Kashibai

Kashibai was Bajirao I's first wife, raised the son he had by Mastani, and is remembered in Maratha tradition for doing the opposite of what her family expected. She came from the wealthy Chaskar Joshi banking family and married Bajirao in 1720, the year he became Peshwa; she suffered from an arthritic condition that limited her movement for much of her life. When Bajirao took Mastani as a second wife around 1728, the household split against him - his mother Radhabai and his brother Chimaji Appa refused to receive her, confined her during his absences, and blocked the religious rites for her son. Kashibai is recorded as the exception. The accounts, which are Maratha and partial, have her maintaining relations with Mastani and, after both Bajirao and Mastani died within weeks of each other in 1740, taking Shamsher Bahadur into her own household and raising him with her sons. He was given a share of the family lands and died fighting for the Marathas at Panipat in 1761. She went on pilgrimage repeatedly, built temples at Chas and Saswad, and endowed rest houses. Her son Balaji Bajirao succeeded his father as Peshwa. She died in 1758, three years before Panipat destroyed the army her husband had built. Her correspondence survives in the Peshwa daftar, the state archive at Pune, which is unusually good for a woman of the period. She undertook a pilgrimage to Varanasi in her later years. The temple she built at Saswad is still in use. Her marriage to Bajirao was arranged when both were children, in the ordinary way for the family.

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