On 6 June, 1674, at a moment pronounced auspicious by the priests, Shivaji was enthroned at Raigad. For the first time in history, a Maratha was ruling in the land of the Marathas. No one remembered who the last Hindu King was, nor when and where he reigned; neither did they care, on that day. The proclamation made at the coronation described Shivaji’s kingdom as ‘extending up to the limits of the ocean’.
Among those who came to Raigad for the ceremony was Mr Henry Oxinden, leading what is described as an ‘embassy’ sent by the East India Company’s President at Surat. Mr Oxinden brought a dozen shawls and a diamond ring as a gift for Shivaji and stayed on in Raigad three months to conclude a treaty. The Company wanted greater trading facilities: a reduction of customs duty, and the restoration of all their wrecks on the Konkan coast.
‘We asked,’ says James Douglas, ‘what we ourselves had not then the ability to grant in our own kingdoms.’ Mr. Oxinden doggedly stayed on at Raigad all through the suffocating premonsoon heat and then the terrible lash of the early rains, his embassy eating so much goat’s meat as to have alarmed…
