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.