Panhala Fort: Shilahara Origins, the 1660 Siege and Tarabai’s Capital

Panhala fort is a hill-plateau fort on a spur of the Sahyadri, about 20 km from Kolhapur in southern Maharashtra, and one of the 12 forts UNESCO inscribed in July 2025 as the Maratha Military Landscapes of India. It was a Shilahara seat by the late 12th century and a Bijapur stronghold for most of the 16th. Shivaji escaped from it in 1660, and after 1700 Tarabai kept a Maratha court alive from its walls.

Most readers know Panhala only for that escape, and they carry two wrong ideas about it. The first is that Shivaji built Panhala; he took it, and most of its walls and gates are older Bijapur work. The second is that Baji Prabhu Deshpande fought his last stand at the fort. He fought it in a mountain pass on the road to Vishalgad, now called Pavan Khind. Once those two are straight, Panhala’s long record falls into a clear order.

What Is Panhala Fort?

Panhala fort is a walled plateau, not a lone peak: a broad hilltop with its own water and grain stores, ringed by cliffs on part of its edge and by built walls on the rest. That’s why the government’s nomination filed it in a class of its own, the only hill-plateau fort in the series. These are the facts worth fixing first.

Who Built Panhala Fort?

The honest answer is that no single builder did. The record starts with the Shilaharas of Kolhapur, a line of kings who ruled the country around Kolhapur and Karad from the late 10th century until the early 13th, first as vassals of the Chalukyas and later on their own. ICOMOS and the state tourism department both date the fort to the 12th century.

The name most notes attach to it is Bhoja II, the last Shilahara king. The Kolhapur district gazetteer cites a copper plate found in Satara which shows him ruling from Panhala in 1191-92, after earlier seats at Valvad and Kolhapur. Tradition credits him with 15 forts, Panhala among them. That tradition is where the line “Bhoja II built Panhala” comes from, and it should be written as tradition.

The same gazetteer adds a detail that pushes the date back. It reads the titles of an earlier Shilahara king, Marasimha, who was ruling in 1058, as showing that the family already held the fort of Panhala in his time. So the safe way to put it is this: a Shilahara stronghold by the 11th or 12th century, and the royal seat of Bhoja II by 1191-92.

The Shilahara line ended at Panhala too. The Yadava king Singhana of Devagiri overthrew Bhoja II in or soon after 1209-10, and one of Singhana’s inscriptions describes him driving off “the mighty king Bhoja, whose habitation was Panhala.” The old names survive in texts as well: the gazetteer records Pranlak and Padmanal in inscriptions, and Pannagalaya, “the home of serpents,” in the Karvir Purana, an 18th-century compilation.

Panhala Fort History, Phase by Phase

Panhala changed hands many times, and each change follows a shift in the region’s politics. Five phases cover it.

Bahmani and Bijapur Rule

After the Yadavas fell to the Delhi Sultanate in the early 14th century, the eastern part of the Kolhapur country came under the Bahmani kingdom. The gazetteer mentions inscriptions recording a Muslim settlement, Nabipur, on Panhala hill in 1376. No surviving building at Panhala is credited to the Bahmanis by name, so treat their period here as a phase of control rather than construction.

The building came next. When the Bahmani kingdom broke up at the end of the 15th century, Kolhapur fell to the Adil Shahi sultans of Bijapur, and they fortified Panhala “with great care.” The gazetteer ascribes the strong ramparts and gateways to the Bijapur government, and it rests that on two kinds of evidence:

• numerous Persian inscriptions of Ibrahim Adil Shah I, whose reign began in 1534, and of Ibrahim Adil Shah II, from 1580;
• the architectural style of the monuments themselves.

Local tradition says the walls took a hundred years to build. That’s tradition, not record, but it captures something true: the Panhala an attacker faced in the 17th century was mostly a Bijapur fort.

Shivaji and the Siege of 1660

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj took Panhala in 1659, immediately after he defeated the Bijapur general Afzal Khan at Pratapgad. ICOMOS gives the same year. For a few months the fort was his southern base, and Bijapur answered by sending Siddi Jauhar, an Abyssinian officer who had seized the fief of Karnul, with an army to recover it.

Here the sources disagree on dates, so both are worth knowing. The gazetteer’s history chapter opens the siege on 2 March 1660. Jadunath Sarkar’s study of Shivaji dates the campaign to about May 1660 and Panhala’s return to Bijapur to about 25 August 1660. Both agree on the shape of what happened: Shivaji was shut inside for roughly four months with every path in and out closed, and he got out by a stratagem at night. Sarkar’s version is that Shivaji opened secret talks with Jauhar to lull him, then slipped out once Sultan Ali Adil Shah II was marching up with his own army.

A comparison helps here. Think of Panhala as a ship stocked for a long voyage, with its granaries as the hold and its tanks as the water casks. A ship like that doesn’t sink for lack of supplies. It sinks when the storm closes in. That’s what 1660 looked like: Shivaji didn’t leave because Panhala ran out of grain. He left because the ring was tightening and the sultan’s main army was coming. The analogy breaks at one point, though. A ship can’t choose its moment to slip away, and a fort’s commander can, which is exactly what he did.

Pavan Khind and the Road to Vishalgad

Shivaji rode for Vishalgad, a fort to the west that Sarkar puts 27 miles from Panhala by the Malkapur road. A Bijapur force set off in pursuit. At a narrow pass on the way, Shivaji left Baji Prabhu Deshpande with a rearguard to hold the mouth of the pass until the main party reached safety.

Both main sources describe the same fight. The rearguard beat back the assaults until guns fired from Vishalgad signaled that Shivaji was inside, and Baji Prabhu died of his wounds soon after. The gazetteer names the pass Ghod Khind and notes that it has since been called Pavan Khind, the sacred pass. Sarkar adds a caution worth keeping: the Persian chronicles are silent about this retreat, so the detailed story comes from Marathi sources.

Panhala itself went back to Bijapur in 1660. One discrepancy is worth noting: the gazetteer’s entry on the town says Shivaji escaped to Rangana, while its own history chapter and Sarkar both say Vishalgad. The majority reading is Vishalgad.

Shivaji recaptured Panhala on 6 March 1673. That same year he built Pawangad on the spur facing it. In his last years the fort also held his son. Sambhaji reached Panhala in December 1679 after leaving the Mughal camp, and the gazetteer says Shivaji kept him under guard there.

Mughal Sieges and Tarabai’s Capital

After Shivaji’s death in 1680, Sambhaji won over Panhala’s commandant, then marched on Raigad and overthrew Rajaram’s faction. When Sambhaji was captured in 1689, Panhala passed to the Mughals. The next 20 years were a tug of war:

• 1692: Parashuram Trimbak retook it for the Marathas.
• 1701: Aurangzeb besieged and took it in person. On 28 April 1701, in his camp there, he received Sir William Norris, an ambassador of the new English East India Company.
• After the emperor left: Ramchandra Pant Amatya took Panhala back by escalade, climbing the walls with ladders.

The fort’s longest Maratha role came next. After Rajaram died in 1700, his widow Tarabai put their son Shivaji II on the throne and took charge of the government herself. The district administration records that she placed him on the gadi (throne) at Panhala, and the gazetteer dates her move into the fort to 1705, after which Panhala was for many years the virtual capital of her court.

Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 and the release of Shahu split the Marathas in two. Shahu took Panhala in the civil war around 1708-09, and Tarabai soon won it back. The Maratha Empire note covers the wider split. At Panhala, the result was a separate Kolhapur state: in 1714 a palace coup raised Rajasbai’s son Sambhaji II in place of Tarabai’s line, and the Treaty of Warna of 26 April 1731 fixed his kingdom south of the Warna river.

Kolhapur State and the Storm of 1844

Panhala stayed the seat of the Kolhapur court for another half-century. The gazetteer says the court moved down to Kolhapur around 1782. The district website dates the shift to 1731 instead. The gazetteer’s account is the more detailed one: it names Ratnakar Pant as the minister who persuaded the young Raja to leave Panhala.

The fort’s last fight came in 1844. Kolhapur’s gadkaris, the permanent fort garrisons who held land in return for service, rose in revolt and seized Panhala and Pawangad. They held Colonel Ovans, the British Commissioner, prisoner inside. A British force opened its batteries on 1 December 1844 and breached the wall within hours. It stormed the fort that afternoon, and the British later dismantled the fortifications.

How Panhala’s Defenses Work

Panhala held out by pairing two things: a hard edge that was difficult to climb, and enough water and grain inside to outlast a blockade. The clearest way to see it is to walk the fort the way an attacker would have met it, from the plateau below to the stores at the center.

The Edge and the Walls

The fort crowns one top of the Panhala spur. The gazetteer puts the uplands around it at about 2,772 feet above sea level, with the fort’s hilltop rising about 275 feet higher. Its account of the edge is precise:

• for about half the circuit, a natural scarp 30 to 50 feet high, strengthened in places by a loopholed parapet;
• for the other half, a stone wall 15 to 30 feet thick at the top, with bastions for guns (ICOMOS counts seven);
• a full circuit of about four and a half miles, roughly 7 km.

The state tourism department gives the circumference as 14 km, double the gazetteer’s figure. A gap that size isn’t rounding, so any answer should name the source with the number.

The Gates

Attackers reached the gates by long flights of stone steps from the tableland. The fort had three double gateways, meaning two gates set one behind the other, so breaking the first only brought an enemy to the second. The Char Darwaza has been destroyed. The Teen Darwaza and the Wagh Darwaza still stand, and the gazetteer notes their fine tracery on the door posts and the architrave, the beam across the top. Close to the third gateway, a breach about 40 yards long marks where British troops broke in on 1 December 1844.

On the north side, a gorge about 90 yards wide opens into a natural basin. Two large raised platforms guard its entrance.

Water and Grain

This is where Panhala differs from a lookout peak. The gazetteer says two unfailing reservoirs and many springs gave an ample water supply, while a large area of rich soil kept a garrison secure from scarcity of grain or firewood. The water system has three parts:

• Andhar Bav, also called the Shringar well, on the west close to the rampart. The state tourism department describes it as a three-story underground well that kept water available during blockades, and ICOMOS lists it as a hidden well with a complex ventilation system.
• The Sadoba and Somala tanks, stone-stepped reservoirs that held water all year.
• The Nagjhari spring, the best of the springs, which dries up in the hot weather.

The grain sat in three enormous stone granaries with arched roofs, built to hold provisions for a large army. The largest, the Ganga Kothi, has staircases on either side leading to a terrace pierced with small holes, through which grain was poured in. The state tourism department calls the granary the Ambarkhana, and a fourth store, the Dharma Kothi, stands separately. Close to the rampart stand the two-story Sajja Kothi and, on the east, the ruined Kalavantin’s Sajja, a terrace-room whose ceiling still carries traces of fine ornament.

That combination explains the shape of the 1660 siege. A fort with its own tanks and granaries couldn’t be starved out quickly, so Bijapur’s best hope was to close every exit and wait.

Panhala Fort Today: UNESCO Status and Protection

Panhala is now component 09 of the Maratha Military Landscapes of India, which the World Heritage Committee inscribed on 11 July 2025 at its 47th session in Paris. The listing made it India’s 44th World Heritage property. The current-affairs note on the inscription covers the whole series, and the UNESCO listing gives the official record. The path to inscription ran like this:

• 13 April 2021: a serial nomination of Maratha forts enters India’s Tentative List. Panhala wasn’t in that first list; it was added later.
• 29 January 2024: the Ministry of Culture names the 12 forts as India’s nomination for the 2024-25 cycle.
• 12 March 2025: ICOMOS, UNESCO’s advisory body on cultural sites, approves an evaluation recommending that the nomination be deferred and refocused.
• 11 July 2025: the Committee inscribes the property anyway, under criteria (iv) and (vi).
• 4 August 2025: a written reply in the Lok Sabha lists Panhala, Kolhapur district, among the 12 forts.

In plain words, criterion (iv) recognizes the forts as an outstanding example of a type of building that marks a stage in human history, and criterion (vi) ties them to living traditions and events of universal significance. For Panhala, that means a plateau fortified to hold out on its own resources, and its place in the story of Maratha resistance.

On protection, Panhala is one of the eight components protected by the Archaeological Survey of India; the other four sit with Maharashtra’s Directorate of Archaeology and Museums. Its twin, Pawangad, had state protection only and was awaiting national designation when ICOMOS reviewed it.

ICOMOS was blunt about Panhala’s condition. It named the fort among those facing the most significant challenges and listed the modern additions that harm it:

• a tall steel tower and a water tank;
• several concrete buildings;
• a road joining the inner and outer areas that cuts through the main fortification.

It also found no specific conservation actions planned for Pawangad. The report makes a point that fits Panhala closely: many of these forts can’t be tied only to the Marathas, because their history covers much longer periods. Panhala, with its Shilahara and Bijapur layers, is the clearest example.

How to study Panhala Fort for exams

Panhala sits in GS Paper I twice: under Indian culture, for fort architecture and World Heritage sites, and under medieval history, for the rise of the Marathas. The 2025 listing makes it fair game for Prelims, and it’s useful in the History optional. No Mains question in the archive names Panhala; the questions test the Maratha story it illustrates.

Mains 2026 History Optional Paper I asked “Trace the trajectory of Maratha polity from Shivaji to Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao. What was the impact of the Third Battle of Panipat (1761) on the Maratha State? Analyze.” and Panhala supplies the Kolhapur branch of that trajectory. Mains 2024 History Optional Paper I asked “How did the Maratha guerrilla warfare tactics contribute to their military successes against larger and more established armies?” and the 1660 siege is a ready example. In the Prelims question bank, Art and Culture accounts for 94 of the 1,403 questions and History for 184.

These are the facts to revise:

• Panhala is the only hill-plateau fort among the 12 UNESCO Maratha forts, in Kolhapur district.
• The Shilaharas held it; a copper plate places Bhoja II there in 1191-92, and the Yadava Singhana overthrew him around 1209-10.
• The ramparts and gateways are ascribed to the Adil Shahis of Bijapur, whose Persian inscriptions survive there.
• Shivaji took it in 1659 and lost it after Siddi Jauhar’s siege of 1660; he retook it on 6 March 1673.
• Baji Prabhu Deshpande’s rearguard fought at Ghod Khind, now Pavan Khind, on the road to Vishalgad.
• Tarabai’s court ran from Panhala after 1700; the Treaty of Warna (1731) settled the Kolhapur state.
• It’s ASI-protected and was inscribed on 11 July 2025 under criteria (iv) and (vi).

Three confusions cost marks. Pavan Khind is a pass, not a part of Panhala. Pawangad is the twin fort across the ravine, not another name for Panhala. And Pratapgad is the Afzal Khan fort of 1659, while Panhala is the siege fort of 1660. The table below keeps the sibling forts apart.

Panhala rewards the aspirant who reads a fort as layers rather than a single hero’s building. If you can say who fortified Panhala and who ruled from it after 1660, in that order, you have an answer that works for a heritage question and a Maratha polity question alike.

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Questions

Prelims

1. Consider the following statements about Panhala Fort: 1. It is classified as a hill-plateau fort in the Maratha Military Landscapes of India. 2. It is protected by the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Maharashtra. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) Panhala is the hill-plateau fort of the series, and it is protected by the ASI, not the state directorate.

2. Consider the following statements about the siege of Panhala in 1660: 1. Siddi Jauhar besieged the fort on behalf of the Adil Shahi sultan of Bijapur. 2. Baji Prabhu Deshpande’s rearguard action was fought inside Panhala fort. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) The rearguard fight took place at Ghod Khind, now Pavan Khind, on the road to Vishalgad.

3. A Yadava inscription describes a king ‘whose habitation was Panhala’. Who was he?

• (a) Marasimha
• (b) Gandaraditya
• (c) Bhoja II
• (d) Singhana

Answer: (c) Bhoja II, the last Shilahara king of Kolhapur, was overthrown by the Yadava king Singhana around 1209-10.

4. The Treaty of Warna (1731) is associated with which one of the following?

• (a) A settlement between Shahu and Sambhaji II that fixed the Kolhapur state
• (b) Peace between Shivaji and the Mughals after the siege of Purandar
• (c) The surrender of Panhala to Aurangzeb
• (d) The British annexation of Kolhapur

Answer: (a) The treaty of 26 April 1731 recognized Sambhaji II’s kingdom south of the Warna river.

5. Consider the following statements about the Maratha Military Landscapes of India: 1. It was inscribed at the 47th session of the World Heritage Committee in Paris. 2. It was inscribed under criteria (iv) and (vi). 3. All 12 of its components are in Maharashtra. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 and 2 only
• (b) 2 and 3 only
• (c) 1 and 3 only
• (d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (a) Gingee Fort, one of the 12 components, is in Tamil Nadu.

Mains

1. Safeguarding the Indian art heritage is the need of the moment. Discuss. (10 marks, 150 words) Previous year: Mains 2018, GS Paper I.
2. Panhala’s history runs from the Shilaharas through Bijapur to the Kolhapur state. How does such layering complicate the idea of a purely Maratha military heritage? (15 marks, 250 words)
3. Explain how water storage and grain reserves shaped the defense of hill forts in the Deccan, with reference to Panhala. (10 marks, 150 words)
4. The siege of Panhala in 1660 is remembered for an escape rather than a victory. What does the episode reveal about Maratha strategy against larger armies? (15 marks, 250 words)
5. Assess the role of Tarabai in sustaining Maratha resistance after 1700 and in the emergence of the Kolhapur state. (15 marks, 250 words)