8 - Tarabai (1675–1761): the rise of Brahmins in politics

Summary

[The Mughals felt] that it would not be difficult to overcome two young children and a helpless woman. They thought their enemy weak, contemptible and helpless; but Tara Bai, as the wife of Ram Raja [i.e., Rajaram] was called, showed great powers of command and government, and from day to day the war spread and the power of the Mahrattas increased.

Khafi Khan (d. c. 1731)

People say that I am a quarrelsome woman.

Tarabai (1748)

Between 1700 and 1710, just when Papadu was most active in Telangana, a powerful anti-Mughal resistance movement convulsed the Marathi-speaking western Deccan. Endeavoring to suppress this larger movement in the west, Aurangzeb siphoned off needed men and resources both from Hyderabad and from north India, hindering imperial efforts to pursue the Telangana bandit. More importantly, it was in the western Deccan that the octogenarian's dreams of a vast, Delhi-based all-India empire would be dashed to pieces, as had earlier happened to Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq in the 1330s and 1340s (see chapter 2).

The movement was led by Tarabai, one of the most remarkable women in Indian history. Her life also coincided with significant developments in the eighteenth-century western Deccan: (a) the rise of powerful Brahmins in the central administration of the new Maratha state, (b) the eruption of Maratha warriors out of the Deccan and across the whole of north India from the Punjab to Bengal, and (c) changes in the social composition of the category “Maratha.” Although Tarabai was by no means the cause of these developments, they can all be found woven into the fabric of her extraordinary career.

A “Queen of the Marathas” (1675–1714)

Born in 1675, just several months after Shivaji Bhosle had launched the new Maratha state, Tarabai was married at age eight to Shivaji's second son, Rajaram (see Chart 4). Since her father,Hambir RaoMohite, had been Shivaji’s commander-in-chief, the marriage cemented an alliance between two distinguished Maratha lineages, the Bhosle and the Mohite clans.