Sambhaji Was Dragged by the Hair From a Hole in His Minister's House in February 1689 and Executed Five Weeks Later. The War Went On for Eighteen More Years.

On Friday 15 February 1689, Emperor Aurangzeb’s camp at Bahadurgarh turned out to watch a prisoner arrive. Saqi Mustaid Khan, who wrote the official history of the reign from the state archives, says the order was that Sambhaji be brought in from two kos (about four miles) outside the camp, on a camel, in the dress of a buffoon, “so that the Muslims might be heartened and the infidels disheartened by seeing it.” Sambhaji was brought before the Emperor and sent to prison. Then, the Maasir says, “That very moment the Emperor descended from the throne, and kneeling on the carpet of prayer bowed his head to the ground in thanking God.”

The prisoner was the eldest son of Shivaji and the second Maratha king. He was 31 and had been on the throne for nine years. Beside him on a camel rode his minister Kavi Kalash. Twenty-four days later both men were dead.

Almost everything we know about those weeks comes from the Mughal side. The Maasir-i-Alamgiri was completed in 1710, three years after Aurangzeb’s death. Khafi Khan, brought up in Aurangzeb’s service, kept a private register of the reign. Bhimsen Saxena, a Kayastha who served in the Mughal armies in the Deccan, wrote memoirs. They agree on an outline and differ on the rest. Later Marathi and European writers added details that none of the three records, and this piece keeps the two piles apart. One Hill Fort and an Empire covers Shivaji, so this one starts with his son. Dates follow Jadunath Sarkar and the Maasir in the Julian calendar then in use, and the Maasir’s Monday, 11 March 1689, fits only that calendar.

Three Mughal accounts of one morning

The Mughal general Muqarrab Khan was besieging the Maratha fort of Panhala when, says the Maasir, his spies reported that Sambhaji had gone to Sangameshwar in the Konkan, “where his minister Kavi-kalas had constructed gardens and lofty buildings, and was there engaged in merriment and pleasure.” Sarkar dates the capture to 1 February 1689, as do the editors of Bhimsen’s memoir, who cite the Jedhe Shakavali, a Marathi chronology. Kincaid and Parasnis, in their 1922 history of the Marathas, give 28 December 1688.

Here the three Mughal writers diverge. In the Maasir, Sambhaji charged the Khan “with the support of four or five thousand Deccan spearmen,” Kavi Kalash was hit by an arrow and fled, and Sambhaji hid “in a hole in the mansion of Kavi-kalas.” Ikhlas Khan, the Khan’s son, went in and dragged both men out, by their long hair, Sarkar adds.

Khafi Khan has a different place and a different force. He has Sambhaji bathing in the Ban-Ganga with “two or three thousand horse,” and Muqarrab Khan, “with his sons and nephews, ten or twelve brave personal attendants, and two or three hundred horsemen, fell sword in hand upon the heedless Sambha, who too late thought of defending himself.” Kabkalas, as Khafi Khan spells the minister’s name, took an arrow in the right arm and fell from his horse, “exclaiming that he would remain there. Sambha, who was about to take to flight, sprang from his horse, and said that he would stay with him.” Sambhaji, in this version, took refuge in “an idol temple.” His son Shahu, “a boy of seven or eight years of age,” was among the 26 taken.

Bhimsen follows neither. Spies in Bhimsen’s text find Sambhaji near the fort of Khelna, “lying unconscious intoxicated (be-hush?) and negligent,” the query being the editors’. Kavi Kalash, whom Sambhaji “knew as his spiritual guide and saint,” was “engaged in devotion and puja.”

All three agree he was surprised, and all three disliked him. Khafi Khan writes that “unlike his father, he was addicted to wine, and fond of the society of handsome women.” Any claim that Sambhaji was drunk or careless that morning comes through those writers. No Maratha account of the morning is among the sources used here.

A boy of eight on the Mughal rolls

Sarkar’s appendix gives Sambhaji’s birth as 14 May 1657. Shivaji, besieged at Purandar in June 1665 by the Mughal general Mirza Raja Jai Singh of Amber, signed the Treaty of Purandar. (Jai Singh’s Kachhwaha clan and its long service to the empire are described in Who Were the Rajputs.) Sarkar quotes Shivaji’s offer to Jai Singh: “I shall depute my son to be His Majesty’s servant and slave, and he will be created a Commander of Five Thousand with a suitable jagir.” Sambhaji, eight years old, reached Jai Singh’s camp on 18 June.

Father and son set out for Agra in March 1666. At the audience on 12 May, in Sarkar’s account, Shivaji learnt that he was standing among the commanders of 5,000 and protested: “My little son of nine years was created a 5-hazari in absentia; my servant Netaji is a 5-hazari.” He turned his back on the throne and walked out, and never again appeared before Aurangzeb. Next day the boy attended court and was given a robe of honour.

On 19 August 1666 the two escaped from custody at Agra, hidden in baskets. Sarkar, following the Maratha chroniclers and Bhimsen, has the exhausted boy left at Mathura with three Deccani Brahmans until his father sent for him. Khafi Khan has him left at Benares with a Brahman named Kabkalas, the family priest, and Sarkar says Khafi Khan “incorrectly” puts it so.

The prince who rode out to Dilir Khan

On 1 November 1676 Shivaji sent his son to Sangameshwar, the town where he would be caught 12 years later, to study under the pandit Keshav Bhatt Upadhyay and to govern the district. Sambhaji attended lectures there in Sanskrit ethics and politics, Sarkar writes, “but profited little by them.” Other sources are kinder. The 2024 introduction to the Bhandarkar Institute’s edition of the Budhabhusana, an anthology of 882 verses attributed to him, says he had trained in Sanskrit, kept many pandits at his court and was its compiler.

On 13 December 1678 he left Parli fort with his wife Yesu Bai, dressed, Sarkar says, “in male attire on horseback,” and joined the Mughal governor Dilir Khan, who sent 4,000 men to meet him. Dilir Khan, in Bhimsen’s words as Sarkar renders them, “felt as happy as if he had conquered the whole Deccan.” Mughal rank followed: commander of 7,000 and the title of Raja.

Why he went is argued. In Shivaji and His Times, and again in his History of Aurangzib, Sarkar says the prince was sent to Parli for having “violated a beautiful Brahman woman.” Vaibhav Purandare, in his biography of Shivaji, says the records “don’t make clear what the immediate trigger was for his defection.” Purandare adds that the Marathi historian Kamal Gokhale, author of a scholarly biography of Sambhaji, holds that stories of the prince’s misconduct began only after Shivaji’s coronation of 1674 and were most likely spread by his stepmother Soyrabai to discredit him. Sabhasad, the chronicler who wrote under her son Rajaram, mentions none of them.

A year in Dilir Khan’s camp followed. At Athni, according to English factory records quoted by Sarkar, Dilir Khan proposed to sell the townspeople into slavery, and Sambhaji objected, was overruled and “began to grow sick of his associates.” On the night of 20 November 1679 he rode out of the camp with Yesu Bai and ten troopers.

Two kings in April 1680

Shivaji died on 4 April 1680 by Sarkar’s reckoning and 3 April by the Jedhe chronology that Bhimsen’s editors cite. In Sarkar’s account Soyrabai convinced most of the ministers present that Sambhaji’s accession would mean disaster. Rajaram, aged ten, was proclaimed king at Raigad on 21 April by the minister Annaji Datto.

By then Sambhaji was at Panhala. Within a week of Shivaji’s death, Sarkar writes, soldiers were arriving daily to join him. He took the fort and wrote to officers across the country. His first measures, Sarkar says, “displayed a degree of sagacity and timely energy which was quite unexpected from a man of his character.” At the end of May the Maratha commander-in-chief Hambir Rao Mohite arrested Annaji Datto and the Peshwa Moro Pant and took them to Panhala, where the army chiefs recognised Sambhaji, and Raigad opened its gates on 18 June. He first sat on the throne on 20 July 1680, and the formal coronation followed on 16 January 1681.

Poison in the fish, 1681

When Moro Pant died in October 1680, Sambhaji released Annaji Datto and made him accountant-general. By August 1681, Sarkar writes, Annaji had formed a plot with Soyrabai and others to kill Sambhaji and crown Rajaram under the protection of Prince Akbar, Aurangzeb’s rebel son, then a guest in Maratha territory. Poison was to go into the king’s dish of fish. A boy in the secret stopped him eating it and gave some to a servant and a dog, and both died within hours.

An English letter from Bombay dated 12 October 1681, quoted by Sarkar, records the punishment: “For plotting against his life, he hath put to death Annaji Pandit, Hiraji Farzand,” and others, “bound and put under elephants’ feet.” Soyrabai was dead by 27 October, “by report poisoned by Shambhuji Rajah’s contrivance” in the Bombay letter’s words. These English records, Sarkar argues, disprove the Marathi chronicler Chitnis, who dates the killings a year earlier. Soyrabai had also been charged with poisoning Shivaji, and Sarkar’s judgment in Shivaji and His Times is that the charge was “in all probability a false pretext for wreaking vengeance on his step-mother for her late attempt to crown her own son.”

A war on too many fronts

Akbar reached Maratha country in 1681. Bhimsen says Sambhaji “considered his (Prince Akbar’s) arrival as a blessing and an honour.” By the end of July the welcome was cooling, and Sarkar quotes a Mughal newsletter in which Sambhaji warns his guest: “If you wish to raise an army, go away to some other kingdom. But if you wish to live in my realm, you must remain in the same condition that you came in.”

Aurangzeb left Ajmer for the Deccan on Thursday 8 September 1681, the Maasir records, and Sarkar has him at Aurangabad by 22 March 1682, with three of his sons and his best generals. His wars ran on several coasts at once. With Akbar he bombarded Janjira, the island fort of the Siddis (Abyssinian admirals allied with the Mughals), for 30 days from December 1681, until a Mughal advance into the north Konkan called him back. An English letter from Bombay reported him “resolved not to raise the siege so long as he hath a rag to his back.” War with the Portuguese followed in 1683, and when their viceroy besieged Phonda that October, Sambhaji’s approach made him withdraw.

By December 1683 the Surat factors were remarking that Sambhaji had “too many irons in the fire,” and Sarkar agrees that he scattered his strength on the western coast while Aurangzeb sat on his eastern flank. Bijapur fell to the Mughals in 1686 and Golkonda in 1687.

The minister both sides blamed

Kavi Kalash was a Kanauji Brahman, the Bhonsle family’s hereditary priest at Allahabad. He arrived at Raigad shortly before Sambhaji’s coronation, Sarkar writes, and gradually took over the administration. By November 1682 he was known in Bombay as “the chiefest minister of State.” Local Brahmans and Maratha patriots, Sarkar writes, have hated his memory.

Sarkar argues the other way in a long footnote. It is “historically untrue,” he writes, “to make Kavi-kalash the scapegoat for Shambhu’s sins,” because the other seven ministers and all the lower officers were men of Maharashtra, and Moro Pant had not moved the young king to any great deed either. Their dislike came, he says, from the fact that Kavi Kalash “gained the royal favour and they could not.”

What the chroniclers say about the sentence

Aurangzeb, in Khafi Khan’s account, “descended from his throne” on seeing the captives, in thanks to God. Kabkalas then recited Hindi verses to Sambhaji: “O Raja, at the sight of thee the King ‘Alamgir (Aurangzeb), for all his pomp and dignity, cannot keep his seat upon his throne, but has perforce descended from it to do thee honour.” Sarkar files this as a tradition. Some councillors, Khafi Khan adds, advised sparing the pair “on condition of surrendering the keys of the fortresses held by the adherents of Sambha,” and the Emperor “rejected the advice.”

Saqi Mustaid Khan states the grounds: “In consideration of the harshness and insult that he had practised by slaying and imprisoning Muslims and plundering the cities of Islam, the destruction of this wicked infidel preponderated over the reasons for keeping him alive.” Sambhaji and Kavi Kalash died “with the sword on Monday, the 11th March, 1689.” He ties the day to the Emperor’s arrival at Koregaon on the Bhima on 3 March.

On the order of the punishments the three writers do not agree. Khafi Khan has the Emperor order “that the tongues of both should be cut out,” then their eyes torn out, then death “with a variety of tortures” for the two and ten or eleven others, and their heads, stuffed with straw, shown in every city of the Deccan. According to the Maasir, Sambhaji’s eyes were put out the night he arrived and Kavi Kalash’s tongue was cut out the next day, then both died by the sword. Bhimsen has Sambhaji’s eyes “put out with nails” and, “after two or three days,” the shoulders of both men “lightened of the load of his head,” which would put the beheading within days of the parade. His editors footnote it to 11 March, the Maasir’s date.

What the later tellers added

Niccolao Manucci, a Venetian whose Storia do Mogor covers India from 1653 to 1708, says Kavi Kalash lured Sambhaji to a village with talk of a married woman and then warned Aurangzeb to send horsemen. None of the three Mughal chroniclers says so. Manucci also says Aurangzeb had Sambhaji’s side cloven open with an axe and his heart taken out, and the body thrown on a dunghill to the dogs.

Robert Orme’s Historical Fragments, first published in 1782, holds the earliest version of a conversion offer we could trace. Orme says Aurangzeb offered Sambhaji “life, and rank in his service, if he would turn Mahomedan,” that the prisoner answered with abuse of the Prophet, and that a second offer, after his tongue had been cut out, drew a written reply: “Not if you would give me your daughter in marriage.” Orme names no source for the offer. Kincaid and Parasnis retell it in 1922, with a footnote naming Orme, the Shedgaonkar bakhar and Khafi Khan as authorities for the scene, but Khafi Khan has no conversion offer in the passage quoted above.

Sarkar’s version in the History of Aurangzib draws on several writers. He has Sambhaji abuse the Emperor and “scurrilously” ask for one of Aurangzeb’s daughters, a fortnight of torture, then limbs hacked off one by one, citing the Mughal writer Ishwardas, and flesh thrown to dogs, citing Manucci. He mentions no conversion offer. A conversion attempt does appear in the court records he uses, but it concerns Sambhaji’s son. Aurangzeb sent Hamid-ud-din Khan in May 1703, Sarkar writes from the court newsletters, to urge Shahu to become a Muslim, and Shahu refused.

Eighteen more years

Maratha opinion on the king’s fall was split. Sarkar writes that “to many of the Marathas this disaster probably appeared as a blessing in disguise.” Kincaid and Parasnis write that when the Maratha leaders heard how he bore his death, “all resentment against the king left their breasts.”

Maratha rule did not end. On 8 February 1689 the commander of Raigad took Rajaram out of prison and enthroned him, and Sambhaji’s widow Yesu Bai backed him, since her own son was six. Rajaram left Raigad disguised as a yogi on 5 April. Raigad fell on 19 October 1689, and Shahu, aged nine, was taken with his mother. Aurangzeb gave him a rank of 7,000 and the title of Raja and kept him in his camp. Sarkar quotes a Maratha chronicle’s note on 1689: “This year the Mughals took all the forts.” Yet Jinji, where Rajaram had set up his court, did not fall to the Mughals until 7 January 1698.

Bhimsen, who watched the later war from the Mughal camp, records a caravan looted near Chanda late in the reign and writes: “As the Marathas gain large sums on the road, they have changed the name of the king’s highway from Shah-rah to path of gold.” Aurangzeb died at Ahmadnagar on the morning of Friday 20 February 1707, more than 25 years after he left Ajmer for the Deccan.