Maratha Ascendancy under the Peshwas

Maratha Ascendancy Under the Peshwas

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• After the death of Shivaji in 1680, the Maratha kingdom was troubled by dynastic factionalism and the relentless pressure of the Mughal policy of conquest in the Deccan.
  • Local deshmukhs (revenue officers) and zamindars took advantage of this instability, at times aligning with the Mughals and at other times joining hands with the Marathas, depending on where their interests lay.
• Shivaji was succeeded by his son Shambhaji, who lacked both his father’s tact and capability — his decision to grant asylum to the fugitive Mughal prince Akbar provoked a major offensive against him by Aurangzeb. In 1689, Shambhaji was overpowered and subsequently executed.
  • His son, Shahu, remained a prisoner under Aurangzeb, while Rajaram, another son of Shivaji, offered token leadership to the various Maratha chiefs in their renewed struggle against the Mughals.
  • When Rajaram died in 1699, one of his queens, Tarabai, began ruling in the name of her infant son, Shivaji II.
• In 1707, Aurangzeb died and was succeeded by Bahadur Shah, who pursued a more conciliatory policy — releasing Shahu that same year and formally recognising him as Chhatrapati, or king of the Marathas, and successor to Shivaji’s Swarajya.
  • With two rival contenders for the Maratha throne now in the field, Maharashtra was plunged into a full-scale civil war for the next eight years, pitting the forces of Shahu against those of Tarabai, who sought to rule in the name of Shivaji II.
  • Shahu sought the cooperation of leading Maratha chiefs through various concessions; as the senior member of Shivaji’s family, his claim generally enjoyed wider support, and he defeated his aunt Tarabai at the Battle of Khed (1707).
• With anarchy becoming increasingly widespread by 1712–13, Shahu appointed Balaji Vishwanath as his Peshwa in 1713 — a capable administrator who had risen from comparatively humble origins.
  • Backed by a group of newly independent sardars, several influential Brahman banking families, and his own considerable political skill as an able Chitpavan Brahman Peshwa, Balaji Vishwanath helped Shahu emerge victorious from this prolonged contest, firmly consolidating his position by 1718–19.
  • Balaji Vishwanath soon emerged as the real power behind the throne, marking the true beginning of the era of Peshwa domination in Maratha politics.

Balaji Vishwanath (1713–20)

• Balaji Vishwanath fully justified the trust Shahu had placed in him — winning over a large number of Maratha chiefs and consolidating Shahu’s authority across virtually the whole of Maharashtra, barring the region south of Kolhapur (Tarabai’s own headquarters).
  • Shahu’s headquarters at Satara now became the focal point of Maratha politics; the rival contest with the Tarabai faction was finally settled later through the Treaty of Warna (1731), which formally granted the state of Kolhapur to Shivaji II.
• Balaji also gave Maratha politics an entirely new direction. Rather than remaining content with Maratha supremacy in the Deccan alone, he took a keen interest in the affairs of north India, his hand strengthened by the ongoing infighting at the Mughal court and the weakness of the reigning emperor.
  • He clashed with both the Nizam and the younger of the Sayyid brothers, Husain Ali Khan — both of whom were ultimately compelled to make peace with the Peshwa owing to their own difficulties at Delhi.
  • In 1719, by helping the Sayyid brothers install a puppet emperor at Delhi, Balaji Vishwanath secured for Shahu a Mughal sanad (imperial order) recognising his right to chauth and sardeshmukhi across the six Mughal provinces of the Deccan, chauth over Malwa and Gujarat, and full independent status within Maharashtra.
    • In return, Shahu was required to pay the emperor an annual tribute of Rs. 10 lakh and maintain a force of 15,000 soldiers for imperial service, as well as for the maintenance of law and order.
  • This treaty substantially strengthened Shahu’s position. Balaji further chose to distribute the newly acquired rights of chauth and sardeshmukhi collection as patronage — an attractive incentive that drew a growing number of Maratha chiefs to Shahu’s side.
    • In the long run, however, this policy proved counterproductive: it encouraged fissiparous tendencies, weakened the central government, and rendered the various regional chiefs increasingly unruly.
    • The newly acquired territories, for all practical purposes, remained outside the effective control of the central government, governed instead by chiefs who were always ready to revolt — a problem that became especially apparent under his son and successor, Baji Rao, following Balaji Vishwanath’s death in 1720.
• Control of the Maratha state gradually passed decisively into the hands of the Peshwas. From Balaji Vishwanath’s time onward, the office of the Peshwa grew rapidly more powerful, becoming the true fountainhead of authority and the principal source of patronage throughout the Maratha kingdom.

Baji Rao (1720–40)

• Baji Rao consolidated his father’s achievements and further pursued the policy of deep involvement in Mughal court politics and the wider affairs of north India.
  • This policy drew opposition from certain chiefs, who felt that consolidating the Maratha position within the Deccan itself was of more immediate importance — but Baji Rao nevertheless held firm to his broader vision.
  • Having earlier accompanied his father to the Mughal court in 1719, Baji Rao had witnessed at close quarters the factional infighting plaguing Delhi, and had become fully convinced that a bold, decisive strike against the Mughal Empire could bring about its collapse.
• Some historians credit Baji Rao with articulating the idea of Hindu Pad Padshahi — the notion of Hindu rule across the subcontinent under the Maratha banner.
  • They point, in support, to his assistance to the Bundela chief Chhatrasal in the latter’s struggle against the Mughals, and his efforts to draw the Rajputs into the broader offensive against Mughal power.
  • This reading, however, does not adequately explain Baji Rao’s own repeated conflicts with fellow Maratha chiefs and other Hindu rulers of central India.
  • It seems more reasonable to conclude that Baji Rao was primarily focused on pursuing an expansionist course in the north, and was determined to subdue any opposition to this goal, whether it came from the Marathas themselves or from others — leaving little real justification for attributing a genuinely religious intent to his broader policy.
• Baji Rao’s reign, in any case, was marked by a period of intense and remarkably successful military campaigns.
  • He remained in power until 1740. By then, the Maratha state had gained control over vast tracts of the former Mughal Empire, with its only major remaining rival being the Nizam of Hyderabad, as both powers vied for control over Karnataka, Khandesh, and Gujarat.
    • Following the Maratha victory at the Battle of Palkhed (1728), the Nizam was compelled to recognise Shahu as the sole sovereign Maratha monarch, with full rights to chauth and sardeshmukhi over the Deccan.
  • Baji Rao subsequently led further campaigns to acquire the fertile lands of Malwa, reaching Rajasthan by 1729.
  • Meanwhile, in Gujarat, Maratha bands took to collecting taxes directly across the countryside, while the Mughals retained control of little beyond the major cities — and the once-lucrative trade at the port of Surat went into rapid decline under this sustained political pressure.
    • The Mughal governor of Gujarat eventually conceded, by treaty, some 60 per cent of the province’s revenues to Shahu and the Peshwa.
  • Baji Rao further advanced towards the Konkan coastal plain, gaining control over the territories of the Sidis of Janjira (Abyssinian Muslims), and drove the Portuguese out of Salsette, Bassein, and Chaul.
  • In 1737, he attacked Delhi itself and briefly held the Mughal emperor captive.
    • The following year, he defeated a substantial Mughal army under the direct command of the Nizam, and the subsequent Treaty of Bhopal (January 1739) ceded to the Peshwa the subah of Malwa, along with full sovereignty over all lands between the Narmada and Chambal rivers.
    • In these newly acquired territories, however, the Marathas made no attempt to overturn the existing local power structure, instead quickly negotiating with local zamindars for the payment of annual tribute.
  • Baji Rao also had to contend with several rival chiefs — notably Dabhade, Angre, Gaekwad, and Bhonsle, among others — some of whom went so far as to question Shahu’s own authority.
    • He defeated these dissenting chiefs decisively at the Battle of Dabhoi (1731), and also brought several Rajput chiefs into a form of subordinate alliance, further strengthening his overall position.
  • Baji Rao thus deserves considerable credit for raising Maratha power to a genuine high-water mark — under his leadership, the Maratha kingdom was transformed into a fairly large empire with a definite, lasting hold over parts of north India as well.

Limitations

• The numerous wars fought under Baji Rao, however, imposed a heavy financial burden on the Maratha state, precipitating a serious fiscal crisis; by the end of his reign, the state had accumulated a debt of some 20 lakh rupees.
• Baji Rao also failed to establish any genuinely sound administration in the newly acquired territories — leaving considerable scope for Maratha chiefs to function with growing autonomy.
  • It was during this period that the four major centres of Maratha power emerged: the Gaekwad of Baroda, the Bhonsle of Nagpur, the Scindia of Gwalior, and the Holkar of Indore.
• These developments would soon have a distinctly adverse effect on the Maratha kingdom as a whole. Under his son, Balaji Baji Rao, the transformation of the Maratha state into a virtual confederacy of autonomous chiefs, operating under the merely nominal leadership of the Peshwa, was effectively complete.

Balaji Baji Rao (1740–61)

• After Baji Rao’s death in 1740, Shahu appointed his son Balaji Bajirao — better known as Nana Saheb (1740–61) — as the new Peshwa.
  • More experienced in administration than in military command, he nonetheless went on to become the most successful of all the Peshwas.
• Nana Saheb became the supreme authority within the Maratha polity following Shahu’s death in 1749; as long as Shahu remained alive, Balaji Baji Rao continued to formally acknowledge his suzerainty.
  • After Shahu’s death, however, he established his own headquarters at Poona, effectively making it the new Maratha capital, while a descendant of Shivaji named Raja Ram succeeded Shahu at Satara in an essentially titular capacity.
• This was, in many respects, the true peak of Maratha glory, a period when virtually every part of India had to reckon with Maratha depredations.
  • In the east, from 1745 onward, Maratha bands under Raghuji Bhonsle of Nagpur regularly raided Orissa, Bengal, and Bihar — raids that ceased only after a 1751 treaty in which Alivardi Khan surrendered Orissa and agreed to pay an annual chauth of Rs. 120,000 for the three provinces.
  • Closer to home, Maratha forces regularly raided the Nizam’s territories in the Konkan, extracting tribute without ever fully subduing them; Balaji Baji Rao later defeated the Nizam decisively at the Battle of Udgir (1760), and also compelled Haidar Ali of Mysore to pay tribute.
  • He continued his father’s policy of active engagement in north India: by the Treaty of Bhalke (1751), the new Nizam, Salabat Jung, effectively ceded control of the entire province of Khandesh.
  • Further north, Maratha bands repeatedly raided the Rajput kingdoms of Jaipur, Bundi, Kota, and Udaipur, as well as the Gond kingdom of Deogarh — intervening in their succession disputes and exacting annual tribute, though never attempting any permanent territorial conquest in the region.
  • In the face of an Afghan invasion overrunning Lahore and Multan, a treaty in 1752 placed the Mughal emperor formally under Maratha protection; a subsequent succession dispute in 1753 gave the Marathas the opportunity to install their own preferred candidate on the Mughal throne.
    • The Marathas also took on the responsibility of defending Punjab against the invasions of Ahmad Shah Abdali of Kabul, and were rewarded in return with the subedari of Ajmer and Agra, along with permission to levy chauth and sardeshmukhi across Punjab.
• By this point, the Marathas had certainly gained mastery over large parts of north India — yet at no stage did they seriously attempt to establish anything resembling a formal empire.
  • It was only in Khandesh, Malwa, and Gujarat that they made any real effort to install a functioning administration; elsewhere, their conquests rarely amounted to more than plunder and the levying of chauth and sardeshmukhi — making this dominance genuinely difficult to sustain over the long term.
• The Marathas’ rising power aroused deep hostility among the Turani nobles at the Mughal court, while their bid to control Punjab provoked the displeasure of Ahmad Shah Abdali himself.
  • In 1761, Abdali invaded Punjab, precipitating the Third Battle of Panipat.
    • Fought on 14 January 1761, the battle saw the Maratha forces under Sadashiv Rao Bhau decisively routed by Abdali, with casualties estimated at roughly fifty thousand — a defeat that marked the beginning of the decline of Maratha power.
  • This decisive defeat shattered Maratha ambitions of succeeding the Mughals as the paramount power in India, dealing a genuinely devastating blow to Maratha prestige.
    • The Marathas’ losses stemmed largely from their continued weakness in pitched battles, where their artillery proved markedly inferior to that of the Afghans.
    • They had also alienated the sympathies of several other Indian powers through a policy of ruthless and largely indiscriminate plunder, with their difficulties further compounded by mutual rivalry and internal dissension within their own ranks.
• Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao himself bore considerable responsibility for many of these problems.
  • He had abandoned the earlier Maratha strategy of swift, lightning raids in favour of large pitched battles — a shift that proved a major strategic weakness.
  • Under pressure from ongoing financial crisis, he sanctioned the plundering of neighbouring territories — even those of nominally friendly powers — costing him the support of many Indian rulers, Rajputs in particular.
  • His annexation of Orissa was similarly resented by some Maratha chiefs, who had themselves hoped to expand further at Bengal’s expense.
• The death of Balaji Baji Rao in 1761, soon after the defeat at Panipat, further weakened the Maratha position.
  • As the young Peshwa Madhav Rao attempted to assert control over the polity, factionalism among the Maratha sardars re-emerged with renewed intensity.
  • This internal fighting intensified further after Madhav Rao’s death in 1772; his uncle, Raghunath Rao, seized power, but faced strong opposition from several important Maratha chiefs — prompting him, in his search for support, to forge a fateful new alliance with the English.

Political Structure Under the Peshwas

• The Peshwa’s rise to supreme power within the Maratha state, and the gradual eclipse of the Maratha king and the Ashtapradhan (council of eight ministers), did not, in itself, imply any radical transformation of the underlying Maratha political system.
  • The zamindars (deshmukhs, deshpandes, and similar landholders) remained a powerful presence within the Maratha political structure, despite continuous attempts to rein in their influence.
  • Leading officers of state — the Pratinidhi, the Pant Sachiv, and others — continued to hold their positions on a hereditary basis, as did their mokasa and saranjam land grants.
  • The general pattern of administration within the core Swarajya territories remained broadly similar to that of Shivaji’s own time.
    • At the village level, patils continued to play an important role in revenue administration right up until the time of Peshwa Baji Rao II, when older office-holders were finally displaced and land was instead farmed out to the highest bidder.
• Even so, certain definite structural changes did emerge under the first three Peshwas, changes that would go on to heavily shape the broader trajectory of the Maratha movement.
  • The Maratha struggle no longer centred purely on “national” survival, but increasingly on domination over the whole of India — the first three Peshwas vigorously pursued territorial expansion across both the north and the south.
    • This northward expansion came chiefly at the expense of the visibly decaying Mughal Empire — first through exploiting factional divisions at the Mughal court, and later by positioning the Marathas as the self-styled protectors of Mughal authority and imperial dignity.
    • Accordingly, the Marathas sought grants or farmans directly from the Mughal emperor authorising them to collect chauth and sardeshmukhi across the Deccan provinces.
• The Peshwa also made deliberate, sustained efforts to dominate the Ashtapradhan and consolidate his own position as the de jure supreme authority within the Maratha state.
  • This inevitably produced intense factional rivalry among the Maratha nobility. Yet, unlike the situation at the Mughal court — where the wazir had failed to dominate state affairs following the rise of the Sayyid brothers in 1719 — the Peshwa at the Maratha court ultimately emerged successful and victorious in this contest.
  • The Peshwa thus became the true functional head of the Maratha state, while the Chhatrapati was reduced to a largely titular figurehead; the Peshwa’s headquarters at Poona became the effective centre of political activity, while the king remained isolated at Satara.
  • It should also be noted that, alongside this rise of the Peshwa, the position of the Maratha king, Shahu, was itself simultaneously strengthened — rivals to Shahu’s own claim to the throne were consistently defeated by the Peshwas.
• To further consolidate his authority, Baji Rao I, the second Peshwa, began deliberately cultivating a powerful Maratha nobility of his own, lavishly granting territories outside the core Swarajya region along with rights to collect chauth and sardeshmukhi.
  • These new grantees were permitted to retain 75 per cent of the total chauth collected as their saranjam grant, used to maintain troops and cover their own expenses.
  • Enjoying considerable autonomy, they assisted the Peshwa in numerous military campaigns while also expanding their own principalities through the conquest of neighbouring territories.
  • The Peshwa, in turn, deliberately played these various Maratha sardars off against one another, preventing them from uniting into a force capable of challenging his own authority.
    • Among the most important of these emerging Maratha sardar houses were the Scindias of Gwalior, the Gaekwads of Baroda, the Holkars of Indore, and the Pawars of Dhar.
  • Before long, however, these Maratha sardars grew increasingly jealous both of each other and of the central Peshwa authority itself — a rivalry that eventually contributed directly to the eclipse of both the Peshwa and the Maratha king as effective rulers.
    • After 1748, central Maratha authority survived largely as an ideal, while the confederacy had become the operative political reality.
  • The third Peshwa also formally abandoned the ideal of Hindu Pad Padshahi, and began inducting non-Maratha mercenaries directly into the Maratha army.
• These cumulative developments transformed what had once been a unified Maratha movement into a loose, parallel movement of feudatory chiefs, who cooperated with one another only for specific common purposes, while independently carving out or extending their own principalities from the decaying Mughal Empire.
  • In this way, the underlying homogeneity of the original Maratha movement gradually broke down.
• The first three Peshwas undoubtedly dreamed of building a genuine Maratha Empire — but, unlike the Mughals, they never succeeded in developing durable institutions capable of assimilating the loyalty of their allies over the long term.
  • The Mughals, by contrast, had evolved the system of granting mansab and jagir to important Rajput princes and other allied chiefs, generally treating them with considerable leniency.
  • The Marathas, on the other hand, consistently distrusted their own allies and instead levied exhaustive tribute — the khandani or malamati — upon them.
    • Such treatment inevitably antagonised the Rajputs, whose genuine loyalty the Marathas failed to secure even for a limited period; their treatment of the Jats, Sikhs, and other allied groups followed a broadly similar pattern.
    • This failure to secure lasting allied loyalty was itself an important contributing factor behind the Maratha defeat at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761.
• In sum, the nature of the political structure under the first three Peshwas remained essentially feudal in character, even as certain deliberate attempts were made to centralise specific powers.
  • The Maratha king remained politically isolated, while the Peshwa reigned supreme in practice — even as the broader Maratha movement steadily lost its earlier homogeneity.
  • The very steps the Peshwas took to consolidate their own authority and build a great Maratha Empire ultimately boomeranged, leading directly to the eclipse of the Peshwa’s own central authority and the emergence of the Maratha confederacy.

The Maratha Confederacy

• The term “confederacy” denotes a combination of essentially autonomous political units, brought together for the pursuit of certain shared goals or purposes.
  • Although the Maratha confederacy became a fully realised political reality only by the middle of the 18th century, the seeds of this development were, in fact, deeply embedded in the broader socio-political background of the Maratha movement from its earliest days.
  • The specific conditions created after Shivaji’s death, together with the Peshwa’s rise to de jure supreme authority, considerably exacerbated and accelerated this underlying process.
• The Maratha movement, at its core, had always resisted the notion of unqualified central authority or external domination — even during Shivaji’s own comparatively centralising reign, the more powerful Maratha chiefs remained substantially autonomous.
  • The Ajnapatra, a Marathi political treatise composed during Shivaji’s reign, describes Maratha chiefs (watandars) explicitly as “partners of the king” and “co-sharers of sovereignty” — a telling indication of how power was genuinely conceived within the Maratha system.
  • Marathas, more broadly, tended to view formal political authority as inherently temporary, placing far greater emphasis instead on enduring attachment to one’s own watan (hereditary landholding) — even Shivaji and his successors themselves retained their personal watan in the pargana of Indapur.
• The death of Shivaji, the beheading of Rajaram, and Aurangzeb’s capture of Shahu shattered even the limited centralising process Shivaji had initiated, giving the broader Maratha movement an entirely new direction.
  • Various claimants to Shivaji’s throne emerged, each seeking the support of powerful Maratha chiefs to bolster his or her own claim — a dynamic that generated fertile ground for the growth of factionalism at the Maratha court.
  • This ongoing political confusion, in turn, gave the powerful watandars considerable added scope and opportunity to come to the forefront and play an increasingly decisive political role.
• Amid this political chaos, Shahu appointed Balaji Vishwanath as his Peshwa, who successfully defeated the rival claimants to the Maratha throne — his considerable political skill helping, for a time, to halt the process of factional disintegration.
  • The Peshwa’s office soon gained clear ascendancy, with the Maratha king correspondingly reduced to a titular head.
  • Even so, the Peshwa’s rise to genuine de facto supremacy was never entirely smooth, his position repeatedly challenged both by rival chiefs and by the Pratinidhi within the Ashtapradhan council — though the Peshwa shrewdly and consistently continued to consolidate his own dominant position over time.
• The second Peshwa, Baji Rao, began granting large watans outside the core Swarajya territory, accompanied by considerable autonomy, in order to strengthen his own political base.
  • These grantees, in turn, helped both the Peshwa and the Maratha king extend their territorial reach — particularly across the north and east — while also expanding their own watans through the conquest of adjoining territories, gradually emerging as genuinely effective centres of regional power.
    • Among the most significant of these were the Scindias of Gwalior, the Gaekwads of Baroda, the Holkars of Indore, and the Pawars of Dhar.
  • The Peshwa consistently followed a policy of playing these various Maratha chiefs against one another, ensuring they could not unite into a force powerful enough to genuinely challenge his own authority.
    • This policy produced two simultaneous developments: first, these chiefs were granted ever greater autonomy, power, and privilege; and second, they grew increasingly hostile towards, and jealous of, one another.
  • This dynamic ultimately fostered growing opposition to central Maratha authority itself — the Peshwa’s own power gradually eclipsed, giving rise to the Maratha confederacy proper.
    • After Shahu’s death in 1748, the Maratha king was formally reduced from the status of Chhatrapati to merely the Raja of Satara — a titular figurehead, with the Peshwa himself now reduced to little more than a nominal head as well.
    • The Peshwa’s government under Nana Phadnis came to be popularly nicknamed the “Bara Bhai” — the confederacy of the twelve brothers.
• These confederate chiefs, in practice, considerably helped extend the reach of Maratha territory.
  • During the days of Balaji Baji Rao, the Bhonsles overran Orissa while the Holkars advanced into Bundelkhand, even as the Peshwa himself extended Maratha influence into Mysore and the Carnatic.
  • At its territorial peak, the confederacy’s power stretched from the Chambal and Yamuna in the north to the Godavari in the south, and from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal.
    • By the mid-18th century, the Marathas stood as the single most powerful force on the Indian political stage, with the Peshwa and his lieutenants levying chauth across virtually the entire subcontinent.
• Paradoxically, this vast territorial expansion also served, over time, to weaken the Maratha movement under the confederacy — generating ever more numerous areas of friction and internal dispute.
  • The movement’s earlier homogeneity was steadily lost, and it increasingly resembled a loose, parallel movement of feudatory chiefs, riven by mutual jealousy and hostility.
  • Genuine cooperation nonetheless did occur under particularly strong and energetic Peshwas — such as Madhav Rao and Nana Phadnis — during whose leadership the Marathas achieved several notable victories.
    • The last occasion on which the Peshwa, the Holkar, and the Scindia genuinely joined forces came during Nana Phadnis’s tenure, when together they decisively defeated Tipu Sultan of Mysore and the Nizam of Hyderabad.
• The rift between the various Maratha sardars, and between these sardars and the Peshwa himself, widened considerably as mutual jealousy and hostility deepened over time — creating precisely the conditions that allowed the British East India Company to gain a gradual, largely unforced foothold in Maratha internal affairs.
  • Unable to act in any genuinely concerted manner, the various Maratha factions were ultimately defeated by the Company one by one.
  • In 1818, Peshwa Baji Rao II himself was formally pensioned off — bringing to a close the era in which Maratha power carried any real weight on the Indian political stage.
• The Maratha confederacy, in sum, emerged as the natural outcome of the underlying socio-political character of the Maratha movement, the specific conditions created by Shivaji’s death, and the Peshwa’s own calculated diplomacy in consolidating his personal authority.
  • While the confederate structure did help extend Maratha territory and augment Peshwa power in the short term, it left the movement fundamentally weakened internally — mutual jealousy and hostility reigned supreme among the confederate chiefs, preventing any genuinely united response to British encroachment, a failure to which they all ultimately succumbed together.