Kanhoji Angre

Overview

Kanhoji Angre was the long-serving admiral of the Maratha Empire on the Konkan coast (the western Indian coast from Mumbai south to Goa) from approximately 1698 until his death in 1729. He commanded a fleet of armed gallivats and grabs operating from a string of coastal fortifications, levied protection rents on European and Indian merchant shipping passing his stations, captured and ransomed vessels that refused the rent, and repulsed repeated punitive expeditions by the English East India Company, the Portuguese Estado da Índia, and the Dutch East India Company across his career. He held the formal Maratha title Sarkhel (Admiral) and operated under the sovereignty of the Maratha state; the English sources of the period invariably style him a pirate.

Origins

Angre was born in August 1669 at the Maratha fortified village of Harnai, on the Konkan coast south of Mumbai. His family was hereditarily associated with naval service to the Maratha state under its founder Chhatrapati Shivaji and his successors. He entered Maratha naval service young and rose through the ranks during the long Mughal–Maratha wars of the late seventeenth century. By 1698 he had been appointed Sarkhel of the entire Maratha western coast fleet by Chhatrapati Rajaram, with operational base at Colaba (a small fortified island near modern Alibag, south of Mumbai).

Career

Angre’s operation differed from European Golden Age piracy in scale and form. He commanded a fleet of about thirty armed vessels of various sizes at peak, garrisoned a series of coastal forts (Vijaydurg, Suvarnadurg, Khanderi, Colaba, and others), and levied formal “passes” (dastaks) on merchant shipping; vessels paying the dastak were left alone, those refusing were captured and ransomed or, occasionally, sold. The model is essentially the South China Sea operation that Zheng Yi Sao would build a century later, with the difference that Angre’s state sovereignty was formally recognised by the Mughal Empire and (intermittently) by the European trading companies.

The English East India Company mounted three major punitive expeditions against Angre during his lifetime: in 1718 (an English East India Company assault on the fort at Khanderi, which failed), in 1721 (a larger combined English-Portuguese expedition against Colaba, which also failed, with significant English losses), and in 1722 (an attack on Alibag, again unsuccessful). The Portuguese launched two of their own (1722, 1729), neither decisive. Angre’s combination of fortified shore positions, oar-equipped vessels suited to the local light winds, and trained gunnery proved consistently superior to the heavier European sailing-ship squadrons in the inshore waters where the engagements were forced.

The English Company eventually negotiated rather than continuing to fight. A series of treaties through the 1720s confirmed Angre’s right to levy dastak passes on East India Company shipping in exchange for the safe passage of Company vessels carrying them; the system remained operational into the 1750s.

Fate

Angre died in office on 4 July 1729 at his fortified base at Colaba, of natural causes, aged fifty-nine. Command of the Konkan operation passed to his sons; the Angre family continued to control the western Maratha coast as a hereditary naval dukedom until the British conquest of the region in 1818.

Legacy

Angre is universally celebrated in modern Indian sources as a defender of Indian sovereignty against European colonial penetration, and is the namesake of the Indian Navy’s western fleet base INS Angre at Mumbai. The English-language secondary literature has been slower to recover him from the “pirate” framing of the East India Company sources, but the trend of recent scholarship has been clearly toward treating his operation as the maritime expression of Maratha state power rather than as piracy in the European Golden Age sense.