Sumit Guha
Maratha
Empire – summary
The Marathas, sometimes called Maharashtrians, are an Indic people, speakers of the Marathi language. The boundaries of the modern Indian state of Maharashtra were drawn so as to include all majority Marathi speaking areas. The Marathi language emerged a thousand years ago, but the Maratha Empire took shape only after 1674. Its leaders contended with the Mughal Empire and contributed to its downfall. They created a loosely knit but dynamic political system that grew within the frame of Mughal imperial power while reducing it to a shadow of its former self. Maratha governors ruled the great cities of Agra and Delhi, and it was from them that the British wrested control of North India in 1803-06. The residual Maratha states still put up a fierce resistance before succumbing to the new British Empire in 1818.
British historians wrote the first draft of Indian history. The English public was uninterested in the Marathas. The Mughal dynasty and the older states of Rajasthan received far more favorable attention. The historical narrative that the British rescued India from chaos also required a depiction of the Marathas as predatory sources of disorder. This representation has resulted in minimizing the commercial dynamism and flexibility of Maratha administration. Maratha taxation was far from destructive. It operated within a dynamic political economy that, while periodically affected (as Indian governments had long been) by climatic catastrophe or political breakdown, could recuperate quickly in better times. The Maratha Empire also represented a unique identification between a people and an empire. Ordinary farmers were proud of its political achievements and identified with the Maratha patria. The empire was also marked by a continuity with the symmetrical patterns of kinship and marriage customary in Maharashtra. While sons of secondary wives could rise to high position in the lineage, primary marriages continued to be with women of status. Affinal relatives were recognized and played a large role in governance. Also unlike the Mughal Empire, the Marathas used their own language wherever they ruled, while enriching and elaborating it. This prefigured the rise of linguistic nationalisms more generally in India under British rule.
Keywords: Forgotten empire, Gender and kinship, Indian economy in 18th century, Legal diversity, Light cavalry, Maratha empire, Peasant soldiers, Powerful queens, Religious pluralism
Contents
- Introduction: a strangely forgotten empire
- Origins of the Maratha imperial project
- Rebirth and expansion of the empire
- Loosely united: the political life of the mature empire
- Pluralism in the judicial and religious life of the Marathas
- Kinship and Gender relations
- Marathi language and Maratha power
- Economic life under the empire
- Military metamorphosis and defeat
- The end of the empire
Introduction:
a strangely forgotten empire
The
term ‘Maratha’ will here refer to a linguistically defined people, speakers of
the Indo-Aryan language, ‘Marathi’, who have inhabited Western peninsular India
since at least the eighth century CE. Most of this area is now included in the
Indian state of Maharashtra with its capital at Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The
region was unified under the rule of the Yadava dynasty between 1150 and 1300
CE. The Sultanate of Delhi was established across Northern India after 1200 CE
and its army made a surprise attack on the Maratha kingdom in 1296. It forced
its king, Ramadeva to pay a large tribute and accept the suzerainty of the
Khalji Sultans of Delhi. In 1318, Ramadeva’s successor rebelled, was defeated,
and replaced by a governor appointed from Delhi. Military commanders sent here
by the Delhi kingdom than staged a successful rebellion two decades later and
established the Bahmani kingdom in Southern India. This dynasty and its
successor Sultanates ruled over most of the Maratha country for the next 300
years, until the Chatrapati (Paramount
monarch) Shivaji established a kingdom in 1674. After the 1689, much of the
region was occupied by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r.1658-1707 CE) but never
wholly subdued. The second Maratha empire emerged out of regional resistance to
the late Mughal occupation.
The
empire’s predominance in eighteenth century India is little known to the
educated public outside Maharashtra. Those aware of the Maratha power associate
it solely with the Chatrapati Shivaji ( lived 1630-1680, ruled with that title
1674-80). Yet when the British-Indian Army under the command of the future Duke
of Wellington took the field across India in 1802, it faced the only great
power in the subcontinent that had the capacity to destroy the emerging British
empire. That power was the Maratha empire. Its rulers maintained a protectorate
over the shadow empire of the Mughals that had, in its palmy days, allowed the
English East India Company to establish its bases nearly two centuries earlier.
Yet the Maratha Empire has received only a fraction of the historiographic
attention lavished upon the Mughals by both their contemporaries and later
Europeans.
This
was, in part, because the Mughal empire was expanding vigorously in the two
centuries when European merchants and rulers became aware of the wealth
obtainable by trade with Asia. Subsequently, the English East Company
petitioned for and obtained official orders from the imperial court to exempt
their trade from various tolls. They cited these documents for centuries. Then,
in 1764 the joint army of the Mughal governors of Bengal and Awadh led by the
otherwise powerless heir to the Mughal throne came united to oust the British
from Bengal. The allies were soundly defeated. The English East India Company
(EIC) still thought it prudent to legitimize its occupation by obtaining the
administrative charge of the enlarged province of Bengal by a grant from the
Emperor in 1765. They agreed to pay him a fixed annual tribute. Coins were
still struck in his name and British envoys still stood as humble supplicants
before him and presented gifts as tokens of submission. The EIC however,
gradually extended its control and, while legally merely holder of a government
administrative service contract, yet rose to the position of a great Asian
power. They kept an anxious eye on the Maratha powers and saw them as the
greatest indigenous power in South Asia. In 1785, a memorandum by the highly
experienced Warren Hastings surveyed affairs in India. He unhesitatingly named
the Marathas as the greatest power in India, divided though they were between
the Pune government of the Peshwas, Mahadaji Shinde in North and Central India,
and the Bhosle kingdom across Central and Eastern India. Below them, he ranked
the kingdom of Mysore governed by Tipu Sultan and in third place, the Nizam of
Hyderabad, a ruler with a small territory and scanty revenue, whose military strength was “most
contemptible.” Even after the death of
Mahadaji Shinde, overlord of Delhi and Agra in 1794, the British emissary at
the Peshwa’s court noted anxiously how the “Poona Government makes subservient
to its views all the great members of the Maratha Empire…” In 1794, the important British diplomat C.W.
Malet reproved the Resident at Hyderabad for endangering the British by
contemptuous descriptions of the Marathas that might provoke them to hostility.
The next year, 1795, Maratha armies easily crushed the Nizam’s forces at Kharda
and forced many concessions from him.
The British knew the danger of provoking the Marathas. In 1774, the Government of Bombay had sought to enlarge its territory by supporting one claimant in a succession dispute for the post of Peshwa. That war had resulted in a major defeat for one British army and the conclusion of a humiliating treaty. Warren Hastings borrowed huge sums in Bengal, and managed to muster force and diplomacy enough to split the Marathas from their allies and make peace through a mutual restitution of conquests. His lengthy self-exculpatory memorandum on his conduct of Indian affairs dwelt extensively on how he had thus averted the complete destruction of a nascent British empire in India. After that war, the now completely powerless Mughal Emperor Shah Alam encountered the great Maratha chief Mahadaji Shinde. Grateful for the protection extended to him, Shah Alam then conferred the title of ‘wakil e mutlaq’ or plenipotentiary deputy on the Maratha commander, who however, accepted it on behalf of his master, the Peshwa in Pune. Thus the real lord of the imperial cities of Agra and Delhi accepted this title only as a deputy for the Peshwa. British authorities do not dwell on these transactions because they conferred de jure supervisory powers over the East India Company in Bengal upon the Court of Pune. Governor-General Richard Wellesley’s careful planning for a breach with the Marathas, the subversion of their officer corps and Arthur Wellesley’s successful execution of a campaign against them delivered the Emperor into British hands in 1803. But the notional sovereignty of the Emperor was acknowledged for another fifty years. Only in 1858 were the Indian territories formally taken over by the British crown and the Mughal emperor deposed.
Thus British historiography worked hard to build a narrative that they had succeeded an already defunct Mughal Empire. It sought to represent the Maratha power as merely been an element of the disorder that followed the decline of the Mughals empire. This was as we shall see, a misrepresentation. A historian once wrote of then fashionable comparisons between the Soviet and American systems that they compared ‘model’ (on one side), with ‘muddle’ (on the other). British historiography on the Marathas the best of their own model with the worst of the other.
Origins
of the Maratha imperial project
If
we surveyed South Asia around 1556, when the 13 year-old Akbar came to the
Mughal throne, there was nothing exceptional about the small and shaky North
Indian kingdom that he inherited from his father Humayun. It had
long-established rivals on all sides. But
Akbar and his advisors successfully constructed a mighty North Indian
empire through his reign, 1556-1605. After 1594, he began to expand southward,
annexing Gujarat and northern Maharashtra. This was when the emperor Akbar
(1556-1605) launched the enterprise of conquering south India in 1595. The
Nizamshahi capital, Ahmednagar itself fell to his armies. But then both Akbar
and his successor Jahangir (1605-1627) were baffled by an unlikely coalition of
surviving nobles who refused to succumb. These warlords gathered under an
Ethiopian regent Malik Ambar, and included the Bhonsle commander Shahaji. The
decades-long resistance was founded on a little-noticed innovation in military
strategy: this was the Maratha way of war. Its foundation was the deployment of
light cavalry composed peasant soldiers
on local horses. They showed how logistically vulnerable the expensive armies
of the Empire were. Maratha chiefs and rulers became prominent in peninsular
India by 1600. One of these was Shahaji Bhonsle. He belonged to a prominent
gentry family that served the Nizamshahi Sultans of Ahmednagar during the rise
of Mughal power in South India.
The
Nizamshahi regent Malik Ambar (d.1626) had the insight to draw his armies from
the peasant communities and local gentry of Maharashtra. The inexpensive light
cavalry they recruited long baffled the large and well-provided Mughal armies.
The residual Nizamshahi kingdom in north Maharashtra that finally fell in the
1630s after nearly forty years of warfare. After Malik Ambar’s death in 1626,
Shahaji Bhosle set up an infant heir to the throne and maintained the kingdom’s
resistance to the expansion of Mughal power. This effort sufficiently alarmed
the southern Sultanate of Bijapur to
produce a brief alliance with the northern Mughal empire. Shahaji was forced to
give up his project and accept the position of a semi-independent war-lord in
today’s northern Karnataka region.
Shahaji’s
older son Shivaji, who remained in his father’s home territory in the mountain
fortresses west of Pune city soon launched his own political project, directed
in the first instance against the Sultans of Bijapur. But the southward
expansion of the Mughal empire soon brought him into conflict with it as well.
After several vicissitudes, he established a new kingdom along the mountain
edge of west peninsular India. The launch of Maratha imperial project was
clearly marked by his decision to crown himself with the new title of
Chatrapati, meaning sovereign or emperor, in 1674. He marked the event by
launching a new era, starting from the year of his coronation. Two decades
later, the first Marathi history remembered this as an epoch-making event: “In
this epoch all the great kings have been barbarian (mleccha); now a Marāṣṭ
pādśāh became chatrapati. This was no ordinary event.”
The new imperial regime also aspired to reduce the power of local gentry and establish a more centralized administration. As a former minister, retrospectively described it, in villages where the hereditary chiefs (mirāsdār) had collected one or two thousands, they paid only two or three hundred as a lump-sum assessment. As a result the mirāsdārs grew rich and built mansions, towers and forts in the villages, posted infantry and musketeers in them and grew powerful. They would not wait on the revenue officers, and if the latter suggested an increase in the revenue, the mirāsdārs became belligerent and prepared to fight. In this way they became refractory and took forcible control of the country...
So
when the Raja (Shivaji) took the country, he demolished the towers, mansions
and forts. Garrisons were lodged in specific forts, and they were not in the
hands of the mirāsdārs. The tax-free lands and dues that they had
appropriated were taken over by the state and allowances in cash and grain
given instead. After an inspection of the villages, the dues of the [hereditary
official and chiefs] were fixed. These gentry were not allowed to build forts
and palaces and made to live in ordinary houses.
The
newly founded British colony of Bombay and its superiors at the post city of
Surat had long been worried by Shivaji’s military strength on land. In the last
decade of his life, he also laid the foundation of a naval force capable of
contending with western ships in coastal waters. They sent an ambassador with
gifts to attend on his coronation as Chatrapati at Raigarh. During the last six
years of his life (1674-80), he maintained his position and expanded his
territories northwards and southwards, anchoring them in great fortresses, both
old and newly-built. This strategic dispersal proved valuable to his successor,
Chatrapati Sambhaji (r. 1680-89) who had to face a full-scale Mughal offensive
under the leadership of the emperor Aurangzeb himself. Sambhaji was finally captured and executed in 1689.
With his death, we can say that the first phase of the Maratha imperial project
came to an end. The capital, Raigad was taken and most northern fortresses were
lost by 1690. Sambhaji’s young son was kept as a prisoner in the Mughal camp
and renamed Shahu, a name that he retained for the rest of his life.
But
Sambhaji’s successors led by his brother the Chatrapati Rajaram (1689-1700) and
then the latter’s widow Tarabai (1700-1713) moved to the southern fortress of
Jinji and while still besieged there, encouraged regional Maratha gentry to
resist the Mughals. Maratha commanders rallied, raised troops and harried the
Mughal camps and garrisons. Forts were taken and re-taken, autonomous Maratha
armies ranged across different parts of peninsular India and finally wore down
the imperial effort at conquest. As the preface to an important Marathi text on
state-craft declared in 1717:
[This
is] the kingdom against which an enemy like Aurangzeb advanced with all his
forces and resources but yet was beaten back against which he expended every
effort before disheartened, mortified, he went to the realm of death. And
Auranzeb was lord of fifty-four kingdoms, whose treasures and armies were
beyond comparison on earth…
The
foundation of the second Maratha empire was being laid. Rajaram consciously
abandoned efforts at centralization: he sent out letters restoring arrangements
that had existed before the 1670s. Instead he encouraged successful chiefs to
defend and enlarge their patrimonies. He had neither lands nor money wherewith
to reward them: so he recognized them as co-sharers in the kingdom. After his
death, his queen, Tarabai ruled as regent and maintained his policies. More and
more Maratha leaders rallied to the anti-Mughal side.
Rebirth
and expansion of the Maratha empire
In
1707, the emperor Aurangzeb died, and the retreating Mughal army released
Chatrapati Sambhaji’s son, who now declared himself the Chatrapati Shahu. He
was to rule for 42 years (r.1707-1749), but initially had to mobilize support
from the various the often feuding Maratha gentry, something he only fully
achieved by 1713, the same year as Balaji Vishwanath became his chief minister or
Peshwa. Shahu was more active in political affairs in the early decades of his
rule. He had been raised as a hostage in the Mughal imperial household and was
open to accepting a notional subjection to the waning Mughal empire in return
for real power over peninsular and then over Central India. Four generations of
Balaji’s family were to hold that office and by 1750, the Peshwas had relegated
the Chatrapatis to a ceremonial seclusion – almost imprisonment – in the town
of Satara. In 1719, the Peshwa negotiated an agreement that accepted a notional
Mughal suzerainty in return for control of six provinces of South India. In
return for accepting Mughal suzerainty, the Marathas were granted 35 per cent
of the gross revenues of the Mughal provinces. This was then an opening for
them to establish their dominance over newer areas. Raids on Bengal in the
1740s for example, were justified by the demand for a 25 per cent share
(chauth). The Mughal governor there ultimately ceded the coastal province of
Odisha (Orissa) to them in lieu of that claim.
By
1719, Maratha armies were raiding in North India and advanced boldly up to the
outskirts of the imperial capital, Delhi. They adroitly sided with one faction
and the Imperial court and compelled the emperor in Delhi to seek their
alliance. In return, the Mughal effectively conceded them extensive taxing
powers in the peninsula. Effectively, they were allowed to establish a system
of dual governance with their officials, soldiers and tax-collectors operating
alongside remaining Mughal appointees. The growth of Maratha power was
accompanied by the reconstruction of temples, but extant Islamic shrines were
not molested. Their land grants were confirmed, and some received additional
patronage from Maratha rulers. Indo-Islamic insignia and styles of dress were
also widely adopted. Persianate cultural styles continued in the eighteenth
century as the Marathas sought to establish a protectorate over the enfeebled
Mughal Emperors.
After
the long reign of Shahu, (1708-49), power effectively slipped from the line of
the Chatrapatis, who were relegated to honorable seclusion in the palace at
Satara. Chatrapati Shahu was served by three successive Peshwas or Prime
Ministers who united political, military and diplomatic talents that enabled
them to manage the numerous chieftains fighting under the Maratha flag. As a
result, the Peshwas became de facto sovereigns and Pune the center of a great
court. While Aurangzeb retreated ignominiously from south India, he nonetheless
left governors in several provinces. These were quickly extinguished by either
the Marathas, or the emerging power of Mysore under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan.
The governor in Arcot became a dependent of the British in Madras.
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