In 1810, when Amir Khan Pindari attacked Udaipur on behalf of Man Singh, 16-year old Krishna agreed to be poisoned to death, to put an end to the war.
Krishna Kumari was one of the several daughters of Bhim Singh, the Rajput ruler of the Udaipur princely state in the Mewar region.
[3] Man Singh then threatened to invade Mewar, and enlisted the support of Daulat Rao Sindhia, the Maratha ruler of the Gwalior State, by paying a tribute.
[4] Subsequently, Sindhia personally intervened in the dispute, hoping to play an active role in the Rajput politics.
Yashwant Rao Holkar, the Maratha ruler of the Indore State and a rival of Sindhia, also decided to take advantage of this conflict to demand tributes from the Rajputs.
Subsequently, he signed an agreement with Holkar, who promised not to object to his marriage to Krishna, and to support Jaipur against a possible attack from Sindhia.
Tucker expressed the possibility of a conflict involving the Rajput states, as well as Sindhia and Holkar, which would "make a very desirable diversion" in the favour of the company.
Soon after this, Jagat Singh's army was forced to leave Jodhpur because of scarcity of water, and because of defections by several Rathores, Sarjerao Ghatge and Amir Khan.
[13] According to a contemporary British account published in the Asiatic Annual Register for 1810-11, Amir Khan came up with the suggestion to poison Krishna "as the only mode of at once settling all their pretensions, and terminating the ten years' war, which this second Helen had excited.
The circumstances of the princess's death were introduced to the British public by Major-General Sir John Malcolm in ‘A Memoir of Central India', 1824.
Another source of information in Britain was Muhammad Amir Khan, an active participant as noted above, whose memoirs were translated from the Persian and published in 1832.
Amir Khan's account of her final moments states that: 'Accordingly, having bathed, and dressed herself in new and gay attire, she drank off the poison, and so gave up her precious life, earning the perpetual praise, and admiration of mankind.
The Asiatic Journal, June 1835, in an article on Oodipore refers to the 'well-known fate of the beautiful Kishen Kower, or Krishna Komari.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon tells the story within The Zenana, again under the heading Kishen Kower[23] (and giving apologies for the anachronism, as the main action of this long poem is set much earlier).
A second, more extended version of the story, appeared in The East India Sketch-book, 1836 (Elizabeth Bruce Elton Smith), entitled The Three Moons.