Panhala & Shiva Kashid

Last night Shivaji won his greatest victory yet, and only eighteen days later he took the great fort of Panhala. But Bijapur was far from finished. Tonight the trap closes around him — and an ordinary man does an extraordinary thing.

Panhala stands on a long, high plateau near the town of Kolhapur. It is one of the biggest forts in the whole Deccan: its walls run for miles around the hilltop, with strong gates, deep wells and great granaries. In early 1660 Shivaji was inside it when Bijapur's answer arrived. The Sultan, Ali Adil Shah, had sent a tough, determined general named Siddi Johar, with a very large army.

Siddi Johar did not try to storm those mighty walls. He did something slower, and much more frightening: he surrounded the whole fort. Camp after camp, tent after tent, a ring of soldiers all the way round, so that nothing and no one could go in or out. This is called a siege. The enemy simply waits outside until the people inside run out of food — or run out of hope.

Weeks turned into months; the siege had begun around March 1660. Outside, Shivaji's cavalry commander, Netaji Palkar, tried again and again to break the ring from the outside, but he could not. Then June came, and with it the monsoon. Everyone expected the heavy rains to drive the besiegers away. But Siddi Johar had come prepared, even bringing waterproof tents. The ring held. Shivaji was trapped.

A trapped lion has to think. So Shivaji did what he did best: he made a plan. First, he sent Siddi Johar a polite letter, hinting that he was ready to give up and talk about terms. Outside, the besiegers relaxed a little — the famous rebel was about to surrender! Meanwhile, inside the fort, Shivaji's men quietly studied every gap in the enemy lines and every path down the cliffs.

The plan was a night escape. But Siddi Johar's spies were watching for Shivaji's palanquin — the covered seat in which important people were carried on men's shoulders. So there would be two palanquins. One would go out where it would be seen, with a "Shivaji" sitting inside it. The other would slip away by a hidden path, carrying the real Shivaji. But who would sit in that first palanquin, knowing he was almost certain to be caught?

Shiva Kashid. He was not a general, and not a nobleman. He was a barber — an ordinary man of Panhala, who happened to look a great deal like Shivaji. And he stepped forward. He knew exactly what it meant: when the enemy found out the truth, they would be furious, and he would almost certainly never come home.

The night of the escape came in July 1660, and it was a wild one: rain lashing down, wind howling, the dark so thick you could not see your own hand. Shiva Kashid put on Shivaji's clothes — the turban, the jewels, the royal shawl — and climbed into the first palanquin. Its bearers carried it out along a path where the enemy was sure to spot it.

Siddi Johar's men pounced, and they were overjoyed: they had caught Shivaji! They carried their prize back to the camp in triumph. And at that very moment, on the other side of the fort, the second palanquin slipped quietly away through the rain, with a small band of Mavlas led by a brave man named Baji Prabhu Deshpande, hurrying along a narrow, slippery path toward the far-off fort of Vishalgad.

In the camp, someone looked closely at the captured "king" — and the truth came out. This was not Shivaji at all! Tricked and furious, Siddi Johar had Shiva Kashid put to death. The old tellings say he faced his end without fear, and that he even said he was proud — though only a pretend Shivaji — to die as Shivaji. (Those words come to us from beloved tradition, not from a record written down that night.)

Think about what he gave. He had no lands to win and no title to gain. He gave the only thing he had — his life — so that his king, and the dream of swarajya, could go on. Swarajya was never built by great men alone. It was built by barbers and farmers and hill-shepherds too, by ordinary people who loved it enough to give everything.

But the trick had bought only a little time. Now the enemy knew that the real Shivaji was out there somewhere in the rain, and a fast force under Siddi Masud rode hard after the little band. Shivaji and his Mavlas ran on through the night — up and down slippery hillsides, across swollen streams, through mud up to their knees — toward Vishalgad, many miles away.

Now for the honest part. How sure are we of all this? The siege of Panhala and Shivaji's escape are certain history. The story of Shiva Kashid is told in Maratha tradition and in later histories, but the earliest records say very little about him, so some of its details may have grown in the telling. Even so, today at Panhala there is a statue of Shiva Kashid, and people still stop there and bow their heads.

And as the grey dawn crept over the hills, the pursuers drew closer and closer, while ahead of the tired runners lay a narrow, rocky pass between the hills. Tomorrow night, at that pass, Baji Prabhu makes one of the bravest stands in all of history.

Goodnight — tonight's badge: nishtha, "devotion" — the quiet courage of an ordinary man who gave everything for something bigger than himself.