They Thought a Widow and Her Four-Year-Old Son Would Be Easy to Defeat

A four-year-old boy sat on the throne of a crumbling empire. His father had just died. And the most powerful ruler on the subcontinent wanted his entire dynasty wiped off the map. Standing between the child and total annihilation was his mother — a 25-year-old widow the Mughals had already dismissed as no threat at all. Her name was Tarabai.

She was born in 1675, the daughter of Hambir Rao Mohite, Commander-in-Chief of the Maratha army. She did not grow up like other girls of her time. She was trained in sword fighting, archery, horseback riding, and diplomacy — the education of a soldier, given to her because the world she was born into was already at war. That war was with the Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb, and it was merciless. In 1680, the Maratha founder Shivaji died. His son Sambhaji took the throne, and in March 1689, he was captured and executed by the Mughals. Tarabai’s husband, Rajaram, stepped in to hold the empire together. He died too, in 1700, leaving behind an infant son and a kingdom on the edge of collapse.

The boy, Shivaji II, was four years old. He was declared ruler. His mother became regent. And she took command of the army. The Mughals were delighted. In their eyes, only a helpless woman and a child now stood in their way. They could not have been more wrong. Tarabai did not wait to be attacked. She rode between forts, rebuilt shattered alliances, raised men and money, and — most remarkably — went on the offensive. She led cavalry charges from the front. A Mughal officer named Bhimsen, no friend of the Marathas, admitted in his own memoir that she governed so tightly that not a single Maratha commander acted without her order.

Here is what most people miss: Tarabai’s genius was not just courage — it was that she studied her enemy and turned his own methods against him. Aurangzeb bribed rival commanders to switch sides; Tarabai did the same to his. Aurangzeb built an administration around revenue collectors; Tarabai appointed her own to tax the very lands the Mughals thought they controlled. Instead of merely defending Maratha territory, she pushed the war outward, sending armies deep into the Mughal heartland as far as Malwa and Gujarat. A kingdom that was supposed to be dying under her was, instead, expanding. For seven years, she held the line against Aurangzeb, an emperor who commanded one of the largest armies on earth. He spent the last stretch of his life trying to crush the Marathas and failed. In 1707, he died in the Deccan, the resistance still unbroken.

But Aurangzeb had left a weapon behind. Years earlier, the Mughals had captured Sambhaji’s wife and his young son, Shahu, and raised the boy in their court. After Aurangzeb’s death, they released Shahu — and they knew exactly what they were doing. Shahu had a direct claim to the throne. His freedom was designed to split the Marathas from within. It worked. Tarabai refused to accept Shahu, arguing that a lifetime as a Mughal prisoner had left him unfit to rule. The dispute became open war between the Marathas. One by one, her own chieftains defected to Shahu’s side. He was crowned at Satara. Tarabai, who had saved the empire, was pushed out of it.

She did not surrender. She set up a rival court at Kolhapur. But she was outmaneuvered again, this time by allies within her own camp, and she was imprisoned — along with her son. During roughly sixteen years of captivity, Shivaji II died. The child she had fought an empire to protect did not outlive her. And still, she was not finished. Freed at last and placed under house arrest at Satara, Tarabai waited. When the aging ruler Shahu fell gravely ill in the 1740s with no heir of his own, she produced a young man she declared was her grandson, Ramraja. Shahu named him his successor. For a brief moment, the old queen had maneuvered her bloodline back onto the throne.

Then the young ruler drifted toward the powerful Peshwa, Nana Saheb — and Tarabai, in a move that still stuns historians, publicly disowned him, declaring he had never been her grandson at all. Power, to her, was never sentimental. By 1752, the fight was over. She accepted a treaty recognizing the Peshwa’s authority and settled into her final role: a formal dowager holding court at Satara. The records of those years are quietly devastating. The woman who had once turned back the mightiest empire in India now issued orders about feed rates for cavalry horses, approved the re-thatching of temple roofs, and settled a divorce case involving her own maid. It was a small stage for someone who had once commanded a war.

Tarabai died on December 9, 1761, at the age of 86. Only months earlier, at the Third Battle of Panipat, an Afghan invader had shattered the Maratha army in a single catastrophic day. Many historians argue that if Tarabai had not seized command back in 1700, the empire would have collapsed decades before Panipat ever happened — and there would have been nothing left to shatter. The war she fought against the Mughals lasted twenty-seven years. She did not win it outright. But she made sure the Marathas survived it, and that survival allowed them to grow into a power that, at its peak, dominated much of India.

They underestimated her because she was a woman and a widow with a child on her knee. History remembers what that mistake cost them. The measure of a life is not the throne you hold, but what still stands because you once refused to fall.