The Rise of the Maratha Power
The rise of the Maratha power was the most spectacular example of regional state formation in the late Mughal period and developments in eighteenth-century Indian history. From its origins in the bhakti and shivaji traditions of the western Deccan, the Maratha state expanded in the early eighteenth century to become the dominant political power in India, controlling a vast area from the borders of Bengal to the gates of Delhi. The Maratha expansion was a major factor in the disintegration of the Mughal empire, and the eventual British conquest of the Maratha Confederacy in the early nineteenth century was the decisive event in the consolidation of British rule in India.
Shivaji and the Foundation of the Maratha State
The Maratha state had its origins in the political and religious traditions of the western Deccan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The bhakti devotional movement, with its emphasis on personal devotion and its synthesis of Hindu and Sufi themes, had produced a distinctive religious culture in the Marathi-speaking regions, and the Warkari tradition associated with the poet-saints of the region provided a cultural basis for a distinct Maratha identity. The political traditions of the region, including the legacy of the Yadava dynasty and the Bahmani sultanate, provided a frame of reference for the later Maratha rulers.
Chhatrapati Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha state, was born in 1630 at Shivneri, a hill fort in the Sahyadri range. His early career was spent in the service of the Adil Shahi sultanate of Bijapur, from which he broke away in the 1640s to build a state of his own. The Maratha state that Shivaji built combined several distinctive features: a highly mobile guerrilla army, the bargi and shiledar cavalry, drawn principally from the Maratha peasantry of the western Deccan; a network of hill forts in the Sahyadri range that provided a secure base for the new state; and a distinctive political ideology that combined devotion to the bhakti traditions with a commitment to the protection of Hindu religious institutions. The guerrilla warfare that Shivaji developed, based on the ganimi kava or “stealthy attack” technique, was particularly effective against the heavy cavalry armies of the Deccan sultanates, and it allowed the Marathas to defeat forces substantially larger than their own.
The most significant event in Shivaji’s career was his coronation in 1674 at Raigad, an event that formally established the Maratha state as an independent kingdom and Shivaji as a sovereign ruler of equal rank to the Mughal emperor. The coronation was performed with great ceremony, and the new monarch assumed the title of Chhatrapati, the “lord of the umbrella,” an ancient title of Hindu sovereignty. The coronation was a direct challenge to the Mughal and Deccan sultanate claims to sovereignty in the region, and it inaugurated a long period of conflict between the Maratha state and its neighbours.
The Conflict with Aurangzeb
The conflict between the Maratha state and the Mughal empire was one of the longest and most exhausting military campaigns of the late seventeenth century. Aurangzeb’s campaign against the Marathas, which began in 1681 and continued until the emperor’s death in 1707, was a major factor in the depletion of the imperial treasury and the overstretching of the imperial military establishment. The emperor himself spent the last twenty-five years of his life in the Deccan, conducting a campaign that, despite substantial military successes, was never able to suppress the Maratha resistance.
The Maratha resistance to Aurangzeb’s campaign drew on several distinctive features of the Maratha state. The guerrilla warfare technique developed by Shivaji and refined by his successors was particularly effective in the difficult terrain of the Sahyadri range, where the heavy cavalry of the Mughal army was at a substantial disadvantage. The Maratha leadership, including Shivaji’s son Shambhaji and the regent Rajaram and his queen Tarabai, displayed considerable military and political skill in resisting the Mughal campaign. The death of Aurangzeb at Ahmednagar in 1707 effectively ended the Mughal campaign against the Marathas, and the subsequent release of Shahu, the Maratha prince who had been held in Mughal captivity, marked the beginning of a new phase in the Maratha expansion.
The Maratha success against the Mughals was also a consequence of the broader religious alienation of the late Mughal period. The desecration of Hindu shrines by the Mughal forces in the course of the Deccan campaigns was a major grievance of the Maratha leadership, and the Maratha resistance to Mughal authority was substantially motivated by religious sentiment. The Maratha political ideology, with its emphasis on the protection of Hindu religious institutions and the establishment of a Hindu swarajya (self-rule), provided a powerful motivation for the resistance to Mughal authority, and it contributed to the substantial popular support that the Maratha state enjoyed in the western Deccan.
The Maratha Confederacy under the Peshwas
The Maratha state of the early eighteenth century was substantially different from the kingdom that Shivaji had founded. The release of Shahu from Mughal captivity in 1707 was followed by a period of political confusion, in which Shahu, the grandson of Shivaji, was challenged by the claims of the rival branch of the Maratha royal family at Kolhapur. The resolution of this conflict was the appointment of Balaji Vishwanath as Peshwa, or chief minister, in 1713. The Peshwa, although technically the chief minister of the Maratha king, was in practice the principal executive authority in the state, and the Peshwa’s family, based at Pune, became the effective rulers of the Maratha Confederacy.
The Peshwa Balaji Vishwanath and his successors, particularly Baji Rao I (r. 1720–1740), Balaji Baji Rao (r. 1740–1761), and Madhav Rao I (r. 1761–1772), were responsible for a major expansion of Maratha power. The expansion was based on a distinctive fiscal and military system: the swaraj, the territory directly administered by the Maratha state, and the chauth and sardeshmukh, a system of revenue extraction that allowed the Marathas to project military power across a wide area. The chauth, a quarter of the land revenue, and the sardeshmukh, a tenth, were essentially protection money paid by the territories within the Maratha sphere of influence, and the system allowed the Marathas to maintain a large military force without having to administer the territories from which the revenue was extracted.
The Maratha expansion of the early eighteenth century was spectacular. Baji Rao I conducted a series of campaigns across the Indian heartland, from Gujarat to Bengal and from the Deccan to the Punjab, and he was widely regarded as the most powerful Indian ruler of his time. The Treaties of Durwasa (1732) and Bhopal (1737) recognised the Maratha right to collect chauth and sardeshmukh across the Mughal heartland, and the Maratha cavalry raided the suburbs of Delhi on several occasions in the 1730s. By the 1750s the Maratha Confederacy was the dominant political power in India, controlling a vast area from the borders of Bengal to the gates of Delhi and from the Himalayas to the borders of the Deccan sultanates.
The Maratha Confederacy and the Scindia-Holkar Rivalry
The Maratha Confederacy of the mid-eighteenth century was a complex political formation that brought together a number of prominent Maratha noble families, including the Peshwas of Pune, the Bhonsles of Nagpur, the Holkars of Indore, and the Scindias of Gwalior. Each of these families controlled substantial territories and military forces, and the relationship between them was a complex mixture of cooperation, rivalry, and outright conflict. The most important rivalry of the period was that between the Scindias and the Holkars, which developed into a major political crisis of the Confederacy in the late eighteenth century.
Mahadji Scindia, the principal Scindia leader of the period, emerged in the 1760s and 1770s as one of the most powerful Indian rulers of his time. He established a major military force trained by European officers and equipped with modern artillery, and he became a major figure in north Indian politics. The Scindias, Holkars, and other Maratha leaders were major players in the politics of the post-Maratha Mughal empire, and they played important roles in the events leading up to the rebellion of 1857. The Scindias and the Holkars, in particular, were major political and military figures in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their rivalry was a major factor in the eventual decline of the Maratha Confederacy.
The Third Battle of Panipat
The Maratha expansion into north India brought the Confederacy into conflict with the Durrani Afghan state founded by Ahmad Shah Abdali. The Third Battle of Panipat, fought on 14 January 1761, was one of the most decisive battles of eighteenth-century India. The Maratha army, led by Sadashiv Rao Bhau, was defeated by the Afghan forces, and the battle marked a major setback for Maratha expansion into north India. The battle is often cited as the principal event that halted Maratha expansion and paved the way for the British consolidation of power in Bengal, but the interpretation has been challenged by recent scholarship, which has emphasised the resilience of the Maratha state in the decades after Panipat.
The Third Battle of Panipat had major consequences for the Maratha state. The military losses were substantial, and the political effect of the defeat was to weaken the prestige of the Peshwa and to encourage the centrifugal tendencies of the various Maratha noble families. The Peshwa’s authority, already compromised by the defeat, was progressively undermined by the rise of the Scindias, Holkars, and Bhonsles, and the Maratha Confederacy of the late eighteenth century was a looser political formation than the centralised state that Baji Rao I had built. The economic decline of the Mughal Empire and the broader decline of the Mughal empire created the conditions in which the Maratha expansion could occur, and the Maratha failure to consolidate their gains after Panipat left the way open for the British expansion of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The Anglo-Maratha Wars
The British expansion of the late eighteenth century brought the British East India Company into direct conflict with the Maratha Confederacy. The First Anglo-Maratha War (1775–1782) was triggered by the British capture of the family of the Peshwa at the Battle of Kharda in 1763 and the subsequent internal conflicts of the Maratha state. The war was inconclusive, and the Treaty of Salbai (1782) restored the status quo ante bellum, but the war established a pattern of British intervention in Maratha politics that was to continue throughout the next half century.
The Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803–1805) was a more decisive conflict. The Maratha Confederacy, by this time dominated by the Scindias and the Holkars, was substantially defeated by the British forces under Lord Wellesley, and the Treaty of Deogaon (1803) and the Treaty of Surji-Anjangaon (1803) imposed substantial territorial losses on the Confederacy. The Pindari War of 1817–1818, in which the British suppressed the Pindari robber bands that had been operating in central India, was a further demonstration of British military superiority, and the Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817–1818) completed the conquest of the Confederacy. The Peshwa Baji Rao II, the last Peshwa, was defeated at the Battle of Khadki and the Battle of Koregaon, and the Maratha territories were annexed to the British East India Company’s dominions. The Scindias and the Holkars were reduced to subsidiary alliance status, and the Maratha political order was effectively brought to an end.
The Legacy of the Maratha State
The Maratha state, despite its eventual defeat by the British, was one of the most consequential political formations of the late Mughal period, and its legacy is substantial. The Maratha administrative system, with its emphasis on efficient revenue extraction, the use of trained military forces, and the integration of the regional nobility into a common political order, was an important model for the later British Indian administration. The Maratha cultural traditions, including the distinctive Maratha literature, music, and religious practices, continued to flourish after the political decline of the state. The Maratha political traditions, including the commitment to the protection of Hindu religious institutions and the establishment of a Hindu swarajya, also had a substantial influence on the later development of Hindu nationalism in India.
The Maratha Confederacy is also important as a case study in the political dynamics of the late Mughal period. The Confederacy was a regional successor state that combined the political, fiscal, and military apparatus of the Mughal empire with a distinctive regional base and a distinctive political ideology. The Maratha state was a genuine political innovation rather than a rump principality carved from a dying empire, and its rise and fall illustrate the broader dynamics of the decline of the Mughal empire. The Maratha conflict with the Mughals, the rise of the Sikh power, the British East India Company’s expansion, and the eventual rebellion of 1857 are all part of a single connected history in which the political fragmentation of the late Mughal period created the conditions for new political formations and the eventual British conquest of India. For the broader context, the Mughal decline overview, the reign of Aurangzeb, the history of the later Mughals, and the Mughal military overview offer comprehensive treatments of the empire’s later centuries.
Sources
- Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, 1600–1818 (NCHI II.4, 1993).