Tukabai
Tukabai was Shahaji's second wife, and the dynasty descended from her outlasted the one descended from his first by a hundred and sixty years. She was of the Mohite family, married into a household whose head was a Maratha general serving the sultans of Bijapur, and lived in the southern half of his career while his first wife Jijabai raised Shivaji in the north. That division is the whole of what is recorded of her: two households, two sons, and a father who spent his life in Karnataka. Her son Vyankoji, also called Ekoji, inherited Shahaji's southern commands and took Thanjavur in 1675, founding a Maratha kingdom in the deep Tamil south a thousand kilometres from Pune. He and his half-brother Shivaji quarrelled over the inheritance and campaigned against each other. The Thanjavur line lasted until the British annexed it in 1855, and it produced Serfoji II, who founded the Saraswati Mahal Library, introduced vaccination to his territory and wrote in four languages - so the branch of the family that history treats as a footnote produced the most bookish court in southern India. Her own family were not minor. The Mohites were a Maratha house of standing who supplied Shivaji with Hambirrao Mohite, his commander-in-chief in the last years of the reign and the man who held the army together during the succession dispute after his death. So the marriage was an alliance rather than a second household tolerated at a distance, whatever the later Maratha chronicles - written under Shivaji's line - preferred to imply. Nothing survives of her own dates, her own words or her own decisions. She exists in the record as a marriage and a line of descent, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to invent a personality for her.
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: noblewoman
