Yesubai

Yesubai was Sambhaji's wife, held as a Mughal hostage for nearly thirty years, and is generally credited with the decision that kept the Maratha state alive after her husband was killed. She was married to Sambhaji as a child, in an alliance with the Shirke family whose lands adjoined Shivaji's, and she was one of the few people Sambhaji is recorded as consulting in his nine-year reign. When he was captured and tortured to death by Aurangzeb in 1689, she was at Raigad with their seven-year-old son Shahu and the state was without a ruler and under siege. She had her brother-in-law Rajaram crowned instead of her own son, and sent him out of the fort to Jinji in the far south to carry on the war - a decision that split the Mughal pursuit and preserved a Maratha government in exile, and that cost her son the throne for eighteen years and cost her her freedom. Raigad fell that November and she and Shahu were taken. She spent the next twenty-nine years in Mughal custody, negotiated over repeatedly, while Shahu was raised in the imperial camp; he was released in 1707 and she was not, remaining as surety for his conduct until 1719, when the Peshwa Balaji Vishwanath obtained her release as part of a treaty with the Sayyid brothers. She lived at Satara until her death. The Sayyid brothers who agreed her release were the kingmakers of the late Mughal court and were themselves destroyed within a few years. Her return in 1719 was treated as a state occasion at Satara. She is a considerable figure in Marathi historical writing and almost absent from English-language accounts.

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