How Kanhoji Angre built a navy that humbled Europe's fleets

Kanhoji Angre — the Sarkhel or admiral of the Maratha Navy, master of the Konkan coast from Kolaba, Vijaydurg and Suvarnadurg, sometimes honoured as Darya-Saranga, lord of the seas. Chhatrapati Shahu and the Satara court — the Maratha state that confirmed Kanhoji's command and to which, in principle, his fleet answered. Balaji Vishwanath, the Peshwa — who in 1713 negotiated a settlement recognising Kanhoji's control of a stretch of coast and its forts, folding him into the Maratha order rather than fighting him. The English East India Company at Bombay — his chief antagonist, whose governors, from Charles Boone onward, launched repeated expeditions against Vijaydurg and Kolaba and failed. The Portuguese at Goa and the Dutch — rival European powers he fought and, at times, played against the English. Commodore Thomas Mathews and the Bombay Marine — who joined a combined 1721 Anglo-Portuguese assault on Kolaba that was beaten off in humiliation. Tulaji Angre — a later kinsman whose Vijaydurg fell in 1756 to a joint British–Peshwa attack, long after Kanhoji's death, ending Angre naval power. Together these players turned one admiral's toll system into a defining contest for the eighteenth-century Indian coast.

The real puzzle is not why the Europeans fought Kanhoji, but why the strongest navies of the age could not beat him for thirty years. Geography was his first ally. The Konkan is a wall of rocky headlands, hidden reefs, tidal creeks and monsoon-lashed anchorages, watched over by hilltop and island forts like Vijaydurg and Kolaba whose guns commanded the approaches. Deep-draught European warships could not close with the shore safely; Kanhoji's lighter, oar-and-sail grabs and gallivats could dart out, strike and slip back into water the enemy dared not enter. His fleet was built for exactly this coast. Second, he understood his opponents' weakness: the English, Portuguese and Dutch distrusted one another as much as they hated him, so their joint expeditions were half-hearted and poorly coordinated, and he could pick them off or wait them out. Third, he had the backing, however loose, of a real state, which gave his tolls legitimacy and his forts a supply chain. And fourth, he simply chose his fights — raiding when the odds favoured him, sheltering behind fort guns when they did not. Against a commander who fought on his own terms, on his own sea, European firepower alone was never decisive.

Myth: Kanhoji Angre was a pirate. This is colonial framing, not fact. A pirate acts for private plunder outside any law; Kanhoji was the commissioned admiral of the Maratha state, levying a lawful toll and pass on his own coast — the same practice the Portuguese cartaz and the Company's own patrols enforced. The English called him a pirate because it was easier than admitting a rival navy blocked their free trade. Myth: he plundered every ship at random. The record shows he mainly seized vessels that refused his pass or belonged to declared enemies; ships that paid usually passed. Myth: he single-handedly ran an independent kingdom. He operated with wide autonomy, but within the Maratha order, confirmed by the Satara court and settled with the Peshwa in 1713. Myth: the British eventually crushed him. They never beat him decisively; he died undefeated at Alibag in 1729. It was only in 1756, long after his death, that a joint British–Peshwa force stormed Vijaydurg and captured his kinsman Tulaji, breaking Angre power. What the record supports: a genuinely formidable naval commander who defended a sovereign coast, defeated European fleets repeatedly, and was mislabelled by the very powers he frustrated. The skill is real; the 'pirate' is propaganda.

Behind the admiral were the working people of the Konkan — the fishermen, boat-builders, rope-makers, gun crews and ordinary sailors who made his fleet float and fight. Kanhoji's grabs and gallivats were rowed and manned by coastal Koli, Bhandari and other communities, and his forts were garrisoned and supplied by the villages around them. His toll system was not only a matter of pride; it funded the wages, rice and gunpowder that kept those families employed and the coast defended. For them, a strong navy meant safer fishing grounds and steadier work. But the war had a hard human edge too. Captured European crews were held for ransom, sometimes for years, and captured Indian and Company sailors on the other side fared no better. Villages near the forts lived under the threat of bombardment when European fleets came to punish Kanhoji, and trade could stall when the sea turned dangerous. Yet the coast largely stood with him, because his fleet was theirs in a way the Company's was not. When the memory of these decades was later kept alive — in local pride, in the survival of his forts, in the naming of a modern naval base — it was this maritime community's long relationship with the sea that his story really commemorates.

Kanhoji matters because he overturns a lazy assumption about Indian history — that Indians fought colonial powers only on land, and only lost at sea. Here is a Maratha admiral who, for three decades, controlled a stretch of the western coast and beat back the finest navies of Europe on their own supposed element, water. His story shows that sea power was understood and wielded in India well before the British made the Indian Ocean their own, and that Shivaji's small navy grew into a force Europe genuinely feared. There is a sharper lesson in the words we inherit. Whether Kanhoji is a 'pirate' or an 'admiral' was decided not by his deeds, which both sides describe alike, but by who wrote the record — a reminder to read colonial-era labels with suspicion and ask whose interests each word served. His legacy is honoured today in the naval base INS Angre and in his standing as a forefather of India's maritime tradition, but the honest reason he endures is simpler: he was a highly capable commander who defended what was his and was never beaten in his lifetime. That is a legacy worth keeping straight, without either the colonial slur or excess myth.