History of Pune

The oldest references are Rashtrakuta copper plates of 758 and 768 CE, which call the area Punaka Vishaya and Punya Vishaya; vishaya means a district, and punya is usually read as holy. By the 13th century the town was Punawadi, under Shahaji's family it was Kasbe Pune, and the British wrote it Poona. The official name changed to Pune in 1978. The rock-cut Pataleshwar cave temple off Jangli Maharaj Road dates from the same Rashtrakuta period.

From the 14th century Pune passed between the Delhi Sultanate, the Bahmanis and the Deccan sultanates and stayed a modest village. Around 1599 the Ahmadnagar sultanate gave it as a jagir (fief) to Maloji Bhosale. In the 1630s a Bijapur general razed the town and, as a sign of total conquest, had the ground ploughed with donkeys; Maloji's son Shahaji got the fief back, had it rebuilt and settled his wife Jijabai and their son Shivaji here. Their house, the Lal Mahal, was finished in 1640; the present Lal Mahal is a memorial rebuilt in the 1980s on the site. Jijabai consecrated the Ganesha of Kasba Ganpati in 1639, and it is still the town's presiding deity.

Shivaji ruled from hill forts rather than from Pune, and the town changed hands with the Mughals several times. In 1663 he raided the Mughal general Shaista Khan in the Lal Mahal at night; in 1670 his commander Tanaji Malusare died taking Kondhana, which was renamed Sinhagad, the Lion Fort.

The Peshwas were the hereditary chief ministers of the Maratha kings, and in the 18th century the real rulers of the state. Bajirao I moved his administration from Saswad to Pune in 1728 and laid the foundation of Shaniwar Wada in 1730; the palace was formally opened in 1732. Pune grew from a kasba of six peths (wards) into the political and financial capital of the Maratha confederacy. His son Nanasaheb dug a lake at Katraj with an underground aqueduct to carry its water to the palace, built the temples on Parvati Hill and a lake at its foot, on whose island the Talyatla Ganpati temple of 1784 still stands in Saras Baug, and laid out new peths such as Sadashiv and Narayan Peth. Around 250 temples and bridges date from Peshwa patronage.

The decline began with the defeat at Panipat in 1761 and continued with palace intrigue. Under Bajirao II, the last Peshwa, the British defeated the Maratha army at Khadki on 5 November 1817, and in 1818 Peshwa rule ended. His residence, Vishrambaug Wada, is now the best-preserved wada in the city; Shaniwar Wada burned in a week-long fire in 1828, leaving the walls, gates and foundations.

The East India Company built a large cantonment east of the old city and another at Khadki, and made Poona the monsoon capital of the Bombay Presidency. The railway from Bombay arrived in 1858, the year of the first municipality. From this era come the Gothic Mahatma Phule Mandai market (opened 1886), the Ohel David synagogue (1867) and the Aga Khan Palace (1892). The first rules of badminton were drawn up here in 1873.

The city became the centre of social reform: Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule opened the first girls' school in Pune in 1848, Fergusson College was founded in 1885, and Dhondo Keshav Karve founded India's first women's university in 1916. Bal Gangadhar Tilak edited Kesari and Mahratta here and turned Ganeshotsav, first held publicly in 1892, into a mass public festival. During the plague of 1897 the heavy-handed measures of the plague commissioner W. C. Rand led to his assassination by the Chapekar brothers. Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar agreed the Poona Pact here in 1932 and was held at the Aga Khan Palace in 1942–44, where his wife Kasturba died.

The University of Pune (now Savitribai Phule Pune University) was founded in 1949, the National Defence Academy in 1955, and industry spread to Pimpri, Bhosari and Hadapsar from the 1950s. The Panshet dam burst in 1961 and flooded the riverside, pushing the city into new suburbs. In the 1990s Pune became a major IT centre; the metropolitan region had about 7.2 million people at the 2011 census.