- Lived:
- 1675 – 9 December 1761 · born into the Mohite family of Maharashtra's warrior gentry; her life ran fort to fort across the western Deccan — Jinji, Panhala, Satara, Kolhapur — and ended where the state she saved kept its throne
- Field:
- war leadership and regency — dowager queen of the Maratha state, regent 1700–07, founder of the Kolhapur line
- The Big Idea:
- With the capital lost, the king dead and the heir four years old, a twenty-five-year-old widow took command of the Maratha war and made Aurangzeb's rear cost more than his front — until the emperor died in camp, after twenty-six years, holding nothing.
- In their words:
- none of her own words survive verbatim; the nearest thing is her enemy's testimony — Khāfī Khān, the Mughal chronicler, called her "a clever, intelligent woman" known even in her husband's lifetime for her grasp "of civil and military matters"
- If you remember one thing:
- She saved the Maratha state in seven years, was discarded by it for fifty, and outlived everyone — and both Maratha thrones that exist today, Satara and Kolhapur, exist because of what she did between 1700 and 1707.