Dattaji Shinde
Dattaji Shinde was asked whether he would fight again and answered that he would, while bleeding to death. He was a son of Ranoji Shinde, the founder of the house that became the Scindias of Gwalior, and one of the Maratha commanders who carried the confederacy's power north to Delhi and the Punjab in the 1750s. That expansion is the background to everything that followed: the Marathas had made themselves the effective power behind the Mughal throne, garrisoned Attock on the Indus, and displaced Ahmad Shah Durrani's claim to the Punjab. Durrani came back for it. He was left holding the north with an inadequate force while the main Maratha army was elsewhere, tried to hold the line of the Yamuna, and was caught at Barari Ghat outside Delhi in January 1760. He was shot and cut down, and the exchange reported afterwards - asked by the Afghan commander whether he would fight again, and replying that if he lived he would - is one of the fixed points of Maratha tradition. His head was displayed. His brother Jankoji was captured and killed at Panipat the following January, in the defeat that ended Maratha ambitions in the north for a generation. The house survived through his illegitimate half-brother Mahadji, who escaped Panipat wounded and rebuilt Maratha power in the north over the following thirty years - to the point of holding the Mughal emperor as a pensioner - and whose line ruled Gwalior until 1947. So the family that lost two brothers in thirteen months at Barari Ghat and Panipat ended as one of the largest princely states in India. The reply at Barari Ghat is quoted in Marathi to this day, usually without the detail that he was dying when he gave it.
- Lived: 1723 CE – 1760 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: military
