Siege of Khelna (Vishalgad)

01The fort in the clouds

Vishalgad, called Khelna in the Persian records, stands on the edge of the Sahyadri crest west of Kolhapur, in some of the wettest country in India. Aurangzeb marched on it in January 1702. Roads had to be cut through forest and ravines for the guns. The siege went on into the monsoon. Rain poured for weeks, the trenches flooded, and men, horses and elephants died in great numbers in the camp below the fort.

02Bought, not taken

In June 1702 the garrison agreed to leave on receiving a large sum, and the Mughals marched in. Aurangzeb renamed the fort Sakhkharlana. The march back to the plains through flooded rivers and mud was a disaster of its own, and Khafi Khan describes the suffering of the army. Within a few years Vishalgad, like Satara and Panhala, was again in Maratha hands, and the Maratha armies were raiding as far as Malwa and Gujarat.

Dynasty · 1674–1848 CE (Swarajya from the 1640s)Maratha Chhatrapatis (Bhonsle)Shivaji Bhonsle built a Hindu kingdom out of hill forts in the Sahyadri and was crowned Chhatrapati at Raigad in 1674. His sons and his daughter-in-law Tarabai held it through twenty-seven years of war with Aurangzeb, and the state they saved became the Maratha power that ruled much of India in the eighteenth century.Read →