01Khelna
The fort sits on a long flat-topped hill at the edge of the Konkan scarp, cut off by ravines on three sides. Under the name Khelna it was one of the hardest places in the Deccan to take: the Bahmani minister Mahmud Gawan spent months before it around 1470. Shivaji took Khelna in 1659, in the weeks after Afzal Khan’s death at Pratapgad, and gave it the name Vishalgad, the broad fort.
02The night of Ghodkhind
In 1660 Siddi Jauhar’s Adil Shahi army had Shivaji shut inside Panhala for months. On a night of heavy rain in July he slipped out in a palanquin with a small body of Mavalas and ran for Vishalgad, about 60 km away. Siddi Masud’s horsemen came up behind. At the narrow pass of Ghodkhind, Baji Prabhu Deshpande turned with a few hundred men and held it for hours. He would not fall, the bakhars say, until he heard the cannon from Vishalgad telling him the Raja was safe inside. The pass has been called Pavan Khind, the hallowed pass, ever since. Aurangzeb took the fort in 1702 and renamed it Sakharlana; the Marathas recovered it after his death.
The life of this place
- c. 1470The Bahmani minister Mahmud Gawan takes Khelna after a long siege.
- 1659Shivaji takes Khelna and renames it Vishalgad.
- 13 July 1660Shivaji reaches Vishalgad from Panhala; Baji Prabhu Deshpande falls holding Ghodkhind.
- 1702Aurangzeb takes the fort after a siege and renames it Sakharlana.
- after 1707The Marathas recover Vishalgad.
About 76 km west of Kolhapur. The Panhala–Pavan Khind–Vishalgad trail is walked by many in the monsoon, in the footsteps of that night.
