Agra, the coronation and the South

Jai Singh persuaded Shivaji to visit the Mughal court at Agra. There he was made to stand before Aurangzeb next to a Mughal general he had defeated earlier.

Angered by the insult, he stormed out of the court. Aurangzeb put him under house arrest.

The escape is one of the famous stories of Indian history, and it worked through patience. Shivaji began sending gifts to holy men and Mughal generals: fruit and sweets, packed in big baskets.

At first the guards checked the baskets. But as the gifts kept coming day after day, they stopped checking. Shivaji had expected exactly that. He and his son Sambhaji hid in the baskets and escaped, and Aurangzeb never caught him again.

In 1674 he was crowned with full Vedic rites at the hill fort of Raigad, taking the title 'Shri Raja Shiva Chhatrapati'. Like some rulers before him, he began his own era for counting years: the Rājyābhiṣheka shaka.

He then set out on the dakṣhiṇa-digvijaya, the conquest of the South, taking the important but poorly defended region of present-day northern Tamil Nadu and parts of Karnataka. This later gave the Marathas great strategic depth (somewhere far away to fall back to) against the Mughals.

While in the South he forbade the Dutch from trading slaves. At the time most Europeans were capturing and selling Indians as slaves, and no Indian power stopped them, until he did.

A fever took his life at fifty. Even in his lifetime his deeds were legendary: Europeans compared him to Alexander, the Bundela prince Chhatrasal was inspired to create an independent Bundelkhand, and the Hindi poet Bhushan travelled to Maharashtra just to meet him.