Jinji
1689–1698 — the state that would not be caught
Rājārām, barely twenty, escaped south in disguise across the whole width of the peninsula and reached Jinji — the fortress his father had taken and fortified in 1677 for precisely this contingency, eleven hundred kilometres from Raigad. From there, for nine years, the Maratha state continued to exist: issuing orders, appointing officers, collecting revenue, conducting a war.
He never claimed to be Chhatrapati in his own right. He ruled explicitly as regent for Śāhū, his nephew, then a child in Mughal hands — a scrupulousness about legitimacy, in the middle of a war of survival, that tells one a great deal about the political culture Shivaji had built.
And he made the decision that won the war. Unable to pay or command a central army, he decentralised the whole military effort: any Maratha chief who would fight was authorised to raise his own force, strike where he chose, collect cauth in the territory he cleared, and keep as jāgīr what he took from the Mughals. It was a deliberate reversal of his father's centralising reform, and it was the correct answer to the situation. It converted a state that could be captured into a swarm that could not. The Mughals could take any fort they were willing to pay enough for; they could not take a war that had a hundred independent centres. Settled
The financial mechanism deserves a note, because it is what made the decentralisation work rather than dissolve. A sardar who cleared a district was authorised to collect cauth in it and to hold as jāgīr what he took from the enemy — but the grant ran in the Chhatrapati's name, was recorded at the court in exile, and was revocable. The result was that ambition and loyalty pointed the same way: a commander enriched himself precisely by expanding the state, and his title to what he held depended on the state continuing to exist. Aurangzeb's own policy of buying Maratha chiefs failed against this, because a chief who defected forfeited a legal title for a Mughal promise, and by the 1690s Mughal promises were not worth much. It is the origin of the confederal system that would later carry the empire to Attock — and, as Part VI records, the origin of its final weakness. Contested
Santājī and Dhanājī
Out of that policy came the two commanders whose names Mughal mothers used to frighten children — literally: the couplet santājī-dhanājī āle passed into the folklore of the imperial camp.
Santājī Ghorpaḍe, Senāpati from 1690, was the finest cavalry commander of his generation. In March 1690 he conceived and executed the most audacious operation of the entire war: while the main Maratha force drew the Mughal generals toward Phaltan, Santājī with two thousand horse rode straight into Aurangzeb's own camp at Tulapur at night, reached the imperial pavilion, and cut the tent ropes so that the whole vast structure collapsed, killing those inside. Aurangzeb had by chance moved to another tent. His personal guard and many of his bodyguards were killed; the golden finials of the imperial tent were carried off as trophies. The Emperor of Hindustan, at the head of a half-million-strong camp, had been reached in his own bed. Settled
Santājī went on to defeat and capture Ali Mardan Khan, to break Zulfiqar Khan's siege lines at Jinji repeatedly, to rout Qasim Khan at Doderi in 1696 — where the Mughal general committed suicide — and to make the imperial commanders so reluctant to engage that Aurangzeb had to threaten them into the field. He was killed in 1696 in a personal feud, a loss the Marathas could ill afford.
Dhanājī Jādhav succeeded him and continued for another twelve years, dividing the armies into independent columns under himself, Paraśurām Trimbak and Śaṅkarājī Nārāyaṇ, and inflicting defeat after defeat across Maharashtra and the Karnataka.
Jinji finally fell in 1698, after an eight-year siege — one of the longest in Indian history — and Rājārām walked out before the end and rode back to Maharashtra, establishing his court at Satara. He had achieved his object: he had kept the state alive for nine years and worn the empire down. He died at Sinhagad in 1700, of lung disease, at thirty.
The Women of the Long War
Yesubai, Tarabai, and the queens who held the state together
No account of these twenty-seven years is honest that treats them as a war of generals. At three separate moments the survival of the Maratha state depended on the judgement of a woman, and in each case the judgement was correct.
Yesūbāī, Sambhaji's queen, made the first. With Raigad about to fall in 1689 and the royal family certain to be taken, she had the choice of trying to save herself and her seven-year-old son Śāhū, or of ensuring the state had a functioning head. She chose the second: she sent her brother-in-law Rājārām out of the fort in disguise with the seals and the authority to act, keeping the child and herself behind as the Mughals closed in. She had calculated that a captured heir was recoverable but a leaderless state was not. She then spent eighteen years in Mughal captivity raising her son in the enemy's camp, keeping him alive, keeping him Hindu, and keeping him fit to rule — and he emerged in 1707 capable of reconstituting the empire. She was released in 1719 under the terms Bālājī Viśvanāth extracted at Delhi, and lived to see the Peśvāī established. Settled
Tārābāī made the second and the greatest. Her decisions in 1700 — to proclaim her infant son rather than let the state fall into a succession war, to take the field herself, and above all to convert a defensive holding action into a strategic offensive against the Mughal revenue base — won the war. Khafi Khan's testimony is the more valuable for being hostile: he records that she became the whole strength of her party, that she personally directed the movements of the armies, and that her arrangements improved year on year while the empire's decayed.
And there were others whose names the chronicles preserve only in passing: Soyarābāī, whose faction-making did real damage but whose political weight was undeniable; Dīpābāī and the women of the sardar houses who administered jāgīrs while their men were in the field for years at a stretch; the wives and mothers who held the forts' domestic economies together through sieges. In a war fought by a society rather than an army, the distinction between the front and the household ceases to exist — which is precisely why that society could not be defeated by taking its capital.
Mahārāṇī Tārābāī
1700–1707 — the regent who finished the war
Rājārām's death left an infant heir and a state at war with the greatest empire on earth. His widow Tārābāī — daughter of Hambīrrāo Mohite, the Senāpati — proclaimed her four-year-old son Śivājī II as Chhatrapati and took the regency into her own hands. She was twenty-five.
She proved to be the most effective war leader the Marathas produced in that generation. She took direct command of policy and strategy, held the fractious sardars together by force of personality, moved among the armies herself, and — critically — shifted the war from defence to offence. Under Tārābāī the Marathas stopped merely resisting in Maharashtra and began raiding deep into imperial territory: into Khandesh, Berar, Malwa and Gujarat, into Burhanpur and Surat and Broach, striking the empire's revenue base a thousand kilometres from the fighting. They retook Vishalgad, Panhala, Sinhagad, Rajgad, Satara, Basantgad — one after another.
The Mughal chronicler Khafi Khan, no friend of the Marathas, recorded her ability with open admiration: that she had become the strength of her people, that she managed the army and the state in person, and that her arrangements grew stronger every year. Settled Aurangzeb, in his eighties, spent his last years personally besieging Deccan hill-forts, taking them at ruinous cost, and watching the Marathas retake them behind him as he moved on.
A widow of twenty-five, with an infant on the throne, took a war that had already lasted eleven years and turned it around — and the Mughal chronicler who hated her cause recorded that her arrangements grew stronger with every year that passed. — On Maharani Tarabai, regent 1700–1707
Aurangzeb died at Ahmadnagar on 3 March 1707, aged eighty-eight, in the twenty-sixth year of a Deccan campaign that had consumed his treasury, his army, his empire's administrative coherence and his own life. He asked to be buried in a plain grave paid for by caps he had stitched himself. The letters of his last years are those of a man who knows he has failed.
The arithmetic is worth stating plainly, because it is the answer to anyone who presents this period as a Maratha decline. Aurangzeb came south in 1681 to destroy a young kingdom whose founder had just died. He destroyed Bijapur and Golconda on the way. He captured, tortured and killed one Chhatrapati; he took a second's capital and held his heir prisoner for eighteen years; he besieged and took nearly every fort in the Deccan at least once. And at the end of twenty-seven years the Marathas held more territory than when he started, were raiding Gujarat and Malwa at will, and were about to expand to the Indus — while the Mughal empire never again recovered a functioning grip on India. The Marathas won the twenty-seven years' war. Settled
Timeline
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1681 | Sambhaji crowned; Burhanpur sacked; Aurangzeb moves the empire south. |
Why the Empire Broke
The arithmetic of twenty-seven years
Aurangzeb came south in 1681 with every conceivable advantage: the revenue of Hindustan, an army of hundreds of thousands, siege artillery, unlimited money for bribes, and the ability to keep a field force in being indefinitely. He faced a state whose founder had died the year before, whose territory was a fraction of his own, and which had no treasury to speak of.
He spent twenty-six years and did not win. It is worth setting out precisely why, because the reasons are the vindication of everything Shivaji Maharaj had built.
The forts could be taken but not held. Aurangzeb's method was to besiege a hill fort, spend months and enormous sums taking it, garrison it, and move on — whereupon the Marathas retook it behind him, often within weeks, because the garrison was isolated in hostile country and could not be supplied. He captured most of the major forts of the Deccan at least once. He held almost none of them at the end.
The state had no single centre to capture. Raigad fell in 1689 and the state continued from Jinji, eleven hundred kilometres away — the fallback his father had fortified in 1677. Jinji fell in 1698 and the state continued from Satara. Rājārām's decentralisation meant that destroying any one army or capturing any one place accomplished nothing.
Bribery failed against legal title. Aurangzeb bought Maratha chiefs continuously and they came back, because a Maratha sardar who defected exchanged a revocable but real grant in a functioning system for a Mughal promise in a collapsing one — and by 1695 everyone in the Deccan could see which was which.
The countryside was against him. After Tulapur, the war had a moral dimension no amount of money could touch. Mughal columns moved through a population that hid its grain, misdirected them and reported their movements; Maratha columns moved through one that fed them.
And the destruction of Bijapur and Golconda was his own worst blunder. In eliminating them in 1686–87 he removed the buffer between himself and Maharashtra, inherited responsibility for administering their territories, and threw tens of thousands of unpaid, disaffected Deccani soldiers onto a market where the Marathas were hiring. Settled
By the time he died at Ahmadnagar in March 1707, the Mughal treasury was exhausted, the north was ungoverned, the Rajputs were disaffected, the Sikhs were in arms, and the Marathas held more territory than in 1681. He had spent the last quarter-century of the greatest empire in the world on a war he could not win, and in doing so he destroyed the empire rather than the enemy. The letters of his final months — in which he writes that he came alone and goes as a stranger, that he has committed numerous sins and knows not what punishment awaits — are the words of a man who understood exactly what he had done.