Of the various uprisings that challenged Mughal power and authority in the eighteenth century, that of the Marathas was the most sustained and consequential. From 1682 to 1699 the Maratha state had waged a defensive war against ‘Alamgir’s aggressive campaigns in the western Deccan. But between 1700 and 1707 Tarabai, governing the kingdom as regent for her infant son, co-ordinated the defence of Maratha strongholds against ‘Alamgir’s armies while establishing a permanent Maratha presence in parts of Khandesh, Malwa and Gujarat. In those provinces her agents extracted a fourth of the revenue normally paid to the Mughals. This levy, called chauth, in effect served as protection money against further Maratha raids, which Mughal authorities were powerless to prevent. But, after 1707, many of Tarabai’s former supporters drifted to Shahu, the adult grandson of Shivaji whom ‘Alamgir had captured in 1689 and held for eighteen years. After the emperor’s death, he was strategically released for the purpose of dividing Maratha loyalties. The ploy succeeded. Maratha chieftains soon split between supporters of Shahu, the son of Shivaji’s first son Sambhaji, and Tarabai, the widow of Shivaji’s second son Rajaram.
Meanwhile, Maratha society and culture became progressively more militarized. From the 1640s, Shivaji had recruited into his service mavalis, the men inhabiting the jungles and ravines of the Western Ghats. By the 1680s, ‘Alamgir was recruiting the same peoples and deploying them against the Maratha state, creating a bidding war between the Mughals and Shivaji’s kingdom over access to the western Deccan’s military labour market. The intensity of these bidding wars increased with the entry first of Shahu in 1707 as a rival to Tarabai, and then of Nizam al-Mulk in 1712 as a rival to Shahu. By this time warfare had become so lucrative that enterprising men with no ties to the land or prior deshmukh status emerged as chiefs (sardar) who enlisted villagers into their war bands. Armed villagers would spend half the year (May to October) working their fields and the other half (October to May) on campaign.14 The militarization of the western Deccan also transformed the meaning of ‘Maratha’, which from at least the fourteenth century had referred to Marathi-speaking chiefs and their warrior-clients who offered military services to the Bahmani sultanate or its successor states of Bijapur and Ahmadnagar. The word thereby became associated with a martial ethos. Over time, the term acquired social boundaries and embraced distinctive patterns of dress, diet and codes of conduct. By contrast, caste Hindus not integrated into a sultanate’s service elite – such as cultivators, artistans or petty merchants – identified themselves as ‘Kunbi’. But in the eighteenth century, as villagers appeared in armies mobilized by the Maratha state, they, too, began to see themselves as Marathas, thereby eroding the distinction between Kunbi and Maratha.15
Accompanying the militarization of the western plateau was the rise of the office of peshwa, a Persian term for ‘prime minister’ that the Bahmani sultans had introduced in the fourteenth century and was inherited by the Maratha state. In 1713, in an effort to lure a powerful maritime lord from Tarabai’s political orbit into his own, Shahu recruited Balaji Vishvanath, a well-networked Chitpavan Brahmin from the Konkan coast. To strengthen his negotiating hand, Balaji demanded that he be named the peshwa of Shahu’s court, to which the Maratha king agreed. Balaji then succeeded in drawing the maritime lord to Shahu’s camp, initiating a progressive decline of Tarabai’s influence in Maratha politics. The office of peshwa soon swelled into the Peshwas – that is, a line of hereditary Brahmin rulers whose authority would ultimately displace that of the Maratha king himself.
At the same time, Brahmins entered the Maratha state’s political economy at all levels.16 Because their troops were paid in cash, sardars had to negotiate loans with bankers at the beginning of each campaign season. And since interest rates on such loans depended on the fiscal stability of the area under a given chief’s control, Brahmin accountants (kulkarnis, deshpandes) would evaluate the fiscal worth of the chief’s lands, and hence his creditworthiness. Banking and credit thus provided the hinge by which Brahmins acquired political influence, whether as village moneylenders advancing cash to chiefs and headmen, or as great banking firms financing the Maratha government’s large-scale campaigns in Mughal north India.17 The translation of Brahmins’ financial power into political power began with Balaji Vishvanath’s appointment as peshwa in 1713 and continued as his fellow Chitpavan Brahmins migrated from their native Konkan coast up to the plateau, where they served as tax-collectors, administrators and especially as bankers loaning Shahu money to raise his armies. Upon Balaji’s death in 1720, Shahu named Balaji’s son Baji Rao (r. 1720–40) as his successor, creating in effect a dynasty of hereditary Brahmin Peshwas.
From 1713 on, Maratha armies ranged ever deeper into the older imperial provinces to the north. Typically filling the vacuum left by the Mughals’ decaying local administration, these raids were manned by Maratha–Kunbi peasant-soldiers, directed by the Peshwas and financed by Brahmin financial credit and the levy of chauth. After 1735, their armies began to remain in north India through the monsoon season without returning to Maharashtra. But this hindered agricultural operations in the Maratha heartland, since so many soldiers were cultivators. Efforts to compensate by mobilizing landless peasants to cultivate state lands and wastelands only reduced government revenues, since landless peasants paid few or no land taxes.18 On the other hand, attempts to bring peasant-soldiers back to Maharashtra for agricultural purposes left the armies in the north strapped for manpower. To meet the deficit, the government enlisted non-Maratha mercenaries, including Pashtun Afghans, Arabs and north Indians.19 This further diluted the character of ‘Maratha’ armies, a process that had already begun with the incorporation of Kunbi villagers in the Peshwas’ infantries.
The growth of Maratha power in north India proceeded by stages. In 1716 Balaji audaciously asked Farrukh Siyar to grant him the right to collect chauth everywhere south of the Narmada, proposing in effect a dual government in which Marathas and Mughals would share the collection of revenue. The emperor angrily rejected the proposal. But in 1719, after Farrukh Siyar was overthrown by the Saiyid brothers, the latter, with whom the Peshwa was then allied, consented to the deal. This agreement served as a charter for subsequent Maratha claims to the Deccan’s revenues, and as a blueprint for access to the revenues of older Mughal provinces in the north. Under Baji Rao, Maratha raids into Malwa became more regular and more lucrative, culminating in 1728 when the Peshwa defeated Nizam al-Mulk just thirty-two kilometres west of the latter’s capital of Aurangabad. From there he continued marching further north to Ujjain, defeating its Mughal defenders. This threw all of western Malwa open to Maratha plundering. After these reverses, Nizam al-Mulk granted the Peshwa what Delhi had already granted the Maratha leader, namely the latter’s right to collect chauth throughout the Deccan. By the 1730s Baji Rao was raising ever larger armies and sending them further afield, through Malwa both north into Rajasthan and east into the Gangetic plain. By 1737 his armies managed to drive north as far as Delhi itself. Neither Muhammad Shah’s decaying government in Delhi nor Nizam al-Mulk’s in Aurangabad could halt the Peshwa. By January 1739 Nizam al-Mulk had acknowledged the Marathas’ complete sovereignty in Malwa and in all lands between the Narmada and the Chambal River, which runs a mere forty-five kilometres south of Agra.
Later that year the Persian warlord Nadir Shah marched through the Khyber Pass with 150,000 cavalry, defeated a much larger Mughal army and sacked a supine, defenceless Delhi. Like Timur more than three centuries earlier, he chose not to remain in India, returning to Iran with caravans laden with looted gold, silver and jewellery worth 1.5 million rupees, including the famed Koh-i-Noor, and, not least, Shah Jahan’s priceless Peacock Throne. With such celebrated symbols of imperial glory for ever stripped from Indian soil, the Marathas were suddenly awakened to the reality that the Mughals were not, in fact, their enemy. Rather, they now saw the house of Babur as the key symbol of Indian sovereignty, to be defended from foreign invaders at all costs. To this end, Baji Rao proposed that all the powers of north India join a confederation to protect India’s Timurid dynasty, making the Peshwa almost resemble a proto-nationalist figure. For several decades, a cornerstone of Maratha policy was to pose as the Mughals’ truest defenders, at least at the imperial level.
At the grass-roots level, however, the Peshwa’s sardars continued to chip away at Mughal sovereignty. In older provinces such as Malwa, Khandesh or Gujarat, independent bands of up to 5,000 light cavalry would raid and plunder the countryside, avoiding pitched battles with imperial armies.20 Mughal authorities in these provinces might still control major fortified urban centres, but they were no longer drawing revenue from their rural hinterlands. The transition from Mughal to Maratha authority between the 1730s and 1750s was therefore barely perceptible, not only because it occurred so gradually, but also because the Marathas continued to use Mughal administrative procedures and practices, mitigating a sense of a political rupture.21 Yet Maratha rule was patchy and irregular across much of central India in those decades, some regions being fully administered by the Peshwa’s men and others only thinly administered, and populated by recalcitrant zamindars who managed to defy Maratha authority from behind walled strongholds.
Under Baji Rao’s son Nana Saheb (r. 1740–61), Maratha conquests briefly encompassed almost all of north India. These included six devastating raids on Bengal between 1741 and 1751. But, by the late 1750s, the Marathas had become more than simply the guarantors of Mughal authority. As their strategic objective shifted from defending their mountainous homeland to plundering and then governing north India’s wide plains, they also adopted Mughal military culture. In the days of Shivaji, Maratha forces had consisted of small, mobile bands of swift cavalry and lightly armed infantry, appropriate for the sort of guerrilla warfare that Malik Ambar had pioneered in the Ahmadnagar sultanate’s final decades. By contrast, the great Maratha armies of the 1740s and 1750s, which numbered up to 40,000 mainly uniformed infantry, lumbered across the land like moving cities, moving no faster than the bullocks that dragged their long trains of baggage and heavy artillery. By mid-century, too, the Maratha ruling elite, owing to its prolonged exposure to north India’s ways, had acquired a taste for the refinements of Mughal culture. This in turn created a demand in urban Maharashtra for Kashmiri shawls, Bengali silks, ivory craft, metalwork in silver, copper and brass and so on, while administrators in the Maratha capital in Satara, and after 1750 in Pune, patronized north Indian styles of painting and music.22
Because they had become so deeply enmeshed in north Indian affairs, it was Maratha generals who in 1759 negotiated with Ahmad Shah Abdali, an Afghan warlord whose army had entered the Punjab and asserted Afghan territorial claims to the province. With a major showdown between the Marathas and Afghans in the air, in December the next year the Peshwa, Nana Saheb, began moving his own army northwards, aiming to join the main Maratha force then camped at Panipat, the historic battlefield north of Delhi. But he never got there. In mid January 1761, an estimated 50,000 Marathas were slaughtered at Panipat in one of the greatest military debacles in Indian history. For the Peshwa personally, the disaster represented a bitter indictment of decades of his and his predecessors’ forward policy in north India. Upon hearing the news while still en route to join the battle, the Peshwa turned round and headed back to Pune, a disillusioned and broken man. Within six months he was dead. The entire Maratha project north of Maharasthra had become either stalled or reversed.