Lokmata Rising: The Many Afterlives of Ahilyabai Holkar

Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before a gathering of over two lakh women in Bhopal today, beneath banners bearing the name of Ahilyabai Holkar. The occasion was the ‘Mahila Sashaktikaran Mahasammelan,’ held to mark the 300th anniversary of the queen’s birth. “This occasion is an inspiration for 1.4 billion Indians. It is a call to contribute to nation-building efforts,” he said. Her tercentenary arrives at a moment when India’s political and cultural memory is once again actively rearranging its past—reviving some figures, retiring others, and recasting the margins of empire into the centre of nationhood.

A commemorative ₹300 coin and postage stamp bearing her likeness were unveiled, formally installing Holkar in the pantheon of Indian modernity. In his speech, Modi cast her as a template for our times and linked her legacy to land reform and tribal welfare: “Lokmata Ahilyabai established a policy for the tribal society to cultivate on undeveloped land. Serving my tribal brothers and sisters under the leadership of a tribal daughter who is currently the President of India is a blessing for me,” PM Modi said.

In drawing a straight line between a Maratha widow’s governance and contemporary welfare schemes, and referring to her efforts at temple restoration and her agrarian policy, Modi was doing more than honouring history. He was absorbing it—folding Ahilyabai Holkar’s legacy into the architecture of present power. This was not the rediscovery of a regional ruler. It was the canonisation of a moral model. A woman who governed from a riverside court was now named guardian of India’s heritage.

It is a remarkable afterlife for a ruler who spent her life resisting performance. Holkar’s legacy has never sat comfortably within textbook categories. Ahilyabai, born in 1725 in a village called Chondi near Ahmednagar, has been cast in many roles: child bride, queen dowager, Maratha governor, widow, temple-builder, legal reformer, a patron of Sanskrit scholars and Vaishnava sadhus, and lately, a national symbol of “nari shakti” invoked by everyone from feminists to political speechwriters.

Her likeness is now familiar across Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra: a bronze or marble figure, draped in a pale plain sari, usually seated, not on horseback, but with a palm-leaf manuscript or a set of scales in her lap. To sit with her legacy is to sit with the tension between duty and power, silence and governance, widowhood and rule. M Between 1767 and 1795, she governed the Holkar territory from the banks of the Narmada in Maheshwar. Her statecraft was detailed in ways that elude modern governance: she read account books, issued coins in her name, and ensured that temples were not simply beautified, but functional. She built over a hundred temples and dharamshalas across the subcontinent, including the restoration of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi. She funded the ghats of Gaya, the lingams of Somnath, and the pavements around Rameswaram. Her name appears in a dozen temple inscriptions from Gujarat to Uttarakhand.

Her governance was both meticulous and merciful. In a letter preserved in the Malwa State Records, she directs her revenue officials not to harass peasants during a poor harvest. SM Edwardes, the early 20th-century chronicler of Maratha principalities, remarked with uncharacteristic awe that the Holkar kingdom under Ahilyabai’s rule was “one of the few examples in Indian history where a woman of great piety proved also to be a capable and secular administrator”. He notes how she gave land not only to Brahmins and Goswamis, but to Muslims and Christians who requested endowments for schools or hospitals. She treated mendicants and merchants with equal seriousness.

Yet Ahilyabai did not inherit a throne. Her rise was rooted in loss. Married to Khanderao Holkar at a young age, she was widowed in 1754 when he was killed during the siege of Kumher. Her only son died a decade later. Her father-in-law, Malhar Rao Holkar, a senior general in the Maratha army and founder of the Holkar dynasty, had trained her in matters of state. It was his insistence that she not commit sati. After his death, and with the Holkar line nearly extinguished, it was Ahilyabai who took up the reins of power, not in a blaze of coronation but with the weary calm of someone who had run out of alternatives.

By the 1770s, she was India’s most quietly effective woman ruler. She did not go to war unless forced. She relied on trusted military commanders but refused to glorify violence. The Imperial Gazetteer of India refers to her rule in passing, but always with a kind of respectful bafflement: “her territories, unusually for the time, were prosperous and orderly, though lacking in outward display.”

It is this lack of display that may explain why her legacy stayed local for so long. Unlike Razia Sultan or the Rani of Jhansi, Ahilyabai left behind no battlefield, no martyrdom, no arresting image of defiance. She was not a nationalist icon because nationalism had not yet been invented. Nor did she become the muse of early feminists, who looked more easily to martyrs and militants. Instead, her memory was kept alive in Maheshwar, in village lore, temple donors’ lists, and in the long oral traditions of the Narmada valley.

Maheshwar bears her thumbprint. The ghats she laid still function as they did then. The Ahilya Fort, restored and converted in parts into a heritage hotel, still holds the simple court where she heard petitions. Malati Shendge has argued that her political genius lay not in reform or resistance, but in “sustained equilibrium”—a capacity to govern through repetition, patience, and moral credibility.

Her reign came during a time of unrest: the Maratha confederacy was fragmenting; the East India Company was clawing northward; Bengal had already been lost to the British; Mughal power was symbolic at best. But Holkar territory under Ahilyabai remained sovereign, stable, and respected. So much so that Company agents, usually contemptuous of native rulers, acknowledged her court as “efficient and upright”.

Today, Ahilyabai Holkar is invoked across political lines: as a civilisational builder by the Hindu right, as a model of decentralised, welfare-oriented governance by reformists, and as a proto-feminist by education boards hungry for women worth celebrating. The term “Lokmata”—mother of the people—was not used in her lifetime. It entered circulation in the 20th century, popularised in local Marathi literature and reinforced by post-Independence state histories.

This is the paradox of her afterlife. She who governed without needing to be mythologised is now enveloped in myth. BJP’s cultural arms claim her as a restorer of sacred India, a woman who reversed the damage of Muslim rule by resurrecting destroyed temples. Yet records show that she issued grants to Sufi shrines and did not involve herself in revenge narratives. Congress, when it still held Madhya Pradesh, named housing schemes and girls’ schools after her, packaging her in the bland grammar of developmentalism. Meanwhile, serials on Marathi television show her as a stoic widow with divine wisdom—half-mortal, half-saint.

In a world addicted to proclamation, Ahilyabai governed through calibration. Her sense of timing, proportion, and restraint remains unmatched in the Indian political imagination. She did not offer spectacle, only reliability. No wonder she is hard to dramatise. Yet perhaps the absence of drama is itself the drama. A woman who rose without theatre, ruled without vanity, died without monument, and still remained unforgettable. In that, she remains politically useful—but also personally haunting. She asks more of us than we are used to giving our historical figures: not awe, not projection, but respect.

As India marks her three hundredth year, the temptation will be to encase her in slogans, to sculpt her into another bullet-point for textbooks and speeches. But Ahilyabai Holkar, Lokmata, builder of ghats and granaries, deserves better. She deserves to be read not as a goddess, but as a human being who made difficult decisions, over decades, without ever raising her voice.

Ahilyabai HolkarAhmednagarlegacyNarendra ModiSashaktikaran MahasammelanVaishnavismWeb Exclusive