Shivaji and His Times c5.s1: §1. Shivaji's ancestors
Shivaji and His Times c5.s1
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§1. Shivaji's ancestors
c5.s1.1
The Bhonslé clan of the Maratha caste was made up of many families, scattered over various places in Western India. Unlike a Rajput or Scottish clan, they had no union under a common and generally-recognized chieftain nor even mutual intercourse, but merely bore the same surname and married into other Maratha families. Agriculture was their original occupation, as with most Marathas. But the break up of the large monarchies of Western India, (namely, the Bahmani at the end of the 15th century and the Nizam Shahi at the beginning of the 17th) opened to the ablest men among them the chance of rising to military power and lordship over land. The history of Shivaji's family illustrates this transformation of the tiller of the soil by successive stages into the bandit, the captain of mercenaries, the feudal baron, and the sovereign ruler, which was so frequent during the troubled times that followed the downfall of central powers like the Bahmani or the Delhi empire and ended only with the establishment of British paramountcy and British peace.
c5.s1.2
In the middle of the 16th century, a Bhonslé named Babaji was living peacefully on the humble gains of agriculture and the dues of his office as headman (patil) of the villages of Hingani Beradi and Diwalgaon in the Puna district (Patas sub-division.) His two sons, Maloji and Vitoji, quarrelled with the other people of the place and migrated with their wives to the village of Verul (Ellora) at the foot of the Daulatabad hills. The prospects of agriculture here were unpromising, and the two brothers went in search of employment to Jadav Rao of Sindhkher, a Nizam Shahi noble, and entered his service as common soldiers (bargirs.) The tradition runs that at a festive gathering in his house, Jadav Rao praised the beauty of Maloji's little boy Shahji and his own daughter Jija Bai, drew them together on his knees, and cried out that they would form an excellent match, and that Maloji immediately stood up and called upon the other guests to witness that his master had betrothed his daughter to his son,—for which presumptuous claim he was forthwith dismissed by Jadav Rao.
c5.s1.3
So, the two brothers came back to their home at Ellora and lived there by agriculture for the next few years. One night Maloji, while watching his crops in the field, noticed a big snake coming out of a hole, and following the popular belief that snakes guard buried treasure he dug the place up and discovered seven pots full of gold coins underground. Here at last were the means of gratifying their ambition. Lodging the treasure with an honest banker at Chamargunda, they bought horses, saddles, arms and tents and equipped a force of one thousand troopers, at whose head they offered their swords to any master that would pay them. Joining a leader of banditti named Nimbalkar (of Phaltan), they soon gained so much importance and power that the decadent Nizam-Shahi Government was glad to enrol them among its captains. This happened at the beginning of the 17th century, when Akbar's conquest of the capital Ahmadnagar had thrown that monarchy into confusion and disruption, which raised the value of able mercenary bands and offered unlimited opportunities of advancement to their captains. Jadav Rao had no objection now to giving his daughter in marriage to the son of the newly-exalted Bhonslé.
c5.s1.4
Maloji wisely spent a portion of his treasure trove in building temples, giving alms to Brahmans, and excavating a large tank on the Shambhu Mahadev hill, in the Satara district, which was a great boon to the tens of thousands of pilgrims who annually flocked to that shrine. These pious investments of his money brought him a good return by raising him immensely in social esteem When he died, the family contingent of troops,—now greatly increased in number from the original thousand men,—was commanded in the Nizam-Shahi service by his younger brother Vitoji, and after Vitoji's death (probably in 1623), by Shahji, the eldest son of Maloji.*