your bridge home
True Valor
Aurangzeb came south in 1681 and never went home. He died in the Deccan twenty-six years later, and the reason begins with a man he captured in 1689.
Aurangzeb had come south in 1681 with the whole apparatus of the Mughal empire and did not go back. He spent the last twenty-six years of his life in the Deccan. And he died there.
The reason he had to stay that long is the man he captured in 1689. And the thing that happened afterwards.
Sambhaji was Shivaji's eldest son, born in 1657.
He came to the throne in 1681. Into a court that had largely not wanted him. His accession was contested. There was a faction for his half-brother Rajaram.
And there had been an earlier episode, in which Sambhaji went over to the Mughals and came back. He inherited a state nine years old whose founder had just died, with the empire massing on its northern edge.
He is worth knowing as something other than a martyr, because the nine years he ruled were not idle.
He was a Sanskrit scholar and a poet, the Budhbhushanam, a work on statecraft in Sanskrit, is his, along with compositions in Braj. A king fighting for his existence on three fronts was writing treatises. He kept Kavi Kalash, a Kanauji brahmin poet, as his closest counsellor, and the two were captured together and died together.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.