Sambhaji Maharaj: nine years of war that Aurangzeb could not win

Aurangzeb's descent on the Deccan was not only about Sambhaji — but Sambhaji made it personal and urgent. Three pressures converged. First, the rebellion of Prince Akbar: a Mughal prince in arms, sheltered by an enemy king, threatened the legitimacy of Aurangzeb's own throne, and he could not let his son build a rival base in the south. Second, the Deccan sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda, wealthy and independent, had long defied Delhi; the emperor intended to annex them and thought the Marathas could be swept up in the same campaign. Third, Aurangzeb had come to see the Marathas as more than raiders — they were a rising Hindu-led power carving a state out of imperial territory, and he wanted it destroyed at the root. He gravely underestimated the task. Maratha strength lay not in set-piece battles but in hill forts, monsoon terrain, and mobile guerrilla warfare that Sambhaji, like his father, used to bleed a huge conventional army. Aurangzeb took Bijapur in 1686 and Golconda in 1687, yet the Marathas he came to finish outlasted him. Historians from Jadunath Sarkar onward have read the Deccan war as the strategic overreach that hollowed out the Mughal empire from within.

Sambhaji (1657-1689) — the Chhatrapati himself: warrior, administrator, and a genuine scholar who wrote in Sanskrit. Aurangzeb (1618-1707) — the Mughal emperor who moved his court south and personally directed the war for over two decades, dying in the Deccan without breaking Maratha resistance. Kavi Kalash — Sambhaji's Kannauj-born Brahmin adviser, poet and confidant, captured and executed with him. Prince Muhammad Akbar — Aurangzeb's rebel son, sheltered by Sambhaji for years before fleeing to Persia in 1687; the asylum that turned the emperor's fury personal. Rajaram (1670-1700) — Sambhaji's half-brother and rival in the succession, who took up the leadership after the execution and kept the resistance alive from Jinji in the far south. Yesubai — Sambhaji's queen, captured with their young son Shahu; she preserved the dynasty's claim through eighteen years of Mughal captivity. Ganoji Shirke and the Shirke faction — Sambhaji's own in-laws, who betrayed his location to the Mughals. Muqarrab Khan — the Mughal commander who sprang the trap at Sangameshwar in February 1689.

For nearly two centuries Sambhaji's memory was carried mostly by his enemies. Mughal chroniclers wrote to justify his execution; some later Maratha bakhars, sympathetic to his rival's camp, painted him as reckless and dissolute. Colonial historians took these at face value — James Grant Duff in 1826 called him a debauched, unfit ruler, and even the nationalist scholar M.G. Ranade dismissed his reign as one that could hardly be said to have governed at all. That verdict held into the twentieth century. Then the sources were re-examined. Dr. Kamal Gokhale's scholarly Marathi biography Shivputra Sambhaji (1971) used new documents to argue for a far more capable king; historians noted, as Jadunath Sarkar had cautioned, that much of the surviving evidence was written by people hostile to him. Today the pendulum has swung the other way — perhaps too far. In Maharashtra and across India, Sambhaji is now a mass hero, the subject of hit films and television, invoked at political rallies as "Dharmaveer." The danger now is the mirror image of the old one: a flattened, faultless icon in place of the flawed, formidable, complicated ruler the records actually describe.

The end came through betrayal, not defeat in battle. In February 1689 Sambhaji, with a small escort and Kavi Kalash, was resting at Sangameshwar when Muqarrab Khan's force — guided by his own kinsmen, the Shirkes — surrounded the town and seized him. He was paraded before Aurangzeb at Bahadurgad dressed in a clown's cap and mocked. According to the accounts, when ordered to surrender his forts and treasure and to convert to Islam, he refused, and the emperor ordered a slow execution. Over roughly a fortnight in March 1689 he and Kavi Kalash were tortured — the sources describe blinding, mutilation and the cutting out of the tongue — before both were beheaded on 11 March 1689 at Tulapur, where the Bhima meets its tributaries near Pune. His dismembered body was reportedly thrown into the river; villagers at nearby Vadhu Budruk are said to have gathered the remains and cremated them. The manner of the killing backfired on Aurangzeb. Instead of terrifying the Marathas into surrender, the news of a king who chose an agonising death over submission hardened them. The war did not end — it deepened.

Myth: Sambhaji was a wine-soaked wastrel who ruined his father's kingdom. This is largely the invention of hostile chroniclers and a rival court faction, uncritically repeated by colonial writers. The fact is that he held off the full weight of the Mughal empire for nine years, fought the Portuguese and the Siddis simultaneously, and left behind Budhbhushanam, a Sanskrit work on kingship and war — hardly the record of an idle drunkard. Myth: he was a flawless hero without a single misstep. Also untrue, and modern historians say so plainly. Stewart Gordon notes that Sambhaji badly alienated powerful deshmukh landholding families, and Jadunath Sarkar recorded that Maratha troops committed atrocities during the 1683 Goa campaign — including violence against civilians. His court was riven by feuds, some ending in executions, and the succession poison never fully drained. The honest verdict, from G.S. Sardesai to Kamal Gokhale, sits between the two myths: a militarily bold, intellectually serious, politically embattled king — formidable and flawed — whose reputation was blackened for two centuries before scholarship restored a fairer, more human picture.

The larger meaning of Sambhaji's life is what did not happen after his death. Aurangzeb expected the execution to shatter the Marathas; instead it steeled them. Leadership passed to Rajaram, who moved the fight to Jinji in the far south, and then to Sambhaji's widow Yesubai's line — his son Shahu, released from Mughal captivity in 1707, would refound the state under the Peshwas, and within decades Maratha power stretched from the Deccan toward Delhi, Bengal and the Punjab. The nine-year stand pinned Aurangzeb in the Deccan for the rest of his life and drained the treasure and manpower that had made the Mughal empire seem invincible; many historians treat the Deccan war as the beginning of Mughal decline. Sambhaji's example also outgrew its own century. A king who chose torture and death over conversion and surrender became, for later generations, shorthand for principled defiance — a memory that political movements have claimed, contested and sometimes distorted ever since. The clearest lesson is the one the records support without exaggeration: resistance can matter even when it ends in apparent defeat, because of what it makes possible for those who come after.