The pass that was renamed

Somewhere in the hills above Kolhapur there is a gorge narrow enough that a few men standing shoulder to shoulder can close it. In the summer of 1660 it was called Ghod Khind — the horse pass. It has not been called that since.

The renaming is the whole story. What happened there was not a victory in any conventional sense. The men who held the pass did not drive off the army in front of them, and most of them did not leave. What they bought was time, measured to the hour, and the measure of their success was a sound they had to survive long enough to hear.

Four months on a hill

By the early months of 1660 Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj was inside the fort of Panhala, and Siddi Jauhar's Adilshahi army was around it. The siege held through the spring and into the monsoon — four to five months by most reckonings. A fort under siege is a slow arithmetic problem: grain against days, and the answer is never in the defender's favour.

The nearest friendly fort was Vishalgad, roughly sixty to seventy kilometres away through hill country, and it was itself under pressure from Adilshahi allies. The plan was not to break the siege. It was to leave, and to be somewhere else before anyone realised.

The night, and the man who was not the king

On the night of 12–13 July 1660 the monsoon came down hard, which was the point. Under that rain a party left Panhala — accounts commonly put it at around six hundred men — and moved into the hills.

A second party left too, and this one was meant to be seen. A soldier named Shiva Kashid, who resembled the king closely enough, was carried out in a palanquin as a decoy toward the Adilshahi camp. He was taken. When the substitution was discovered, he was killed. The hours his deception cost the pursuit were the hours the real column needed.

The pursuit, once it recovered, was led by Siddi Masud, son-in-law of Siddi Jauhar, at the head of a cavalry force that contemporary and later accounts put in the thousands — ten thousand is the figure most often repeated, though such numbers in this period are estimates rather than counts.

The arithmetic at the gorge

Some distance short of Vishalgad the column reached Ghod Khind and did the arithmetic. They were not going to outrun cavalry. But cavalry cannot use its advantage in a defile. In a gap wide enough for only a few men, numbers stop mattering and the fight becomes a queue.

Baji Prabhu Deshpande stayed, with his brother Fulaji and the Bandal infantry. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj went on toward Vishalgad, where a second Adilshahi force still had to be broken through before he could get inside.

The instruction given at the pass was not to win. It was to hold until the cannon of Vishalgad fired — the agreed signal that the king was safe behind walls. Until that sound, the gorge stayed shut. After it, the survivors were free.

What the record actually says

Here the sources part company, and it is worth being honest about it rather than picking the most cinematic version.

The number of men who stayed is given as three hundred in most popular and regional accounts; some scholarly summaries put the rearguard far higher, in the thousands, with around seven hundred dead. The duration is given as five to six hours in most accounts and as considerably longer in others. Even the date is not perfectly settled: 13 July 1660 is standard in Marathi and Indian sources, while some English-language scholarship, following Jadunath Sarkar, places the episode later in the year.

What is not in dispute is the shape of it. A pass was held. The king reached Vishalgad. Baji Prabhu Deshpande was mortally wounded and, by every account, refused to stop fighting until the guns sounded.

The sound

The cannon fired from Vishalgad. It travelled the few kilometres to the gorge, and the men still standing there knew what it meant.

Baji Prabhu Deshpande died at the pass. Ghod Khind was renamed Pavan Khind — the sacred pass, the pass made holy — and that is the name it carries today.

Every year the route from Panhala to Vishalgad is walked by people who were not born for three centuries after the event. It is a hard trek in ordinary weather and a punishing one in monsoon, which is when many choose to do it. That is not commemoration in the usual sense. It is closer to arithmetic performed with the body: an attempt to feel, in the legs and the lungs, how long sixty kilometres takes, and therefore how long somebody else had to stand still.

Watch the reel

Pavankhind

The same story, as a short film.

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