The island fort held; Sambhaji had to lift the siege when a Mughal army struck at his lands.
01The fort in the sea
Janjira stands on a rock in the sea off Murud, with walls rising straight from the water. Its Siddi lords, of Abyssinian descent, served first Bijapur and then the Mughals, and their fleet raided the Konkan villages and carried off people. Shivaji had besieged it more than once and failed. Sambhaji, crowned in 1681, made it his first great war. His guns pounded the fort from the shore and from the island of Kasa, and the Maratha accounts and English letters of the time speak of his attempt to fill the channel with stone and timber so that troops could walk across.
02Called away
The rains and the sea undid the work, and the Siddi fleet broke the Maratha blockade more than once. Then Aurangzeb, who had come south himself in 1681 with the full strength of the empire, sent Hasan Ali Khan into the Konkan. Sambhaji left a force before Janjira and turned to defend his kingdom. Janjira was never taken by the Marathas, and the Siddis held it until Indian independence.
Janjira was the one fort on the Konkan coast the Marathas could never take, and Sambhaji’s failure there marked the start of Aurangzeb’s long Deccan war.