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.
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