The Maratha navy
Shivaji had built a fleet and a chain of sea forts, and Kanhoji Angre, appointed admiral in 1698, made it a force that the Portuguese, Dutch and English all failed to dislodge. Operating from Vijaydurg, Suvarnadurg and Kolaba, he required ships trading along the coast to carry his passes and took those that did not.
The English called him a pirate. From the Maratha side he was exercising the sovereign right of a coastal state to license traffic in its own waters — the same right the European companies asserted with their own pass systems. Which description is used depends on which sovereignty is recognised, and the dispute is a useful illustration of how the vocabulary of eighteenth-century maritime history was made.
Kanhoji defeated or repelled English squadrons repeatedly between 1712 and 1724, and died undefeated in 1729.
The end
His sons divided the command and quarrelled. In 1756 a combined force of the Royal Navy under Clive and Watson and the Peshwa's troops took Vijaydurg and destroyed Tulaji Angre's fleet — the Peshwa's participation being the decisive factor, and a striking case of an Indian power assisting the removal of its own navy.
The Konkan sea forts survive along the coast, and the Angre name is carried by an Indian naval base at Mumbai.
Further reading
- Basham, A. L. The Wonder That Was India. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
- Bakker, Hans T. The World of the Skandapurana. Brill, 2014
- Bayly, C. A. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1988
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.