The Mughal Empire

The Maratha-Mughal Wars

The Maratha-Mughal wars, fought in three principal phases from the 1640s to the 1760s, were the longest sustained military conflict of the entire Mughal period. Beginning as a regional insurgency under Shivaji against the sultanate of Bijapur and the Mughal government of the Deccan, the conflict expanded under Aurangzeb into a twenty-five-year campaign that drained the imperial treasury and accelerated the political fragmentation of the late seventeenth century, and culminated in the eighteenth century in the rise of the Maratha Confederacy to the position of the dominant power in India. The political and military background of the conflict is examined on the rise of the Maratha power and the Shivaji and the Mughals pages.

The Origins of Maratha Resistance Under Shivaji

The origins of the Maratha-Mughal conflict lay in the political and military situation of the western Deccan in the early seventeenth century. The Maratha chieftains of the western ghats had, since the late sixteenth century, been gradually consolidating their authority over a substantial portion of the upland and hill country of the region. The most successful of these chieftains was Shivaji, who succeeded to the small principality of Poona in 1647 and over the next two decades built a substantial military and political force that came to challenge the authority of both the sultanate of Bijapur and the Mughal government of the Deccan.

The political and military background of the early Maratha polity is examined on the Maratha expansion page, and the wider context of Mughal policy in the Deccan is treated on the Aurangzeb and the Mughal administration overview pages.

The Treaty of Purandar

The first major engagement between the Marathas and the Mughal authorities occurred in the 1660s, when the Mughal government of the Deccan, then under the prince Muazzam, conducted a series of campaigns against the Maratha heartland. The campaign culminated in the Treaty of Purandar in 1665, by which Shivaji ceded a substantial portion of his territory to the Mughals and agreed to serve the empire as a mansabdar.

The Coronation of Shivaji

The Treaty of Purandar did not, in the event, settle the Maratha-Mughal conflict. Shivaji continued to build his military strength, and in 1674 he performed the ancient Hindu ceremony of coronation, assuming the title of Chhatrapati and formally establishing an independent Maratha state. The coronation was a direct challenge to Mughal authority, and it marked the beginning of an open Maratha-Mughal conflict that would last for the next three decades.

The political and religious background of the coronation is examined on the Hindu-Muslim relations and the Maratha expansion pages, and the wider context of the late seventeenth-century crisis is treated on the Aurangzeb and the Mughal Empire overview pages.

Maratha Guerrilla Tactics

The military history of the Maratha-Mughal conflict was dominated, on the Maratha side, by the systematic use of guerrilla tactics. Shivaji and his successors developed a distinctive mode of warfare that combined rapid cavalry raids, the use of small but well-trained infantry units, the exploitation of the difficult terrain of the western ghats, and the systematic avoidance of pitched battles with the larger Mughal forces. This mode of warfare proved remarkably effective against the more conventional Mughal army, and it drained the resources of the imperial government over many decades.

The Long Wars 1680s-1707

The most serious phase of the Maratha-Mughal conflict began in the 1680s, when Aurangzeb, then in the fourth decade of his reign, determined to suppress the Maratha state once and for all. The emperor himself moved to the Deccan in 1681, and for the next twenty-six years he conducted a long and increasingly difficult campaign against the Marathas. The Mughal army captured several of the principal Maratha strongholds, including the forts of Raigad, Satara, and Jinji, but it was unable to bring the Maratha leadership to a decisive engagement.

The political and military context of these campaigns is examined on the Aurangzeb and the Mughal Empire overview pages, and the institutional consequences of the long Deccan wars are treated on the economic decline of the Mughals and the Mughal administration overview pages.

The Mughal Failure to Subdue the Marathas

The Mughal failure to subdue the Marathas was facts of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The long Deccan campaigns absorbed a very substantial proportion of the empire’s military and financial resources, and they contributed directly to the crisis of the early eighteenth century. The political and economic consequences of the failure are examined on the Aurangzeb, the later Mughals, and the economic decline of the Mughals pages.

The Maratha Expansion Northward

The Maratha expansion northward, which began in the 1720s and 1730s and culminated in the engagement at the Third Battle of Panipat 1761, was the direct political consequence of the Mughal failure to subdue the Marathas in the previous century. By the 1740s, Maratha armies had pushed as far as the Punjab and had established a system of revenue extraction that, in effect, treated much of North India as a tributary region.

Sources

  • Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, 1600–1818 (The New Cambridge History of India II.4, 1993).
  • Jadunath Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times (Longmans, 1920; reprint Oriental Books, 1973).