How Chimaji Appa drove the Portuguese out of Vasai in 1739

The obvious question is how a land army with no navy captured a Portuguese sea-fort that had stood unbeaten for two hundred years. The answer is engineering, not just courage. Vasai was superbly sited — water on three sides, thick stone ramparts, and heavy cannon in bastions that could sweep any attacker crossing open ground. A direct assault on those walls would have been slaughter, and the Marathas had no fleet strong enough to blockade the fort from the sea and starve it out quickly. So Chimaji fought the battle underground. His army included thousands of men trained to dig mines — long tunnels driven under the ramparts, their spoil hidden and their depth managed so the Portuguese would not hear or flood them. The tunnels were packed with gunpowder and blown to shatter the towers from below. On 1 May 1739 the Marathas laid a cluster of mines near the tower of Remedios; on 3 May a mine brought down the tower of São Sebastião, opening a breach the defenders could no longer cover with fire. This was also why timing mattered: the siege had to be pressed hard before the monsoon flooded the low ground and before fresh Portuguese ships could arrive. Superior siegecraft, patience and sheer numbers, not luck, decided Vasai.

The scale of the Vasai siege is worth pinning down. According to a Portuguese account, Chimaji's army numbered around 40,000 infantry and 25,000 cavalry, backed by about 4,000 men trained to lay mines, plus roughly 5,000 camels and 50 war elephants — close to 100,000 people in the siege lines. Against them, the fortress held a garrison of only about 1,200 Portuguese and Indian auxiliary soldiers under Captain Caetano de Souza Pereira. The siege ran from 17 February to 16 May 1739 — three months of digging, bombardment and assault. In the final push the Marathas drove roughly ten mines toward the ramparts near the Remedios tower and blew several to open breaches; a separate mine shattered the São Sebastião tower on 3 May. Portuguese losses in the storming were heavy, with around 800 of the garrison killed. When the fort surrendered on 16 May the survivors were allowed to withdraw to Goa with honour, and the Maratha saffron flag flew over Baçaim by 23 May. The wider campaign was even larger in its toll: across 1737–1740 the Portuguese are said to have lost eight cities, four major ports, some twenty forts, two fortified hills and around 340 villages to Chimaji's armies.

Chimaji Appa (Chimaji Balaji Bhat) — born around 1707 as Antaji, younger brother of Peshwa Bajirao I and second son of Balaji Vishwanath, the first hereditary Peshwa; a trusted deputy and the general who planned and won the Vasai campaign. Bajirao I — the Peshwa and head of Maratha expansion, whose backing gave Chimaji the men and money for the coast; he died in April 1740, months before his brother. Malhar Rao Holkar — the rising Maratha sardar who pressed the Portuguese from the Thane side and later founded the Holkar house of Indore. Ranoji Shinde (Scindia) — another key commander who struck toward Daman, cutting Portuguese support; ancestor of the Gwalior Scindias. Manaji Angre — the Maratha admiral of the Konkan coast whose ships harried Portuguese sea movement. Caetano de Souza Pereira — the Portuguese captain who commanded the Vasai garrison to the end and negotiated the honourable surrender. Together these men turned a border quarrel into the decisive Maratha thrust to the western sea; the campaign was very much a team effort under Chimaji's overall direction, not a lone hero's charge.

In 1739 Vasai was a working Portuguese city, not a ruin — a walled port with churches, convents, noble houses and a garrison, the northern anchor of Portuguese India between Goa and Daman. To the people who lived under that rule it meant trade and revenue for the crown, but also the pressure of forced conversion and religious restriction that made the Maratha advance welcome to many local Hindus. After Chimaji's victory the city passed into Maratha hands and slowly lost its old importance; the churches emptied, the sea trade shifted, and later the fort changed hands again as the British East India Company took Salsette and the region in the 1770s. Today Vasai Fort is a sprawling, half-overgrown heritage site near Mumbai — crumbling ramparts, roofless Portuguese churches and gateways wrapped in creeper, popular with photographers, film crews and weekend history-walkers. A statue of Chimaji Appa stands at the fort, and the Vajreshwari temple he is said to have built to mark the win still draws pilgrims nearby. The stones that once decided an empire's frontier are now a quiet park, and the honest way to visit is to read both layers: a Portuguese colonial port and the Maratha campaign that ended it.

Behind the map-changing headline, Vasai reshaped real lives. For the roughly 1,200 defenders and their families, the siege ended in ruin: around 800 soldiers died, and the survivors — soldiers, priests, traders and their households — packed up two centuries of settled life and sailed south to Goa under the surrender terms. Portuguese churches and estates that had stood for generations were abandoned or repurposed, and a whole Luso-Indian community was uprooted from the northern Konkan. For many local Hindus, though, the same event meant relief from forced conversion and the return of temples and open worship, which is why Chimaji is remembered in the region as a liberator as much as a conqueror. For the Maratha soldiers, the win came at a hard price paid in the mines and the breach, where storming a defended wall was brutal, close work. And for Chimaji himself the triumph was shadowed by grief and short-lived: his brother and patron Bajirao I died in April 1740, and Chimaji followed him on 17 December 1740, only about eighteen months after his greatest victory, aged only around thirty-three. The fortress he won outlived him by centuries; the man himself barely had time to enjoy it.

Vasai matters because it marks the moment a Maratha land empire reached out and took the western sea from a European power at the height of its coastal grip. The plain lesson is not that faith won over faith, but that method won: Chimaji Appa beat a stronger fortress by refusing to fight it on its own terms. He isolated it first, denied it relief, and then went under its unbreakable walls with mines instead of throwing men at them — a patient, engineered victory rather than a reckless charge. That is a more useful history than a simple tale of heroism, and it is one reason military writers still study the siege. The battle also asks how we choose to remember. To many in Maharashtra, Chimaji is a liberator who ended forced conversions and pushed back a colonial power a full century before 1857; to others he is one able commander in a larger, messier expansion. Both can be true. Honouring his real skill does not require flattening the Portuguese defenders into cardboard villains or ignoring that empires, Maratha and European alike, were built on conquest. The lasting reason Vasai matters is that it is a rare, well-documented case of an Indian power beating a fortified European bridgehead on its own coast — and winning it with brains as much as bravery.