Mahoba

Mahoba lies in Bundelkhand, a country of granite hills and shallow basins where water has to be stored in tanks. The Chandela kings made it a capital and dug the great tanks of Keerat Sagar and Madan Sagar, and rock-cut Jain figures on a nearby hill and a ninth-century granite Sun temple recall its early centuries. Later, heroic ballads preserved the memory of the Chandela warriors.

By the fourteenth century Mahoba was a provincial town under the Delhi sultans and then their successors, and it never recovered the rank it held in Chandela days. When Akbar took the fortress of nearby Kalinjar in 1569, Mahoba was recorded in his revenue register, the Ain-i-Akbari, as a district under that fortress. In the seventeenth century the Bundela chief Chhatrasal rebelled against Aurangzeb and won back much of Bundelkhand. In 1729 he asked the Maratha Peshwa for help against a Mughal attack and left him a share of his lands on his death in 1731, after which Maratha influence reached Mahoba.