj himself.

Another band entered from a different gate, dragging “prisoners” in chains, their shouts and curses adding to the charade. Beyond the city, thousands more Marathas lay in wait, torches ready to blaze should the retreat need shielding.

The gates opened. The deception worked. Pune welcomed the wedding party.

At the stroke of midnight, the two bands converged near Lal Mahal. Maharaj slipped in through the cookhouse. Inside, shadows thickened. Cooks were strangled before they could raise alarm; guards were dispatched with swift blades. The great palace, Shaistekhan’s pride, became a silent maze of death.

Then the alarm broke. Servants cried out. The Khan’s women screamed. Shaistekhan himself, roused from sleep, first dismissed the commotion as drunken brawling, but within moments, Marathas were inside his chambers.

“Strike, Mavalas, strike!
The tiger leaps in the dark,
The jackal hides in his den,
And Pune wakes in flame.”

Here the chronicles diverge.

• In Sabhasad Bakhar, Shaistekhan sprang up, bow in hand, firing an arrow that felled a Maratha warrior before a sword sliced off his thumb. His son, Abdul Fateh Khan, rushed forward and was cut down in the melee. Panic swept the household. Believing the Khan slain, Shivaji Maharaj ordered a retreat.

• In Shivdigvijaya Bakhar, the moment is darker, almost theatrical. Maharaj himself mistook the Khan’s son for the general and struck him down with a firangi blade. The Khan’s wife threw herself at Shivaji’s feet, pleading for mercy. Moved, he spared the general, but not before severing his fingers, a command that his presence in Lal Mahal would end by dawn.

“Blood on the carpets, cries in the zenana,
The lion’s paw is cut,
The hawk takes wing,
And shame rides with Shaistekhan.”

Whether thumb or fingers, the wound was real. Shaistekhan’s pride, his authority, his very body had been mutilated. The mighty Mughal viceroy of the Deccan was left shivering, humiliated, his blood staining the same palace where Shivaji Maharaj had once played as a boy.

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Aftermath

As the Marathas vanished into the night, the hills around Pune seemed to glow with fire. At Katraj, torches tied to cattle horns and treetops flickered, mimicking an encamped army. Mughal forces charged toward the phantom lights, only to find themselves duped, while Maharaj and his men slipped back to Sinhgad unscathed.

Aurangzeb’s uncle had been humbled. Within days, Shaistekhan abandoned Pune and crept to Aurangabad, his mutilated hand a constant reminder of that April night. Aurangzeb, furious at the disgrace, dismissed him from command and replaced him with his son, Prince Muazzam.

Across Maharashtra, however, the news was sung with joy. Powadas rang through villages and courts alike: a handful of men had struck at the heart of the Mughal army, not for territory, but for honour. Lal Mahal, defiled by an enemy, had been redeemed in fire and blood.

Echoes of the Lal Mahal

The Lal Mahal that stands today is not the same building where these events unfolded. It is a reconstruction, modest and symbolic, raised centuries after the original had vanished. The truth is, the first Lal Mahal was never a palace of grandeur, it was likely a timber-framed wada, practical rather than palatial, and so fragile that within decades even its memory had almost dissolved. By the end of Peshwa rule, its exact footprint was uncertain; tradition kept the land in use so it would not fade entirely into oblivion.

And yet, despite the absence of stone or mortar, the Lal Mahal endures. Its presence lingers not in architecture but in chronicles, in the voices of the bakharkars, in the thunder of powadas sung on village stages. What has survived is not the structure, but the story: the audacity of a night raid that humbled Aurangzeb’s uncle, the defiance of a people who refused to bow, the fire of memory that burns brighter than any wall.

This is why we return to the Lal Mahal. Not to see its ruins or reconstructions, but to hear its echoes, of courage, cunning, and the night the tiger leapt.

“The palace is dust, the walls are gone,
but the song still lives,
and the tiger still leaps in every telling.”

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Eight years after his elevation as Peshwa, Bajirao I resolved to build a residence worthy of his position. He chose Pune, then a modest kasba, but one alive with memory: the town where Shivaji Maharaj had spent his boyhood, and where Bajirao’s father, Balaji Vishvanath, had once served as sarsubha of the district. Sheltered by the twin fortresses of Sinhagad and Purandar and watered by the Mula and Mutha rivers, the location was both strategic and auspicious.

Yet legend gives us a more dramatic origin. While scouting for a site, Bajirao is said to have witnessed the astonishing sight of a hare chasing a hound along a hillock by the Mutha. Interpreting this inversion of nature as a sign of invincibility, he declared the spot chosen. Another story tells of his horse stumbling there, which he took as a gesture of Providence. History, however, offers a quieter reason: the site stood close to the Lal Mahal, Shivaji Maharaj’s childhood residence. In a symbolic gesture of continuity, Bajirao is said to have carried soil from Lal Mahal and mixed it with the foundation of his new home, linking the Peshwa’s future to the legacy of the Maratha founder.

On Saturday, 10 January 1730, the foundation stone was laid. Two years later, on another Saturday, 22 January 1732, the Gruha Pravesh was performed. This symmetry gave the palace its name: Shaniwar Wada, the Saturday Palace.

The original design was modest, a two-storeyed mansion built at the cost of Rs. 16,110. But it soon expanded into a fortified complex of six storeys, with bastions, gates, and sprawling courtyards. Within its walls flourished a dazzling world of halls and mansions, many now known only by name.

There was the Ganpati Rang Mahal, immortalised in the paintings of James Wales; the mirrored Arse Mahal, where walls and ceilings shimmered with reflection; and chambers with names that read like poetry, the Meghadambari (cloud-capped), the Asmani (sky-reaching), the Hastidanti Mahal (ivory hall). The jewel of them all was the Hazari Karanje, a lotus-shaped fountain with 196 jets, fed by an underground aqueduct.

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The Lost Lotus of Shaniwar Wada

Among the many marvels of Shaniwar Wada, none shone brighter than the Hazari Karanje, the “Fountain of a Thousand Jets.” Built for the pleasure and delight of Peshwa Sawai Madhavrao, it was both an object of curiosity and a symbol of wonder.

Shaped like a great stone lotus nearly eighty feet in circumference, its basin unfurled into sixteen broad petals, each petal fitted with sixteen jets. In all, 196 streams of water sprang forth in shifting patterns, no other fountain in India was said to rival it. When in play, the Hazari Karanje was a spectacle: water arcing like silver threads, the stone lotus blossoming not with marble but with living streams.

Ingeniously constructed, its lifeblood flowed from the waters of the Katraj Lake, some eighteen kilometres away, carried underground through an aqueduct into the very heart of the palace. For the courtiers who gathered in its cool spray, it was a marvel of artistry; for visitors, a revelation that such engineering and elegance could exist in a city still finding its place as an imperial capital.

The courtyards, too, carried their own identities, the Granary Court, the Dancing Court, the Kitchen Court, and the Sweetmeat Court. Around them rose no fewer than seven grand reception halls. Ambassadors were received in the Kacheri Diwankhana; dancers performed in the Nach Hall; while the Ganesh Diwankhana housed the family deity, resplendent during Ganesh Chaturthi. Later came Narayanrao’s Hall, named after the young Peshwa whose murder within its walls in 1773 cast a long and haunted shadow.

The palace grew with each generation. Its northern entrance, later known as the Delhi Gate, was not part of Bajirao’s original design. Chhatrapati Shahu of Satara, wary of offending the Mughal emperor, requested that Bajirao halt its construction. Only after Shahu’s death did Bajirao’s son Balaji complete it, its massive bastions inspired by the gates of Purana Qila in Delhi.

Of all its portals, though, the most poignant remains the Mastani Gate, which led to the quarters of Bajirao’s companion and beloved. Their union scandalised orthodox Pune, and her presence at Shaniwar Wada lingers as both romance and rebellion.

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Within these walls, policies were forged that reshaped the subcontinent. It was here, in the original mansion, that Bajirao took the historic decision to march the Maratha armies northwards to Delhi, dealing the final blow to a tottering Mughal empire. Eighteenth-century shahirs like Ram Joshi and Honaji Bala celebrated the palace in their powadas, likening it to Krishna’s palace at Dwarka. For Pune’s citizens, Shaniwar Wada was not just a residence but a symbol of pride, power, and poetry.

But splendour is rarely eternal. On the night of 21 February 1828, a great fire consumed the palace. The cause was never fully explained, but by dawn, its magnificent halls were reduced to ashes. All that remained were its stone walls, gateways, and the stubborn memory of what once had been.

Today, visitors see only ruins: bastions standing guard, the outlines of vanished courts, and the Delhi Darwaza, massive and unyielding. The fountains are dry, the mirrored halls gone, the ivory walls vanished. Yet in front of the gate stands the bronze equestrian statue of Bajirao I, reins loose, lance at his shoulder, horse mid-stride.

The sculptor captured him as he was remembered: striking in appearance, fair-skinned, commanding in presence. Legends tell of the women of Nizam-ul-Mulk’s zenana begging to glimpse him from behind curtains. Yet his life was marked by simplicity, his attire plain, his meals as meagre as those of his soldiers. One tale recounts how Emperor Muhammad Shah sent an artist to capture the likeness of the marauding Peshwa. The painting returned showed a horseman in a trooper’s garb, reins slack, eating corn as he rode. Alarmed, the emperor is said to have exclaimed: “This man is a fiend!” and rushed to sue for peace.

That restless spirit still lingers in bronze outside Shaniwar Wada. The palace may lie in ruins, but Bajirao endures, forever caught in motion, as if about to charge once more. Relentless, uncompromising, he remains what he always was: a man not destined for repose, but for the saddle.

And perhaps that is the true legacy of Shaniwar Wada. The palace may have perished in flame, but the man who built it continues to ride, his story galloping far beyond its fallen walls.

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