The Sagas
Every film, in six collections
46 short films from the age of the Marathas. Hindi narration, English title cards, each one researched before a frame of it existed.
15 films
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj
The founding of Hindavi Swarajya — from a boy on a hill to a crowned king, and the system of forts, ethics and strategy he built underneath it.
Born at Shivneri
Before he was a king his people had no kingdom of their own. The Marathas were bleeding for other men's thrones. Then a child was born in a storm at Shivneri.
A boy and a lone hill
A Pune burned to ash, a mother who would not give up, and a teenage boy looking at a land with no king of its own. The sultanate laughed. It stopped laughing.
They chained his father
1648. Unable to catch the son, Bijapur imprisoned Shahaji Raje instead. Fight, and your father dies. Surrender, and everything ends. He found a third answer.
An idea, not an army
Every king of the age fought for land. He fought for a proposition — that ordinary people could govern themselves. It had a name, and it outlived every empire that feared it.
Anyone can take one fort
Planting a flag on a single fort is not difficult. Building a kingdom out of the Sahyadris, fort by fort, was the actual work.
Ganimi Kava
Two empires and armies in the hundreds of thousands, and none of them could hold him. He did not win on weight of numbers. He won because the mountains were a weapon.
Pavankhind
13 July 1660. Three hundred Bandal Mavlas and Baji Prabhu Deshpande held a mountain pass so their king could reach Vishalgad. They were not fighting to win. They were buying minutes.
The Mughal illusion
Close to fifteen thousand nobles took rank under the Mughal throne. One man never did. The only authority he knelt to was at Tuljapur.
The coronation, 1674
On 6 June 1674 at Raigad, a dream took a throne. After centuries of subjugation, Hindavi Swarajya had a crowned king and a seal of its own.
Raigad was engineered
An entrance you cannot see until you are inside it. Geometry that broke a charging elephant. Acoustics that carried an order but not an eavesdropper. Raigad was not built. It was engineered.
Hiroji Indulkar's reward
He raised an entire capital on a cliff for his king, and when told to name any reward he wanted, asked for the strangest thing in the record.
What he did with prisoners
What happened to enemy soldiers after a battle was over is not what most people assume. The code of conduct inside Swarajya is the part nobody teaches.
How the forts were fed
History remembers the swords. Thousands of men held isolated hill forts for months at a time, surrounded and cut off. Something less glamorous than courage kept them alive.
Sher Shivraj
A wandering poet, a stormy night, and a meeting in the Sahyadris. Bhushan's verse did more for the idea of Swarajya than most campaigns did.
Raigad, in silence
He climbed with a phone full of notifications. Then the battery died, and three hundred years of fort had the floor to itself.
12 films
The House of Scindia
From Ranojirao's rise under Bajirao I to the guardianship of Delhi, the building of Gwalior, and a modern century of public life. Produced with the Scindia Research Centre.
Ranojirao, the founder
He came out of Kanherkhed in the service of Bajirao I, carried Maratha power into Malwa, made his seat at Ujjain and raised Mahakaleshwar again. The house he founded would guard Delhi.
Swarajya carried north
Before the Marathas stood outside Delhi, before Mughal power began breaking apart across Malwa, one cavalry commander carried Swarajya past the Narmada.
1761
Panipat broke the empire. One warrior walked out of it wounded and spent the rest of his life putting the pieces back.
The Lion of Panipat
Four brothers martyred in a single day and himself gravely wounded. Everyone agreed the Marathas were finished. Mahadji Scindia disagreed.
After Panipat
Broken is not the same as defeated. The rebuilding of Maratha power after 1761, and the man who carried most of it on his back.
The Architect
Courage had not been enough at Panipat. In 1784 Mahadji handed Benoît de Boigne a brief that would turn Maratha infantry into something Europe had to take seriously.
The army, then the temples
He built India's first complete modern army, and then went back for its temples. The dharmic half of Mahadji's project is the half that gets left out.
Who Delhi answered to
The Mughal emperor still sat on the throne. For years the man he actually answered to was a Maratha. At Burari Ghat, Dattaji Scindia paid for that in blood.
Baiza Bai
She rode at the head of her own troops, struck coins in her own name, and lent the East India Company money she could call in whenever it suited her. They could not beat her or buy her, so they took her throne.
Scindia and Gaekwad
Two houses out of ordinary farming families, two and a half centuries of friendship, and one betrothal that took eighty-three years to complete.
Madho Rao Scindia II
A ruler who built railways, waterworks and institutions, and is remembered far less than the century he shaped.
Jiwajirao Scindia
A tribute on his birth anniversary to one of modern India's more consequential and least discussed princely rulers.
9 films
The Maratha Empire
The scale of it, the wars that made it, and the machinery underneath — the navy, the cavalry, the weapons and the frontier at the Indus.
How big was it, actually
Two and a half million square kilometres, three hundred forts, and eighty-five years from coronation to high-water mark. Most Indians have no picture of the scale at all.
Sarkhel Kanhoji Angre
Thirty years, three European navies, and not one of them ever took a ship of his at sea. They called him a pirate to make the failure easier to write down.
Maharani Tarabai
Rajaram dead, the treasury empty, and Aurangzeb himself in the Deccan to finish Swarajya. She was twenty-five. She crowned her infant son, took command, and outlasted him.
Assaye, 1803
He beat Napoleon at Waterloo. Asked for the finest thing he ever did in war, the Duke of Wellington gave a one-word answer, and it was not Waterloo.
Attock to Cuttack
In 1020 the Indus frontier was lost. No Indian power held it again for seven centuries — until 1758, when the saffron stood on the banks of the Sindhu.
Marathas and Sikhs
Abdali's Afghans had taken Amritsar. What happened after Lahore was liberated is the part the textbooks leave out: two peoples restoring the Harmandir Sahib side by side.
The real dam battle
Bhatvadi, 1624. Shahaji Raje Bhosale used water as a weapon and destroyed a far larger army. The scene you have seen in a film happened here first.
The weapons
From the vaagh nakh to the dandpatta. Every weapon the Marathas carried answered a specific problem, and the choices tell you how they intended to fight.
The Bhimthadi horse
They did not build their warfare around the biggest horse available. They built it around the right one, and the campaign map is the result.
4 films
Living Heritage
Traditions that are not history yet, because they never stopped — the Wari to Pandharpur, the temples the Marathas endowed, and an uprising that came before 1857.
The road to Pandharpur
Lakhs of people walk 225 km and nobody books a room or buys a meal. The villages feed them without asking anyone's name or caste. Everyone on that road is called Mauli.
Devprayag rebuilt
An 1803 Himalayan earthquake brought down the Raghunath temple where the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi become the Ganga. It was raised again from hundreds of miles away, by a throne then at war with the British.
Shri Jyotiba
Ranoji Shinde raised the temple on Wadi Ratnagiri around 1730. Three centuries on the Gwalior house still honours the deity, and a serving Union Minister carries the god's name.
The Hul
On 30 June 1855, two years before the Revolt, the Santhal declared the Hul. Sido, Kanhu, Chand and Bhairav, and their sisters Phulo and Jhano. Told in the community's own Jadopatia scroll tradition.
3 films
Kolhapur
A city that has been playing football since the 1880s, and the families still holding the evidence.
Why FIFA spoke Marathi
FIFA posted in Kolhapuri Marathi, which made no obvious sense — Maharashtra is cricket country. Except Kolhapur built its first club the same year the world played its first World Cup.
The 1936 draw
Khasbaug Maidan. Barefoot local boys in a jersey stitched by the village tailor, against a British regiment. It finished one-all, and a century of Kolhapur football was built on that afternoon.
The jersey, kept 95 years
After the football film went out, the grandson of Shri S. R. Sawant got in touch — with the 1931 team photograph, and his grandfather's jersey, kept by the family since.
3 films
Distant Threads
Outsiders who ended up in Indian service, and Indian things that ended up a long way from home.
Sergey Prokofieff
In 1920 a Russian engineer walked out of Soviet Central Asia to Persia and kept going until he reached India. He worked on the Tansa waterworks Mumbai still drinks from, and in 1927 Gwalior made him an executive engineer.
The rocket's red glare
The rockets in the American anthem trace back to a foundry in Mysore — captured in 1799, re-engineered in England, fired over Baltimore in 1814. And one man commanded battalions for the Peshwa before becoming a US general.
From Raigad to Israel
Three hundred and fifty years after the coronation, the reach of what was built at Raigad turns up somewhere nobody expects.