your bridge home
True Valor
Her father was murdered in open durbar by the dynasty he served. She raised her son knowing exactly what serving other people’s kingdoms was worth.
Shahaji sent his wife and his fourteen-year-old son to Pune in about 1636, and what he sent them to was not a city.
It had been fought over by the Nizam Shahi, the Adil Shahi and the Mughals in turn, and burned in the process. The tradition holds that an iron crowbar had been driven into the ground. And an ass yoked to a plough, run across the site.
That is the formal gesture for a place declared dead. Cursed against resettlement. The population had gone. The revenue had gone.
Jijabai was given that as an estate to administer, and she was not a regent in name only. Shahaji was away campaigning for the Adil Shahi in the Karnataka country and stayed away for years at a stretch. The jagir was hers to run, and she ran it for the better part of two decades.
Jijabai was born on 12 January 1598 at Sindkhed Raja. Daughter of Lakhuji Jadhav, a Maratha noble of the Nizam Shahi court.
His family claimed descent from the Yadavas of Devagiri. She was married young to Shahaji Bhonsle, son of Maloji, of another family in the same service.
What that service was worth is the thing that shaped her. Her father was murdered in 1629, with two of his sons, at the Nizam Shahi court.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.