THE WARS OF MARATHA SUCCESSION

King Shahu’s long reign ended in 1749. A confusion of succession struggles among factions of the royal family promptly ensued, until the peshwa Balaji Bajirao intervened to restore order. The leaders of the various contending factions were convened and forced to accept the conditions he set down, for by this time the peshwa was the true ruler in all but name. He decided that the capital of the kingdom would henceforward be Pune, not Satara, where Shahu had held court; certain offices, such as that of nominal head of the armies, which had been royal appointments, were abolished and along with them many royal rights. All power as well as authority was now concentrated in the peshwa’s office, and he insisted that he would control the king in all things.

The usurpation of royal power by a Brahman minister merely ratified a situation long in development. With a more centralized government structure had comes other accretions of ministerial power. Balaji Bajirao now commanded an army of paid soldiers; no longer did Maratha soldiers retire from campaigns each year in order to cultivate their fields. The day of the Maratha peasant warrior band was over; most fighting men now served as paid soldiers, garrisoned in forts and towns far from home, and trained as infantrymen as well as horsemen. Artillery, however, remained marginally incorporated. The large guns were nominally under the command of Maratha officers; those who fi red and maintained them were often foreigners – Portuguese, French and British – but the guns themselves were not up to the state of artillery art already known to Europeans and to a new, menacing force destined to extinguish the imperial moment of the Marathas at Panipat, near Delhi, in 1761.

Panipat brought the Marathas into fatal contact with the king of the Afghans, Ahmad Shah Abdali of the Durrani clan, who had already proved himself capable of halting the Maratha advance into the Punjab, which he invaded eight times before finally pressing on towards Delhi. The Marathas were now divided among several commanders who approached battle with widely differing tactics; some followed the old system utilizing light horse, others adopted the ponderous Mughal tactics and one Muslim commander modeled his force on the European lines of trained and coordinated infantry and artillery.

Artillery decided the battle in January, 1761: the light, mobile artillery of the Afghans proved lethal against both Maratha cavalry and infantry. Six months were to elapse before the shattered remnants of the Maratha armies that had gathered at Panipat found their way back to Maharashtra, and by then Maratha supremacy over the subcontinent had passed.

During the next forty years, the polity briefly centralized by the peshwas dissolved into a set of states united in one objective: they would no longer brook the arrogant rule of Chitpavan ministers. Otherwise the major Maratha houses, all founded by members of the new military elite that had emerged under the peshwas, concentrated on making kingdoms of their own. The new kingdoms were at Baroda in Gujarat under the Gaikwad family, at Indore in Malwa and in the central Deccan tracts north of the Narmada under the Holkars. South of Delhi at Gwalior was the Shinde (or Sindhia) family; at Nagpur in western Maharashtra the Bhonsles endured; and, finally, in the Pune region, descendants of the peshwas retained a territorial sway made fragile by competing smaller houses in the heartland of the former state. It was this set of fissiparous Maratha states, fragments of the great expansion of the middle decades of the eighteenth century that confronted a British power then in the process of territorial entrenchment in Bengal and the Carnatic, and poised to open the colonial era of Indian history.

PESHWA BUREAUCRACY

Malwa and Gujarat, closer to the Maratha heartland, had greater wealth than Rajasthan and were treated in a different way. A system of revenue farming was introduced to provide a reliable stream of income to the peshwa without any costly reforms of the socio - economic and political structure of local society. The key Maratha official in this system was called the kamavisdar; he was appointed by the peshwa and empowered to maintain a small body of soldiers to police the administrative tract for which he had purchased the right to collect revenue. A small staff of clerks and minor servants, usually Brahmans, were employed to maintain the accurate revenue records demanded by the peshwa. Tax - farming contracts were auctioned annually after the revenue for a particular place was first estimated by the peshwa ’ s civil servants, usually on the basis of previous years ’ yields. An aspiring tax farmer who won the kamavisdar contract was expected to have a reputation for wealth and probity; he was required to pay a portion of the whole of the anticipated revenue – one - third to one - half – either out of his own wealth or from what he could borrow from bankers. Conscientious kamavisdars prepared detailed records of the localities they had bid for so that they might repeat the process in subsequent years. Most of them also invested in the cultivation and commerce of their allotted territories, expecting to add profits to the commissions they took from the revenue contract.

Record - keeping under the peshwas exceeded any previously known in India, judging from their daftars, which were ledgers of correspondence and account books. These have provided a rich resource for modern historians as well as a model for local administration, imitated by the British India in the next century. The Maratha regime at its zenith was headed by literate Brahmans who made policies as well as account books. Other regimes of the time also employed scribes and some kinds of records were maintained, often by Brahmans whose caste practices were not priestly, but secular, working in the world of politics and commerce just as the Chitpavans did. Hence, while the Chitpavans may have devised the most elaborate system of documentary control India had known up to that point, they were not the only ones to attempt it, in part at least because the problems of governance had become more complicated for all by the eighteenth century.

By then, if not before, bureaucratic management began to be as important to states as military and charismatic lordship. Accurate record - keeping had been introduced in numerous local settings and institutions, but not until the eighteenth century did the principle find expression at the apex of a political order, thanks to Brahman managers who constructed a state form that matched the challenges of the age, yet accorded well with their traditional caste occupation.

Regimes like the peshwas’ look distinctly modern in comparison with the Mughals’, to whose fall they contributed militarily. But the seeds of the Mughal demise were not merely military, or administrative. Peasant restiveness and rebellions had stretched them beyond their already desperate condition in the Deccan. At the same time, gentry nurtured within Mughal society saw its interests better served in opposition to the Timurid regime. The Maratha kingdom of the eighteenth century faced some of the same pressures of change, but devised ways of surmounting them, at least for a time.

The peshwas had to dominate a complex world of negotiation with the diverse local institutions that the Marathas encountered in such far - flung places as Malwa, Gujarat, Khandesh and their territories in the Kaveri basin and elsewhere in the south. Zamindars, or big landlords, village headmen representing powerful peasant castes, and deshmukhs, or regional chiefs, had to be either suppressed or integrated into increasingly centralized structures.

That meant bending these historically autonomous magnates to the will and the ordinances of the rulers. As never before, resources had to be assessed accurately and in detail so that central demands could be accepted as legitimate by the traditional heads of communities who were still capable of effective and costly resistance.

Gradually, during the eighteenth century the proto - gentry of the sixteenth century emerged as a class. Its members were privileged in their political relations with states like the Maratha and the British who succeeded them, and they were involved in rural commodity production and in market towns. These elite also assumed roles as arbiters of local culture, as trustees of religious organizations, which had previously belonged to kings; from that sponsorship they acquired yet another increment of prestige in their social worlds.

Mirroring the processes of social mobility and class formation were new forms of production. The early eighteenth century was once more an epoch of building, most notably of mansions of wealthy families, whose imposing exterior walls enclosed sumptuous interiors with accessibility limited in accordance with the principles of purdah. A new market for luxury consumption of metal work, ornamental ivory, wood and silver work developed, and support for musicians and poets was made part of the quasi - court life of the elite. A new class of wealthy, powerful households had emerged which was to constitute the basis for a modern middle class during the twentieth century.

MARATHA MONETARY MASTERY

The Maratha over lordship in the Deccan was based less upon its superior military might than upon the qualities of the Maratha elite that grew up under the peshwas and Shahu in the years before 1740. (At the same time, the former imperial Mughal ruling class was being scattered among provincial and minor courts.) Talented and ambitious peasant Marathas found openings to fortune even as those of the older elite of deshmukh families fell, and Brahmans rose with the same tide. Their scribal abilities were at a premium as conquests were followed by the establishment of civil rule. The peshwa’s Chitpavans kinsmen were the special recipients of honours and office, not merely as bureaucrats, but as soldiers in the manner of Bajirao himself. Other Brahmans became bankers, joining those from traditional banking groups who were being drawn into state service. Financial knowledge and institutions were mobilized to realize the prompt transmission of tribute from an increasingly extensive empire, and Bajirao adopted the policy of centralizing all fiscal functions in Pune by 1740.

The northern frontiers of the Maratha state were rapidly pushed into Rajasthan, Delhi and the Punjab; to the east, the Marathas launched raids from Nagpur against Bihar, Bengal and Orissa; and the older area of Maratha influence to the south – Karnataka and the Tamil and Telugu areas eastwards – experienced a Maratha over lordship now invigorated by its sub-continental dominance. Between 1745 and 1751 plundering expeditions were launched yearly by the Maratha chieftain Raghuji Bhonsle and vigorously opposed by Alivardi Khan in Bengal, now more or less independent of Delhi. Raghuji nevertheless forced a settlement which placed Orissa under a governor chosen by the Marathas, making it a Maratha province in effect, and in addition a very large tribute was forthcoming from Bengal. The conflict between Marathas and the Nizam continued over Karnataka, on the southeastern frontier of the Marathas, becoming a stalemate in which Karnataka was shared between both.

Periodic raiding gave way to more permanent administrative milking by the 1750s, which saw a new element added to the complex politics of the Deccan when a French - led army of mercenaries acting for the Nizam fought against Maratha soldiers and provided impressive evidence of a newer European military technology. This was based upon well drilled infantry formations backed by rapid - fi ring, precision - cast artillery pieces, both of which diminished the advantages previously enjoyed by Maratha light cavalry.

Further to the north, in Rajasthan, Maratha influence took another form; there territorial aggrandizement was eschewed in favor of the enforcement of a tribute system over numerous large and small lordships. A lucrative sideline of the Rajasthan policy was the hiring out of Maratha squadrons to minor chiefs who were engaged in fighting each other for some territorial advantage. In time, the Maratha tributary regime extended itself to within fifty miles of Delhi, where, in a narrow tract, the remnant of the great Mughal Empire gasped its last.

THE NEW ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL OPPORTUNITIES UNDER THE MARATHAS

Warfare opened opportunities for talented commanders among deshmukh families, but there were also increased opportunities for Brahmans, and they too contributed to the vigorous expansion of Maratha power early in the eighteenth century. Notable among them was the ministerial lineage of Chitpavans, who held the office of peshwa under King Shahu and his successors.

Originating modestly as that of keeper of records, under the peshwa Balaji Viswanath, the office was transformed into that of prime minister of the kingdom, and hereditary to boot. Viswanath’s son Bajirao held the post from 1720 to 1740 and Bajirao’s son Balaji Bajirao from then to 1761. Under the peshwas a new elite formed consisting partly of old deshmukh families to which were added other, self - made, men, leaders of military bands who might have held pedigrees no greater than that of village headman. New men and households displaced older families that failed to meet the standards of rapine and cunning of the new era politics in an emergent Maratha state.

Given the persistent independence and fickle affiliation of the chiefly deshmukhs and warrior leaders among the Marathas, such solidity as the Maratha state possessed must be attributed to the personalities of Shahu and his ministers, the peshwas. Consolidation of royal power during the first half of the eighteenth century was tenuously achieved, or bought, through the conferral of royal entitlements upon those who served Shahu or the peshwa. These were non - hereditary grants of privilege and property, supposedly conditional on state service. However, the fighting elite who were the usual recipients of such honours assiduously converted the conditionality of the grants into community - backed, hereditary privileges called watan, a term signifying the ‘home’ and the core rights of a family upon which wealth and status depended. Nevertheless, during Shahu ’ s forty - year reign, even while a large set of landed households profited from state employment, a stronger, more centralized, state structure began to take form, thanks to the ageing king and his succession of ministers.

During most of Shahu’s reign, there was a steady increase in the territory under Maratha sway, from which tribute was extracted; after his death in 1749, and until 1761, these conquests were at first continued under the peshwa Balaji Bajirao. Shahu’s perspicacious choice of the twenty-year–old Bajirao to follow his father into the office of peshwa in 1720 had defied advice, but misgivings were stilled when Bajirao outlined his plans. He had decided to launch the major Maratha thrust against the Mughals, leaving for the future the possibility of advancing the Maratha hegemony into the south and against the realm of the Nizam of Hyderabad. He also decided that he himself should assume command of this northern expedition on behalf of Shahu, so as to assure that the king alone accrued the glory and wealth of humbling the Mughals that he was sure would follow. To finance this military campaign, he judged that the treasure it would yield would pay for both the war and the subsequent administration of Gujarat and Malwa. Even Delhi itself was not ruled out as an object of conquest and source of treasure.

Bajirao was astute in his choice of commanders for these undertakings. Passing over the established elite of the deshmukhs, commands were given to new men of the Gaikwad, Holkar and Shinde families, who had been loyal to Shahu and to his father and now to himself. Enhanced armies were formed, and when they were not deployed on the peshwa’s conquests they served his interests by being hired out to lesser lords in some remote conflict.

The northern adventure proceeded. Malwa and Gujarat were freed of Mughal domination by the mid - 1720s, after the dispirited Mughal commanders were defeated along with troops of the Nizam who intervened on behalf of the Mughals. Now it became necessary to deal with the Nizam, and this Bajirao did; in 1728 the main force of the Nizam was trapped by Maratha horsemen in the favorable guerrilla terrain around Aurangabad and forced to agree to terms. Bajirao demanded the recognition of Shahu as the king of Maharashtra and overlord of the rest of the Deccan, from which the tribute of chauth and sardeshmukhi could be legitimately collected by Maratha officials.

The way to a resumption of the northern conquests was open and during the 1730s Maratha forces – larger than ever – ranged northward to the Gangetic valley and finally raided Delhi in 1737. A ransom was collected from the humiliated Mughal emperor and a year later the Marathas inflicted a crushing defeat on another Mughal army. A treaty agreed at Bhopal in 1739 formally ceded Malwa – from the Narmada to the Chambal River – to the Marathas. This placed their authority some fifty miles south of Agra, and the victorious Bajirao added a large tribute of treasure for presentation to Shahu.

Having conquered this vast territory, the peshwa lost no time in consolidating Maratha rule by appointing Maratha collectors of tribute in the courts of the larger zamindars. The conquest of Malwa became a model for other conquests. Maratha rule was first established in the countryside rather than cities, and at the outset no effort was made to displace local, rural magnates, merely to collect tribute from them.

The confidence with which Bajirao extended the power of the Marathas grew not so much from their military supremacy as from the weakness of their enemies, especially the Mughals. True, the Marathas mounted ever – larger forces. In the early eighteenth century, their armies consisted of no more than 5000 horsemen and no artillery; after 1720, the operating units doubled in size but even then they were not able to match the Mughals and their other enemies in artillery, which proved a serious limitation in wars against the Nizam in the middle 1730s. Eventually, however, the Mughal failure to maintain the efficiency of their gunnery after Aurangzeb ’ s time became evident to all during the cataclysmic invasion of India by the Iranian king Nadir Shah.

Having driven the Mughals from Afghanistan with surprising ease, Nadir Shah was emboldened to press on into the Punjab and continue on to Delhi, where he defeated a demoralized Mughal army in 1739. As a final humiliation of the once great Mughals, the city was sacked and over 20,000 of its inhabitants were killed during the pillage. A vast treasure was looted, including the Peacock Throne itself. And one element in Nadir Shah’s success was his improved artillery, especially horse - mounted guns for use against the Mughal cavalry.

THE MARATHA MOMENT

The Marathas had emerged from among the dominant peasant clans living in the western Indian Territory where the Marathi language was spoken. During the sixteenth century the sultans of Bijapur and Ahmadnagar had recruited them to serve as light cavalry and balance the political ambitions of the Muslim soldiers in their employ. Other Maharashtrians to benefit t from the equal opportunity policies of the Muslim overlords were Brahmans, who were divided into those who lived on the dry plateau above the sea and called Deshastas, and those from the lowlands along the Arabian Sea, the Konkan region, who were called Chitpavans. Though all were Marathi - speakers, they distinguished their statuses carefully from the peasant Marathas. The Brahmans derived their high standing from administrative service to Muslim regimes and also from their participation in the bhakti or devotional cults of Maharashtra.

In addition to supplying soldiers and administrators to neighboring states, Maharashtra attracted economic interest. Cotton was spun, cultivated and woven, contributing a valuable commodity to the trade of the port of Surat. A thriving inter-regional commerce connected the high plateau and the littoral. From the littoral came a variety of useful coconut products, fish, salt, timber and fruit, which were exchanged for upland products, sugar cane, cotton, tobacco and pulses, which complemented the rice diet of the coast.

A final feature of sixteenth - and seventeenth - century Maharashtra which helps to explain some of the synergistic expansionism of the eighteenth century was the structure of local authority. A few towns and cities showed influences from and maintained contact with the wider Deccan region and the Arabian Sea coast outside of Maharashtra – Ahmadnagar, Aurangabad, Nagpur, Nasik and Burhanpur – but the politics of the region were those of rural chiefs called deshmukh (literally, ‘ head of the land or place’).

The territorial sway of the deshmukhs extended over between twenty and a hundred villages, each of which had a powerful headman (Patel), assisted by a keeper of records (kulkarni). Headmen were inevitably drawn from the Maratha peasant castes, while village accountants were almost always Brahmans. In the absence of a powerful state apparatus within the country, this local community - level officials were the government. The role of external authorities such as the Deccan sultans, or, later, occasionally the Mughals, was minimal; all of them took an irregular share of the taxes collected from agriculture and trade and conferred legitimating documents of investiture, or revenue collection contracts, upon deshmukhs, patils and kulkarni. A more elevated deshmukh office was that of sardeshmukhi, head of deshmukhs, recognized by the Mughals, as was that of chief accountant (deshkulkarni). The ambiguity of such offices was revealed in a seventeenth - century Marathi political treatise, the Ajnapatra:

The deshmukhs and deshkulkarni, the patils et cetera, they may be called ‘office - holders’, but this is only a term of convention. They are in fact small but self – sufficient chiefs. They are not strong on their own, but they succeed in keeping up their power by allying themselves with the ‘lord of all land’ [i.e. the king]. Yet it must not be thought that their interests coincide with that of the latter. These people are in reality the co - sharers (dayada) of the kingdom.

The writer was a minister of the Maratha king Shivaji, who, like other rulers of the seventeenth century, sought greater control over the autonomous countryside. The word ‘ dayada ’ aptly characterizes the lightness with which the state bore down upon Marathi - speakers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the heavily localized socio - political system could be galvanized from within under vigorous leadership, which happened in Maharashtra in the early eighteenth century as Mughal power waned.

Aurangzeb’s determination to stifle the political and military challenge of the Marathas had begun with the intention of punishing Shivaji’s successor Shambuji for offering shelter to the rebel prince Akbar. Subsequently the emperor found other reasons to try to rid the Deccan of Maratha predations, and he dedicated the Mughal house to this ultimately vain pursuit. Shambuji faced the onslaught with skill and cunning, though in the end he was captured and executed. At the same time he found himself threatened by the deshmukhs who resented his royal pretensions; some of them even approached Aurangzeb, offering to join with Mughals against Shambuji providing they were adequately rewarded. In return for serving the Mughals, they wanted confirmation that all the special rights their families had accumulated would remain hereditary, and some of them were granted valuable jagirs by the wily emperor. Shambuji dealt with their treason by burning their villages, not sparing some who were close to his own family by marriage.

 Shambuji’s successors faced the same wavering loyalty from deshmukh families. Switching between Mughal and Maratha service regularly occurred, each change of employment an occasion for a deshmukh to add to his family property and entitlements. In return, when a deshmukh defected he took with him the militia he commanded. By the time of Shambuji’s grandson King Shahu – a name meaning ‘honest’, and originally a soubriquet accorded by Aurangzeb to contrast his character with that of Shivaji – who ruled from 1708 to 1749, Maratha fighting bands could combine in formidable armies which regularly raided and pillaged Mughal tracts along the northern frontier. Soon they were reaching towards Delhi itself, as well as continuing to prey upon parts of Karnataka and the Tamil country.