BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
The first thing you notice about Pune is that nothing has been erased.
I don’t mean this in the sentimental sense—the sort of thing travel writers reach for when they want to make decay sound charming. I mean it literally. Walk from the Kasba Peth police station towards Shaniwar Wada and you pass through three centuries in about four hundred yards. The buildings don’t announce themselves as heritage; they just stand there, occupied, functioning, with someone’s washing hanging from a balcony that might have been built when Napoleon was still kicking around.
Kasba Peth is the oldest continuously inhabited part of the city. Archaeological evidence suggests settlement here since at least the fifth century, and possibly earlier—the Satvahana period artefacts dug up in 2003 push the date back towards the early first millennium. That’s roughly contemporary with the Roman Empire. The houses are packed so tight you could shake hands with your neighbour through the window without leaning. The lanes narrow to the width of a bullock cart, which was the point—they were designed that way. The Marathas understood that wide streets are fine for processions but useless for defence. When you’re expecting the Mughals to show up eventually, you build to slow people down.
The Kasba Ganapati temple sits in the middle of all this. It’s not grand. You could walk past it without noticing. But it was commissioned by Jijabai in the 1630s, which means it was standing when her son Shivaji was a boy learning to read maps down the road. The temple survived the Mughal invasions, the British occupation, and now it survives the real estate developers. Every year during Ganesh Chaturthi, the entire city queues up to pay respects here before doing anything else. That’s not sentiment. That’s hierarchy. This is the gram devata, the village deity—not of some rural hamlet, but of a million-person city that still remembers it grew from a kasba, a market town.
This requires explaining Shivaji, because he is not a figure who translates easily. He was born in 1630 at Shivneri fort, about sixty miles north of Pune, into a Maratha family of the Bhonsle clan. His father Shahaji was a military commander who served the Deccan Sultanates—the Islamic kingdoms that had ruled much of central India for centuries. His mother Jijabai raised him on stories from the Hindu epics and tales of old kingdoms like Vijayanagara. The combination matters: a father who worked within the existing power structures, a mother who reminded him of what existed before them.
In 1636, Shahaji entered the service of the Adilshahi Sultanate of Bijapur and was granted the Pune region as a jagir—a fief, essentially—along with territory around Bangalore. He appointed an administrator to look after Pune and left his wife and young son there while he campaigned elsewhere. This is the first thing to grasp about Shivaji’s Pune: it was a frontier outpost on the edge of a sultanate, not a capital of anything. The boy grew up among the hills and valleys, the Mavals, with their hardy inhabitants who would later form the core of his infantry.
When the administrator died in 1647, the sixteen-year-old Shivaji took over. His first act was to capture the nearby Torna Fort, seizing the treasure stored there. Then he took Purandar, Kondhana, Chakan. He used the Torna treasure to build a new fort, Rajgad, which served as his capital for the next decade. Within two years, the Bijapur government had imprisoned his father in an attempt to contain him.
What was he doing? The standard interpretation is that he was building a Hindu kingdom, carving out Swaraj—self-rule—from the Deccan Sultanates. His official seal read: “Ever-increasing like the crescent moon, the kingdom of Shivaji, son of Shahaji, will always seek the welfare of the people.” But it’s worth noting that his early targets were not just Muslim rulers. In 1656, he killed Chandrarao More, a fellow Maratha feudatory of Bijapur, and seized the Javali valley. He was building a state, not a crusade.
The defining moment came in 1659. The Bijapur court, now stable after a succession struggle, sent its veteran general Afzal Khan to deal with this upstart once and for all. Before marching, Afzal Khan’s forces desecrated the Tulja Bhavani temple, holy to Shivaji’s family, and the Vithoba temple at Pandharpur, a major pilgrimage site. This was psychological warfare: we will destroy what you revere.
Shivaji retreated to Pratapgad fort. Afzal Khan besieged him but lacked the equipment to take the fort. After two months, the general proposed a meeting—private, outside the fort, each man armed only with a sword and accompanied by one follower. Shivaji suspected treachery. He wore chain mail beneath his clothes. He concealed a bagh nakh—”tiger claws,” a metal weapon fitted over the knuckles—on his left arm. He carried a dagger in his right hand.
What happened next is disputed in detail but agreed in outcome. Afzal Khan embraced Shivaji in greeting and stabbed him in the back with his dagger. The blade failed to penetrate the armour. Shivaji ripped open the general’s stomach with the tiger claws, then signalled his hidden troops to attack. The Bijapuri army was destroyed. More than 3,000 soldiers died. The captured officers were freed with money and gifts; the Marathas were rewarded. After the victory, Shivaji held a grand review below the fort. He had killed the enemy commander in single combat, then treated his defeated army with courtesy. This was a pattern: ruthlessness in tactics, magnanimity in victory.
Over the next two decades, Shivaji built a navy, captured forts across the Konkan coast, and fought both the Sultanate of Bijapur and the Mughal Empire. In 1674, he crowned himself Chhatrapati at Raigad Fort in a formal Hindu ceremony, reviving ancient political traditions and replacing Persian with Marathi and Sanskrit at court. He employed Muslims in his administration and Europeans in his artillery. He was praised even by his enemies for his treatment of women and civilians. He died in 1680, aged fifty, leaving a kingdom that would expand into a Maratha Empire dominating much of India for the next century.
After Shivaji’s death, his successors gradually ceded power to their hereditary ministers, the Peshwas. By the 1720s, the Peshwas were the effective rulers of the Maratha Confederacy, and in 1732, the first Peshwa, Baji Rao I, built himself a new residence in Pune. He called it Shaniwar Wada—Saturday Palace, named for the day construction began.
Shaniwar Wada was meant to be stone, seven storeys, a capital worthy of an empire. But the Chhatrapati—still technically the sovereign, now based in Satara—objected: only the king could sanction a stone monument. So the upper storeys were built in brick instead. The story tells you everything about Maratha politics: power had shifted, but forms were maintained.
The fortifications were serious. Five gates, nine bastions. The main Delhi Darwaza faced north—towards the Mughal capital—and was studded with steel spikes at elephant-head height, twelve inches long, arranged in grids of seventy-two per gate, to discourage battering rams of the four-legged variety. The approach forced attackers to turn sharply twice, giving defenders multiple chances to fire. This was military architecture designed by people who expected to need it.
Inside, there were reception halls, mirror chambers, a fountain called the Hazari Karanje—”thousand jets”—designed as a sixteen-petal lotus for the pleasure of an infant Peshwa. An admiral who visited in 1791 described it as “very magnificent. A hundred dancers can dance here at a time.”
But Maratha power was already fraying. In 1773, the fifth Peshwa, Narayanrao, was murdered by guards on the orders of his uncle and aunt inside the palace. Legend has it his ghost still calls out on full moon nights: “Kaka mala vachava”—Uncle, save me. The gate through which his body was removed for cremation is still called the Narayan Darwaza.
The British dismantled the Maratha Confederacy piece by piece. In 1818, the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, abdicated to a British official and went into exile at Bithoor, near Kanpur. Ten years later, a fire broke out inside Shaniwar Wada. It burnt for seven days. Everything wooden—the carved teak pillars, the glass chandeliers, the Persian rugs—was consumed. Only the stone walls, the granite ramparts, the deep foundations survived.
They still stand. You walk through the Delhi Darwaza into a garden, neat and municipal, planted by the archaeological department. The black scorch marks climb the walls. The buildings are gone. The shell remains.
A mile south, Vishrambaug Wada tells the same story from the other side. This was built by Baji Rao II, the last Peshwa, in 1810. He was trying to consolidate power that had already slipped away. The wooden carvings are exquisite—teak pillars, intricate brackets—but the empire was bankrupt and the British were already making arrangements. He lasted another eight years. The wada survives because people live in it. Walk through the courtyard and you’ll see residents coming and going, carrying vegetables, parking scooters. It’s not a museum. It’s a house that happened to belong to someone historically significant.
This is the thing about Pune’s old fabric: most of it is still inhabited. The peths—the localities that grew up around the original kasba—were established at different times, many named for the days when their markets operated. Somwar Peth for Monday, Mangalwar Peth for Tuesday, Budhwar Peth for Wednesday, Guruwar Peth for Thursday, Shukrawar Peth for Friday, Shaniwar Peth for Saturday, Raviwar Peth for Sunday. Some predate the Peshwas entirely: Kasba Peth from around 1300, Somwar and Raviwar Peths from before 1610. The Peshwas added more in the eighteenth century—Sadashiv Peth in 1769, Narayan Peth in 1761, Nana Peth in 1789.
Each peth has its own character, its own trades. Kasba Peth still has Kumbhar Wada, where potters work, and Tambat Ali, where coppersmiths hammer utensils. The lanes are named for what happens in them: Shimpi Ali for tailors, Vyavahar Ali for commerce. You can still buy a copper pot hammered by hand, from a man whose father did the same work, in a lane that’s existed for four hundred years.
The British arrived properly after 1817, and they built differently. The Pune Railway Station, finished in 1925, is solid Victorian Gothic—pointed arches, coloured brick, the sort of thing you’d find in a Manchester suburb. The General Post Office goes for Italianate: heavy stone, symmetrical, built to convey permanence. There’s still a red letterbox outside with “GR” cast into it—George VI, not King Charles. Nobody’s removed it because nobody’s thought to.
The Camp area, originally the military cantonment, is wider and greener than the Peths. The streets are laid out on a grid. The bungalows have gardens. It feels like an English county town that got transplanted and left in the sun too long. The East India Company built it this way deliberately—separate from the “native” city, ordered, controllable. A century and a half later, the distinction has blurred but not disappeared. The Peths are still denser, louder, older. Camp is still quieter, leafier, more inclined to serve toast with breakfast.
The Aga Khan Palace, built in 1892, is the strangest building in Pune. It’s Italian arches with Mughal domes and Rajasthani carved stone, all set in English lawns. The 48th Imam of the Nizari Ismailis built it as a charitable venture, intending to provide work for local farmers during a famine. It worked—thousands were employed—but the building outlasted the intention. During the Quit India Movement in 1942, the British turned it into a prison. Gandhi was held here, along with his wife and secretary. Kasturba Gandhi died in captivity, in a small room that’s now preserved exactly as it was. The dissonance is extraordinary: this grand, eclectic palace, designed to project wealth and benevolence, became a place of confinement and death. Nobody planned it that way. History just layered itself on.
The Ohel David Synagogue, also from the 1860s, is another Sassoon production—red brick, a 90-foot clock tower, Jewish worship in a city better known for Hindu temples and Muslim shrines. The Sassoons were Baghdadi Jews who made fortunes in Bombay and spread their money across the region. They built hospitals, schools, synagogues. The one in Pune still functions. On Saturdays, the congregation is small—most of Pune’s Jewish community left decades ago—but the building remains, maintained, used.
Kirkee War Cemetery, just north of the city, holds 1,668 Commonwealth graves from the two world wars. The dead are mostly British, but also Australian, Canadian, South African. The headstones are identical—white stone, regimental badge, name, age, date. The gardeners keep the grass short and the flowerbeds neat. It’s impeccably maintained, as these places always are, because the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has a budget and a mandate. But what strikes you is the distance. These men died thousands of miles from home, in a country most of them had never heard of before being posted here. The cemetery doesn’t try to make sense of it. It just records the facts.
What holds all this together is the city’s physical texture. Pune doesn’t have a heritage precinct cordoned off for tourists. The old buildings are mixed in with the new, the important with the ordinary. A 17th-century wada might have a mobile phone shop on the ground floor. A lane that’s existed for four hundred years might dead-end into a flyover built last decade. The effect isn’t picturesque—it’s just how the city grew, by addition rather than replacement.
The peths themselves follow a logic. The earliest, Kasba, grew up around the temple and the market. Later peths were added as the city expanded under the Peshwas—Ganesh Peth in 1755, Sadashiv Peth in 1769, each named for someone significant or something worshipped. The British added Ganj Peth (now Mahatma Phule Peth) in the late eighteenth century, and Navi Peth—New Peth—later still. Each wave of expansion respected what came before, building outward rather than tearing down.
This is unusual. Most Indian cities of Pune’s size have been aggressively redeveloped. Old Bombay is largely gone. Old Delhi survives in patches but is increasingly a tourist zone. Pune’s old core remains inhabited, working, continuous. The same families have lived in some of these wadas for generations. The same temples have been worshipped at for centuries. The same lanes have been walked by people going about their business, regardless of who ruled from Delhi or London.
Shivaji’s story matters here because it explains the city’s deepest layer. He was born when Pune was a provincial outpost. He built his first fort from a neighbouring hill. He walked these lanes, probably—the Lal Mahal where he grew up was in Kasba Peth, its reconstruction now standing a few hundred yards from Shaniwar Wada. When he later built a navy and fought the Mughals, he was operating from a base that included this city. The Maratha Empire that his successors built, and that the Peshwas later administered from Shaniwar Wada, started here.
But the city outlasted the empire. It outlasted the Peshwas. It outlasted the British. The Peshwas built their great palace and it burned. The British built their cantonment and they left. The wadas still stand because people live in them. The temples still function because people pray in them. The lanes still exist because they lead somewhere people need to go.
This is what makes Pune worth attending to. Not romance. Not atmosphere. Just the plain fact of persistence. A city that kept its old fabric because nobody saw the point of tearing it down. A place where history isn’t preserved but simply allowed to remain.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024). He is currently working on a biography of Shivaji.