Rajaram I

Rajaram was crowned when his elder brother Sambhaji was tortured to death, escaped a besieged fort disguised as a pilgrim, and ran the Maratha war from a fortress at the far end of India for eight years. He was Shivaji's younger son, nineteen when Sambhaji was captured in 1689, and he owed the throne to his brother's widow Yesubai, who had him crowned instead of her own seven-year-old son on the reasoning that a child could not lead a war. Raigad was surrounded within weeks; he got out and travelled the length of the subcontinent in disguise to Jinji, a hill fortress in the Tamil country nearly a thousand miles south, and held out there for eight years while Mughal armies besieged it. That distance is the strategy: the empire had to divide itself to reach him, and the Maratha commanders in the west - Santaji Ghorpade and Dhanaji Jadhav - were free to raid Mughal supply lines continuously. He issued grants and appointments from Jinji, keeping a functioning government in exile, and the practice of paying commanders with rights to collect revenue rather than with money is usually dated to this period; it kept the war going and weakened central authority permanently. He escaped again when Jinji finally fell in 1698, reached Satara, and died of illness at thirty in 1700, leaving his widow Tarabai to take over the war. Jinji is now a fortress complex in Tamil Nadu open to visitors. The revenue-farming expedient he adopted is generally seen as the origin of the semi-independent Maratha houses - Scindia, Holkar, Gaekwad - that later divided the empire. He was crowned at Raigad and again in the south. His first wife Jankibai was Prataprao Gujar s daughter. He is buried at Sinhagad, where he died. Shivaji II, the son Tarabai crowned, was four years old.

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