Sachin Joshi has mapped the forts with the help of GPS and Google Earth for the first time.
It was while going through some Google images for research when city-based researcher Sachin Joshi noticed some wall-like structures at sites, which were not known to have forts. Thus began a journey to discover not one or two, but five unknown forts of the 15th and 16th century.
He is also credited for mapping the forts with the help of global positioning system (GPS) and Google Earth for the first time. His two books — Raigad Jilhyache Durgavaibhav and Ratnagiri Jihyache Durgajignyasa — are based on the forts in Raigad and Ratnagiri districts respectively, which were
released recently.
Joshi, who works as a research assistant at Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, has discovered two forts of Chhatrapati Shivaji among the five. Panhalghar in Mangaon taluka of Raigad district and Mohangad, near Bhor in Pune district were among the undiscovered forts of Chhatrapati Shivaji.
“While I was looking at the Google images of Raigad district during my research in 2006, I saw something like a fortification wall. But I was surprised because as per my knowledge there was no known fort on that spot. I therefore embarked on a journey to look out at what that structure was,” said Joshi.
He then went to a nearby village and found that the villagers had seen tank-like structures there. When he visited the place he saw the tanks and also the wall.
“The villagers who grazed their cattle in the area had covered the tanks with sand because their cattle often fell in the tank. But archeological features like the stone carved tanks and the fortification wall, the typical structures of a fort, were evidence of a fort being there all these years,” said Joshi.
Generally, forts were named after the villages, near which they were situated, so Joshi christened it as Panhalghar. This is one of the nine important forts around Raigad from where Chhatrapati Shivaji ruled his kingdom.
“These forts around the capital aimed at keeping the enemy at bay,” said Joshi. He later went on to discover Mohangad in Pune district in 2009, situated on the border of Pune and Raigad district. This fort was only on papers until Joshi traced its exact location and went to Varanda ghats on Pune-Mahad route to find it. It’s
about 30 km from Bhor near Pune.
In one of his letters to Maratha warrior Baji Prabhu Deshpande, Chhatrapati Shivaji has mentioned the fort. “But no one knew where the fort exactly was. I traced it through the location that was mentioned in the documents,” state Joshi. The other three forts Manikdurga and Navate in Chiplun and Kasardurg in Guhagar are some of the other important forts in Konkan, which Joshi found in 2010.
“These forts belong to the Vijaynagar empire. The art work on the remnants of the fort proves this. We traced the period of all the discovered forts through archeological evidences like the tanks, wall, coins and pottery that were discovered in the forts,” stated Joshi adding that the documentation of all these forts was essential for conservation purpose.
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