The Arabs and the Maratha coastal seafarers were perhaps the last to enter the lucrative business of attacking ships with goods for easy money. The Arabs and the Portuguese fought many wars, and once the Arabs even attacked Diu. The anarchic conditions in the second half of the seventeenth century extended to the provinces of Bengal and Bihar, where Mughal Governors came down heavily on the Europeans.
The Marathas were one of the few seafaring people in India who assembled a fleet of warships. The long Indian coastline was difficult to guard and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the arrival of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, and the French led to a chain of ports used by the trading companies, from Chandernagore in Bengal to the ports of Gujarat. The lucrative trade in Indian cotton, silk, pepper, and the market for European goods in India, brought European companies to Indian shores either by acts of Parliament as in the case of England, or through companies managed by the king, as in the case of the French or the Portuguese. Bit by bit, these early adventurers who voyaged over huge distances across uncharted seas, surviving shipwrecks and disease, came to India to make big fortunes through trade. The entire East was open for trade and the goods brought huge profits back home in Europe.
Bit by bit, the Europeans began to build factories and forts, and imported guns to defend themselves. Later, they were drawn into local conflicts, as in the Carnatic. On India’s western coast, the Portuguese were the first and the most pre-eminent of the seafarers and demanded that anybody plying the sea needed to obtain a passport, or cartez, from them. Gradually, this was challenged, and the British and the Dutch began to ply their ships without a Portuguese cartez.
In the seventeenth century, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj founded his Swarajya and gave a clarion call that the rule of the Bahmani Sultans or the Mughals was anything but ‘self-rule’ and in fact, a period of bondage. The Swarajya of Shivaji Maharaj was etched out from his patrimony in Pune and enlarged to the Konkan coast in 1658, when he captured the town of Kalyan. Here, in the inland waterway of that town, he hired a Portuguese father-and-son surnamed Viegas and some more of their creed to build the first Maratha warships. The Portuguese at Goa did not look kindly at this, and soon asked their countrymen to withdraw. By then, the Marathas had learnt the basics of ship-building. The Maratha Navy was, therefore, founded in 1659. The purpose of the Navy, besides defence, was to protect the merchant vessels that travelled across the Arabian Sea to littoral states. After 1664, many coastal forts were built that gave the Maratha navy safe harbours. The role of the British at Bombay was recognised for the value they brought to goods produced in the Maratha country. Their transgressions were kept in check and from time to time, when they supported either the Mughals or the Sultan of Bijapur, they were punished.
The Navy grew over the next twenty years, and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj is known to have gone by the sea to attack the port of Basnoor in the Bijapur kingdom in the 1670s. The names of the first captains of the navy that come down to us are men like Daryasarang, Maynak Bhandari, and Daulat Khan. Besides the Portuguese, there were the Siddis or Habshis (Abyssinians) – and these men came from Abyssinia and joined the Bijapur kingdom. They held many sea forts, of which the chief was the island of Janjira. The Habshis had acquired sufficient strength to rule over a contiguous piece of land in the Konkan, and along with the Portuguese, indulged in religious oppression of the local populace. Maratha rule over Konkan could only be secured provided the Siddi, the most powerful of the rulers there, be adequately controlled. Without a navy, this was difficult. Sir Jadunath Sarkar writes, “Without a navy, his subjects on the sea-coast and for some distance inland would remain exposed to plunder, enslavement, and slaughter at the hands of the Abyssinian pirates.”
The naval arm of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj was thus necessary to check these foreign elements. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj did not just build ships, but many forts along the coast, chief of these were at Colaba, Vijaydurg, and Sindhudurg. On islands near Mumbai, Goa, and Janjira, he erected forts like Padmadurg, Suvarnadurg, and Khanderi to threaten the alien powers. The Maratha navy could boast of two to three hundred ships with six to eighteen guns each. These small ships were easy to manoeuvre and to navigate, some with two masts and larger ships with three masts. Their speed and manoeuvrability gave them an edge over the well-armed larger ships of the Europeans.
After 1680, Sambhajiraje, the son and successor of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, spent many years battling the Siddis and the Portuguese on the Konkan strip. After the Bijapur kingdom was extinguished by Aurangzeb in 1685, the Habshis went over to the Mughals.
To be continued…
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