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The Portuguese colonial empire on the west coast had already been defeated by Sambhaji in 1683-4 and only escaped a more serious setback because a Mughal main-force army advanced against the Marathas at the same time. Additional frictions in the 1730s led to a fresh outbreak of hostilities and in 1738-39 Maratha armies seized most of their richest territory and besieged and captured the great fortress at Bassein (Vasai) near modern Mumbai. Meanwhile, the sea-faring tradition founded by the Chatrapati Shivaji persisted. The Angres established themselves in key fortresses on the Arabian sea coast and exacted protection from or seized shipping, whether indigenous or European along that coast. They inflicted several ignominious defeats upon the English fleet from Mumbai. Even while warring with the Portuguese and overawing the English, the Marathas were able to also deploy an army that forced the powerful imperial commander, the Nizam Asaf Jah into an ignominious armistice at Bhopal in the same period (1738). They also overcame the emergent Rohilla principality that had threatened to displace the semi-independent Mughal governors in Awadh. Almost in passing, the Maratha army had advanced into the region in order to rescue the Bundela ruler Chatrasal from the Bangash Afghans who briefly dominated the central Gangetic plain or Avadh. Chatrasal ceded the fort of Jhansi and that led to the emergence of a loose Maratha suzerainty south of the Yamuna river, with dependent rulers installed in Jhansi and Banda.
Of the vestigial Mughal states within the Maratha sphere of influence only one lineage, that of Asaf Jah, that managed to survive into colonial times. This became the dynasty of Mughal governors in modern Telangana region titled “Nizams”. They tried several times to check the rise of the Marathas. Their efforts – in the 1720s, 1730s, 1750s – all failed (though you would not know this from the histories sponsored by the Nizams). Even when they raised a French-trained infantry army and secured a French alliance they were still decisively beaten at the battle of Udgir in 1760. The Nizam’s government was gradually reduced to governing securely only in East-Central Telangana area and depending on alliances with the emerging European powers, and divisions among their enemies for their survival.
In 1760-1, the Peshwa’s brother Sadashivrao followed up on earlier raids into North India that had seen a Maratha army advance across Panjab as far as Attock on the Indus river. He quickly occupied Delhi and Agra, but his force suffered a decisive check at the battle of Panipat against the Afghan king Ahmed Shah, who had also been raiding North India. Sadashivrao’s large army was almost completely destroyed. Meanwhile, a succession dispute within the Peshwa family further weakened the empire. This situation resulted in renewed attacks from the Nizam’s state which now allied itself with the Bhosle rulers of Nagpur in east central India and actually sacked the Peshwa’s capital of Pune. The Nizam was however defeated shortly thereafter and forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty. A more consequential result of the crisis of 1761-64 was that it allowed Hyder Ali, initially an officer in the Mysore army, to seize and consolidate power in that kingdom. He was unable to resist Maratha armies but their subcontinental preoccupations prevented them from launching a concerted effort against him. Overall, however, Maratha recovery from the disaster at Panipat was swift. The refractory state of Nagpur brought to heel, Hyder Ali of Mysore was chastised and expansion in northern India resumed, reaching a new level when Mahadaji Shinde secured the position of Imperial Deputy for the Peshwa. In 1795, the Nizam of Hyderabad again challenged the Peshwas and was once more defeated. But soon after, following a titanic struggle, the rising economic and military power of the British was finally able to break up the empire, annex its central territories and reduce other states to vassalage – a process that lasted till 1818.
Loosely united: the political life of the mature empire
In Hastings’ time, several different Maratha chiefs had established regional kingdoms across the subcontinent, while still avowing the suzerainty of the Chatrapati in Satara through his ministers, the Peshwas in Pune. They sometimes warred with each other: the British government in Madras observed in 1770 that nothing could reduce their power except internal dissensions “and it is fortunate for the other Powers in Hindustan that the Maratha Chiefs are always ready to take every advantage of each other.” But Hastings in 1786 also added that the Mahrattas possess alone, of all the peoples of Indostan and Decan, a principle of national attachment which is strongly impressed on the minds of all individuals of the nation, and would probably unite their chiefs as in one common cause, if any great danger were to threaten the general state.
The Maratha state was not never a tightly knit hierarchy: much of its dynamism came from the independent enterprise of chiefs whose authority was loosely bound to that of the Chatrapati in Satara and the ministerial establishment based largely in the city of Pune. The historian Andre Wink described it as spreading across the subcontinent as a loose association or confederacy of military rulers. This was also how an Irish officer in the Maratha service saw it in 1796. It was not, W.H. Tone declared, a monarchy, nor did it have a hereditary nobility so that it might be termed an aristocracy. Overall, therefore, he thought it might best be termed a “military republic, composed of chiefs who are independent of each other; acknowledging as their supreme head the Paishwa, who is himself the supposed minister of the Sattara Rajah. Their submission is however, in many particulars, merely nominal.” Their dissensions were the obverse of their political dynamism.
W.H. Tone, an Irishman who became an infantry officer in the Maratha service also remarked on “the great simplicity of manners” which distinguished the Maratha people and extended to shape the style of Maratha courts and rulers.
“I have seen one of the most powerful chiefs of the empire, after a day of action, assist in kindling a fire to keep himself warm during the night, and sitting on the ground on a spread saddle-cloth, dictating to his secretaries and otherwise discharging the duties of his station.”
That was characteristic of this relatively open empire. Energetic and capable men of humble rural origins could rise to high rank. The agricultural regime in arid Western India had never been able to support the growth of a complex rentier hierarchy. Villages were predominantly inhabited by peasant proprietors, collectively responsible for taxes and governed by their headmen. Villages were clustered in parganas of 50 to 200 villages with strong hereditary chiefs assisted by hereditary accountants. The right to serve as headman (pāṭil) of an ancestral village was eagerly sought by great potentates. Indeed Mahadaji Shinde (Scindia), ruler of Delhi and Agra, so prided himself on the family post that it was said of him that he had made himself overlord of Hindustan while calling himself pāṭil (headman).
Pluralism in the judicial and religious life of the Marathas
Royal claims to tribute and taxes were assigned to holders of military prebends and usually managed through hereditary officers. Over time, however, the Sultans and then Mughal emperors also installed prayer-leaders and qāḍis in some villages and most towns. These quickly became hereditary properties as many offices already were. The local qadi always formed part of the tribunals of arbiters that gathered to settle important local disputes. Before the seventeenth century, the qadi was usually listed among the central, or royal officials but the rise of an autonomous Maratha kingdom led them to affiliate with other local watandārs (property-owners). Wael Hallaq has argued that the qāḍis like other officials had always to consider the effects of their decisions on their own social, economic and moral networks. This flexibility is what probably preserved them into the 19th century. It could also be turned to advantage with practices not permissible in classical Islamic law, but current among the majority Hindu community were introduced. This was even done by the widow of a Muslim judge, who successfully petitioned to adopt an heir who would succeed to her late husband’s hereditary post. Elsewhere, many custodians of the local mosque or shrine came to depend on fees for slaughtering animals for the Maratha residents, with religious roles as a secondary occupations.
Kinship and Gender relations
The empire was marked by a social continuity between peasants, soldiers, chiefs and rulers. This meant that Maratha kinship and gender relations, even within ruling houses retained the character that they had among the population as a whole. W.H. Tone wrote that he had seen the daughter of a prince who commanded immense armies, nonetheless making bread with her own hands. A more important effect was the extent to which marriage relations remained bilateral and isogamous. As a result, even when the Maratha chiefs and rulers reached high positions they still sought to marry into families of rank in Maratha society. This led to newly risen princes marrying into distinguished, but not always prosperous families that had been prominent in the days of the Sultanates. Iravati Karve was the first anthropologist to study this deeply. She pointed out, Maharashtra is a transition zone between the Dravidian-speaking culture zone and the Indo-Aryan one. The area has therefore integrated the culture of marriage as an alliance of equal lineages that continue to intermarry through time with the patriarchal structure of northern India. This meant that incoming queens were persons of status, who often brought some of their relatives with them into the new household they joined. Ruling houses maintained these customary practices along with the partition of property among sons, sometimes even extending to the partition of kingdoms. Finally, the executive power of royal women formed a continuous theme throughout Maratha history. The widowed queen Tarabai directed the successful struggle against Mughal occupation after her husband’s death in 1700. Many such powerful women are found in Maratha history, including the famous queen Lakshmibai of Jhansi who died in battle against the British in 1858.
Marathi language and Maratha power
The Marathi language became predominant in the life of the Maratha empire. I will therefore seek to delineate a history of language awareness and language use in the Marathi-speaking world. Middle Marathi much inflected with Persian was the standard language of scribes across the empire. Its origins lie during the Bahmani sultanate (c.1350-1500). Regional scribes benefited from linguistic segregation that rendered their records and accounts impenetrable to central authority. This then forced imperious court officials to accommodate them in the political system.
Malik Ambar died in 1626 and Shahaji Bhosle began his bid to control the Sultanate. By that time the political significance of Maratha gentry and soldiers was manifested in the increasing volume of bilingual Persian-Marathi edicts, orders and other official documents issuing from the both the Nizamshahi and Adilshahi courts. It is also perhaps significant that documents issued by the great Maratha families (Bhosle, Nimbalkar, Ghorpade, Kharate, Ghatge) were exclusively in (heavily Persianized) Marathi. An early survey by the leading scholar G.H. Khare, found no examples of Persian or bilingual documents sent out by them. We also have a return to a stronger emphasis under Rajaram and Tarabai on the ethnic Maratha character of the kingdom. In a letter—likely one of many sent in the desperate year 1690—Rajaram wrote to Baji Sarjerao Jedhe, “he Marāṣṭa rājya āhe” (this is a Maratha kingdom). As we have seen, the experienced minister Krishnaji Ananta Sabhasad nostalgically read ethnic (Marāṣt) assertion into Shivaji’s coronation as Chatrapati in 1674. The Marathi language expanded to serve the expanding empire. It is interesting that the Peshwas, who took effective control of the Maratha state in the early eighteenth century, while lavishly patronizing the traditions of Sanskrit learning, did not promote it seriously in the sphere of government and diplomacy. Some Sanskrit correspondence continued, as for example in a letter sent with two emissaries to Jodhpur in 1736. But the text is a word-for-word translation of a Marathi official text with all the conventions of that genre. It also bears a great formal resemblance to Rajasthani letters in the same collection. I surmise that scribes in all three languages were modeling themselves on well-established Persian epistolary conventions. The letter ends with the conventional Marathi protocol “Why should I write much?” but in Sanskrit. Meanwhile, back in Maharashtra, the language of the administrative documents of the era reflects, if anything, the strong legacy of sultanate/Mughal statecraft and eighteenth century Hindustani usage. Memory of the empire served however to energize the Marathi language and, with the adoption of printing, to create the largest body of popular historical writing extant in South Asia.
Economic life under the empire
Later British historians – even the few who had otherwise favorable views of the Maratha government, almost unanimously condemned its economic policies. They viewed them as disorganized, unstable and predatory: and they saw their own government as vastly superior in terms of security of life and property. That was, in fact, their major argument legitimating British conquests and annexations.
Eighteenth century India certainly saw several major calamities leading to mass starvation. But the greatest of them (the Bengal famine of 1769-70), occurred in Eastern India, in peacetime and under the supposedly beneficent rule of the English East India Company. A series of other great peacetime famines punctuated the history of the British Empire in India, down to 1900 (and the last famine came in Bengal during World War II). Seen in this comparative light the Maratha record does not seem inferior to the British. In fact, the coming of British rule was often accompanied by a depression in trade and commerce. Thus Thomas Marshall reporting from North Karnataka in 1820-21, wrote that trade had been brisk under Maratha rule despite all the exactions by tax officers. He visited a recently built market at Bagalkota where the roomy streets and large shops indicated great commercial activity in the recent past. But it was “still and spiritless”. The boards “which separate the body of the shop from the covered seat in front [were] now seldom opened, even in a Market Day.” Eighty years earlier, when the Marathas subverted Mughal power in the peninsula they imposed a pattern of dual power upon the countryside. According to the contemporary historian Khafi Khan, they had divided all the districts among themselves and “following the practice of imperial rule” appointed governors, tax collectors and highway toll collectors of their own.
They collected exorbitant amounts which they shared with corrupt Mughal appointees who did not interfere with them. Matters, he wrote, did not improve with the treaty of 1719 by which the Emperor officially conceded large shares of the gross revenue of the six provinces of South India to the Marathas. They now demanded and got access to records of all exactions, not just the official revenue but also the unofficial surcharges made by police chiefs and other officers. Each tax roll had to be reviewed and endorsed by the representative of the Maratha sardeśmukh and only then could other payments be made. Extortionate tolls on the highways continued to be collected even after the peace with the Mughals. But economic life still continued and the tax base was sufficiently stable for a complex empire to be erected upon it. The relative tranquillity resulting from Mughal rule had meant that goods could move safely across India, though at a cost. The Marathas (in Khafi Khan’s view) did not disrupt the system: they collected heavy tolls, just as tyrannical commandants of police (faujdārs) did.
We need therefore, to view the Maratha system in a more dispassionate light. First of all, Maratha political thought prized bankers and merchants. The early (c.1717) work titled Ājnapatra makes no overt reference to the old Sanskrit scholastic tradition: it is very much lodged in the real world of the time. For example, Chapter five breaks new ground, and opens with the following words: “Businessmen are the ornaments of the kingdom. It becomes populous and prosperous by their presence.” However, the presence of a completely different class of businessmen is also noted: “Businessmen include Phirangi, [here meaning the Portuguese] Ingrez [English], Valandez [Dutch], Dingmar [Danes] etc., hat-wearing peoples who also trade. But they are not like other merchants. Each of them has a king for a master. It is at his command and on his account that they come to these lands. Has anyone ever seen a king who was not hungry for land?” This critical attitude to Western trading companies was then reciprocated by the Westerners, who however, have dominated the historiography of the Marathas.
Taxes of all kinds were often “farmed” out to contractors, usually great bankers, who advanced the expected amount and reimbursed themselves from future collections. As the tax-farmer could not afford to ruin his district, which he often held for many years, he needed to negotiate with tax-payers. The British thought this oppressive – yet the system had long operated under the Mughals, and under the name of hawala lasted for half a century under the British themselves. One experienced Englishman took a more a balanced view of the system. John Malcolm wrote that the tax-farmers were either “bankers, or men supported by that class, they have acquired, and maintain an influence, both in the councils of the State, and the local administration of the provinces, that gives them great power, which they solely direct to the object of accumulation.” On the other hand, he added that while the payment of taxes and interest might keep the cultivators poor, yet it gave the bankers an incentive in supporting the latter through crises so as to avert the loss of all the loans already advanced. It is noteworthy that though defaulters were sometimes mistreated by the Maratha tax-collectors (as they were by the East India Company), yet they never followed Mughal practice of treating any default as an act of rebellion. Under the Mughals, the collective failure of a village to pay the demand could result in its being sacked and the inhabitants enslaved.
In 1985, Andre Wink provided a careful description of how long-lived, if not permanent, village valuations formed the basis of the tax system down to the first decades of British rule. He also reached the important conclusion that the actual ‘surplus’ collected by the sovereign or his nominees “varied greatly according to political and economic circumstances and it could never be equated with the complement of the rayat’s [farmer’s] subsistence or prajbhāg. The king ... was a co-sharer in the revenue among the other hereditary holders of concurrent vested rights.” My own research has re-confirmed this judgment. The system lacked the bureaucratic precision valued by the British, but it worked at least as well at their one at the time.
Military metamorphosis and defeat
The Marathas rose to power as horsemen and down to the end of the eighteenth century cavalry figured largely in their armies. From the 1750s however, impressed by Western battlefield tactics that were beginning to the deployed in India, they added an increasing complement of infantry and artillery. This was however expensive since the light cavalry had to be maintained as well. Overall, the fiscal system of the Maratha states was severely strained by 1800, when it was challenged by considerable fraction of the armed forces of the second British Empire. Some contemporary British officers saw regular infantry and artillery as a source of weakness. They thought it slowed down Maratha armies and made it easier for slow, heavy British armies to force them to battle. On the other hand, the combination proved effective against the Marathas’ Indian enemies. Furthermore, when Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington confronted the new Maratha armies in 1803-06 they proved almost a match for the British Indian forces that he brought to the field. It was their cavalry that failed to fight at the crucial encounter at Assaye and elsewhere. However, Holkar’s attempt to revert to a light cavalry strategy also ultimately failed in this period. This was due to a key change in battlefield artillery: the deployment of horse-drawn or ‘galloper guns’. It came alongside the raising of elite units of English cavalry that, in turn trained Indian horsemen in European tactics. A key success for horse artillery came the battle of Farrukhabad against Holkar. The combined forces marched 60 miles in 24 hours to completely surprise Jaswant Rao Holkar’s cavalry army. During this combat, the British artillery captain James Young noted with amazement that a large mass of cavalry that was pursuing a handful of British horsemen no sooner saw his horse artillery unlimber, than they “turned about & fled with the utmost precipitation”. If they had persisted, he mused, they might have suffered a dozen casualties, but not one his isolated troop would have escaped. The same fate awaited the Peshwa’s government when it challenged the British for the last time in 1817-18. After a protracted campaign, the Peshwa Bajirao II surrendered and his territories were annexed to the British empire and added to its Bombay Presidency.
The end of the empire
In confronting the British, the Marathas were dealing with a power that could deploy global resources and draw from a fiscal system far beyond that of any Asian government. Beyond battlefield tactics, it was the deep pockets of the East India Company and its extensive credit in wealthy Britain that enabled its agents in India to support its wars – if at the cost of ruining the Company’s trade and increasing its debts in India and Britain. Richard Wellesley, the governor-general who had launched this imperial strategy was recalled in disgrace in 1805, but the collapse of the Maratha empire was, by this time, irreversible. After 1804, the crucial Maratha outpost in North India, the Gwalior kingdom of the Shindes essentially withdrew from the Maratha empire to accept a subordinate place in the new British one. Delhi and Agra and the person of the Mughal emperor passed into British hands and then no possibility of Maratha revival remained. History is written by the victors: and as we have seen in the opening section, British historians were keen on burying dangerous memories of their great challengers.
ENDNOTES
*I have translated all the Marathi sources used in this Chapter.
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