Anandibai

Anandibai is remembered for altering one letter of one word, and the tradition may be exactly true or may be the way a court explained a murder it could not otherwise account for. She was Raghunathrao's wife, married into the Peshwa family, and shared her husband's twenty-year attempt to take an office that kept going to younger men. In August 1773 the eighteen-year-old Peshwa Narayanrao was confining Raghunathrao in the Shaniwar Wada at Pune. The order that reached the Gardi troops is said to have been written by Raghunathrao as an instruction to seize the boy - dharaave - and to have been altered by Anandibai to maaraave, kill him, a change of a single Marathi letter. Narayanrao was cut down running through the palace calling for his uncle. The enquiry by Ram Shastri Prabhune found Raghunathrao guilty and did not formally rule on her part. She spent the rest of her life in flight and confinement with her husband, moving between British protection and Maratha custody, and gave birth to Bajirao II at Dhar in 1775 while on the run. He became the last Peshwa. She died in 1794. Whether the letter was altered cannot be established from any surviving document, and the story has been told in Marathi drama and film for two centuries. Marathi accounts differ on whether she acted alone or at her husband s knowledge. She was held for periods at Kopargaon and at Dhar. Her son inherited the office his father never securely held and lost it to the British.

• Lived: 1756 CE – 1794 CE
• Nationality: Indian
• Roles: royalty