What Happened to the Peshwa's Family After the British Exiled Him?

On the twenty-eighth of January 1851, at Bithoor, a small town on the Ganges near Cawnpore, today Kanpur, Baji Rao the Second, the last Peshwa of the Maratha Empire, died at the age of seventy-six, after thirty-three years in exile. On the day he died, his pension of eight hundred thousand rupees a year stopped. Some fifteen thousand people had depended on it. His adopted son and heir, Nana Sahib, asked the British to continue it. The Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, refused. The Peshwas had once ruled from Pune at the head of the Maratha confederacy, for much of the eighteenth century the greatest power on the subcontinent. In 1818, beaten in the Third Anglo-Maratha War, Baji Rao surrendered to Sir John Malcolm, gave up all his titles and was sent north, more than a thousand kilometres from Pune, to an exile on the Ganges. It was a golden cage: a palace, a little court, an enormous pension, and no power at all. In this video, we trace what actually happened to the Peshwa's family after the British exiled him. From the adopted sons of Bithoor, and a girl named Manikarnika who grew up at the old Peshwa's court and became Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, to the mission Nana Sahib sent to London in 1853 to save the pension, which failed. From the rebellion of 1857 at Cawnpore, where a promised safe passage for the British garrison ended in a massacre and the women and children taken prisoner were later killed, all under Nana Sahib's flag, though historians still argue over who gave the orders, to the British revenge and the palace at Bithoor razed to the ground. We follow the family in flight to Nepal, where the women paid for protection with their jewels, his brother, said to have died of fever, his nephew Rao Sahib, hanged in 1862, and Nana Sahib himself, who vanished without a body, a grave or a confirmed date of death. And we end in Varanasi, with the descendants of another branch of the family, still receiving a small pension in 2009. This is the full story of a family that traded an empire for a pension, and then lost everything else. If you made it this far, leave the word Bithoor in the comments. And if you enjoyed the video, please subscribe. These deep dives take real work, and your support genuinely makes a difference. Sources: • Wikipedia, Baji Rao II • Wikipedia, Nana Saheb Peshwa II • Wikipedia, Third Anglo-Maratha War • Wikipedia, Treaty of Bassein (1802) • Wikipedia, Siege of Cawnpore • Wikipedia, Bibighar massacre • Wikipedia, Bithoor • Wikipedia, Azimullah Khan • Wikipedia, Tatya Tope • Wikipedia, Rani of Jhansi • Wikipedia, Amrut Rao • Indica Today, Baji Rao II and the Establishment of Bithoor, parts I and II • Tantia Topi's deposition (1859), in Kaye and Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, vol. 5 • britishempire.co.uk, Cawnpore: Nana Sahib and Rao Sahib • FIBIS wiki, First Lucknow Relief • Outlook India, Pride, Flash, Glory and Dust • Open Magazine, on Mahendra Peshwa (2009) #Peshwa #BajiRaoII #NanaSahib #MarathaEmpire #Marathas #Bithoor #Kanpur #Cawnpore #Pune #RaniLakshmibai #TatyaTope