- Lived:
- 31 May 1725, Chondi, a village in the Deccan (in today's Ahilyanagar district, Maharashtra) → Indore, and then Maheshwar on the Narmada, the small capital from which she governed Malwa
- Field:
- queen-regent of the Holkar state of the Maratha confederacy — administrator, judge, builder, and paymaster of an all-India programme of public works
- The Big Idea:
- A shepherd-community widow who had lost nearly everyone took charge of a Maratha state in 1767 and ran it for twenty-eight years with such justice — open court daily, light taxes, safe roads — that her subjects simply called her reign "the good rule"; and with her own private purse she answered the era's most famous temple destructions, rebuilding Kashi Vishwanath and Somnath and endowing pilgrim works from Rameswaram to Badrinath.
- In their words:
- "What I do here, I must answer for there." — the refrain of her letters as the Holkar records and her biographers report it: the state's wealth was not hers but a trust, an amānat, held for God and the people
- If you remember one thing:
- The Kashi Vishwanath temple that millions of pilgrims touch today is the building a widow from Malwa raised in 1780, beside the site of the temple an emperor had ordered demolished in 1669 — she answered a century of destruction with masonry, and she paid for it out of her own purse, with the accounts kept honest.