Shivaji's Coronation at Raigad Establishes Hindavi Swarajya

One hundred fourteen years after the Goa Inquisition began suppressing Hindu worship in Portuguese Goa in 1560, already recorded here, and one hundred sixty years before indentured labour carried Hinduism to Mauritius in 1834, also recorded here, a Hindu kingdom rose to sovereign standing in territory long under Mughal and Deccan Sultanate rule. On 6 June 1674, the Maratha chieftain Shivaji Bhonsle was crowned Chhatrapati at Raigad Fort, in an orthodox Vedic rite conducted by the Varanasi brahmin Gaga Bhatta, who poured water gathered from seven sacred rivers over Shivaji's head while reciting the coronation mantras and bestowed on him the title Haindava Dharmodhhaarak, protector of the Hindu faith. Stewart Gordon's academic history of the Marathas, in the New Cambridge History of India series, reads the coronation as Shivaji's deliberate construction of Hindu kingly legitimacy through the very Sanskrit and Vedic apparatus Mughal rule had displaced from political life, founding what his court called Hindavi Swarajya, Hindu self rule. James W. Laine's academic study of Shivaji traces Gaga Bhatta's own recruitment from Benares specifically to supply that legitimacy, alongside a Sanskrit court epic composed in Shivaji's honor. The coronation gave a documented, dated instance of Hindu religious kingship reasserting itself in the same century Goa's inquisition was still suppressing Hindu worship elsewhere in India.