Murud-Janjira

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Murud-Janjira is the name of an insular fort and a former principality situated on the coast of the Konkan.

The site is presently included in the district of Raigad in Maharashtra, India.

The fort was first built by Habshis, African Muslim slaves from Somalia and held it ever since.

The word Habshi is claimed by some to be a corruption of Abyssinian. This is improbable, for the pre-Islamic Arabs already knew the Horn of Africa as Habasat (See the account of the wars of Abrama of Yemen against the Ethiopians).

Moreover, it is not exact to identify the Habshis with Ethiopia, for the Arabic Habasat was originally an indiscriminate term for the entire region including present Somalia, and only later developed into a specific name for Ethiopia.

The term Siddi is an expression of respectful address commonly used in North Africa. The ruler of the Habshi state of Murud-Janjira was known as the Siddi. Others believe that Habshis that converted to Islam called themselves "Sayyadis" (descendants of Muhammad); from which came the term "Siddi".

At the time they seized the fort, the Siddis were employed by the Bahamani Sultan of Ahmednagar and a Habshi, Malik Ambar (1550-1626), held a prominent position in that government. Before the rise of the Maratha sardars, the courts of the Bahamani sultanates were rent by rivalry between the Indian Muslims and the foreign Muslims, as a result of which, the Sultans began to patronize the Marathas as a third force, leading to the rise of Shivaji and the Maratha Empire.

Malik Amber initially rose to great prominence as the Prime Minister of Ahmednagar. He is credited with having carried out a systematic revenue settlement of major portions of the Deccan, which formed the basis for many subsequent settlements.

When the Ahmadnagar kingdom was conquered by Bijapur and the Mughals in alliance, the Siddis switched their allegiance to the Sultanate of Bijapur; when the Bijapur kingdom was conquered by the Mughal Empire, the Habshis switched their allegiance to the Mughal Empire.

As clients of these Muslim states, the Siddis were nominally part of their navies, and fulfilled the role of defending Muslim interests in the sea, and particularly, access by sea for the Hajj and Umrah, for which reason, the interior Muslim states felt compelled to aid and rescue the Siddis from their enemies.

Despite being feudatories, first of Bijapur and then of the Mughals, the Siddis acted as if they were independent, and lived mainly by piracy on coastal shipping.

The piracy of the Siddis provoked the various local powers to attempt to suppress them, but despite eforts by the Portuguese, Dutch, English and the Marathas, the fort was never conquered. The fort thus earned a reputation for being impregnable.

The reputation may be false. Mass mobilizations by the English and Marathas were always forced off before they could complete the task by the intervention of another power, such as the Mughals, creating a diversion in order to prevent the fall of Murud-Janjira. It must be noted that the same happened with Goa, with the Mughals invading Maratha lands in order to divert Maratha attempts to conquer Goa.

The name of the fort is a concatenation of the Konkani and Arabic words for Island, "morod" and "jazeera". The word "morod" is peculiar to Konkani and is absent in Marathi. In Goa, the word is now more generally used for those parts of the village which were originally dry land as against the fields, which were swamps. Thus, during the rains, the fields get flooded, but the morods never flood.

The State of Murud-Janjira was known to the Maratha Empire as Habsan, the land of the Habshis.

The founder of what later developed into the Maratha Empire, Shivaji Bhosale, sent his Prime Minister or Peshwa, Moropant Pingle to conquer the Siddis and end their piracy during August, 1676, albeit unsuccessfully. Shivaji's inability to capture this fort led him to build the Vijaydurg fort down the coast, and also a fort named Sindhudurg on the island of Padmagad, near the town of Malvan. The Siddis remained a formidable foe to him until his death.

Several further attempts were made by the Marathas to conquer the Siddi principality, but in vain.

The English too strived in vain to suppress the Siddis, and the Siddis even succeeded in seizing Bombay for a day, overwhelming the English garrision, before being driven away by a militia organized by a Parsi from his fellow-immigrants from Surat.

As the Muslim powers of the interior waned in the face of rising English power, the Siddi state submitted to England under the system of Subsidiary Alliance, becoming a dependency under paramountcy of the Kings of England. The state continued in this condition until late 1947, when the last prince acceded his state to the Indian Union, and his state was merged into the Bombay Presidency which was later transformed into the State of Bombay and the State of Maharashtra.