Sambhaji

Early life

Sambhaji was born on 14 May 1657 at Purandar Fort, the eldest son of Shivaji, founder of the Maratha kingdom, and his first wife Saibai, who died when Sambhaji was about two years old; he was raised largely under the care of his grandmother Jijabai. He received a broad education in Sanskrit, Persian, and Marathi, alongside training in warfare and statecraft, and would go on to compose Sanskrit works of his own in adulthood.

As a boy of about nine, Sambhaji was sent to the Mughal court as a hostage and mansabdar under the terms of the 1665 Treaty of Purandar, which Shivaji concluded with the Mughal general Jai Singh I after a military setback. He accompanied Shivaji to Agra in 1666 for the tense audience with Aurangzeb that ended in Shivaji's house arrest, and was present during Shivaji's celebrated escape from confinement, smuggled out of the city, according to tradition, concealed in baskets of sweets; Sambhaji made his own way back to Maharashtra separately.

Succession

Shivaji died on 3 April 1680. His second wife, Soyarabai, sought to install her own young son, Rajaram, on the throne with the backing of several ministers, and Sambhaji was briefly confined at Panhala Fort. He broke free, seized control of the administration, and was formally crowned Chhatrapati on 20 July 1681 at Raigad.

War with the Mughals

Aurangzeb moved his own court and army into the Deccan in 1682, beginning a campaign against the Marathas and the remaining Deccan sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda that would occupy the rest of his reign and keep him there until his death in 1707. Sambhaji met this pressure with the guerrilla tactics his father had pioneered, harassing Mughal supply lines and outposts. In 1681, he gave shelter at his court to Prince Muhammad Akbar, Aurangzeb's own son, who had rebelled against his father and fled south seeking Maratha support; the prince eventually left India for Persia, but the episode illustrates the extent of the internal strain Aurangzeb's Deccan campaign placed on the Mughal ruling house itself.

Other campaigns

Sambhaji also fought the Portuguese in Goa, in response to their support for Mughal operations and to policies including the Goa Inquisition, and made repeated attempts, ultimately unsuccessful, to capture the island fortress of Janjira from the Siddis of Janjira, an Abyssinian-descended naval power allied with the Mughals along the Konkan coast. Maratha forces under his command also raided into Karnataka and the Tamil country, extending Maratha reach, if only briefly, beyond Maharashtra.

Administration and scholarship

Sambhaji largely continued his father's system of an Ashta Pradhan (eight-minister) council. Unusually for a ruler of his era, he was also a practicing Sanskrit author: his Budhbhushanam (1684), a treatise on politics and kingship, survives along with shorter works including Nayikabheda and Satsatak, reflecting the literary education he had received as a child.

Capture and execution

In early 1689, Sambhaji was betrayed by his brother-in-law Ganoji Shirke, who revealed his location to Mughal forces; he was captured with his adviser Kavi Kalash at Sangameshwar on 1 February 1689 by the Mughal general Muqarrab Khan. Brought before Aurangzeb, he was reportedly offered clemency in exchange for converting to Islam and surrendering Maratha forts; he refused. He was tortured over several days and executed on 11 March 1689 at Tulapur, at the confluence of the Bhima and Indrayani rivers near Pune. Local tradition credits villagers of the area with recovering and cremating his remains.

Aftermath

Sambhaji's execution failed to break Maratha resistance. His half-brother Rajaram assumed leadership, and after Rajaram's death in 1700, his widow Maharani Tarabai continued to direct Maratha operations on behalf of her infant son. The prolonged Maratha campaign against Aurangzeb, sustained through Sambhaji's death and beyond, is credited by historians with substantially draining Mughal resources and contributing to the empire's decline after Aurangzeb's own death in 1707. In 2023, the city long known as Aurangabad was officially renamed Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar in his memory.

Sources

Sambhaji's execution is recorded from the Mughal side in the Maasir-i-Alamgiri, the official chronicle of Aurangzeb's reign compiled by Saqi Must'ad Khan, which confirms the date and the charge of continued rebellion, though it frames the killing in terms sympathetic to the emperor. Maratha-side accounts appear chiefly in later bakhars, court-sponsored prose chronicles composed in Marathi in the decades and centuries after the events they describe, including the Sabhasad Bakhar; because these were compiled well after Sambhaji's death and often served to legitimize his successors, historians treat their more dramatic details, such as the exact sequence of his torture, with some caution even where the broad outline is corroborated by the Mughal record.