Even as Shahaji Bhosale and his clan served in the Mughal armies, under the Nizams of the Ahmednagar Sultanate and later the Adilshahs of Bijapur, they carried deep in their hearts the dream of ‘Swarajya’, an autonomous dominion for the Marathas. That aspiration begins to take shape as Shahaji’s son Shivaji unites the youth of the Maaval region under the banner of Hindvi Swarajya. The Shivaji Mahasamrat Series of novels is Vishwas Patil’s most ambitious work thus far. Few books on the establishment of the Maratha Empire have recreated so deftly the many durbars of seventeenth-century India, their political intrigues and war tactics, or revealed so much about the lives of Shivaji’s forebears—especially, Shahaji Bhosale, an extraordinary warrior in his own right, and Jijabai, who came from a family of dauntless fighters and was an astute stateswoman.