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Freedom fighter

Nana Saheb Peshwa

Adopted heir of the last Peshwa

19 May 1824 – after 1859 (fate unknown)

Dhondu Pant, adopted son of Peshwa Baji Rao II, led the rising at Kanpur in 1857 after the Company refused him his father’s pension. He withdrew into the Nepal Terai in 1859 and was never seen again by the British.

01The pension that was stopped

Baji Rao II, the last Peshwa, surrendered to the Company in 1818 and was sent to Bithoor on the Ganga with a pension of eight lakh rupees a year. Having no son, he adopted Dhondu Pant in 1827. When Baji Rao died on 28 January 1851, the Company refused to continue the pension to his heir. Nana sent his agent Azimullah Khan to London to plead the case; the appeal failed. He lived at Bithoor on the family’s private estate, on good terms in public with the British officers at Kanpur.

02Kanpur, 1857

In June 1857 the sepoys at Kanpur rose and Nana Saheb put himself at their head. General Wheeler’s entrenchment was besieged from 6 June and surrendered on terms on 25 June. On 27 June, as the garrison boarded boats at Satichaura Ghat, firing broke out and most of the men were killed. The women and children taken captive were held at the Bibighar and were killed on 15 July as Havelock’s column approached; who gave that order is still argued over. Havelock took Kanpur on 17 July, and Neill’s reprisals on the city and nearby villages followed. Nana had been proclaimed Peshwa at Bithoor on 1 July.

The Peshwas of Pune
Dynasty · 1713–1818 CEThe Peshwas of PuneThe Peshwas were the hereditary chief ministers of the Chhatrapatis, and from 1713 to 1818 they ran the Maratha state from Pune. Under Bajirao I and his son Nanasaheb the Marathas became the strongest power in India, until Panipat in 1761 and the British wars that ended the line in 1818.Read →

Battles

Kanpur, 1857

Nana Saheb, adopted son of the last Peshwa, led the rising at Kanpur; the siege, the killings at Satichaura Ghat and the Bibighar, and the Company’s reprisals made it the darkest chapter of 1857.

June–December 1857

Places

Kanpur (Cawnpore)Standing
Company rule and the war of 1857

Kanpur (Cawnpore)

The Ganga town where the Company kept a great cantonment and where, in June and July 1857, Nana Saheb’s forces besieged and destroyed the British garrison. It became one of the bitterest names of that war on both sides.

Bithoor (Brahmavarta)Standing
Company rule and the war of 1857

Bithoor (Brahmavarta)

Brahmavarta on the Ganga above Kanpur, honoured as the place of Brahma’s yajna and of Valmiki’s ashram, where the last Peshwa lived in exile and where Nana Saheb, Tatya Tope and the girl who became Rani Lakshmibai grew up together.