#BajiRaoI

“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.”

“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.”