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The final decade of the seventeenth century witnessed some of the most intense and consequential military activity of the entire Mughal-Maratha conflict. The death of Chhatrapati Sambhaji in 1689 had appeared to cripple the Maratha cause — the Mughal forces had captured, tortured, and executed him, seized the Maratha capital at Raigad, and driven his younger brother Rajaram into a desperate flight southward. Yet rather than collapsing as Aurangzeb had anticipated, the Maratha resistance underwent a remarkable transformation.
Rajaram’s arrival at Gingee Fort in 1689 effectively shifted the centre of Maratha resistance from Maharashtra to the far south, and under the protection of those extraordinary fortifications, the Marathas reconstituted their military capacity with astonishing speed.
The early 1690s became a period of aggressive Maratha offensive activity across the Karnatak — the broad arc of territories stretching across present-day Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka — designed to undermine the Mughal logistical and administrative presence in the region, capture resources to sustain the garrison and the war effort, and demonstrate to local powers that Mughal authority was neither stable nor permanent.
Central to this effort were two of Rajaram’s most capable military commanders: Santaji Ghorpade and Dhanaji Jadhav. Their operations in late 1692 and early 1693 produced a series of stunning successes that altered the balance of power in the region, humiliated the Mughal administrative apparatus, and allowed Rajaram to make a bold political claim over the territories of the Karnatak.
Santaji Ghorpade: The Maratha Commander Who Transformed the War
Before examining the specific engagements of December 1692, it is worth understanding the man who led them. Santaji Ghorpade was, by any measure, the most brilliantly aggressive Maratha general of the post-Sambhaji period. He had served under Shivaji’s commanders as a young officer and rose rapidly through his combination of daring, tactical creativity, and an almost instinctive grasp of how to exploit the Mughal army’s structural weaknesses.
Where Mughal armies were large, slow, and dependent on elaborate supply lines, Santaji moved fast and light, launching strikes deep into territory that the Mughals believed to be secure. He understood that the Maratha advantage lay not in pitched battles against superior Mughal numbers but in relentless raiding, the capture of key personnel and resources, and the constant disruption of Mughal communications and administration. His campaigns across the Karnatak in the early 1690s became a textbook demonstration of what modern military historians would call an asymmetric strategy — using mobility, surprise, and psychological impact to compensate for numerical inferiority.
By December 1692, Santaji had already conducted several successful operations against Mughal positions in the south. His reputation among both Maratha troops and Mughal officers was formidable; the latter had learned to fear sudden descents by his cavalry, which could cover enormous distances in remarkably short times. It was in this context that he turned his attention toward Conjeevaram.
Santaji’s Strike at Conjeevaram: The Capture of Ali Mardan Khan
Conjeevaram — known today as Kanchipuram — was one of the most significant towns in the Tamil country, an ancient centre of Hindu religious culture and a commercially important node that the Mughals had incorporated into their administrative framework as they extended their authority southward. Its faujdar, Ali Mardan Khan, was the Mughal revenue and military officer responsible for the district, tasked with collecting taxes, maintaining order, and providing military support to the larger Mughal operations in the region.
In December 1692, Santaji Ghorpade moved against Conjeevaram with a characteristic combination of speed and deception. The precise route of his approach is not recorded in detail, but the pattern of his operations suggests that he moved his cavalry through terrain that the Mughals did not expect to be threatened, bypassing the main routes that Ali Mardan Khan’s scouts would have been watching. The first sign Ali Mardan Khan had of the Maratha presence was likely when Santaji’s forces were already in the immediate vicinity of the town.
Ali Mardan Khan made a decision that proved catastrophic. Rather than remaining within whatever fortified position Conjeevaram offered and waiting for relief or negotiating terms, he chose to sally out and engage the Maratha force. This decision appears to have been made on the basis of a significant underestimation of the strength and quality of the Maratha cavalry confronting him. The Mughal faujdar, accustomed to the administrative rhythms of a district posting, may have assumed that what he faced was a raiding party rather than a substantial operational force led by one of the Marathas’ finest commanders.
The engagement was brief and entirely one-sided. Santaji’s troops enveloped the Mughal force as it moved out of the town, cutting off its retreat and bringing overwhelming pressure to bear from multiple directions. Ali Mardan Khan’s smaller force was surrounded and overrun. The Mughal commander was captured along with an extraordinarily valuable haul — 1,500 horses, six war elephants, and large quantities of military stores, weapons, provisions, and presumably the contents of the district treasury. The 1,500 horses alone represented a prize of enormous operational value; Maratha cavalry effectiveness depended on maintaining adequate numbers of mounts, and horses acquired in the Karnatak were well-suited to the terrain and climate.
Ali Mardan Khan was taken from Conjeevaram and transported to Gingee Fort, where he was held as a prisoner pending ransom negotiations. The practice of holding high-ranking prisoners for ransom was standard in the warfare of the period, serving both financial and political functions — it generated income for the captors while simultaneously humiliating the captured officer’s government and demonstrating the captor’s reach and capability.
Dhanaji Jadhav and the Capture of Ismail Khan Makha
Concurrent with or shortly following Santaji’s operation at Conjeevaram, the second of Rajaram’s great commanders was conducting his own successful operation against another Mughal officer in the region. Dhanaji Jadhav, who would go on to become the dominant Maratha military figure of the late 1690s and early 1700s, was at this stage of his career building the reputation for aggressive offensive action that would eventually make him Santaji’s successor as the Marathas’ leading general.
Ismail Khan Makha was a Mughal officer whose exact position in the administrative hierarchy is not precisely defined in all sources, but he was clearly a figure of sufficient importance that his capture was recorded and celebrated by the Marathas. The circumstances of his defeat contain a detail that is both historically specific and revealing about the conditions of Mughal military administration in the Karnatak at the time. Ismail Khan was apparently delayed in mobilizing his troops because he was occupied with the collection of baggage and provisions — a detail that speaks to the logistical preoccupations that consumed enormous amounts of time and attention in Mughal campaigning.
This delay proved fatal to his position. Dhanaji Jadhav struck before Ismail Khan could concentrate and organise his forces, catching the Mughal officer in a state of disarray and vulnerability. Unlike Ali Mardan Khan, who was captured apparently unharmed, Ismail Khan was wounded during the engagement — a detail preserved in the sources that adds texture to the account, suggesting a more contested fight even as it ended in the same decisive Maratha victory.
Ismail Khan was taken prisoner along with significant quantities of Mughal property — weapons, horses, provisions, and the various stores that an officer gathering his baggage would have had assembled. He was transported to Gingee Fort, joining Ali Mardan Khan as a high-profile captive whose detention served both practical and symbolic purposes for the Maratha cause.
The near-simultaneous capture of two significant Mughal officers in different parts of the Karnatak was not a coincidence. It reflected the coordinated nature of Maratha operations under Rajaram’s direction from Gingee — a campaign plan designed to strike multiple points in the Mughal administrative network simultaneously, preventing any one Mughal commander from reinforcing another and creating the maximum possible psychological and political impact across the region.
Rajaram’s Political Proclamation: Asserting Maratha Sovereignty Over the Karnatak
The military victories of Santaji and Dhanaji in late 1692 created a political opening that Rajaram moved swiftly to exploit. The Mughal administration of the Karnatak had been visibly humiliated — two of its officers captured, their troops routed, their resources seized. Local powers and communities who had been watching the balance between Mughal authority and Maratha resistance were now given a striking demonstration that the Mughals could not protect their own officers in the field.
Rajaram, displaying the political acumen that his father Shivaji had also possessed in abundance, followed the military successes with a bold administrative and proclamatory step. He issued a formal declaration asserting the Maratha state’s assumption of authority over the territories of the Golconda-Karnatak — the broad region that had previously been administered under the late Golconda Sultanate and was now nominally under Mughal control. This proclamation was not merely rhetorical; it was backed by the visible military successes just achieved and was intended to create the legal and administrative framework for the actual exercise of Maratha governance in the region.
The reference to “Golconda-Karnatak” in this context is significant. The Golconda Sultanate had been conquered by Aurangzeb in 1687, and its territories had been absorbed into the Mughal empire. By asserting Maratha authority over the “Golconda-Karnatak,” Rajaram was effectively claiming that the Mughal conquest of Golconda had not created a legitimate permanent transfer of sovereignty — that the territories were now available for Maratha political assertion through right of military conquest and administrative effectiveness. This was a sophisticated legal and political argument embedded in what might appear on the surface to be a straightforward military proclamation.
The proclamation served several audiences simultaneously. For local zamindars, village headmen, and petty chiefs who had to decide which power to pay revenue to, it provided a formal Maratha claim that could justify submission to Maratha authority. For Mughal administrators in the region, it was a direct challenge to their legitimacy. For the broader Maratha network — the deshmukhs, the military commanders scattered across different parts of the south — it was a signal that the resistance from Gingee was not merely defensive but was actively projecting power across the region.
Administrative Consolidation: Kesava Raman and the Subhedari of Conjeevaram
The most concrete expression of Rajaram’s political programme was the appointment of Maratha administrative officers in the territories that Santaji and Dhanaji had brought under Maratha influence. In January 1693, following directly on the heels of the December 1692 victories, Rajaram appointed Kesava Raman as the Maratha subhedar — governor — of Conjeevaram.
The appointment of Kesava Raman was a carefully calibrated administrative act. Conjeevaram was not merely a military position; it was one of the most symbolically and culturally significant towns in the Tamil country, a centre of Shaivite and Vaishnavite religious life and a town whose acknowledgment of Maratha authority carried weight with Hindu communities throughout the region. By placing a Maratha subhedar in Conjeevaram, Rajaram was not simply claiming a strategic town — he was planting the Maratha administrative flag in a location whose significance resonated far beyond its military value.
Kesava Raman was provided with a substantial force to support his administration: 1,000 cavalry and 4,000 infantry. This was a sizeable garrison by the standards of district-level administration, reflecting both the importance attached to holding Conjeevaram and the realistic assessment that the Mughals would attempt to reassert control over the town once they had recovered from the shock of Ali Mardan Khan’s capture. The combination of cavalry and infantry gave Kesava Raman both the mobility to pursue raiders and the defensive strength to hold the town against counterattack.
His responsibilities encompassed both military defence and civil administration — collecting revenue, maintaining order, adjudicating local disputes, and representing Maratha authority in dealings with local religious institutions, landholders, and merchants. The appointment thus represented the full ambition of Maratha governance in the Karnatak: not merely military occupation but the construction of an alternative administrative system that could replace the Mughal one.
The Broader Impact: Demoralisation of the Mughal Administration
The cumulative effect of the December 1692 operations and the subsequent Maratha administrative appointments was deeply damaging to the Mughal position in the Karnatak. The psychological impact of seeing two senior officers captured within a short period was severe. Other Mughal faujdars and commanders in the region became acutely aware of their vulnerability, and this awareness inevitably affected their willingness to take aggressive action against the Marathas. A commander who sallied out to meet a Maratha force risked the fate of Ali Mardan Khan; one who stayed inside his fort was less vulnerable to capture but also less capable of preventing Maratha revenue collection and administrative consolidation in the surrounding countryside.
This was precisely the strategic trap that Santaji and Dhanaji had constructed. By demonstrating the consequences of aggressive response without providing any safety in passivity, the Marathas had created a situation where Mughal administrators were effectively paralysed — unable to defend their territories effectively but also unable to withdraw without formal orders. The result was a kind of administrative vacuum in large parts of the Karnatak, into which Maratha governance could flow relatively uncontested.
For the main siege of Gingee itself, the operations of December 1692 also had significant implications. The resources captured — the horses, elephants, weapons, and provisions — helped sustain the fort’s garrison and the forces operating in support of Gingee, alleviating some of the supply pressures that any long siege inevitably created. The ransom negotiations over Ali Mardan Khan and Ismail Khan Makha would in time produce cash payments that further funded the Maratha war effort. And the political proclamation of Maratha authority over the Karnatak generated a stream of revenue and support from local powers that helped sustain Rajaram’s position through the remaining years of the siege.
Gingee Fort as Political Capital and Military Bastion
It is worth reflecting on the dual role that Gingee Fort played during this period. In the conventional military narrative, it is primarily the object of the Mughal siege — the fortress that Zulfikar Khan was trying to capture and that Rajaram was defending. But the operations of December 1692 and January 1693 reveal a more complex picture. Gingee was simultaneously the defensive bastion from which Rajaram directed operations and the political capital from which he governed — or attempted to govern — a substantial portion of southern India.
The fort served as the destination for high-profile prisoners like Ali Mardan Khan and Ismail Khan Makha, whose presence there underscored its status as the seat of Maratha authority in the south. It was from Gingee that the proclamation asserting Maratha sovereignty over the Karnatak was issued, and it was through Gingee’s administrative apparatus that appointments like the subhedari of Kesava Raman were made and given formal authority.
This political dimension of Gingee’s role during the siege is often underappreciated. The fort was not merely a refuge; it was a functioning capital from which a serious state-building enterprise was being conducted even as Mughal forces maintained their encirclement. Rajaram’s achievement in maintaining this dual function — military resistance and political governance — through almost a decade of siege conditions was extraordinary, and the events of 1692 to 1693 represent one of the high points of that achievement.
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