The Island Nobody Could Take

There's a fort in the Arabian Sea, about four hours south of Mumbai, that nobody ever conquered. Not the Portuguese, who controlled most of the Indian Ocean trade. Not the Mughals, who conquered nearly everything else. Not the Marathas, who spent a century trying. Not the British, who eventually just cut a deal.

The people who held it were Africans—Ethiopians, mostly, brought to India as slaves, who became sailors, then admirals, then rulers. They called themselves Siddis, and they ran a naval state from an island fortress called Janjira for over three hundred years.

You've probably never heard of them.

From Slave Ships to Warships

The story of Africans in India is older than most people realize. From the 13th century onward, Arab, Portuguese, and Dutch slave traders brought East Africans to the subcontinent's western coast—to Goa, to Gujarat, to the Konkan. They were called Habshis (from the Arabic "Al-Habash," meaning Ethiopian) or Siddis (possibly from "sayyid," meaning master, or "sayid," meaning captive—nobody's quite sure which, and the irony would work either way).

What made India different from most places where slaves were brought was the possibility of rising. The Deccan sultanates—Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Golconda—were constantly at war with each other and with the Mughals to the north. They needed soldiers. They didn't much care where those soldiers came from. A capable slave could become a soldier. A capable soldier could become a general. A capable general could become... something more.

The most famous example was Malik Ambar. Born in Ethiopia around 1548, sold into slavery as a child, transported through Yemen and Baghdad, he eventually ended up in India serving the Ahmadnagar Sultanate. By 1600, he was effectively running the place. He built an army of 50,000 men—10,000 of them fellow Africans—and spent the next quarter century making the Mughal emperors miserable. Jahangir hated him so much he commissioned a painting of himself shooting arrows at Ambar's severed head. It was the closest he ever got to killing him.

Ambar died in 1626, undefeated. He left behind a city (Khadki, later renamed Aurangabad), a military tradition that would influence the Marathas, and a network of African commanders scattered across the Deccan.

One of those networks held Janjira.

An Island Nobody Could Take

The island sits about a kilometer off the Konkan coast, near the village of Rajapuri. It's not large—roughly oval, maybe half a kilometer across. In the 15th century, local Koli fishermen built a wooden stockade there to protect themselves from pirates. The Nizam Shahi Sultanate of Ahmadnagar saw its strategic value and sent a general named Piram Khan to take it. He did.

By the 1560s, Malik Ambar had arranged for the wooden structure to be replaced with stone. The walls went up forty feet. Twenty-six bastions ringed the island. Cannons—eventually more than five hundred of them—bristled from every angle. The main gate was designed to be invisible until you were forty feet away from it. There was a postern gate facing the open sea, for escape if things went badly, but things never went badly enough to need it.

The most remarkable feature was the water. Surrounded by salt sea, the fort somehow contained two freshwater lakes, fed by natural springs. Defenders could hold out indefinitely.

In 1621, the Siddi commander Ambar the Little (no relation to Malik Ambar, just the same name—it was popular) declared independence from his overlords. He became the first Nawab of Janjira. His descendants would hold that title for the next 326 years.

"A Disease in the Stomach"

For Shivaji Bhonsale, the founder of the Maratha Empire, Janjira was an obsession.

The Siddis controlled the Konkan coast. They raided Maratha territory. They burned villages, kidnapped people, disrupted trade. Shivaji's own minister, Ramchandra Amatya, called them "a disease in the stomach" in an official document. They were a threat he couldn't ignore and couldn't eliminate.

Starting in 1659, Shivaji attacked Janjira nearly every year. He built a fleet—eventually 200 ships, some estimates say as many as 640—specifically to challenge them. He captured some of their mainland territories. He blockaded the island, trying to starve them out.

It didn't work.

In 1676, Shivaji personally led an army of 10,000 men under his Peshwa Moropant to finally take the island. The Siddis, who had by then allied with the Mughals, received reinforcements: a fleet commanded by Siddi Qasim with Mughal warships and 300 fresh troops. Qasim destroyed Moropant's floating batteries and forced the Marathas to retreat.

The final tally of Shivaji's wars against Janjira: 15,000 Maratha soldiers killed, the fort still in Siddi hands.

Shivaji responded by building his own island fortress—Padmadurg, northeast of Janjira—to keep watch on his enemies. He called it his "counter-Janjira." It was a monument to failure.

The Sons Couldn't Do It Either

After Shivaji's death in 1680, his son Sambhaji tried new tactics. He sent allies to fake defections to the Siddi side. He tried to build a causeway—filling a channel 800 yards wide and 30 feet deep with rocks and rubble to create a land bridge for assault troops.

The Siddis destroyed the causeway with cannon fire. Their biggest gun, Kalal Bangdi, weighed 22 tons—the third largest cannon in India—and had a range long enough to hit targets on the neighboring forts.

Sambhaji tried tunneling. Sources disagree on exactly what happened, but the tunnel never reached the fort.

In 1682, Sambhaji personally led a siege. He had to abandon it when Mughal forces attacked his capital, Raigarh. The Siddi commander Qasim pursued the retreating Marathas all the way to the outskirts of Bombay, destroying ships and killing hundreds.

Fifty years later, the Peshwa Bajirao—one of the most successful military commanders in Indian history—was still trying. In a letter dated May 26, 1733, he wrote to his minister:

"In spite of a number of attempts the Siddi has remained unbeaten. Tremendous effort is required to uproot him. At least fifteen thousand soldiers, half of whom should be matchlock men, are necessary to besiege him... I expect the siege to last for a couple of years."

In 1736, the Marathas finally won a major battle against the Siddis on the mainland at Rewas, killing 1,500 including the Siddi commander. A treaty followed. The Siddis lost most of their territory—but they kept Janjira.

Nobody ever took it.

What Made Them Unbeatable?

The simple answer is geography. An island fortress a kilometer offshore, with walls forty feet high, is extraordinarily difficult to assault. You can't starve it out if it has freshwater. You can't tunnel under the sea. You have to come by boat, which means coming under the guns.

But the Siddis had advantages beyond geography. They were sailors first—the naval skills that made them valuable as slaves in the first place made them deadly as defenders. They knew the waters, the tides, the monsoon patterns. They could sortie and raid and retreat before enemies could respond.

They also played politics brilliantly. When the Ahmadnagar Sultanate fell to the Mughals, the Siddis switched allegiance. Aurangzeb paid them 400,000 rupees a year to maintain their fleet and protect Mughal shipping in the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. This gave them resources the Marathas couldn't match and made attacking them an attack on the Mughal Empire.

In 1587, a combined Ottoman-Siddi fleet defeated the Portuguese in Yemen. From then on, Janjira was a player in Indian Ocean geopolitics, not just a local nuisance. The Portuguese, British, and Dutch all tried to take the island at various points. All failed.

The Last Nawabs

When the British established dominance over India in the early 1800s, they didn't bother conquering Janjira. They recognized it as a princely state—one of the smallest in India, but a state nonetheless. The Siddi rulers received the title "Nawab" officially in 1803.

For the next 144 years, Janjira was a curious footnote: an African-ruled island state, nominally independent, flying its own red flag with a crescent moon. The Nawabs built a palace on the mainland at Murud. They sent representatives to imperial durbars. They maintained a tiny army of 123 men, which was really just for show.

In 1947, when India became independent, the princely states were given a choice: join India or join Pakistan. The Nawab of Janjira joined India. The state was merged into Bombay Presidency, and the dynasty that had held the island for over three centuries became private citizens.

The last royal resident left Janjira fort in 1975.

What Remains

The fort still stands. The walls are intact. The bastions still bristle with rusting cannons—including Kalal Bangdi, still mounted, still pointing out to sea. Inside, the palace is in ruins, the mosque is crumbling, but the freshwater lakes still hold water. The hidden entrance still startles visitors who don't know to look for it.

At the main gate, there's a stone carving: a beast that looks like a lion or tiger, clutching elephants in its claws. It was the symbol of the Siddis—the small power that crushed larger ones.

Descendants of the Siddi community still live in the coastal villages around Murud and in pockets across Gujarat, Karnataka, and Goa. Estimates suggest 50,000 to 100,000 people of Siddi descent live in India today. Most are working-class; the days of admirals and nawabs are long gone. In 2003, the Karnataka Siddis were granted Scheduled Tribe status, an official recognition of their marginalization.

But the fort remains. You can take a boat from Rajapuri jetty—twenty minutes across the water—and walk where Shivaji's armies never could. Stand on the ramparts and look out at the sea that protected this place for five hundred years.

Nobody conquered Janjira. In the end, the only thing that took it was time.

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Visiting: Murud-Janjira is about 165 km south of Mumbai (roughly 4 hours by road). Boats to the fort run from Rajapuri jetty between 9 AM and 4:30 PM. Ticket prices vary but expect ₹50-100 per person for the boat ride. The fort itself has no entry fee. Allow 2-3 hours for the full trip including exploration. Best visited October through March; the monsoon makes boat travel risky.

Getting there: The nearest railway station is Roha (about 40 km away). State transport buses run to Murud from Mumbai, Pune, and Alibaug. Most visitors drive or take the ferry from Gateway of India to Mandwa, then drive south.

Nearby: The Nawab's palace at Murud is still standing and worth a look from outside. Kashid Beach, about 30 km north, is one of the better beaches on the Konkan coast.