Lakhuji Jadhav

Lakhuji Jadhav was murdered with three of his sons in the audience hall of the sultan he served, and his grandson founded a kingdom against that sultan's successors. He was a Maratha noble of the Jadhav family, claiming descent from the Yadavas of Devagiri, and held a large command under the Nizam Shahi sultanate of Ahmadnagar - one of the Deccan Muslim states that employed Maratha cavalry commanders as the backbone of their armies. That arrangement is the world Shivaji was born into and reacted against: Maratha families held land and troops as the servants of sultans, changing sides between Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and the Mughals as the wars went, and none of them ruled anything in their own name. The descent claim mattered more than it sounds. Maratha families were soldiers and cultivators whose right to be treated as Kshatriya rank was disputed by Brahmins, and a documented line back to the Yadava kings of Devagiri was the answer to that. Shivaji faced the same argument at his own coronation forty-five years later, and had to import a Benares scholar to settle it. His daughter Jijabai married Shahaji Bhonsle, and the two families quarrelled violently afterwards - a feud that the accounts describe as starting at a festival and never healing. In 1629 the regent Malik Ambar's successor summoned him to court at Devagiri and had him cut down there with his sons, in the ordinary way that Deccan sultans dealt with over-powerful vassals. The consequence was not what was intended. Jijabai raised her son Shivaji largely alone in the Pune lands, and Maratha tradition credits her with giving him the idea of an independent kingdom rather than another generation of service. Whether or not the murder of her father and brothers is what put the idea there, it is what the tradition says, and the Maratha state that resulted outlived Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and eventually the Mughals themselves.

• Nationality: Maratha
• Roles: military