The provenance of many things past can be tricky, but it is especially so in this case because it is impossible to trace the ‘wagh nakh’ that’s in the V&A museum precisely back to the Chhatrapati’s armoury, and eyewitness accounts suggest there were at least three other such ‘tiger claws’ in Satara for which similar claims were made well after an East India Company official had taken this particular weapon to England in the 1820s.
The museum, in its description of the item on its website, says it has “not been possible to verify whether the tiger claws are the ones used by Shivaji”. It received it from the descendants of the British political agent in Satara after the collapse of the Peshwa rule in 1818.
If there is a lack of clarity over whether Shivaji Raje had actually used the ‘wagh nakh’ on display at London’s V&A that is being loaned to the state for three years, it can, in part, be explained by the way the ‘wagh nakh’ found its way into Britain.
According to the museum, the ‘wagh nakh’ “was given to James Grant Duff who was resident of Satara by the Prime Minister of the Peshwa of the Marathas” after the collapse of Peshwa rule in 1818. The word Peshwa itself means Prime Minister, so who is the ‘PM of the Peshwa’ the museum is referring to? It’s not clear. Further, the museum states “it is possible” that Bajirao II, the last Peshwa, “surrendered this weapon to Grant Duff.” And it wasn’t Duff himself who handed over the weapon to the museum when he returned to England in 1823; his grandson, Adrian Grant Duff, did, late in the nineteenth century.
Claim and questions
Historian Pandurang Balkawade of Pune’s Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal, the biggest repository of Maratha documents and artefacts, disputes this version. According to him, Bajirao II was banished to Bithoor near Kanpur in 1818 and the British East India Company installed Pratapsinh as Chhatrapati at Satara. Grant Duff was appointed as the Raja’s political agent and served in this role from 1818 to early 1823; Duff eventually wrote a 3-volume history of the Marathas. The ‘wagh nakh’ was in the sanctum sanctorum of the Satara raja’s family, and it was he who gave it to Grant Duff, Balkawade said. “The object must have been sacred for it to be kept in the ‘dev ghar,'” he noted.
What happened to the arsenal and the artefacts?
At the best of times, the origin of historical objects can be hard to find; things can get tougher if there’s decades of warfare involved. No contemporary catalogue of Chhatrapati Shivaji’s arsenal at the time of his death in 1680 is available. Aurangzeb descended on the Deccan the next year (1681) in order to try and conquer it, and a big clash broke out between Marathas and the Mughals. It lasted over 25 years, ending with Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. As Shivaji’s capital Raigad was among the places seized early by the Mughals, a majority of Maratha documents and artefacts there got destroyed or burnt. The Chhatrapati’s family members, fighting the Mughals, carried several of the belongings, but the trail for a number of objects got eventually lost in the armed conflict. Until Grant Duff was handed the ‘wagh nakh’ in Satara.
Thus, it isn’t certain how the ‘wagh nakh’ travelled for 160 years from 1659, the year in which Shivaji used it against Bijapur general Afzal Khan. Yet, even the inexact journey would have been okay were it not for other assertions made soon after Duff got hold of the relic.
A governor’s wife speaks
Lucius Cary was governor of Bombay between 1848 and 1853. He’s better known as Lord Falkland, after whom a road in the city is named. With his wife, the Viscountess Falkland, he travelled to Satara. In her account of her travels published in 1857, the Viscountess mentioned their meeting with the raja and ‘ranees’ of Satara. The ‘ranees,’ she stated, showed her “several varieties of ‘wagnuks’, and even the very one which Sivaji stuck into Afzool Khan’s side.” This was two decades after Duff had taken the “gifted” weapon to England. So, which one was the genuine article? Also, mention of “several varieties of wagnuks” suggests Marathas had made many of them, complicating the picture.
Grant Duff’s son’s account
A little over a decade after Falkland’s Satara visit, Grant Duff’s son Mountstuart made a claim of his own. Mountstuart was an MP in the British Parliament and served as Under-Secretary of State for India between 1868 and 1874. When he went to Satara, he was shown Shivaji’s sword “Bhowanee” and “the two wagnuks which her illustrious owner used on a critical occasion.” Mountstuart wrote that according to his father’s history of the Marathas, Shivaji had used one ‘wagh nakh’, but “Bhowanee’s guardians say he used two, which is improbable.” Mountstuart was right. Shivaji’s contemporary chronicler Sabhasad writes he held the ‘wagh nakh’ in his left hand and a ‘bichwa’ (dagger) in his right when he retaliated against Afzal Khan. Mountstuart further wrote, “Of these two, one is a facsimile of that in my possession; but the other is smaller and more manageable, with only three claws – a very sweet thing of its kind.” Mountstuart here mentioned the ‘wagh nakh’ in his possession (which his son Adrian later gave the museum) but did not dispute the claim made for the other wagh nakhs in Satara. So whose claim was correct – Adrian’s or that of Satara?
Likely candidate?
At any rate, the Satara possessions seem to have not been brought into the spotlight after that. Nor have counter-claims been made, in the wake of government’s announcement about bringing back the ‘wagh nakh’, that the real article is in India. There’s no definitive answer, and certainly the most likely candidate at present to fit the bill – in the absence of any other contender — is the one in the V&A museum. But the story of the legendary tiger claws indicates how historical objects, like history itself, can have their own mysteries.
