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Gingee Fort

Also known as Senji

Gingee Fort is a fortress built across three granite hills in northern Tamil Nadu, the seat of the Nayakas of Gingee, where the Maratha king Rajaram held out against a Mughal siege for most of the 1690s.

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The fortress

Gingee stands in the plain about 150 kilometres south-west of Chennai. Three steep hills of piled granite boulders, Rajagiri, Krishnagiri and Chandrayandurg, are joined by walls into a single triangle several kilometres round, and each hill has its own citadel. Rajagiri, the highest, can be reached only by a narrow path and a bridge over a deep cleft. On the plain between the hills lie the palace enclosure, granaries, tanks, temples and a mosque. The tower known as the Kalyana Mahal, a square building with a pyramidal roof, is the best-known landmark of the lower fort.

There were fortifications here before the sixteenth century, but the fort in its present form is mainly the work of the Nayakas who governed the region for Vijayanagara and then ruled it in their own right.

Bijapur and Shivaji

In 1649 the forces of the Bijapur sultanate took Gingee, in the campaigns that brought the southern plain under the Deccan sultans after the decline of Vijayanagara. In 1677 Shivaji, on his great southern expedition, took the fort, and it became the main Maratha base in the Tamil country.

Rajaram's refuge

When Aurangzeb executed Shivaji's son Sambhaji in 1689, Sambhaji's younger brother Rajaram escaped from Maharashtra and made his way south to Gingee, which became the Maratha capital. The Mughals under Zulfiqar Khan laid siege to the fort in 1690. The siege lasted, with interruptions, about eight years. The Mughal commanders were accused at the time of prolonging it, and the Maratha generals Santaji Ghorpade and Dhanaji Jadhav harried the besiegers from outside. In the meantime Maratha commanders in Maharashtra continued the war on their own account. Rajaram slipped away from Gingee before it fell in early 1698 and returned to the Deccan.

The siege tied up Mughal armies far from the main theatre, and historians often count it as one reason why Aurangzeb's long Deccan war ended without a decisive result.

Later history

Under the Mughals the fort was given to a Bundela officer, Sarup Singh, whose son Tej Singh is the hero of the Tamil ballad of Raja Desingu, killed fighting the Nawab of Arcot in 1714. In 1750 the French under Bussy seized the fort, and they held it until 1761, when it surrendered to the British. It lost its military value after that. The Archaeological Survey of India now protects it, and in 2024 it was inscribed by UNESCO as part of the Maratha Military Landscapes of India.

Further reading

  • Gordon, Stewart. The Marathas 1600-1818. Cambridge University Press, 1993
  • Stein, Burton. Vijayanagara. Cambridge University Press, 1989
  • Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993

See also

  • Nayaks of Gingee — The Nayaks of Gingee ruled the northern Tamil country from a fortress spanning three hills that Shivaji later called the most impregnable in India.
  • Vijayanagara Empire — Vijayanagara was the last great empire of southern India, founded on the Tungabhadra in 1336, ruling most of the peninsula for two centuries until its defeat at Talikota in 1565, and leaving the ruined city at Hampi.
  • Shivaji — Shivaji Bhonsle (1630–1680) was the founder of the Maratha Empire, crowned Chhatrapati in 1674 after building an independent state in the Deccan through decades of warfare against the Bijapur Sultanate and the Mughal Empire.
  • Maratha Empire — The Maratha Empire was a Hindu warrior state that rose in the Deccan under Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in the mid-17th century and, as a loose confederacy of allied houses, became the dominant power across most of the Indian subcontinent before its final defeat by the British in 1818.
  • Aurangzeb and the Marathas — The Mughal-Maratha wars were a 27-year series of campaigns (1681–1707) fought by Emperor Aurangzeb in the Deccan against the Maratha kingdom founded by Shivaji, ending in Mughal exhaustion and the later rise of Maratha power across much of India.
  • Mughal-Maratha wars — The Mughal-Maratha wars were a prolonged series of conflicts between the Mughal Empire and the Maratha state founded by Chhatrapati Shivaji, fought mainly between 1657 and 1707 and continuing in altered form until Maratha power was broken by the British in 1818.
  • Carnatic Wars — A series of three conflicts fought between 1746 and 1763 in which the British and French East India Companies, each backing rival claimants to local thrones, competed for control of southeastern India.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.