Chhatrasal Appeals to the Peshwa
In 1729 an eighty-year-old Bundela king, besieged by a Mughal governor, wrote to the Maratha Peshwa for help - and paid for it with a third of his kingdom. Chhatrasal had spent his life fighting Aurangzeb. He began in Mughal service, met Shivaji in the 1660s, and came away persuaded that a Hindu king could hold territory against Delhi. From about 1675 he raised Bundelkhand in revolt and fought a war of raids and hill forts across the broken country between the Yamuna and the Narmada for fifty years, carving out an independent state around Panna and the diamond field that made it rich. Aurangzeb's death in 1707 did not end the pressure. In 1728 the governor of Allahabad invaded, defeated Chhatrasal's forces and besieged him. His appeal to Pune was answered by Bajirao I in person, who marched north, broke the siege and drove the Mughal army out. Chhatrasal adopted him as a son and left him a third of Bundelkhand, which is the least remarked-upon and most consequential thing in the story. It gave the Marathas a territorial base north of the Narmada for the first time, and from it Bajirao took Malwa and Gujarat and began raiding towards Delhi. The rest of the kingdom was divided among Chhatrasal's sons into states too small to matter, and the Bundelas never again fielded an army. What the region kept was cultural: the Bundeli oral epic of Alha and Udal, still sung at fairs, in which Chhatrasal is a figure, and the diamond field at Panna, still worked by hand under licence.
- Year: 1728 CE
- Category: Military
