Shivaji Maharaj Rajyabhishek

The Film

A short piece produced under Prachyam in 2022 on the Rajyabhishek — the coronation of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.

The film is above. A fuller write-up on how it was made is still to come.

The Subject

Shivaji Bhonsle was crowned Chhatrapati at Raigad Fort on 6 June 1674, in a
coronation staged specifically to assert something that had no obvious
precedent to point to: an independent Hindu sovereign, ruling in his own
right rather than as a subordinate of the Mughal empire or the Bijapur and
Golconda sultanates that dominated the Deccan.

The ceremony itself was a deliberate act of restoration. The Kashi-based
pandit Gaga Bhatt was engaged to conduct it according to Vedic rite, precisely
because Shivaji's clan status as a Kshatriya entitled to a formal rajyabhishek
had been disputed — Maratha chieftains, however powerful, were not by
convention crowned monarchs. Gaga Bhatt's genealogical research affirming
Shivaji's Kshatriya lineage was itself part of the political work the
coronation had to do, alongside the Vedic rituals: the abhisheka bathing in
sanctified waters drawn from India's principal rivers, and the weighing
against gold and precious metals distributed afterward to the poor.

Shivaji took the title Chhatrapati — literally, lord of the umbrella, the
royal parasol being a Kshatriya's mark of sovereignty — and the coronation
also marks the formal start of the Maratha calendar era used in Maratha
administrative records thereafter. A second, tantric coronation ceremony
followed later the same year, conducted by Nischal Puri Goswami, layering a
Shakta rite over the Vedic one.

The event is widely read as more than a personal honour: a claim, made in a
specific ritual idiom, that regional and religious sovereignty in the Deccan
did not have to run through the existing imperial order.