Shivaji II

Shivaji II was proclaimed Chhatrapati at four by a mother who governed in his name, was displaced in a succession war, and ended as the first ruler of the rival Maratha branch at Kolhapur. He was the son of Rajaram I and Tarabai, born during the long Mughal war that followed the execution of Sambhaji, and was raised to the throne when his father died in 1700 at Sinhagad. Tarabai ruled as regent and conducted the war against Aurangzeb herself for seven years, keeping the field when the Mughals held every fort, which is the period Maratha historians treat as the state's survival rather than its eclipse. In 1707 the Mughals released Sambhaji's son Shahu, deliberately, to divide the Marathas, and it worked: Shahu defeated Tarabai's forces at Khed in 1707 and took Satara. Tarabai withdrew with her son and set up a rival court at Panhala and then Kolhapur. In 1714 a coup within that court by Rajaram's other widow, Rajasbai, deposed Shivaji II in favour of her own son Sambhaji II, and mother and son were imprisoned at Panhala. He died in confinement at thirty. The division he embodied hardened into two permanent Maratha houses, Satara and Kolhapur, recognised by treaty in 1731, and the energy that might have gone into the Mughal war went into the quarrel instead. His mother Tarabai outlived him by fifty-five years and reappeared in Maratha politics in the 1750s at Satara, claiming a grandson she later disowned. The Kolhapur house he founded lasted as a princely state until 1949. Contemporary Mughal chroniclers, no friends of the Marathas, wrote with respect of the regency conducted in his name. He is sometimes numbered differently in Maratha genealogies, since a later Kolhapur ruler also took the name.

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