Miracle of Reverse Engineering Used By Chhatrapati Shivaji

In the medieval period of history, when other Hindu kings couldn’t even think of raising the eyes before Aurangzeb, the Mughal king, Shivaji was the one to initiate fearsome attack on him. Notwithstanding extremely adverse circumstances with numerically small army and minimum of resources, he gave defeats to the armies of Aurangzeb and British many a time, adopting guerilla- warfare and cleverly chalked out strategies. One of the most notable defeats he thus gave to British navy was the one which is as follows:

Shivaji had known it too well that if anything that threatened Hindvi- swaraj[ Hindu self-rule] most then it was the menace of European invasion from the sea-front. Therefore, to deal with any such kind of eventuality, he decided to build a fleet of 20 ships with 32 guns to be stationed on each of them in Bhagwati River near Pane, close to the western coastal border. So, the service of 400 Portuguese naval specialists was taken to fulfill the entire operation. They were paid whatever money they demanded for their service. Knowing the fact that Portuguese, being the foreigners after all and therefore couldn’t be relied upon blindly, Shivaji deputed a crew of equal numbers of selected Marathas of sharp intellect with them so that they could learn the technique working with them. And, few days later, what Shivaji suspected came true.

At the very crucial moment when the British were to launch the attack on the Marathas, Portuguese dismantled the fleet and slunk away from there. But, thanks to Shivaji’s far-sightedness that till then Maratha-crew had become well-versed in the technique of building the fleet themselves. And, soon a new fleet named Sangmeshwari got ready to face the British army. This was the miracle of Reverse Engineering through which imported technology is improved on to make the use of it according to the local condition; presently, Japan is said to be far ahead in this mode of technology.

So, the fleet thus built by the Shivaji’s men proved far better than the one to be built through foreign technique. Western border of India thus got to be well defended. And, when defeated in the battle of Khanderi from Maratha army, William Minwin, the commander of British navy, said that they had been defeated because they didn’t have the fleet like Sangmeshwari that Shivaji had.

By- Er. Rajesh Pathak