01Forty days in the camp
On 1 February 1689 Mughal troops under Muqarrab Khan surprised Sambhaji at Sangameshwar in the Konkan and captured him with his minister and friend Kavi Kalash. They were brought to Aurangzeb’s camp and paraded in humiliation. The Maasir-i-Alamgiri, the court history, records that they were blinded and their tongues cut out, and that on 11 March 1689 both were killed at the emperor’s camp at Tulapur. Maratha accounts say Sambhaji was offered his life if he gave up his forts and his treasure, and his faith, and he refused. He was thirty-one.
02The samadhi at Vadhu
Villagers of Vadhu Budruk gathered his remains and cremated them, and his samadhi stands there today, with a memorial at Tulapur by the confluence and the old Sangameshwar temple. The execution did not end the Maratha state. Rajaram escaped to Jinji, and the war that Aurangzeb had come south to finish went on for eighteen more years, until he died in the Deccan in 1707. Every year in Phalguna the anniversary is kept at both places.
The life of this place
- 1 February 1689Sambhaji and Kavi Kalash are captured at Sangameshwar.
- 11 March 1689Both are put to death at Aurangzeb’s camp at Tulapur (Maasir-i-Alamgiri).
- 1707Aurangzeb dies in the Deccan with the Maratha war unfinished.
About 30 km north-east of Pune; Tulapur and Vadhu Budruk are a few kilometres apart and are visited together.
