Deccan Poona of Peshwas still scripts Marathi culture
Pune, spelled Poona in official English until 1978, sits on Maharashtra's Deccan Plateau and passed through Rashtrakuta, Ahmadnagar, Mughal and Adil Shahi hands before becoming the Peshwas' seat in the eighteenth century. A copper plate from 937 CE calls it Punya-vishaya, and figures from Dnyaneshwar and Shivaji to Gokhale and Savitribai Phule did their work here.
Copper plates of 858 and 868 CE record a farming village called Punnaka under the Rashtrakutas, whose era produced the rock-cut Pataleshwar temple. Other plates give Punakavishaya and Punya Vishaya, where vishaya means land and the first element means holy, and by the thirteenth century people said Punawadi. In 1599 the Ahmadnagar sultans granted the district as a fief to Maloji Bhosale, who passed it to his son Shahaji.
An Adil Shahi general, Murar Jagdeo, razed the town in 1636. Shahaji recovered the fief and settled his wife Jijabai and young son Shivaji there; their Lal Mahal was finished in 1640, and Jijabai is credited with the Kasba Ganapati temple, whose idol became the guardian deity. Mughals and Marathas traded control repeatedly, and Aurangzeb held it from 1703 to 1705, briefly renaming it Muhiyabad.
Transformation began when Peshwa Baji Rao I moved his base from Saswad in 1728 and completed the Shaniwar Wada palace on the Mutha in 1730. His son Nanasaheb dammed a lake at Katraj and piped water underground to the palace, and laid out gardens and new quarters such as Sadashiv Peth. Some 250 temples and bridges went up, with religion accounting for about 15 percent of the economy. The British defeated the Peshwa at Khadki on 5 November 1817 and built a cantonment east of the old city; the Southern Command has been headquartered there since 1895. A railway to Bombay and a municipality both arrived in 1858, and between 1875 and 1910 Tilak and Gokhale led political agitation while Phule, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai pressed for social reform.
After 1947 came a university in 1949, the National Chemical Laboratory and the National Defence Academy. The Panshet dam burst of 1961 flooded riverside housing and pushed growth into new suburbs, Hindustan Antibiotics began industrialisation in 1954, and IT parks later rose at Hinjawadi and Kharadi. The Serum Institute, the world's largest vaccine maker, is based here.
Source: Pune
