THE STORY OF ICHALKARANJI
these Santaji Ghorpade was one of the greatest, and served Sambhaji with as great valour and loyalty as he had given to Shivaji, his first lord and master. And in those busy days of fighting he was loyally assisted, say the family chronicles of Ichalkaranji, by Naro Pant.
It is hardly necessary to elaborate here, perhaps, the way in which the fanatic Emperor's suicidal imprudence in cruelly killing Sambhaji reacted most unexpectedly on himself and his own empire. The Mahrattas soon found that their long cherished religion and their hard~won liberty were again in danger, and that they were faced with a return of the conditions from which Shivaji had rescued them. With such a prospect of national calamity before them, they quickly sank their personal differences and their hereditary separatist tendencies. They rallied round the standard of Rajaram, Shivaji's second son, who now sought to take up the task which Sambhaji had unfortunately refused. Pralhad Niraji, Ramchandra Nilkanth, Khando Ballal, Santaji Ghorpade, Dhanaji Jadhav and others, who pledged themselves to win or to die in the new War of Independence, unitedly advised Rajaram to become Regent of the Mahratta Kingdom during the minority of Sambhaji's son Shivaji, later so well known as Shahu Maharaj. These statesmen and generals solemnly promised their combined support to Rajaram in view of the fact that his Regency had
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