The Marathas, Part 8 - Hindu Pad Padshahi

The Return of Shāhū

1707 — a released prisoner and the reordering of the state

Aurangzeb's successors released Śāhū — Sambhaji's son, taken as a child of seven at Raigad and held for eighteen years — in the calculated hope that a disputed succession would do to the Marathas what twenty-seven years of war had failed to do. It very nearly worked. Tārābāī, who had led the war to victory and whose own son sat on the throne, refused to yield to a claimant she regarded as a Mughal creation. The matter was settled at the Battle of Khed in 1707, where Dhanājī Jādhav went over to Śāhū and decided it; Tārābāī withdrew to Kolhapur and founded a rival line that endured for generations. The Maratha state emerged with two Chhatrapati houses, at Satara and Kolhapur — a division that was never fully healed and that would cost dearly later.

What Śāhū brought was not martial genius but something the moment required: an instinct for delegation. In 1713 he appointed as Peśvā a Chitpāvan Brahmin revenue officer of exceptional administrative skill, Bālājī Viśvanāth Bhaṭ, who reconciled the sardars, brought the great captains into a workable settlement, and then in 1719 performed the diplomatic stroke that transformed everything: marching to Delhi with a Maratha force to support the Sayyid brothers, and returning with imperial sanads granting the Marathas cauth and sardeśmukhī over the entire Deccan, the release of Yesūbāī and the family from captivity, and recognition of Śāhū's swarājya. The empire that had spent twenty-seven years trying to exterminate them now issued them legal title to its own southern revenues. Settled

Bālājī Viśvanāth died in 1720. The Peśvāī passed to his twenty-year-old son.

Bājīrāo Ballāḷ

Forty-one battles, not one lost

The appointment of a twenty-year-old to the highest office in the state was resented by every senior man at Satara, and Śāhū's judgement was vindicated within a decade. Bājīrāo I (1700–1740) is, by the assessment of British and Indian military historians alike, among the very small number of commanders in world history who fought a long war and never lost an engagement: over forty-one major battles in twenty years, and not one defeat. Settled

His strategic conception was stated at the outset, to a council that wanted to consolidate in the Deccan. His argument was that the Mughal empire was a withered tree — strike at the trunk and the branches must fall of themselves; and that the Maratha flag should fly from the Kṛṣṇā to Attock. He was proposing, in 1720, that a Deccan state should make itself the paramount power of Hindustan. He called the object Hindu Pad Pādśāhī — Hindu imperial sovereignty — the natural extension of his great-grandfather's Hindavī Svarājya from a kingdom to a subcontinent.

The method

Militarily he perfected what Shivaji had begun. He discarded almost everything that slowed an army: heavy artillery, baggage trains, elaborate camps, siege equipment. His force was light cavalry that lived off the country and covered forty to fifty miles a day, appearing where it could not possibly be, cutting supply lines, refusing battle until the ground was of his choosing, and forcing far larger armies to exhaust themselves chasing him. He is said to have eaten in the saddle and slept beside his horse, and his troopers followed him because he lived exactly as they did.

Palkhed, 28 February 1728, is the classic demonstration and is still taught as such. The Nizam-ul-Mulk of Hyderabad, a seasoned commander with a large artillery-heavy army, moved to install a rival claimant and expected a decisive collision. Bājīrāo refused to defend his own capital. He swung away, drew the Nizam on a long chase across the Deccan while Maratha columns stripped the Nizam's own territories behind him, and finally cornered that heavy army in waterless broken ground near Palkhed, cut it off from supply and water, and starved it into terms without a general action. The Treaty of Mungi-Shevgaon confirmed Śāhū as Chhatrapati and Maratha rights to cauth and sardeśmukhī across the Deccan. Field-Marshal Montgomery called it a masterpiece of strategic mobility, and studied Bājīrāo's campaigns when developing his own doctrine of manoeuvre. Settled

Delhi, March 1737. Bājīrāo rode from the Deccan to the walls of the imperial capital with a light force, outmarching every army sent to intercept him, and appeared before Delhi so suddenly that the emperor Muhammad Shah shut himself in the Red Fort. He fought a sharp action outside the city, made his point, and withdrew before the Mughal armies could converge. The message was unmistakable: the throne of Hindustan could be reached at will.

Bhopal, December 1737. The Nizam came north with a grand coalition army and full artillery to settle the Maratha question for good. Bājīrāo encircled him at Bhopal exactly as he had at Palkhed, cut him off, and forced the Convention of Doraha: the cession of Malwa and the territory between the Narmadā and the Chambal, and a large indemnity. The heartland of northern India passed to Maratha control.

He also fought Bundelkhand, where his rescue of the aged Chhatrasāl from Muhammad Khan Bangash in 1729 earned the Marathas a third of that kingdom and the enduring alliance of its house; and Vasai (Bassein), where his brother Cimājī Appā broke Portuguese power on the Konkan coast in 1739 — storming the fortress on 5 May after mining the tower of São Sebastião, ending two centuries of Portuguese rule north of Goa, and carrying the church bells of Vasai home to hang in Hindu temples at Jejuri, Tuljapur and elsewhere, where they still ring. Settled

Two campaigns show the range beyond the set-pieces. In Bundelkhand (1729) the aged Chhatrasāl, hard pressed by Muhammad Khan Bangash and abandoned by everyone else, wrote to Bājīrāo in verse comparing himself to the elephant Gajendra seized by the crocodile and calling on him as Viṣṇu to come. Bājīrāo came, covering the distance at a speed nobody thought possible, and broke the siege. Chhatrasāl adopted him as a son and left him a third of his kingdom — territory that gave the Marathas their permanent footing in central India.

In the Konkan, his brother Cimājī Appā conducted the campaign that ended Portuguese power in western India: through 1737–39 the outposts fell one by one — Thāṇā, Parsik, Uran, Arnala, Bandra, Versova, Dharavi — while Mānājī Āṅgre blockaded from the sea. At Vasai the Marathas mined the walls under continuous fire and stormed the breach on 3 May 1739 when the tower of São Sebastião came down. It was the reckoning for two centuries of forced conversion and demolished temples on that coast, and everyone involved understood it as such.

The state-builder

His most durable work was not a battle. Bājīrāo created the great Maratha houses that carried the empire for the next century, raising able commanders from modest origins and settling them on the territories they conquered: Rāṇojī Śinde (Scindia) at Gwalior, Malhārrāo Holkar at Indore, Pilājī Gāikwāḍ at Baroda, Udājī Pawār at Dhar, with the Bhonsles at Nagpur. This confederal structure gave the empire enormous reach and resilience — and, as Part VI will show, contained the flaw that the British would eventually exploit. Contested

He died of a fever in camp on the Narmadā on 28 April 1740, aged thirty-nine, having never been beaten.

The Empire at Its Height

1740–1760 — from the Kaveri to the Indus

Under Bālājī Bājīrāo — Nānāsāheb, Peśvā 1740–1761 — the Maratha state reached its greatest extent, and the centre of gravity moved decisively from Satara to Pune. Śāhū died in 1749 having effectively made the Peśvā the working head of the state; the Chhatrapati remained the source of legitimacy while the executive sat at the Shaniwar Wada.

The reach in these two decades was extraordinary. Maratha armies operated in Bengal and Odisha under Raghojī Bhonsle, extracting cauth and eventually annexing Odisha. They campaigned in Rajputana, in Bundelkhand, in Gujarat under the Gāikwāḍs, in the Karnataka and against Mysore and Hyderabad, defeating the Nizam decisively at Udgir in 1760. In 1752 the Mughal emperor concluded the Ahmadiya treaty making the Marathas the protectors of the empire — responsible for defending Delhi against internal and external enemies alike. The empire the Marathas had been founded to resist was now formally under their protection.

And in 1758 came the moment that fulfilled Bājīrāo's declaration to the letter. Raghunāthrāo, Bājīrāo's second son, marched north through the Punjab, took Sirhind and Lahore, expelled the Afghan governor — Ahmad Shāh Abdālī's own son Timur Shah — and in April captured Attock on the Indus, then Peshawar. Maratha garrisons stood on the north-west frontier of India, at the very gate through which every invader for a thousand years had come. Settled From the Indus to the Kaveri, from Odisha to Gujarat, the Maratha Confederacy was the paramount power of the subcontinent, controlling on the order of a third of it.

This is the fact that the standard account of Indian history buries. Between the death of Aurangzeb and the rise of the British, India was not a vacuum awaiting a European master — it was a Maratha empire, Hindu, indigenous, extending from the Afghan frontier to the far south, and it had been built in eighty years by a people who in 1630 had held nothing at all.

How the Empire Worked

Cauth, the confederacy, and the army that crossed India

An empire that reached from the Indus to the Kaveri without a standing imperial bureaucracy needs explaining, and the explanation is the cauth.

The system was elegant and it was the engine of everything. In territory the Marathas did not administer directly, they levied cauth — a quarter of the assessed revenue — and sardeśmukhī, a further tenth. In exchange, the paying state was protected against third parties and against Maratha raiding alike. The collection was farmed out to the sardar whose armies covered that region, who kept a share and remitted the rest. This meant the empire could extract revenue from an enormous area without garrisoning it, without displacing its rulers, and without building an administration it could not staff. It also meant every Maratha commander had a direct financial interest in extending the system further.

The confederal structure followed from this. Śinde (Scindia) at Gwalior held the north and the Doab and eventually the person of the emperor. Holkar at Indore held Malwa and much of Rajputana's tribute. Gāikwāḍ at Baroda held Gujarat. Bhonsle at Nagpur held Berar, Odisha and the pressure on Bengal. The Peśvā at Pune held the Deccan and the coordinating authority; the Chhatrapati at Satara held the legitimacy. Each house maintained its own army, its own revenue and its own diplomacy, bound by allegiance rather than by administration.

The strengths were real: enormous reach, low overhead, and a system that could absorb the loss of any single component. The Marathas could lose an army at Panipat and still have four intact field forces elsewhere — which is precisely why they recovered within a decade. No centralised state of that period could have survived a comparable disaster.

The armies themselves were built for distance. A Maratha column moved with almost no baggage, remounted itself from the country, and covered ground at rates that Mughal and later British staffs found difficult to credit — forty to fifty miles in a day sustained over weeks. Grain was carried by Banjārā caravans that travelled with the force under long-standing arrangements. Intelligence came from a network of harkārās and from the Brahmin and merchant networks that spanned the subcontinent. This is how a Deccan power appeared before Delhi, at Attock, in Bengal and in the Carnatic within the same generation.

And the weakness was the same as the strength. A system held together by allegiance rather than administration depends on the personal authority of the man at the centre. Under Bājīrāo, Nānāsāheb, Mādhavrāo and Mahādjī, that authority held. Under a weak or treacherous Peśvā it did not — and the East India Company, which had studied the structure carefully, built its entire Indian strategy on that single fact. Contested

Panipat

14 January 1761 — the hardest day

Holding the Indus meant answering for it. Ahmad Shāh Abdālī, the Durrani king, had invaded India repeatedly since 1748 and regarded the Punjab as his. The expulsion of his son from Lahore made a reckoning certain. He returned in late 1759, and this time he came with a coalition assembled on explicitly religious grounds: the Rohilla Afghans under Najīb-ud-Daulā and the Nawab of Awadh, Shujā-ud-Daulā, joined him against the Marathas.

The Peśvā sent north a great army under his cousin Sadāśivrāo Bhāū, with his own son Viśvāsrāo as the nominal head, Ibrāhīm Khān Gārdī commanding a modern trained artillery corps, and the Scindia and Holkar contingents. They took Delhi in August 1760 and stormed Kunjpura. Then Abdālī crossed the Yamunā below them and placed himself between the Maratha army and its base. Both armies dug in at Panipat and sat for over two months.

The Maratha position was made desperate by circumstances that deserve to be stated exactly, because they are the answer to every casual dismissal of that army. First, they were operating a thousand miles from home with their supply line cut. Second, they had with them not merely soldiers but some two hundred thousand non-combatants — pilgrims, families, camp followers who had joined the march north — mouths that had to be fed from a countryside stripped bare. Third, the north Indian powers who ought to have been their allies had gone over or stood aside: the Marathas fought that battle essentially alone. By January the army was starving; horses were dying; the men had been on short rations for weeks. Bhāū's decision to give battle on 14 January was not recklessness. It was the choice between fighting on empty stomachs and starving without fighting.

There was also a failure of alliance that must be named, because it decided the battle before it was fought. The Marathas had spent thirty years extracting cauth from the Rajput states, from the Jats and from Awadh, and had made enemies of every one of them. Sūraj Mal, the Jat ruler of Bharatpur, offered sound advice — leave the heavy baggage and the pilgrims at Agra, fight light, use the Doab — and, when it was rejected and he was slighted, withdrew his contingent. The Rajputs stayed home. The Sikhs, who had their own accounts with Abdālī, were not brought in. The result was that a Hindu army fought the decisive battle for northern India while every other Indian power that stood to lose by an Afghan victory watched from the sidelines or joined the other side. Settled It is the oldest failure in this history and the most expensive.

They very nearly won it. The Maratha centre and Ibrāhīm Khān's artillery broke the Rohilla wing in the morning and the Durrani line bent badly; by early afternoon the day was arguably theirs. Then Viśvāsrāo, the Peśvā's son, was shot dead in the middle of the line. Sadāśivrāo Bhāū dismounted from his elephant to lead a charge and, once his howdah was seen empty, the army believed both its commanders dead. Abdālī committed his reserve of ten thousand fresh troops into exactly that moment. The Maratha line dissolved.

The losses were catastrophic — perhaps sixty to seventy thousand fighting men killed in the battle, and in the days after, tens of thousands of non-combatants massacred or marched into slavery. Bhāū, Viśvāsrāo and Jankojī Śinde were dead. Mahādjī Śinde escaped, wounded for life. It was, and remains, the bloodiest single day in the history of Indian warfare. The news killed Nānāsāheb within months.

The names should be recorded. Sadāśivrāo Bhāū, who had beaten the Nizam at Udgir the year before and who died in the line rather than leave it. Viśvāsrāo, seventeen years old, the Peśvā's son and heir, shot through the head at the head of his troops. Jankojī Śinde, twenty-five, captured and killed after the battle. Ibrāhīm Khān Gārdī, the Muslim artillery commander who had trained the Maratha gunners on European lines, whose batteries broke the Rohilla wing that morning, who refused to abandon his guns, and who was taken and tortured to death by the Afghans for having fought for a Hindu king. Settled He is one of the great figures of this history and is remembered by almost nobody.

And the aftermath is the part almost never told. Abdālī won the battle and lost the war. His own troops mutinied for arrears and he was compelled to withdraw to Afghanistan within weeks; he never established rule in India; his subsequent invasions achieved nothing. The Punjab passed not to him but to the rising Sikh confederacies. He wrote afterwards to seek terms with the Peśvā.

The Marathas, meanwhile, recovered with a speed that astonished everyone. Mādhavrāo I, Peśvā at sixteen, rebuilt the state's finances and armies, subdued Hyderabad at Rakshasbhuvan in 1763, brought Mysore to terms, restored the confederacy's discipline — and in 1771, ten years after Panipat, a Maratha army under Mahādjī Śinde and Visājī Krishna Biniwale retook Delhi, reinstated Shāh Ālam II on the imperial throne as a Maratha pensioner, and recovered the northern territories. Settled The recovery was complete within a decade. Mādhavrāo died of tuberculosis at twenty-seven in 1772, and Grant Duff — no admirer of the Marathas — wrote that the plains of Panipat were not more fatal to the empire than his early death.