What happened at the Battle of Sinhagad?
The Marathas won. In early 1670 Tanaji Malusare, one of Shivaji's oldest captains, led a night escalade of the Mughal-held fort of Kondhana near Pune. He and the Rajput commander Udaybhan were both killed, but his brother Suryaji rallied the attackers and took the fort, the first of many forts Shivaji recovered that year.1
On a dark night early in 1670 a few hundred Maratha infantrymen led by Tanaji Malusare climbed the cliffs of Kondhana, a hill fort southwest of Pune held for the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and took it in a hand-to-hand fight. Tanaji and the fort's Rajput commander, Udaybhan Rathore, cut each other down. Sarkar called the capture Shivaji's most conspicuous success of that year; it is also one of the most retold, and most embroidered, episodes in Maratha history.2
Part of Battles of India · Before: Haldighati, 1576 · Next: Plassey, 1757
Who won the Battle of Sinhagad and why?
The Marathas won. Tanaji Malusare's picked infantry climbed the cliffs at night by a rope ladder, and the Rajput garrison was slow to turn out. When Tanaji and the commander Udaybhan killed each other, his brother Suryaji rallied the wavering attackers, brought in the men waiting below and overwhelmed the defenders.3
Why did Shivaji attack Kondhana in 1670?
Shivaji wanted back the forts he had surrendered to the Mughals under the Treaty of Purandar in 1665. Kondhana, now called Sinhagad, commanded the road from Pune down to the Konkan coast. When his uneasy peace with Aurangzeb broke down around January 1670, retaking it was the obvious first blow of the new war.4
Background: Purandar, Agra and a broken peace
The fort stands on a high point of the Sinhagad and Bhuleshwar range, about 11 to 12 miles southwest of Pune, ringed by a wall of black rock above steep slopes. Shivaji had first gained it in the 1640s by bribing its Bijapuri commandant. In 1665 a Mughal army under Raja Jai Singh besieged Purandar and forced him to terms. By the treaty that followed he ceded Kondhana with many other forts: 23 in the Mughal list that Sarkar reproduced, 27 in the Maratha chronicle of Sabhasad, and 20 out of 32 according to the Poona gazetteer of 1885.5
In 1666 Shivaji went to Aurangzeb's court at Agra, was kept there under guard, and escaped in August by having himself carried out in baskets of sweets. A truce followed, but by the end of 1669 it was breaking down. Sarkar points to Mughal attempts to recover a loan from Shivaji's lands in Berar, and notes that two other sources, a Maratha chronology among them, indirectly link the rupture to the temple demolitions Aurangzeb ordered in 1669. Sabhasad says Shivaji now ordered his officers to recover the ceded forts, and that Tanaji offered to take Kondhana himself.6
The commanders and their forces
Tanaji Malusare, a young Konkan deshmukh (hereditary local chief) when he joined, was one of Shivaji's first captains; the gazetteer names him in the small party that went with Shivaji on the night raid on the Mughal governor Shaista Khan in Pune. His brother Suryaji went with him to Kondhana. The sources disagree on numbers: Sabhasad gives Tanaji 500 men, Sarkar speaks of 300 picked Mavles, and the gazetteer, following Grant Duff's history of 1826, of 1,000, with a reserve left below under Suryaji.7
The fort was held by Udaybhan, a Rajput in Mughal service whom Live History India and The Week name as a Rathore (Rathod). Sabhasad says 1,200 men of the garrison, gunners, archers, lancers and swordsmen, turned out against the attackers; Ajay Singh, writing in The Week, puts the garrison at about 1,700. Rajputs had long served the empire as commanders, as Man Singh had done against Mewar at Haldighati in 1576, so the fight at Kondhana set Shivaji's state against an imperial garrison under a Rajput commander, not one faith against another.8
The commanders' decisions
Shivaji chose surprise over siege. Grant Duff writes that he counted Kondhana among the strongest forts in the country, and that the garrison's confidence in it had made the men careless; Sarkar, too, describes the Rajputs as slow to arm when the alarm came.9
Tanaji split his force. A few men would climb the precipice first and fix a rope ladder, a few hundred would follow them up, and the rest would wait below, ready to come in once the climbers were inside. Grant Duff and the gazetteer place this reserve under Suryaji; Sarkar speaks of supporting columns waiting outside the Kalyan gate.10
Udaybhan's answer, once the alarm was raised, was to bring his whole garrison out to fight. Both Sabhasad and Grant Duff describe the Rajputs lighting torches and blue fire to see their attackers. The fight was settled in the open on the summit, hand to hand.11
The night climb
The date is uncertain. The 1885 gazetteer places the attack on the dark ninth of the lunar month of Magh, Sarkar dated it late in January 1670, modern accounts, The Week among them, give the night of 4 February 1670, and Kincaid and Parasnis 17 February.12
In Sabhasad's account two Mavles climbed the precipice in the dark like monkeys and fixed a rope ladder, up which Tanaji and 300 men followed. Sarkar places the climb near the Kalyan gate; the gazetteer at a sheer southwest gorge that seemed least likely to be guarded. Before all of them were up, the garrison raised the alarm and came out with torches.13
The fight on the summit
According to Sabhasad the battle raged for one prahar, a watch of the night. Udaybhan himself met Tanaji; Tanaji's shield broke, he fought on taking blows on his left arm, and the two men killed each other. Sarkar tells the same single combat. The Mavles began to waver, but Suryaji rallied them and, in Sarkar's version and Singh's, opened the Kalyan gate to the men waiting outside. The garrison was overwhelmed and many defenders died trying to climb down the cliffs.14
The victors fired the thatched cavalry lines as a signal. Sabhasad and Sarkar say Shivaji saw the blaze from Rajgad, about nine miles to the south; the gazetteer names Raigad instead.15
How many died at Sinhagad?
No reliable count exists. Sabhasad says 1,200 of the garrison were killed, and Sarkar follows him, adding that many more fell from the hillside. The gazetteer, drawing on Grant Duff's history of 1826, gives 500 Rajputs found dead or wounded in the morning, and Kincaid and Parasnis, attributing it to Sabhasad, write that over 500 of a garrison of 700 Rajputs were killed or wounded, although Sen's translation of Sabhasad gives 1,200 killed. Several hundred more defenders, Grant Duff adds, tried to escape over the cliffs and many were dashed to pieces. Neither Sabhasad nor Sarkar counts the Maratha dead; Grant Duff and the 1885 gazetteer estimate about 300 Mavles killed or disabled.16
The Maratha side
For Shivaji the price was personal. Sabhasad records his words on hearing the news: “One fort has been taken, but another fort is gone.” The better-known saying, Gad aala pan simha gela (the fort is won but the lion is gone), appears only in later works, Sen's notes to Sabhasad (as something Shivaji is said to have exclaimed) and the 1885 gazetteer, both citing the British historian Grant Duff. Suryaji was given command of the fort. The attackers were rewarded generously: Grant Duff writes that every private soldier received a silver bracelet, Sabhasad that the bravest got gold bracelets and every man gold-embroidered clothes.17
The Mughal side
For the empire the loss of Kondhana was one blow among many. The Mughal command in the Deccan was paralyzed in 1670 by a quarrel between Prince Muazzam and the general Dilir Khan, Sarkar writes. Bhimsen, a writer in Mughal service quoted by Sarkar, says the imperial commanders of most of these forts fell after fighting heroically. The official court chronicle, the Maasir-i-Alamgiri, reports the loss of Purandar that spring but does not mention Kondhana.18
Sarkar claims the Rajput defenders were slow to arm because they were stupefied with opium; the gazetteer says only that long security had made them careless. Not every Mughal fort fell: at Mahuli in February 1670 the Rajput commander Manohar Das Gaur threw back a similar night escalade, Sarkar records.19
Aftermath: the campaign of 1670
Kondhana was the first of a run of recoveries. Early in March Purandar fell and its commander Razi-ud-din was taken prisoner; Grant Duff and Kincaid and Parasnis both say Suryaji Malusare led or helped lead the escalade there. Not every attempt succeeded: an attack on Shivneri, the fort near Junnar where Shivaji was born, was beaten off. By June the Mughals had lost their hold on the Kalyan country. Sabhasad claims 27 forts were won back in four months, a figure Sarkar calls an exaggeration. In early October Shivaji plundered Surat for the second time: the Maasir-i-Alamgiri dates the attack to 2 October, the English records used by Sarkar to 3 October. The Maratha power that grew from these hills would reach Panipat in 1761, a long way from the empire Babur had founded in 1526.20
The fort kept changing hands. Shivaji's son Rajaram died there in 1700, Aurangzeb's army took it in 1703, and the Marathas recovered it three years later. The Maratha state later fought the East India Company, as at Assaye in 1803, and in March 1818 a British force took Sinhagad.21
Legend and history: the lizard and the name
The most famous detail is not in Sabhasad or Sarkar. A Marathi powada, a ballad that Harry Acworth judged to be the work of a Gondhali singer and put into English verse in 1894, has Tanaji send up a trained lizard with a chain bound around her. In 1885 the gazetteer recorded that the old people of the fort still said a large lizard, a ghorpad, had carried the rope up. Modern retellings name her Yashwanti. Sarkar called the ballad spirited but legendary, and Ajay Singh suggests the story may grow out of Ghorpade, a common Maratha surname.22
The ballad tells a different story from the chronicles. In it Shivaji's mother Jijabai wins a game of dice against her son and claims Sinhagad as her forfeit, and Tanaji is called away from the wedding of his son Rayaba to take it for her. Kincaid and Parasnis retold this version in 1918, with the lizard named Yeshwant, and then judged the chronicle's account less romantic but more probable.23
The renaming is also tradition. Sarkar wrote that Shivaji named the fort Sinhagad after the lion-hearted Tanaji, but the gazetteer says Shivaji gave it that name in 1647, and Live History India cites the Shivapur Deshpande chronicle calling it Sinhagad in 1647 or 1648.24
How the battle is remembered today
A memorial to Tanaji, with his bust, stands on the summit. Live History India credits a 19th-century Marathi play, Gad Ala Pan Sinh Gela, with fixing the legend in popular memory. In 2020 the film Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior, directed by Om Raut, cast Ajay Devgn as Tanaji and Saif Ali Khan as Udaybhan. It is a dramatization: Scroll's reviewer wrote that it freely adapts the lore, and Film Companion's critic noted that although both men were Hindus, the film styled Udaybhan as a stock Muslim villain.25
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