Tarabai

Tarabai took command of the Maratha war against Aurangzeb at twenty-five, held it for seven years, and spent the following half-century fighting her own family for the throne. She was the daughter of Shivaji's admiral Hambirrao Mohite and the wife of Rajaram, and when he died in 1700 with the Mughal armies in the Deccan and the heir an infant, she had her own son Shivaji II crowned and ruled in his name. What followed is the part the sources agree on: she directed the war herself, moved between forts, appointed and dismissed commanders, and pushed the fighting north into Malwa and Gujarat rather than merely defending, which is what exhausted the Mughal effort. Aurangzeb died in 1707 having taken forts and never the country. Then Shahu, Sambhaji's son, was released from Mughal custody and claimed the throne, and Tarabai fought him instead - she lost, was imprisoned by a rival queen of her own faction, and set up a separate Maratha state at Kolhapur that survives as a distinct line to this day. She reappeared in 1749 at about seventy-four, presenting a grandson as Shahu's heir, quarrelled with the Peshwa, imprisoned the boy, and finally admitted in public that he was an impostor she had invented. She died at eighty-six. Maratha historiography has never settled whether she is the saviour of the state or the author of its succession wars. Kolhapur remained a separate princely state under her line until 1949. A ballad tradition in Marathi celebrates her generalship. She was held in confinement at Satara for fifteen years by Rajasbai, a rival widow of Rajaram.

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