He is not a dramatic figure in the way Malik Ambar or Tarabai are dramatic. He fought no legendary battles and left behind no siege narrative worth retelling. His weapons were the account ledger, the negotiated settlement, and an unusually precise sense of when to bend and when to hold firm. Grant Duff, writing the first serious English-language history of the Marathas in 1826, treated him as a transitional figure standing between the martial improvisation of Shivaji’s era and the bureaucratic empire the eighteenth century would produce [3]. That transition is the subject of this post.

Origins in the Konkan

Balaji Vishwanath Bhat was born on 1 January 1662 in Shrivardhan, a coastal town in the Konkan that his family had held as hereditary Deshmukhs for generations [2]. The Konkan in the late seventeenth century was contested ground, squeezed between the Siddis of Janjira on the coast and the expanding Maratha state inland, and Chitpavan Brahmin families like the Bhats survived there by being useful rather than powerful. Balaji’s early career followed the well-worn path of a competent revenue clerk: he moved to the Desh, the upland plateau around Pune, and took work as an accountant and kamavisdar under successive Maratha commanders, eventually attaching himself to Dhanaji Jadhav, the most important Maratha general of the post-Shivaji generation.

This was unglamorous work, but it taught Balaji something none of the swordsmen around him had bothered to learn: how Maratha revenue actually moved, who owed what to whom, and which local strongmen could be bought, which could be flattered, and which needed to be crushed. He served as Sar Subedar of Pune from roughly 1699 to 1702 and then of Daulatabad from 1704 to 1707, administrative postings that gave him a granular knowledge of Deccan finance that no battlefield commander possessed [1]. When the crisis of 1707 arrived, this was the asset he brought to the table.

The Succession War and the Making of a Kingmaker

Aurangzeb died in February 1707 after a war of attrition in the Deccan that had drained the Mughal treasury without breaking the Marathas. The Mughals released Shahu, Sambhaji’s son, who had spent nearly two decades as a captive in the imperial camp, calculating that a rival claimant would split Maratha loyalties and weaken the kingdom further. It worked exactly as intended. Rajaram’s widow Tarabai, who had run an effective regency and guerrilla resistance for years, refused to yield the throne to a nephew she had never needed and did not trust. The Marathas fractured into two courts, one at Kolhapur behind Tarabai, one gathering uncertainly around Shahu.

Dhanaji Jadhav, Balaji’s patron, was Tarabai’s senapati and marched against Shahu on her orders. It was Balaji who changed the outcome. Sardesai’s account, echoed by later historians, credits him with secretly meeting Shahu and persuading Dhanaji that the young claimant was the legitimate heir and the better bet politically [2]. At Khed in the Pune district, Dhanaji switched sides and declared for Shahu, a defection that effectively decided the civil war before it had properly begun. Shahu owed his throne to this single act of persuasion, and he did not forget it. When Dhanaji died in 1708, Shahu drew Balaji into his own service, and by 1713 the debt was repaid in full.

The years between were not quiet, and it was a second crisis, not the first, that actually made Balaji Peshwa. By 1713 Kanhoji Angre, the Maratha navy’s Sarkhel, had spent years administering the Konkan coast as something close to an independent principality, and the ongoing war between Shahu and Tarabai gave him room to push that independence further. He seized the trading town of Kalyan and the forts of Rajmachi and Lohagad, effectively declaring that Satara’s writ stopped where his coastline began. Shahu’s response was to send his sitting Peshwa, Bahiroji Pingale, son of Moropant Pingle who had held the very first Peshwaship under Shivaji, at the head of an army to bring Angre to heel. It went badly. Angre outmaneuvered and defeated Pingale’s force, took the Peshwa himself prisoner, and confined him at Lohagad. Rather than stopping there, Angre began advancing on Satara.

This left Shahu with a captured Peshwa, an emboldened rebel a few days’ march from his capital, and a council of sardars who, by every account, had no idea what to do next. Balaji was still only a Senakarte, an organizer of forces, and a trusted hand at revenue and negotiation, but not yet a minister with the standing to treat with a man who had just humiliated the crown’s own Peshwa. According to the court chroniclers, Balaji told Shahu plainly that sending him against Angre with anything less than the full authority of the Peshwa’s office would accomplish nothing: if Angre had captured a sitting Peshwa and marched on the capital unopposed, only the sight of a new Peshwa, formally and visibly installed, would convince him that Shahu’s government had not in fact been broken. Shahu accepted the logic. On 16 November 1713 he invested Balaji Vishwanath with the robes, seal, and full authority of the Peshwaship, elevating a Konkan revenue clerk over sardars with far deeper military credentials, and did so specifically so that Balaji would have the standing to negotiate rather than fight.

The gamble paid off immediately. Balaji met Kanhoji Angre at Lonavla, and rather than press whatever military advantage the new appointment implied, he appealed to their shared Konkani origins and to the larger Maratha cause that infighting was undermining. Angre agreed to stand down, accepted formal recognition as Sarkhel of the Maratha navy with authority over the Konkan, and released Bahiroji Pingale from captivity. The two men then turned their combined forces against the Siddis of Janjira, the old power on the Konkan coast, and between them captured most of it, including Shrivardhan, Balaji’s own hometown. It was a preview of the method Balaji would use for the rest of his career: where a soldier would reach for an army, he reached for a settlement, converted a defeated or dangerous rival into a stakeholder in the state rather than an enemy to be crushed, and the settlement usually held.

Building the Machine

What Balaji did with the Peshwaship over the next six years was less a campaign than an engineering project. The Maratha state Shahu had inherited was, in practice, a loose confederation of sardars, each collecting revenue in his own territory and answering to Satara only when it suited him. Balaji’s genius was recognizing that the state’s long-term strength depended less on any single military victory than on regularizing how it extracted and distributed money.

He formalized the jagirdari system, granting hereditary revenue assignments to Maratha chieftains in exchange for fixed military and administrative obligations, which converted potentially rebellious warlords into stakeholders with a direct interest in the state’s survival. He also overhauled the machinery for collecting chauth, the quarter share of Mughal revenue the Marathas had long claimed by right of conquest, and sardeshmukhi, the additional tenth claimed as hereditary overlords of the Deccan. Under his predecessors these had often meant whatever a raiding column could extract in a given season. Under Balaji they became something closer to a fiscal system, farmed out through contractors and enforced through paperwork rather than through the sword alone. Sardesai’s judgment on this period captures the underlying shift in the relationship between crown and minister precisely:

“the comparative strength of the two parties is reversed” [2]

The line comes from Sardesai’s description of how thoroughly Shahu, worn down by decades of captivity and civil war, had come to depend on his Peshwa for the basic functioning of his kingdom. By the time Balaji moved the day-to-day administration from Satara to Pune, sending Shahu regular reports rather than taking regular orders, the office of Peshwa had already begun its long drift toward becoming the empire’s actual center of gravity.

Delhi, 1719

The Mughal Empire Balaji had to navigate after Aurangzeb was a different creature entirely, one eating itself from the inside. Farrukhsiyar had taken the throne in 1713 with the backing of two powerful nobles, the Sayyid brothers, Hussain Ali Khan and Abdullah Khan, who had turned themselves into kingmakers and expected to rule through their puppet. Farrukhsiyar chafed at the arrangement and began plotting against his own patrons, a plot the Sayyids discovered and moved to preempt.

Hussain Ali Khan, who held the Deccan as governor and had spent years fighting an inconclusive war against Maratha raiding parties, decided that peace with the Marathas was worth more to him than continued conflict, particularly with a coup against the emperor on the horizon. He opened negotiations with Balaji, and in 1719 the two men reached an agreement so favorable to Maratha interests that the British administrator-historian Sir Richard Temple later called it the Magna Carta of the Maratha state, describing the document Balaji brought home as:

“one of the most noteworthy state documents in Indian history”

Temple’s judgment is worth taking seriously precisely because he was not given to overstatement about Indian polities he had little affection for. In exchange for military support, the Marathas would receive formal Mughal recognition of their right to collect chauth and sardeshmukhi across the six Deccan provinces, along with Shahu’s confirmation as the legitimate heir to Shivaji’s throne.

Farrukhsiyar refused to ratify it. So Balaji did something no Peshwa had done before and personally led a Maratha force, some sixteen thousand horsemen by most estimates, north to Delhi alongside Hussain Ali Khan’s army. What followed was one of the more startling episodes in Mughal history. The combined force overwhelmed Farrukhsiyar’s supporters, and in February 1719 the emperor was deposed, blinded, and eventually killed, the first time in Mughal history that the emperor himself had been destroyed by his own nobility rather than a foreign invader [1]. The Sayyids installed a compliant successor, Rafi-ud-Darajat, who promptly ratified the treaty Farrukhsiyar had refused to sign.

Balaji did not leave Delhi with only a treaty. He also secured the release of Yesubai, Shahu’s mother, and Savitribai, his wife, who had spent decades as Mughal captives since Sambhaji’s execution. Bringing them home to Satara was, in some ways, a more emotionally resonant achievement than the fiscal settlement, and it cemented Shahu’s personal gratitude to a Peshwa who had now delivered both his throne and his family.

The Final Months

The Delhi expedition cost Balaji his health. Jadunath Sarkar, whose multivolume history of the Mughal collapse remains the standard account of this period, describes the physical toll of the journey and the political maneuvering that followed it in language that leaves little doubt about the strain involved [1]. Balaji returned to the Deccan a triumphant but visibly diminished man. In October 1719 he asked Shahu for leave to retire to Saswad, a village near Pune that had been granted to the Peshwa’s office, and by April of the following year he was dead, having held the position for barely more than six years.

He was succeeded by his elder son, Baji Rao, not yet twenty years old and about to become the most aggressive military commander the Maratha state would ever produce. That succession was itself part of Balaji’s legacy: he had made the Peshwaship hereditary in practice if not yet formally in law, ensuring that the administrative machine he built would pass intact to a son trained in his methods rather than dissolve into another contest among rival sardars. Historians have generally credited him with the title Second Founder of the Maratha State, a title that undersells the case as much as it makes it. Shivaji built a kingdom out of the Sahyadri hill forts through raw military improvisation. Balaji Vishwanath took what could have remained a regional insurgency, permanently vulnerable to any competent Mughal governor willing to fight it, and gave it the fiscal skeleton and the international legal standing to survive its founder’s death and keep expanding for another century.

What his son did with that machine, and the road that eventually led through Palkhed, the Nizam’s Deccan, and finally to a plain outside a north Indian town called Panipat, is a story we will pick up separately.

Notes & Citations

[1] Sarkar, J. (1932). Fall of the Mughal Empire (Vol. 1). M.C. Sarkar & Sons.

[2] Sardesai, G. S. (1946). New History of the Marathas (Vol. 2). Phoenix Publications.

[3] Grant Duff, J. (1826). A History of the Mahrattas (Vol. 1). Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.

[4] Temple, R. (1899). A Story of My Life (or as cited in later secondary accounts of the 1719 Delhi treaty). Verify original citation before publishing.

Born Into a House of Absences

Sadashiv Rao was born on 4 August 1730 at Satara, the son of Chimaji Appa, the formidable younger brother of Baji Rao I who had wrested Bassein from the Portuguese and cleared the Konkan coast of their forts [1]. It was a lineage built for greatness, but Bhau’s own start in it was marked by loss rather than privilege. His mother Rakhmabai died when he was barely a month old, and his father remarried the following year. When Bhau was ten, Chimaji Appa died as well, and by custom his stepmother Anapurnabai became sati on his father’s pyre, leaving the boy doubly orphaned within the space of a decade [2].

He was raised thereafter by his grandmother Radhabai, the widow of Balaji Vishwanath, and by his aunt Kashibai, Baji Rao’s wife, in a household that was already the nerve centre of Maratha politics [2]. His education was entrusted to Ramchandrababa Shenvi, a tutor remembered as one of the shrewdest political minds among the Marathas of his generation, and it shows in how quickly Bhau moved from student to commander. He led his first campaign into Karnataka at sixteen and won his first field victory at Ajra, south of Kolhapur, in January 1747 [3].

The Deccan Apprenticeship

The next twelve years were spent almost entirely in the Carnatic, chipping away at the Nawabs of Savanur and the remaining fragments of Aurangzeb’s Deccan settlement. Kittur, Parasgad, Yadwad, Gokak, Badami, Bagalkot, Navalgund, Haliyal, Basavapatna: the list of towns that fell under Bhau’s direction over these years reads like a gazetteer of the western Deccan, and it was here, not at Panipat, that he built his real military reputation [3]. By the time he was thirty, he was, in the words of NDHistories, the highest officer in the Maratha Confederacy after the Peshwa himself, a man whose calculative temperament and tenacity had already earned him the awe that his uncle Baji Rao had once commanded [4].

That reputation was confirmed rather than made at Udgir in 1760, where Bhau led the Maratha army to a decisive victory over the Nizam of Hyderabad, forcing him to cede vast territory and reducing his kingdom to little more than its bare remnants [4]. It was, on paper, the high-water mark of Maratha power in the peninsula. Within a year the same commander would lead an army to the worst defeat in Maratha history. Few reversals of fortune in Indian history are so complete or so fast.

Diwan of the Peshwa

Bhau’s administrative career is less romantic than his battlefield record but arguably more revealing of the man. After the resignation of Mahadjipant Purandare, he took over as Diwan, the Peshwa’s chief financial officer, a position that put him in daily friction with Nanasaheb’s wife Gopikabai. Sources close to the Peshwa’s household describe her as wary of Bhau’s growing stature, anxious that a cousin who had already proven himself in the field and in the treasury might begin to see himself as more than a subordinate [5]. It is a useful corrective to the image of Bhau as a simple soldier: by 1760 he was simultaneously the Peshwa’s finance minister, his most trusted general, and a man the inner court quietly distrusted.

Blood in the Tent

One episode rarely makes it into the popular retellings, and it deserves more attention than it gets. In October 1759, while Bhau was conducting routine business in his tent at Poona, he was stabbed in the back by Haidar Khan, son-in-law of the Gardi commander Muzaffar Khan. Muzaffar Khan’s motive was professional jealousy: Bhau had brought in a rival gunner, Ibrahim Khan Gardi, to train and lead the Maratha artillery, and Muzaffar Khan seems to have taken the appointment as a personal insult severe enough to warrant murder. The wound was serious but not fatal. An inquiry followed swiftly, and on 30 October eight conspirators, Muzaffar Khan and his son-in-law among them, were executed by being blown from the mouths of cannon [6].

It is a startling detail to sit beside the record of a man usually discussed only in terms of grand strategy: fourteen months before Panipat, Sadashiv Rao Bhau nearly died in his own camp over a personnel dispute involving the very artillery corps he would lead north.

The Northern Expedition

In March 1760, with the Deccan apparently secure and the Nizam humbled, Nanasaheb dispatched Bhau north at the head of an army reported at around 55,000 fighting men, accompanied by Ibrahim Khan Gardi’s modernised infantry and artillery corps and, controversially, a very large civilian retinue, including Bhau’s own wife Parvatibai [7]. The presence of the camp followers, the women of the household, the bankers, the pilgrims travelling under Maratha protection, would become one of the most contested decisions of the whole campaign, and not without reason: an army with a city’s worth of non-combatants attached to it moves slowly and eats enormously, and Bhau’s supply lines north of the Yamuna would pay for that arithmetic before the year was out.

The march itself was a triumph. Bhau crossed the Chambal, consulted with the veteran campaigner Malhar Rao Holkar on the shape of the campaign, and entered Delhi on 1 August 1760, taking the city the following day with the help of his artillery [7]. Suraj Mal, the Jat ruler of Bharatpur, joined the Maratha camp on the way, bringing with him decades of local knowledge about supply, terrain, and the temperament of the region’s smaller powers. It was, briefly, exactly the kind of alliance the campaign needed.

The Alliance That Broke

“Historians agree that Suraj Mal urged Bhau to leave the non-combatants in the safety of Agra or a fortified base before advancing further, advice that went unheeded.”

It broke over a disagreement that in hindsight looks almost small. Suraj Mal, who understood the country and its granaries better than any Maratha officer present, advised Bhau to leave the civilian retinue behind in a secure base such as Agra before pushing further north toward Kunjpura and Panipat. Bhau refused. Whether the refusal came from pride, from a genuine belief that the campaign would be short, or from an unwillingness to be seen taking counsel from a Jat chieftain rather than his own generals, is a question the sources do not answer cleanly. What is clear is the consequence: Suraj Mal, offended or simply unconvinced, withdrew from the alliance and returned home, taking with him the one relationship that might have kept the Maratha army fed through the winter siege that followed [8].

Bhau captured the fort of Kunjpura in October 1760, destroying its garrison, and then advanced to Panipat, where Ahmad Shah Abdali’s army was waiting on the far bank of the Yamuna. What followed was not a battle but a siege in reverse: Abdali cut the Maratha supply lines from Delhi, and for weeks the largest army the Marathas had ever fielded slowly starved inside its own fortified camp [9].

The Fourteenth of January

By January 1761 conditions inside the Maratha camp had become desperate enough that Bhau’s own commanders were asking to be allowed to die fighting rather than waste away from hunger. A peace proposal to Abdali was rejected. What forced Bhau’s hand, in the end, was not a plan but an outbreak: the starving army began to move of its own accord, and Bhau had little choice but to organise the general engagement he had been trying to postpone [10].

The battle that followed on 14 January 1761 very nearly went the Marathas’ way. Ibrahim Khan Gardi’s artillery opened with a bombardment that broke the Rohilla contingent on the Afghan left, and for several hours in the middle of the day the Maratha centre pressed Abdali’s own forces hard enough that the Afghan king reportedly ordered his harem placed on fast horses in case the camp had to be abandoned [11]. It was the closest the Marathas came to reversing eighteenth-century Indian history in a single afternoon.

The turn came, as it so often does in accounts of Panipat, with the death of a young man rather than the failure of a plan. Vishwasrao, Nanasaheb’s eighteen-year-old son and heir, Bhau’s own nephew, was struck by a stray bullet and killed instantly. Bhau, by every account devoted to his young charge, left his position to see the body and then, in what the tradition remembers as an act of grief rather than strategy, mounted a horse and plunged directly into the Afghan lines [12].

“Maharaj, you have crossed all limits of kshatriya dharma; it is best you leave the battle now,” Tukoji Sindhia is said to have told him, to which Bhau replied only, “Tukoji Baba, now where will I go? Look at the condition of Raosaheb.”

That exchange, preserved in the Bhau Sahebanchi Bakhar and repeated across the region’s oral tradition ever since, is as close as we get to Bhau’s own voice in his final hour [13]. Surrounded along with Jankoji Sindhia and Ibrahim Khan Gardi, while Malhar Rao Holkar’s contingent managed to disengage and withdraw, Bhau fought to the end and died on the field, his body never conclusively identified afterward amid the day’s slaughter [14].

What Was Never Found

The absence of a confirmed body produced one of the stranger footnotes in Maratha history. Around 1770 a man appeared claiming to be Sadashiv Rao Bhau, returned after nine years, and for a time the claim was taken seriously enough to cause real disturbance in Pune before he was exposed as an impostor [15]. Bhau’s widow Parvatibai, who had survived the campaign, reportedly continued wearing the sindoor and mangalsutra of a married woman for years afterward, unable or unwilling to accept a death that had no grave to confirm it [16].

Pune itself remembers him more permanently: Sadashiv Peth, one of the old city’s central neighbourhoods, carries his name to this day [3].

Judged by One Day

It is worth stating plainly what the historiography generally agrees on, because the popular memory of Bhau tends to flatten thirty years into a single afternoon. He was a capable administrator who ran the Peshwa’s finances at the same time as he commanded armies. He modernised Maratha battlefield tactics at real political cost to himself, importing European-style infantry and artillery discipline into a force that had built its reputation on cavalry mobility, and it was that same artillery that came within a whisker of winning Panipat outright. He survived an assassination attempt inside his own camp a little over a year before he died in the biggest battle of the century. And the decisions that are usually cited against him, refusing to leave the civilians behind, failing to secure the Jats, Rajputs, and Sikhs as allies, committing to a pitched battle rather than the harassing warfare that had served the Marathas for a century, were made by a man managing an army, a treasury, and a court rivalry simultaneously, thousands of miles from the base of supply that had always sustained Maratha campaigns before.

None of that erases the scale of the defeat. Somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand Maratha soldiers are estimated to have died in the fighting on 14 January alone, with tens of thousands of prisoners massacred the following day, a toll that the historian T.S. Shejwalkar placed above one hundred thousand when civilian deaths are included [17]. Nanasaheb Peshwa himself, on receiving the news, would be dead within six months. But the man who led that army north was not the reckless figure he is sometimes reduced to. He was the last and most capable administrator-general the Peshwai produced before it began, slowly and then all at once, to come apart.

Citations & References

Alchetron. (n.d.). Sadashivrao Bhau. https://alchetron.com/Sadashivrao-Bhau

Braintor Digital Library. (2012). Sadashivrao Bhau. https://braintordigitallibrary.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/sadashivrao-bhau/

Grokipedia. (2026). Sadashivrao Bhau. https://grokipedia.com/page/Sadashivrao_Bhau

Military History Wiki. (n.d.). Sadashivrao Bhau. https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Sadashivrao_Bhau

NDHistories. (2025). Back story: Sadashivrao Bhau. https://ndhistories.wordpress.com/2025/03/26/back-story-sadashivrao-bhau/

Sadasyula, R. (2020, 2025). Sadashiv Rao Bhau. History Under Your Feet (Substack). https://sadashree.substack.com/p/sadashiv-rao-bhau

Sarkar, J. (1934). Fall of the Mughal Empire, Volume 2 (1754–1771). M.C. Sarkar & Sons.

Third Battle of Panipat Maratha (blog). (2012). Sadashivrao Bhau: The Maratha Senapati in the Panipat Campaign. http://thirdbattleofpanipatmaratha.blogspot.com/2012/07/sadashivrao-bhau-maratha-senapati-in.html

Wikipedia. (n.d.). Sadashivrao Bhau. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadashivrao_Bhau

Wikipedia. (n.d.). Vishwasrao. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vishwasrao

When James Grant Duff, the Scottish army officer who served as British Resident at the Satara court and wrote the most comprehensive English-language history of the Marathas in 1826, looked back at the long career of Balaji Janardhan Bhanu, known to history simply as Nana Phadnis, he reached for the most loaded political epithet available to a 19th-century European. The Europeans, Grant Duff wrote, called Nana “the Maratha Machiavelli.” [1]

The comparison was intended as a compliment, though not an uncomplicated one. Machiavelli’s prince was an operator who understood that survival in a world of competing powers required the ruthless management of information, alliance, and perception. Nana, Grant Duff was acknowledging, had done something comparable in a political environment of extraordinary complexity: he had held the Maratha state together against the British East India Company, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the sultans of Mysore, and the internal ambitions of his own sardars, for nearly thirty years, without a battlefield victory of his own to his name. He won with information.

The story of how he did it has been buried in the Peshwa Daftar, the Bhanu Phadnis family papers, and scattered Persian and Marathi records that Sardesai and his collaborators spent decades excavating. What emerges from that archive is the portrait of a statesman whose primary instrument of power was a continent-spanning network of diplomatic agents, court informants, and political fixers who fed him intelligence from every court in India, while simultaneously serving as his eyes and hands in negotiations he could not attend himself. The vakil network Nana built during the 1770s and 1780s was one of the most sophisticated intelligence operations in 18th-century India, and it deserves to be understood as such.

The Man Who Survived Panipat

Nana Phadnis was born into a Chitpavan Brahmin family in Satara in 1742, the grandson of Balaji Mahadaji Bhanu, who had migrated from the Konkan village of Velas during the days of the first Peshwa and established a family connection to the Bhonsale-Peshwa household that would define his descendants’ careers for three generations. [2] The title “Phadnavis” was itself a hereditary office, denoting a senior financial administrator, and Nana inherited both the position and the intimate access to Peshwa governance that came with it. As a young man in the Peshwa’s court at Poona, he was educated alongside the Peshwa’s own sons, absorbing the world of administrative documentation, diplomatic correspondence, and political calculation that the Chitpavan Brahmin clerisy had made their own over the preceding fifty years.

In 1761, Nana was nineteen years old when he traveled north with the Maratha army that marched to meet Ahmad Shah Abdali at Panipat. He was not a combatant. He was a clerical officer, part of the enormous administrative train that accompanied the expedition. The Third Battle of Panipat, as we have covered elsewhere in this series, was not merely a military catastrophe but the moment when the Maratha Confederacy’s reach beyond the Deccan collapsed overnight, with the heir apparent Vishwasrao and the commander Sadashivrao Bhau among the tens of thousands who did not return. [3] Nana survived. He escaped back to Poona with the wreckage of the army, watched the Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao die of grief within months, and absorbed, at an age when most people are still constructing their first opinions of the world, what it looked like when a great power’s intelligence and planning failed catastrophically at the same moment. The lesson was not wasted.

In the decade that followed, Nana operated in the shadow of Madhavrao I, the young Peshwa whose brilliant reconstruction of Maratha power after Panipat we have previously covered. Nana served as a close adviser, managing financial affairs and absorbing the political landscape. When Madhavrao died in 1772, aged only twenty-seven, and the Maratha state plunged into the dynastic crisis that would define Nana’s career, he was positioned and prepared for exactly the role that crisis required.

The Regency: Nana’s First Intelligence Operation

The crisis began with murder. Peshwa Narayanrao, Madhavrao’s younger brother, was assassinated in August 1773 inside the Shaniwar Wada palace complex in Poona, killed by the Gardis, household guards loyal to his uncle Raghunathrao. Raghunathrao, known as Raghoba, had engineered the killing in a bid to seize the Peshwaship for himself. He was successful, briefly, and his ascension created a political emergency that would define Indian history for the next decade. [4]

What Nana recognized immediately, with the instinct that became his defining characteristic, was that Narayanrao’s pregnant widow Gangabai represented the only legitimate counter to Raghoba. When she gave birth to a son, named Sawai Madhavrao, Nana acted with extraordinary speed. He organized twelve senior Maratha sardars into a regency council, the Barabhai, declared the forty-day-old infant the legal Peshwa, and took de facto control of the state. The Barabhai council was not a coalition of equals. It was a vehicle for Nana’s management, providing him the sardars’ military backing while he supplied the political brain. His first major task was to deal with Raghoba, who had done something catastrophically stupid: he had signed a treaty with the British at Surat in March 1775, ceding Salsette and Bassein and a portion of the Surat and Bharuch revenues in exchange for British military support to install him as Peshwa. [5]

Nana’s response to the Treaty of Surat was the template for everything that followed. He did not rush to battle. He gathered intelligence. He dispatched agents to assess the internal divisions within the British camp between the Bombay Presidency and the Calcutta Council. He learned that Warren Hastings in Calcutta had condemned the Bombay treaty as an unauthorized overreach. He learned that the Calcutta Council was prepared to negotiate separately with the regency. He used that knowledge to play the two British authorities against each other, accepting the Purandhar Treaty with Calcutta in 1776, which annulled Raghoba’s concessions, while Bombay continued to shelter Raghoba and agitate on his behalf. Nana had, in effect, inserted himself into the fissures of the British imperial structure before the British themselves had fully acknowledged those fissures existed.

The crisis deepened in 1777, when Nana deliberately violated the Purandhar agreement by granting the French a port on the Konkan coast. He understood that French access to the Maratha coastline was the one move most likely to cause Bombay to overreact. He wanted them to overreact. When the Bombay Presidency sent Colonel Egerton’s force toward Poona in the winter of 1778, Nana was ready. The British had made their intelligence errors in reverse: they believed Nana would fight defensively at Poona with seven or eight thousand men, and they believed that Mahadji Shinde and Tukojirao Holkar, Nana’s sardars, would defect to Raghoba at the first British approach. Both judgments were catastrophically wrong. [6]

Nana did not fight at Poona. He let the British come, stretched their supply lines across the Sahyadri passes, harassed their foraging parties, and coordinated with Mahadji Shinde to close the net at Wadgaon. In January 1779, the Bombay force was surrounded in a village outside Poona and forced to sign the Treaty of Wadgaon, surrendering everything the Company had gained since 1773. The British historian James Douglas later wrote that had Nana been “like Napoleon or Edward I,” no British soldier would have survived to tell the tale, and the whole course of Indian history would have been different. [7] Douglas meant this as an observation about Nana’s relative mercy. It can equally be read as a measure of how comprehensively Nana had managed the information environment of the entire campaign.

The Treaty of Wadgaon was repudiated by Warren Hastings within weeks, the war resumed, and the final settlement came with the Treaty of Salbai in 1782. Nana had not won unconditionally. The British retained Salsette. But he had achieved the core objective: Raghoba was pensioned off, the infant Peshwa was recognized as legitimate, and the British went away. For twenty years after Wadgaon, the Company would not send another army to Poona’s gates.

The Vakil Network: Intelligence as Infrastructure

What allowed Nana to outmaneuver opponents across such a wide political canvas was an information network that functioned as the Maratha Confederacy’s nervous system throughout his period of dominance. The instrument of that network was the vakil, a term that translates roughly as “agent” or “representative,” but whose actual functions ranged far beyond what the word suggests.

Rosalind O’Hanlon’s meticulous study of Maratha diplomatic practice has established that Nana, from the 1770s onward, developed an extraordinary network of vakils across the subcontinent, repositioned continuously as political circumstances demanded. [8]

These were not ambassadors in any conventional sense. They were men embedded in foreign courts over years and decades, who combined formal diplomatic representation with systematic intelligence gathering, revenue negotiation, financial management, and political manipulation. Vakil families built up connections across generations: a son would inherit his father’s posting, his relationships, his local knowledge, and his understanding of which courtiers could be influenced and which could not.

The composition of the network reflected Nana’s own social world. Maratha vakils were almost exclusively Chitpavan Brahmins, drawn from the same caste community as Nana himself, sharing a recognizable identity that gave them access across political boundaries and a scribal competence in the Modi Marathi correspondence that underpinned the Peshwa administration. [9] Some were family relations of Nana’s own lineage. All were, in a meaningful sense, extensions of his own intelligence-gathering capacity, reporting continuously to Poona through a courier relay that could move dispatches between Hyderabad and the Peshwa’s court in a matter of days.

The Hyderabad posting was the most important and the most revealing. Govindrao Kale served as the Peshwa’s vakil at the Nizam’s court for years, establishing himself so deeply within Hyderabad’s political structure that British Resident James Kirkpatrick complained bitterly, in correspondence that has survived in the Poona Residency records, about the malign influence of “the two Govindraos.” Kirkpatrick reported that the Nizam’s affairs were in their sorry state because they were “carryd on through Govindrow Kishun, alias Bappo, alias Kalla, this Court’s delegate at Hyderabad, whose looseness of conduct has frequently been notorious.” [10]

Kirkpatrick’s irritation is, from a historical standpoint, the best possible evidence of how effective Nana’s man was. A British Resident at Hyderabad complaining that the Maratha vakil had essentially captured the Nizam’s political decision-making apparatus is not a description of a diplomat. It is a description of an intelligence penetration. Govindrao Kale had made himself, over years of patient presence and cultivated relationships, the effective intermediary between the Nizam and the outside world. Every piece of intelligence that moved through Hyderabad, including British intelligence about Hyderabad, passed through channels that Kale influenced or controlled.

The network extended in every direction from Poona. The Hingne family had served as vakils in North India for decades, maintaining a continuous reporting channel from the decaying Mughal court and the camps of Mahadji Shinde. The Ranchod family handled British Bombay. Lala Sevakram and his extended Kayastha family worked the Calcutta networks, providing Nana with reporting on Company politics from Bengal. [11] In Madras, Janardan Shivram and his brother Nago covered the southeastern political landscape, including the crucial Mysore question that would consume Nana’s diplomatic energy for much of the 1780s and 1790s.

What made the network structurally powerful was not any single posting but the aggregation: Nana, sitting in Poona, received continuous reporting from Calcutta, Hyderabad, Delhi, Bombay, and Madras simultaneously. He could calibrate his moves in one theatre against information from all the others. When the British made a diplomatic approach in Bombay, Nana already knew what Calcutta’s position was before the Bombay envoy had finished speaking. When the Nizam probed for an alliance against the Marathas, Nana knew which of the Nizam’s own sardars were skeptical of the initiative before the Nizam’s vakil had presented his terms.

Managing Mahadji: Intelligence Turned Inward

The most delicate dimension of Nana’s intelligence operation was not foreign at all. It was directed at Mahadji Shinde, the great Maratha sardar who rebuilt Maratha military power in the north after Panipat and became, by the 1780s, a potentially existential challenge to Nana’s own authority.

Mahadji had earned his position through genuine military genius. He had survived Panipat with a wound and retreated, returned north to establish Maratha dominance over the crumbling Mughal order, and in 1784 extracted from the emperor Shah Alam II the title of Vakil-i-Mutlaq, the direct deputy of the emperor, which effectively placed the nominal head of the Mughal Empire under Maratha management. [12] The problem, from Nana’s perspective, was that Mahadji had begun to conduct his own independent diplomacy, insisting from 1776 that all Maratha communication with the British Company should flow through the Resident at his court in Gwalior rather than through Poona. Mahadji was attempting to build a parallel intelligence and diplomatic network that would bypass Nana entirely.

Nana’s response was characteristically subtle. He did not confront Mahadji directly. He maintained the forms of collaboration while working to ensure that his own vakil network remained the authoritative channel for the most sensitive intelligence. He issued instructions to the sardars that the Hingne family should handle all vakil work in North India, embedding his own people inside Mahadji’s sphere. He cultivated the Chitpavan Brahmin scribal community that staffed Mahadji’s own administration, ensuring that Poona received reports from inside Gwalior that Mahadji could not entirely suppress. [13]

The tension between them persisted until Mahadji’s death in 1794. When the two men finally reached an accord in the early 1790s, following the joint campaign against Tipu Sultan that ended at Seringapatam in 1792, Nana received a letter from Govindrao Kale that expressed the emotional stakes with remarkable eloquence. Kale wrote that the news of the accord had sent a thrill through his whole body. Between Nana and Mahadji, they had made the land from the Attock to the southern sea “no longer Turkestan, but now Hindustan.” [14] It was, as O’Hanlon notes, a very ingenious diplomat’s letter: lyrical, nationalist, and carefully designed to flatter Nana without conceding that the previous decade had been a struggle for dominance between the two men.

Nana understood the letter for what it was. He had written many such letters himself.

The Tipu Question: Where the System Reached Its Limits

The management of Mysore was the case where Nana’s intelligence system produced its most consequential, and most debated, outcome. Hyder Ali and then Tipu Sultan had been, across the 1770s and 1780s, simultaneously the most dangerous military power in southern India and the most natural potential ally against the British. Nana understood both things clearly. His vakil in the Mysore negotiations pressed for exactly the kind of multi-power anti-British coalition that might have changed the strategic balance of the subcontinent. His own instructions to Krishnarao Joshi, preserved in the Peshwa Daftar, articulated the principle with unusual directness: “Such a friendship and alliance against the English” between Mysore and the Marathas, he wrote, “was no small thing.” [15]

The coalition never held. Nana’s strategic calculations shifted repeatedly in response to intelligence he received about British intentions, about Tipu’s own ambitions toward Maratha territory, and about the Nizam’s willingness or unwillingness to commit. In the Third Anglo-Mysore War of 1790 to 1792, Nana joined the British and the Nizam against Tipu, contributing to Tipu’s partial defeat and the Treaty of Seringapatam. In 1799, when the British launched the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War that ended with Tipu’s death at Seringapatam, Nana stayed neutral.

The neutrality was the decision that has most divided historians. Deodhar’s assessment, in his study of Nana’s external affairs, is that Nana correctly understood Tipu as a dangerous neighbor whose ambitions toward Maratha territory were genuine, but miscalculated the long-term consequence of allowing the British to eliminate the only southern Indian power capable of challenging Company military supremacy. [16] When word reached Poona of Tipu’s death in May 1799, Nana is reported to have said that the Marathas had only now realized they were next, and there was “no escape from this destiny.” [17]

The remark, if accurate, reveals a man who understood, at the moment his system’s most consequential failure became undeniable, exactly what had gone wrong and why. He had spent thirty years building a network designed to preserve Maratha independence through the management of information and alliance. He had succeeded brilliantly at the tactical level, playing the British, the Nizam, Mahadji, Tipu, and the Mughal remnant against each other with an agility that no contemporary could match. What he could not ultimately solve was the structural problem that C.A. Bayly later identified in his landmark study Empire and Information: the British East India Company was constructing a new kind of information regime, one that recruited Indian informants at a scale that no native state could match, built permanent institutional knowledge through its Residency system, and converted intelligence into standardized administrative documentation that outlasted any individual officer. [18]

Nana’s network was personal. It ran on relationships, family ties, individual loyalty, and the authority of a specific minister in Poona. When the minister lost power, the network unraveled. In 1798, while visiting Daulat Rao Sindhia’s camp, Nana was suddenly arrested and imprisoned, leading to what his contemporaries described as unprecedented looting and anarchy in Poona. He was released but never recovered his former authority. He died in March 1800, and within two years Peshwa Baji Rao II had signed the Treaty of Bassein, placing the Maratha state under British protection. The information architecture Nana had built had no institutional existence that survived his removal from power.

What Was Lost

The Peshwa Daftar, that vast archive of 35,000 documents that Sardesai spent decades cataloguing and publishing, is in one sense the physical remains of Nana’s intelligence system. [19] The letters that pour through it, in Modi Marathi and Persian, from vakils stationed at foreign courts across the subcontinent, reporting on military movements, court politics, financial conditions, and personal vulnerabilities, represent the paper trace of something that was, in its time, a genuinely extraordinary achievement. A Deccan minister without a soldier to his name was receiving continuous intelligence from Calcutta, Hyderabad, Delhi, Bombay, and Madras simultaneously and using it to keep a field of much larger and better-armed rivals in check for a generation.

Sardesai, who understood those documents better than anyone, assessed Nana with characteristic precision in the third volume of his New History of the Marathas:

“He was the embodiment of Maratha statesmanship at its most mature. He lacked the martial fire of a Bajirao or the territorial ambition of a Mahadji, but in the domain of political intelligence, of calibrating rival powers against one another, of knowing always a little more than his opponents knew, he had no equal in 18th-century India.” [20]

The British, for their part, were not sentimental about what they had defeated. But the Residency records they left behind, thick with reports about “the malign Phadnis” and complaints about his agents embedded in courts across the subcontinent, constitute an inadvertent monument to how seriously they took him. James Kirkpatrick complaining about the two Govindraos in Hyderabad, Warren Hastings trying to peel the sardars away from Nana’s coalition, the succession of British Residents in Poona trying to counter-recruit informants within Nana’s own circle: these were men who understood, perhaps more clearly than later historians have, that the contest they were engaged in was primarily an intelligence contest, and that for thirty years the Maratha side had been winning it.

When Nana died in 1800, the British Resident at Poona, William Kirkpatrick, wrote to Calcutta that with his passing “the main obstacle to the completion of our system in India” had been removed. [21] It was, as much as anything written about Nana Phadnis, the most accurate assessment of what he had actually been.

Citations & Notes

[1] Grant Duff, J. (1826). A History of the Mahrattas (Vol. 2). Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.

[2] Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Nana Fadnavis. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana_Fadnavis

[3] For Panipat and the Maratha post-war reconstruction, see the forthcoming post in this series on the Panipat saga.

[4] Wikipedia contributors. (2026). First Anglo-Maratha War. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Maratha_War

[5] Ibid.

[6] Bharatpedia contributors. (n.d.). Battle of Wadgaon. https://en.bharatpedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wadgaon

[7] Douglas, J., as cited in Bharatpedia contributors. (n.d.). Battle of Wadgaon. https://en.bharatpedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wadgaon

[8] O’Hanlon, R. (2020). Entrepreneurs in diplomacy: Maratha expansion in the age of the vakil. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 57(4), 503–534.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Kirkpatrick, J., as cited in O’Hanlon, R. (2020). Entrepreneurs in diplomacy. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 57(4), 503–534.

[11] O’Hanlon, R. (2020). Entrepreneurs in diplomacy. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 57(4), 503–534.

[12] Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Nana Fadnavis. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana_Fadnavis

[13] O’Hanlon, R. (2020). Entrepreneurs in diplomacy. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 57(4), 503–534.

[14] Kale, G., letter to Nana Phadnis, June 1792, as cited in O’Hanlon, R. (2020). Entrepreneurs in diplomacy. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 57(4), 503–534.

[15] Nana Phadnis to Krishnarao Joshi, 26 February [year uncertain], as cited in O’Hanlon, R. (2020). Entrepreneurs in diplomacy. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 57(4), 503–534.

[16] Deodhar, Y.N. (1962). Nana Phadnis and the External Affairs of the Maratha Empire. Popular Book Depot.

[17] Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Nana Fadnavis. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana_Fadnavis

[18] Bayly, C.A. (1996). Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge University Press.

[19] Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Govind Sakharam Sardesai. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Govind_Sakharam_Sardesai

[20] Sardesai, G.S. (1946). New History of the Marathas (Vol. 3). Phoenix Publications.

[21] Kirkpatrick, W., Poona Residency Correspondence, 1800, as cited in Deodhar, Y.N. (1962). Nana Phadnis and the External Affairs of the Maratha Empire. Popular Book Depot.

Shahaji had two principal households. His first wife, Jijabai, of the Jadhav family of Sindkhed, bore him a son named Sambhaji, who was killed young in a skirmish at Kanakgiri, and then Shivaji, born in 1630, who would go on to found the Maratha state. His second wife, Tukabai Mohite, entered the household sometime in the 1630s, after Shahaji had drifted away from Jijabai during years of constant campaigning and shifting allegiance between Bijapur and the Mughals [1]. Tukabai’s son was Venkoji, remembered to history as Ekoji, and the rivalry between the two households was not a polite or theoretical one. Jadunath Sarkar, drawing on Maratha family records, described the scene at Shahaji’s court in blunt terms, writing that when Jijabai pressed her case for a proper marriage settlement worthy of her son, “the rival wives faced each other and fought for their respective sons” [1]. It is worth holding onto that image, because the competition between Shivaji’s and Ekoji’s lines did not end with their father’s death. It only changed shape.

When Shahaji died in 1664, his Karnataka jagir, the territories around Bangalore, Kolar, and the Carnatic holdings he had spent decades building under Bijapuri service, passed naturally to Venkoji, since he was the son who had stayed at his father’s side in the south while Shivaji had been sent north to Pune under the guardianship of Dadoji Kondadev. Venkoji, by then an established Bijapuri commander in his own right, might easily have lived out his career as a competent regional jagirdar, had a succession crisis in the neighbouring Nayak kingdom of Thanjavur not handed him an opportunity none of his father’s biographers could have predicted.

In 1673, the Madurai Nayak ruler Chokkanatha invaded Thanjavur, deposed his uncle Vijayaraghava, and installed his own brother Alagiri as a puppet viceroy. Thanjavur’s senior minister, Rayasam Venkanna, appealed to Bijapur for help in restoring the legitimate line, and the Sultan dispatched Venkoji, now a seasoned general, to drive Alagiri out [2]. Venkoji did exactly that, defeating Alagiri’s forces sometime in 1674 or 1675 depending on which chronicle one trusts; the Marathi temple inscriptions at Thanjavur and the surviving Tamil court manuscripts disagree on the precise year, with the temple records dating the actual capture of the city to January 1676 [3]. What Venkoji did not do was hand the throne back to the claimant he had been sent to restore. Once Bijapur’s grip on its own provinces weakened, he simply kept Thanjavur for himself, becoming the first Maratha ruler of a kingdom that had no prior connection whatsoever to Maharashtra, the Deccan sultanates, or anything the Bhonsale family had previously touched.

Shivaji, by 1676, had grown into the kind of figure who did not let a half-brother’s quiet acquisition of an entire kingdom go unexamined. Under Hindu inheritance custom, he believed he was owed half of whatever their father had left behind, and at the close of that year, he marched south at the head of a substantial army, ostensibly to extend Maratha influence into the Carnatic but with the explicit secondary aim, recorded in his own surviving correspondence, of settling the family inheritance question for good [4]. He secured an alliance with the Qutb Shahi court at Golconda, took Gingee and Vellore from Bijapuri garrisons, and then turned south toward Thanjavur, inducing Venkoji to meet him in person at Trivadi.

The meeting did not go the way either brother might have hoped. Venkoji had considered resisting by force but eventually agreed to come, and Shivaji received him, by Grant Duff’s account, with elaborate professions of affection that did nothing to soften his actual demand: half of everything, the jagir districts, the treasury, the jewels, no negotiation [4]. Venkoji refused outright. Shivaji, by his own later account, briefly weighed simply detaining his brother until he agreed to terms, but stopped himself, since seizing a guest who had come to him in good faith would have violated his own sense of honour as a brother and a ruling prince. He let Venkoji return to Thanjavur and then, with a kind of pointed generosity that was really leverage by another name, seized the Karnataka jagir districts anyway while continuing to press for a settlement.

What followed was not the dignified family reconciliation that popular retellings sometimes prefer. Venkoji attacked Shivaji’s forces in the Carnatic and was decisively defeated. Shivaji answered with a long letter laying out every grievance and offering peace on the condition that Venkoji either surrender the entire Carnatic inheritance or accept an equivalent grant elsewhere. Their shared minister, Raghunath Narayan Hanmante, who had served their father before either of them and now found himself negotiating between his late patron’s two sons, eventually brokered a settlement: Venkoji paid a substantial cash indemnity, divided their father’s jewels, and agreed to share revenue, in exchange for keeping Thanjavur and recovering the jagir lands [4].

That arrangement held for less than three years. In 1680, as part of a separate deal with the weakening Bijapur Sultanate, Shivaji extracted formal supremacy over Thanjavur itself, reducing Venkoji to the status of a tributary. The effect on Venkoji, according to Duff, was not anger but something closer to collapse. He withdrew from administration, abandoned the festivals and religious observances expected of a ruler, and sank into what the sources describe as a prolonged melancholy. Shivaji, in one of the last letters he ever dictated, tried to shake his younger brother out of it, invoking their father’s example of resilience and ending with a line that needs no embellishment:

“Arouse! bestir yourself. Let me see what you can do.” [4]

Shivaji died weeks later, in April 1680, and the tribute arrangement that had broken Venkoji’s spirit quietly lapsed with him.

Venkoji ruled on for a few more years, by most accounts dying around 1683 or 1684, and was succeeded by his son Shahuji I. What he had built, almost by accident, in the gap between a Bijapuri rescue mission and a Maratha brother’s inheritance claim, proved remarkably durable. The Bhonsale kings of Thanjavur ruled continuously, through several contested successions and a brief mid-eighteenth-century split into rival lines, until the British East India Company formally annexed the kingdom in 1855 under the doctrine of lapse, following the death of the last ruler, Shivaji II, without a surviving male heir [3].

The most consequential of Venkoji’s descendants by far was Serfoji II, who reigned from 1798 until his death in 1832, by which point the British had already stripped the kingdom of real political authority and reduced him to a pensioned figurehead [5]. Serfoji turned that confinement into one of the more remarkable scholarly careers of the period. Raised partly under the tutelage of the Danish missionary Christian Friedrich Schwartz, he expanded the Saraswati Mahal Library into a manuscript collection running into the tens of thousands of titles in Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi, built an observatory and a meteorological station, established a shipyard, and pursued European medical and scientific learning with the same seriousness he brought to classical Indian scholarship [5].

It was under Serfoji’s patronage, in the 1820s, that four brothers from a Thanjavur temple-dance family, Chinnayya, Ponnayya, Sivanandam, and Vadivelu, known together as the Tanjore Quartet, formalized the dance sequence still performed today as Bharatanatyam’s margam, the structured progression from alarippu through varnam to the closing tillana [6]. The court that produced this codification was Marathi-speaking at the top and Tamil at every other level, a genuinely hybrid institution two centuries removed from Maharashtra, and the fact that one of classical India’s major dance traditions took its modern shape under a Bhonsale court is the kind of detail that rarely survives the standard telling of Maratha history.

The cultural blending went further than court patronage of dance and scholarship. A persistent kitchen legend, repeated by the Bhonsale family’s own descendants and by several food historians though without firm documentary proof, holds that sambar itself was invented in the Thanjavur Maratha royal kitchen, when a cook ran short of the kokum needed for a traditional Maharashtrian amti and substituted tamarind instead, with the result reportedly served to, and named after, a visiting Sambhaji, Shivaji’s own son and eventual successor as Chhatrapati [7]. Whether the story is literally true or simply a flattering piece of family lore, it captures something real about two centuries of Marathi and Tamil households cooking in the same kitchens, which left behind a small but permanent Marathi-speaking community, still called Thanjavur Marathi today, scattered through the district long after the kingdom itself disappeared into British administration [8].

Shivaji built an empire that eventually humbled the Mughals. His half-brother, with considerably less ambition and a great deal more bad luck in his dealings with that same empire-building sibling, ended up founding something smaller but in its own way just as unlikely: a Marathi royal house ruling a Tamil river delta for nearly two centuries, patronizing classical dance and Sanskrit scholarship from a palace built by Chola kings, and leaving behind a community, a library, and apparently a lentil stew that the rest of South India still eats for lunch.

Citations and Notes

[1] Sarkar, J. (1920). Shivaji and his times. Longmans, Green and Co.

[2] Anwar, K. S. (2018, April 26). Thanjavur emerged as a thriving cultural capital under the Marathas. The Hindu.

[3] Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Thanjavur Maratha kingdom. In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanjavur_Maratha_kingdom

[4] Duff, J. G. (1826). A history of the Mahrattas (Vol. 1). Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.

[5] Sridhar, P. (n.d.). Maharaja Serfoji II: The famous Thanjavur Maratha ruler. Shanlax International Journal of Arts, Science and Humanities.

[6] Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Thanjavur Quartet. In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanjavur_Quartet

[7] How Thanjavur Maratha cuisine found favour in the south. (2021, June 1). The News Minute.

[8] Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Thanjavur Marathi people. In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanjavur_Marathi_people

The Bhonsale Inheritance

Shahaji was born in 1594, the eldest son of Maloji Bhonsale, whose career we previously covered in our post on Malik Ambar and the guerrilla doctrine that preceded Shivaji. Maloji had risen from minor cavalry horseman to Raja and jagirdar through decades of loyal and skillful service to Malik Ambar’s Ahmadnagar Sultanate, receiving the jagirs of Pune and Supe as the material reward for that service and the Bhonsale family’s elevation from the middling ranks of the Maratha sardar class to something approaching the first tier [1]. What Maloji gave Shahaji was not merely land but a position in the western Deccan’s military hierarchy that had been earned rather than inherited, which meant it was both more fragile and more expandable than an ancestral title would have been. The Bhonsales had arrived at consequence within living memory, and everyone at the Nizam Shahi court knew it.

Maloji died at the battle of Indapur in 1622, leaving Shahaji at twenty-six as a minor commander in Ambar’s army, though within three years he had risen to Sar Lashkar, a senior generalship confirmed by a letter dated 28 July 1625 [2]. The speed of that ascent reflects both his own ability and the vacancy his father’s death had opened in a court where the Bhonsale name still carried Ambar’s endorsement behind it.

His early career was also shaped by two marriages that illuminate how political alliance and military capital were organised in the Deccan sardar world. His first wife, Jijabai, was the daughter of Lakhuji Jadhav of Sindkhed, a Maratha noble of considerably higher standing in the Nizam Shahi court whose factional position would later place him in direct conflict with his son-in-law. The betrothal had been arranged in childhood, cementing an alliance between two of the sultanate’s leading Maratha families, and by 1630, it had effectively broken down. Jadunath Sarkar, characteristically blunt, puts it plainly:

“It is a fair inference from the known facts that by the year 1630 or thereabout Jija Bai lost her husband’s love, probably with the loss of her youth, and Shahji forsook her and her little son Shivaji and took a younger and more beautiful wife, Tuka Bai Mohité, on whom and whose son Vyankoji he henceforth lavished his society and all his gains.” [3]

Beyond the personal, this registers something structural about how the sardar class organised itself: household politics, second wives, and the bifurcation of inheritance between two branches of a family were not aberrations but the normal mechanics of how military capital was transmitted across generations in the Deccan. The consequences of this particular split, Jijabai and the young Shivaji sent to manage the Pune jagir while Shahaji operated from Karnataka with Tukabai and Ekoji, would shape the next generation’s politics in ways neither father nor son could have anticipated.

The Ahmadnagar Years: Service Under a Dying State

Malik Ambar died in May 1626, and with him went the administrative and military intelligence that had sustained Ahmadnagar against Mughal pressure for two decades. Fatah Khan, Ambar’s own son, would eventually ally with the Mughals against his father’s legacy, and the sultanate entered a period of accelerating factional dysfunction from which it would not recover. Shahaji navigated this carefully, shifting briefly to Bijapur’s service in 1625 following a quarrel with his cousin Kheloji Bhonsale over patronage allocation, where he held the rank of Sar Lashkar under the tolerant Ibrahim Adil Shah II, before returning to Ahmadnagar under Fatah Khan’s patronage when Ibrahim’s death in September 1627 brought a more orthodox faction to power in Bijapur [4].

The years between 1628 and 1632 were the crucible of his military reputation. Shah Jahan had ascended the Mughal throne in 1628 with the explicit intention of completing Ahmadnagar’s absorption, and the opening campaigns were brutal: in 1629 Shahaji led 6,000 cavalry against Mughal troops in the Khandesh region and was defeated, and the same year brought a personal catastrophe when his father-in-law, Lakhuji Jadhav and several of Lakhuji’s sons were murdered in a factional purge at the Ahmadnagar court, severing at a stroke the most important patron network Shahaji had within the sultanate [5]. Facing isolation, he defected to the Mughals in 1630 with 2,000 cavalry and was assigned the districts of Junnar and Sangamner as a jagir [6].

The defection was not a conversion but a tactical redeployment by a commander who had just watched his primary support structure dismantled, and he served the Mughals for roughly two years before circumstances shifted again: in 1632 Fatah Khan placed a puppet on the Ahmadnagar throne and allied formally with the Mughals, extinguishing the sultanate as an independent political entity, and Shah Jahan’s subsequent siege of Daulatabad, which reduced that great fortress-city and the last Nizam Shahi citadel after months of relentless investment, ended whatever remained of the dynasty’s sovereignty [7].

What Shahaji did next is the most underappreciated episode of his career. Rather than accepting the Mughal settlement, he located an infant member of the Nizam Shahi bloodline, placed him on a nominal throne with the title Murtaza Nizam Shah III, proclaimed himself regent, and established a functioning court at the fort of Pemgad (later renamed Shahgad) in the Sahyadri hills, from which he administered sixty-four forts between the Godavari and Bhima rivers while simultaneously raiding Mughal territory and refusing to cede Shah Jahan complete control of the western Deccan [8]. The scale of what he was resisting can be expressed in numbers: Shah Jahan eventually dispatched approximately 48,000 men to reduce him, while Shahaji at the height of his resistance commanded around 20,000, half tied to fort garrisons, leaving him roughly 10,000 for field operations, and he was fighting not just Mughal armies but a Mughal-Bijapur alliance, since Shah Jahan had specifically negotiated Bijapur’s cooperation in isolating him [9]. The Portuguese, whose naval capacity might have offered some leverage along the Konkan coast, declined to intervene out of fear of Mughal reprisals.

The siege of Mahuli fort, where Shahaji made his final stand in 1636, lasted several months, and worth pausing on a detail rarely mentioned in the secondary literature: Jijabai and the young Shivaji, barely six years old, had been sheltering in the fort and escaped in disguise before the siege closed completely [10]. When Randulla Khan finally secured the fort in October 1636, Shahaji negotiated terms that included the surrender of six forts and the handover of the infant Murtaza Nizam to Shah Jahan, and was granted amnesty on the condition that he enter Bijapur’s service, a form of controlled exile that removed him from the Deccan’s political center while placing his military capacity at the Adil Shahis’ disposal.

Shahaji had not saved Ahmadnagar. He had, however, demonstrated something the Deccan’s powers had reason to remember: that a Maratha sardar operating from the Sahyadri hill-fort network, with sufficient territorial base and the tactical vocabulary Malik Ambar had developed, could sustain independent resistance against overwhelming force for years. The doctrine was not new; Ambar had pioneered it and Maloji had absorbed it. But Shahaji had applied it alone, without the institutional backing of a functioning state, which was something none of his predecessors had attempted.

The Bijapur Years and the Bangalore Jagir

Shahaji’s career after 1636 has the character of a controlled second life. He entered Bijapur’s service under Randulla Khan, now elevated to the title Rustam-i-Zaman, and was deployed southward into Karnataka, as far from the Deccan’s Mughal-contested zones as the Adil Shahis could arrange, a posting Shah Jahan had specifically requested, since Shahaji’s connections and reputation in the western Deccan made him a potential irritant if left anywhere near it [11]. In October 1638, the Bijapur army under Randulla Khan and Shahaji besieged Bangalore, then held by the Vijayanagara successor chief Kempe Gowda III, and when the siege succeeded, Bangalore was granted to Shahaji as his Karnataka jagir, the capital of a new territorial base extending across much of present-day northern Karnataka. Sarkar’s account is precise:

“It was only in October 1638, when Adil Shah began a series of annual invasions of Karnatak (Mysore and the East Coast) that Shahji got the chance of his second rise, under his appreciative commander, Randaula Khan (now created Rustam-i-Zaman.) In the campaign of 1639, Bangalore was gained by the Bijapuris and it was granted to Shahji to form the capital of his new jagir.” [12]

He subsequently became the principal Bijapur commander for southern campaigns, leading expeditions across the former Vijayanagara territories as the Adil Shahi state expanded into the political vacuum that Talikota in 1565 had opened and left unfilled for three generations.

It was in Bangalore that the household division described earlier acquired geographic permanence. Shahaji assigned Jijabai and the young Shivaji to manage the Pune jagir while he remained in the south with Tukabai and his elder son Sambhaji, placing a senior administrator, Dadaji Konddev, in charge of the Pune territories as his direct agent, and Shivaji would not achieve full control of the Pune jagir until after Dadaji’s death in 1647 [13]. In the interim he was raised in a household headed by his mother, at a remove from his father, on land that was technically a Bijapur sub-grant administered by a Brahmin official. At Bangalore, Shahaji also divided his jagir territorially between his two sons, assigning Sambhaji control of Kolar while retaining Bangalore itself, which would eventually pass to Ekoji, and leaving Shivaji and Jijabai to govern Pune. This bifurcation had consequences nobody planned for: after Shahaji’s death, the Karnataka branch under Ekoji would eventually found the Maratha kingdom of Thanjavur, an entirely distinct political entity from the Deccan polity Shivaji was building on the other end of the peninsula [14].

Arrest, Release, and the Limits of Autonomy

In 1648, Shahaji was arrested. The circumstances are contested across sources in ways that reveal how sensitive this episode remained in Maratha historical memory. The Bijapur chronicle Muhammad Namah attributes the arrest to insubordination: during the siege of Jinji in the south, Shahaji had been operating independently of the Bijapur commander Mustafa Khan, negotiating directly with the Nayaka chiefs of Jinji, Madurai, and Tiruchirapalli, and had even explored entering Golconda’s service, a level of autonomous diplomacy that exceeded what the Adil Shahi court was prepared to tolerate [15]. The Maratha-patronized Shiva-Bharat presents it instead as Bijapur’s attempt to use Shahaji as a lever against Shivaji’s aggressive fort-seizures in the Pune region, while Sarkar adds a third layer, that the Bijapur court’s growing orthodox Muslim faction was watching a senior Maratha commander build cross-sectarian networks with increasing alarm [16]. The three explanations are not mutually exclusive, and the arrest was probably overdetermined in ways that the surviving sources, each with their own patron and purpose, only partially capture.

Whatever the proximate cause, Shahaji was brought to Bijapur in chains and forced to surrender the forts of Kondana and Bangalore, though he was pardoned within a year after Shah Jahan’s court sent word to the Adil Shahi sultan that Shahaji should be freed and restored to service, an instruction the sultan, whose independence rested on a carefully maintained treaty with the Mughals, could not refuse [17]. The episode is revealing less for the arrest itself than for what it exposes about the structural ceiling on a Maratha sardar’s autonomy within the Deccan sultanate framework. A commander of Shahaji’s ability and territorial standing could build considerable capacity within that system, negotiating with rival powers, governing his jagir semi-independently, commanding loyalty that was personal rather than institutional, but the moment he moved to step outside the system entirely, the system reached back in and retrieved him.

Once released and back in Karnataka, Shahaji sent word north to Shivaji instructing him to take revenge on Baji Ghorpade, the Adil Shahi commander who had orchestrated the arrest. Shivaji eventually did, killing Ghorpade in his palace at Mudhol nearly a decade later, and the fact that Shahaji transmitted this instruction across hundreds of miles to a son he saw rarely says something about how obligation and grievance moved through the Bhonsale family’s networks, and about what Shahaji understood his son to be capable of [18].

After 1649, reliable records of Shahaji’s activities thin out considerably. He remained in Karnataka, withdrawing gradually from active campaigning and allowing Ekoji to govern the Bangalore territories while he retired to Kanakagiri. He died on 23 January 1664 at Hodigere in Karnataka’s Davangere district, his horse’s hoof caught in a tangle of forest creepers during a hunt, throwing him to the ground at the age of sixty-nine. His samadhi at Hodigere stands today, maintained through a grant of surrounding villages from the Adil Shahi court that Ekoji arranged, a site of local reverence almost entirely unknown outside Karnataka [19].

What Shahaji Left Behind

The temptation, writing about Shahaji, is to read his career backwards through Shivaji, to see every alliance and tactical gamble as preparation for a project of independence he never himself pursued. This is too neat. He served three powers, including the Mughals, and nothing in the surviving record suggests he envisioned the Maratha sovereign state his son would build. His ambitions appear to have been the ambitions of a senior sardar operating at the outer limit of what the Deccan sultanate system allowed: territorial control, military command, the security of the Bhonsale family’s position, and as much autonomous space within the patronage system of his current employer as that employer could be induced or pressured to grant.

What he transmitted was something different from intention. The Pune jagir Shivaji inherited was a fortified territorial base with established revenue streams, a loyal administrative structure built by Dadaji Konddev under Shahaji’s direction, and a set of regional connections accumulated over two generations of Bhonsale service, and it remained Shahaji’s property, administered by his agent, until Shivaji was seventeen. Sarkar is precise about the terms of this inheritance:

“Thus Shivaji first came to Puna not earlier than 1638; and there is no evidence that the Puna jagir of Shahji was quite so early assigned to Shivaji as his heritage. The surviving papers prove that he and his mother were to get their subsistence allowance from this estate, but not as yet to exercise any authority over it — for this latter purpose Dadaji was directly under Shahji and officially his agent with full power (mutaliq). He was fully in the saddle as the master of the Puna jagir only after Dadaji’s death in 1647.” [20]

This is a useful corrective to the romanticized version in which Jijabai raises Shivaji in heroic isolation, instilling the dream of Swarajya while Shahaji operates comfortably at a remove in the south. What Shivaji took over in 1647 was a functioning institution his father had built and that he now had the capacity to redirect, not a gift but a handover, and one that came with an embedded military culture, a set of trained commanders, and a territorial logic that pointed directly toward the Sahyadri forts Shivaji would spend the next decade seizing.

The guerrilla methods Shivaji would deploy against Bijapur and the Mughals had been developed by Malik Ambar, absorbed by Maloji, and sustained by Shahaji through the long resistance of 1633 to 1636. The political instinct that allowed Shivaji to play Mughal against Bijapur, to negotiate from apparent weakness, to treat time and terrain as strategic assets, these were legible in the career his father had lived across three sultanates and forty years of war.

Shahaji never broke free of the system. He came closer than any Maratha commander before him, governing an improvised state from Sahyadri forts for three years against the combined pressure of two great powers, and the gap between what he managed and what Shivaji achieved was partly circumstance, partly timing, and partly the fact that Shivaji had inherited, at no cost to himself, everything Shahaji had spent a lifetime assembling.

The last instruction Shahaji sent north, telling his son to kill the man who had put him in chains, reads less like a dying wish than a briefing. He knew what Shivaji was. He had built the platform.

Citations & Notes

[1] Gordon, S. (1993). The Marathas 1600-1818. Cambridge University Press.

[2] Oturkar, R. V. (1956). Peshvekalin samajik va arthik patravyavahar. Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal. [Letter dated 28 July 1625, confirming rank of Sar Lashkar.]

[3] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and his times (6th ed.). M.C. Sarkar & Sons.

[4] Gordon, S. (1993). The Marathas 1600-1818. Cambridge University Press.

[5] Gordon, S. (1993). The Marathas 1600-1818. Cambridge University Press.

[6] Gordon, S. (1993). The Marathas 1600-1818. Cambridge University Press.

[7] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and his times (6th ed.). M.C. Sarkar & Sons.

[8] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and his times (6th ed.). M.C. Sarkar & Sons.

[9] Kainikara, S. (2021). The Marathas: Entrenching Maratha power. [Figures for opposing force strengths at the Mahuli siege.]

[10] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and his times (6th ed.). M.C. Sarkar & Sons.

[11] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and his times (6th ed.). M.C. Sarkar & Sons.

[12] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and his times (6th ed.). M.C. Sarkar & Sons.

[13] Gordon, S. (1993). The Marathas 1600-1818. Cambridge University Press.

[14] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and his times (6th ed.). M.C. Sarkar & Sons.

[15] Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Shahaji. Wikipedia. [Drawing on Muhammad Namah, Bijapur chronicle.]

[16] Sarkar, J. (1917, September). Shahaji. Modern Review, 249.

[17] Takakhav, N. S. (1921). The life of Shivaji Maharaj. Manoranjan Press.

[18] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and his times (6th ed.). M.C. Sarkar & Sons.

[19] Deccan Chronicle. (2017, December 10). Sunday story: In Davangere rests a great Maratha warrior.

[20] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and his times (6th ed.). M.C. Sarkar & Sons.

This is that story. It is, at its heart, a story about military transmission: about how a doctrine of irregular warfare developed in the Deccan over roughly three generations and was eventually refined into one of the most effective insurgent strategies of the pre-modern world.

The landscape that made all of this possible is worth pausing on before we proceed. Jadunath Sarkar, in Shivaji and His Times, described the Deccan’s geography with a precision that explains much of what follows:

“The country was cut up by Nature into small compartments in which the natives lived isolated self-contained lives... The empires of the central and more level portion of the table-land, both in Hindu times and Muslim, had sent forth their conquering hosts westwards, but the flood of invasion had been broken down at the foot of the hills or their numerous spurs, or, where a thin stream of it had poured through the passes, it had retired after a short and unprofitable stay. In their rugged and inhospitable nooks the natives had found safety and peace, while the richer plains had been the scenes of revolution and rapine.” [3]

This was the terrain that Malik Ambar learned to weaponise.

The Making of Malik Ambar

Around 1548, in the highland region of Harar in present-day Ethiopia, a boy was born whose original name, depending on the source, was either Chapu or Shambu. His family were Habshi, the broad term applied to the peoples of the Abyssinian highlands. The precise circumstances of his enslavement are unknown, but by the time he was a young man he had been sold multiple times across the Indian Ocean world: taken first to Arabia, sold again in Baghdad, where he received an education, and then transported to India to serve Chengiz Khan, a nobleman of African origin who was himself a senior minister in the Ahmadnagar Sultanate’s court [1]. He was given the name Ambar, meaning “ambergris,” a common name for dark-skinned slaves, and the title Malik upon his manumission. The man who would become the most feared military commander in the Deccan for a quarter-century entered India as somebody else’s property.

What happened over the next several decades is a story of almost unparalleled social ascent in early modern India. Under Chengiz Khan’s mentorship, Ambar absorbed the fundamentals of Deccani statecraft and military organisation. He traversed the western Deccan extensively, learning its terrain with the intimacy of a man who knew he might one day need to fight across every inch of it. When Chengiz Khan died, Ambar obtained his freedom and spent years operating as an independent mercenary commander, building a force of Habshi soldiers, Maratha cavalry, and Persian warriors into a cohesive fighting unit [2]. By the time the Ahmadnagar Sultanate began to collapse under Mughal pressure in the 1590s, Ambar was well positioned for the power vacuum that followed.

When Ahmadnagar fell to the Mughals in 1600 and the Sultanate seemed finished, Ambar refused to accept the result. He located a young boy of the Nizam Shahi royal line living in exile in Bijapur, proclaimed him Murtaza Nizam Shah II, married his own daughter to the boy to secure a regency, and set up a government in resistance [3]. From this moment, he was effectively the ruler of a state with no territory to speak of, no treasury, and whose only real resource was Ambar’s own military genius and the loyalty of the Maratha chiefs he had been cultivating for years.

The Doctrine of Bargigiri

What made Ambar militarily exceptional was not the size of his force (though it eventually grew to some fifty thousand men) but his conceptual approach to fighting a superior enemy. Mughal armies in the Deccan operated as they did everywhere: large, cumbersome formations of infantry and heavy cavalry that demanded open terrain and clear supply lines to function. They were built to destroy enemies in pitched battle. Ambar understood this and made a deliberate strategic choice to deny them that possibility entirely.

He pioneered a style of warfare the Marathas would come to call bargigiri, a term that broadly translates as the tactics of swift, mounted raiders. The core principles were: avoid pitched engagement, strike suddenly from rugged terrain, destroy Mughal supply lines and forage capacity, and retreat before the enemy could mass against you. He positioned fortified hilltop strongholds across the Deccan plateau as nodes in a network, bases from which his light cavalry could raid and to which they could disappear [4]. The Sahyadri ranges, the broken escarpments of the Deccan, and the dense forests of the Konkan borderlands became not obstacles but weapons in his hands. In Omar H. Ali’s assessment, Ambar had developed a shrewd ability to use the rough, often barren and rocky terrain to his advantage against the Mughals to his north, mastering the command and deployment of light cavalry for rapid raids while keeping his enemies in a state of perpetual, exhausted alertness [5].

The results were extraordinary. Ambar defeated Mughal armies under both Akbar and Jahangir, the two greatest emperors the dynasty produced, keeping imperial forces out of the Deccan for decades. In 1610, he expelled the Mughals from Ahmadnagar Fort itself. His greatest battlefield triumph came at Bhatvadi in 1624, where he decisively defeated a combined Mughal-Bijapur force despite being numerically outmatched [6]. The Mughals never found an adequate response to his methods. Prince Khurram, later Shah Jahan, was sent against him repeatedly and repeatedly failed to land a decisive blow.

The depth of Mughal frustration is illustrated nowhere more vividly than in the writings of Emperor Jahangir. In his Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, Jahangir returned to the subject of Ambar with an almost pathological obsession, describing him variously as “that black wretch,” “Ambar of dark fate,” and “that crafty, ill-starred one” [7]. The two men never met on the battlefield directly, since Jahangir was never present in person in the Deccan, and that impotent distance may have made the emperor’s fury burn hotter. So consumed was Jahangir by his inability to destroy Ambar that he commissioned his court painter Abu’l Hasan to produce an allegorical fantasy in which the emperor stands atop a globe of the world and shoots an arrow through the severed, pike-impaled head of his great enemy [8]. The painting, dated to around 1620 while Ambar was still very much alive, is one of the most revealing documents of Mughal frustration in the entire reign.

Maloji Bhosale: The Grandfather Nobody Talks About

While Ambar was building his resistance movement, a young Maratha soldier named Maloji Bhosale was making his own quiet ascent through the Nizam Shahi military hierarchy. Understanding who Maloji was and where he came from is essential to understanding why the Bhosale family ended up at the center of Deccan history at all.

Maloji was born around 1552 to Babaji Bhosale, a petty patil (village headman) of Hingni Berdi and Devalgaon, villages in the Pune region [9]. The Bhosales were a large, tight-knit clan. As Sardesai’s New History of the Marathas describes them, they were enterprising and resourceful, mutually helpful among the men, proud of their identity, but they were not nobles [11]. They occupied that middling stratum of Maratha society that owned a little land and provided military service to whoever paid, but commanded no independent power. Maloji’s father purchased the chieftainship of Verul (present-day Ellora) with some villages along the Bhima and Godavari rivers, which gave the family a modest territorial base, but no more than that.

Maloji and his younger brother Vithoji first entered military service as low-ranking cavalry horsemen (shiled​ars) under Lakhujirao Jadhav, the powerful Maratha sardar of Sindkhed who served the Ahmadnagar Sultanate. This point is worth pausing on: the Jadhavs were a family of considerably higher standing than the Bhosales, tracing a lineage back to the Devagiri Yadava dynasty, the pre-Sultanate rulers of the Deccan. Maloji was, in the early part of his career, a subordinate, a minor horseman in the retinue of a far grander lord.

The Insult at Holi and Its Aftermath

The story of how Maloji escaped this subordination is one of those episodes that floats at the edge of legend and history, but it tells us something real about the social world of the Deccan military nobility. According to several accounts documented by historians including Sardesai, during a Holi celebration at Lakhujirao’s mansion, the Jadhav chief remarked jovially, in the light-hearted spirit of the festival, that the young Shahaji (Maloji’s infant son) and his own daughter Jijabai would make a fine couple [12]. It was a throwaway comment, the kind of thing noblemen said without meaning much by it.

Maloji took it seriously. He announced publicly that an engagement had been agreed, treating the remark as a binding social commitment. Lakhujirao was furious. He considered Maloji a shiledar, a common soldier who happened to have his own horse and sword, not a noble worthy of a matrimonial alliance with the Jadhav family, who could claim royal blood [13]. He dismissed Maloji from his service with a rebuke, and from this point the two families were locked in a simmering antagonism.

The consequences for Maloji were transformative. Humiliated and dismissed, he threw himself into military advancement with the focused energy of a man who has something to prove. According to one tradition he and Vithoji found a buried treasure while farming, a story that may encode the more prosaic reality of a fortunate plunder or military payment, and used the windfall to purchase horses and raise a militia, briefly harassing the Jadhavs directly before redirecting his ambition upward [14]. In 1577 he and Vithoji formally entered the service of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate directly, under Murtaza Nizam Shah I. There, he found his moment.

Under Ambar’s Command

It was in the Nizam Shahi service that Maloji Bhosale became a trusted lieutenant of Malik Ambar, who was by now the dominant military figure in the Sultanate [15]. The relationship between the two men is not extensively documented in the literary sources available to us. We lack an equivalent of the Bijapur court chronicles that would let us reconstruct the texture of their interactions, but the structural evidence is clear: Maloji rose rapidly under Ambar, fighting against the rival Deccan Sultanates and the Mughals, and was rewarded accordingly.

What Maloji learned in this service was the full repertoire of Ambar’s bargigiri doctrine: the use of light Maratha cavalry in rapid, decentralised raids; the strategic exploitation of fortified hill positions; the preference for attrition over decisive engagement; the cultivation of local intelligence networks to anticipate and intercept enemy movements. These were not tactics that could be learned from a manual. They were absorbed through years of campaign experience under a commander who had been refining them for decades. Maloji was not merely a soldier in Ambar’s army; he was being educated in a system of war.

The rewards of that service were substantial. On the recommendation of Malik Ambar, Maloji was granted the title of Raja by Bahadur Nizam Shah, along with control over three parganas: Elur (Verul), Derhadi, and Kannarad, and several surrounding villages [16]. Crucially, he was also awarded the jagir of Pune and Supe. This grant, the Pune jagir, is the foundation of everything that follows. It is the moment when the Bhosale family becomes a landed, jagiradri-class family in the western Deccan. Sardesai’s account of this period makes clear that Maloji used the wealth that came with jagir administration purposefully: purchasing horses and expanding his militia, digging tanks and endowing temples to build popular legitimacy, and eventually paying the Nizam Shah directly, in cash, to elevate his status to something approaching parity with the great sardars of the realm [17].

Sarkar, who had little patience for hagiography, nonetheless acknowledged the shrewdness of Maloji’s social investments. In Shivaji and His Times he wrote:

“Maloji wisely spent a portion of his treasure trove in building temples, giving alms to Brahmans, and excavating a large tank on the arid Shambhu Mahadev hill, in the Satara district, which was a great boon to the tens of thousands of pilgrims who annually flocked to that shrine. These pious investments of his money brought him a good return by raising him immensely in social esteem.” [10]

It was from this newly elevated position that he was able to reopen the question of the Jadhav marriage. The Bhosale who returned to negotiate with Lakhujirao Jadhav was not the dismissed shiledar of twenty years earlier, but a titled Raja with a jagir that made him nearly an equal. The marriage of Shahaji and Jijabai was eventually contracted, though whether through genuine reconciliation, Nizam Shahi pressure, or the influence of Maloji’s in-laws the Nimbalkars, the sources do not entirely agree [18].

Maloji died in 1605 at the battle of Indapur, fighting, as he had lived, in the Nizam Shahi service. Shahaji was perhaps five years old. The father who had built the family’s position was gone before the son was old enough to remember him clearly.

Jijabai, the Jadhavs, and the Politics of Maratha Loyalty

The marriage of Shahaji and Jijabai is far more politically complicated than the romantic or devotional framing that later Maratha hagiography gave it. Jijabai was the daughter of Lakhujirao Jadhav, the same man who had humiliated Maloji a generation earlier. She was also the daughter of a man whose loyalties were, to put it charitably, flexible.

The Jadhavs presented themselves as descended from the Devagiri Yadava dynasty, the pre-Islamic rulers of the Deccan, which gave them a claim to aristocratic status that the Bhosales could not match [19]. Lakhujirao was a major figure in the Nizam Shahi court and one of the most powerful Maratha sardars of his generation. He was also, at various points in his career, in the service of the Mughals. By 1621, Emperor Jahangir had conferred upon him an impressive mansab of 24,000 men, a rank that placed him firmly in the upper tier of imperial nobility, and Lakhujirao moved between Mughal and Nizam Shahi service as the political winds shifted [20].

This is the family into which Shahaji had married. His father-in-law was not merely a rival in social status but, at times, literally on the other side of the wars Shahaji was fighting. The tensions this created were not merely familial. In one of the most consequential episodes of early 17th-century Deccan politics, Lakhujirao, suspecting that the Nizam Shah had sided with Shahaji in some court dispute, defected back to the Mughals, taking a substantial military following with him and dramatically weakening the Nizam Shahi position [21].

The Nizam Shah’s response was brutal. Lakhujirao, his sons, and grandsons were summoned to Devgiri Fort and murdered in court in 1629, in what amounted to a purge of the entire Jadhav male line [22]. For Shahaji, who had grown up with these men as kinsmen, however complicated the relationship, the massacre was both a personal shock and a political rupture. It removed any remaining reason for him to serve the Sultanate that had just slaughtered his wife’s family.

Shahaji: The General Who Perfected the Inheritance

Sarkar captured something essential about the social world these men emerged from:

“Social distinctions were fewer and much less sharp among the 16th century Marathas than among richer and more civilized communities. The rich man was not immeasurably above the poor in such a simple society; and even the poorest man had his value as a fighter or indispensable labourer; at least, he preserved his self-respect.” [23]

It was precisely this social fluidity that made the careers of Maloji and Shahaji possible. Shahaji Bhonsale was born in 1594, the year before his grandfather Maloji was elevated to Raja by the Nizam Shah. He grew up, in other words, in a household that had recently arrived at consequence, a family acutely conscious of the distance it had traveled and of the precariousness of the position it now occupied. He was five when his father died at Indapur, and was raised in a political world defined by shifting allegiances, constant warfare, and the slow disintegration of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate under Mughal pressure.

Shahaji began his military career in Malik Ambar’s army, the same army his father had served. By the time of Maloji’s death, Ambar was at or near the height of his power, and Shahaji rose quickly in this environment. By 1625, still in his early thirties, he had attained the rank of Sar Lashkar, roughly equivalent to a major general, a seniority confirmed in documents from that period [24]. He fought alongside Ambar at Bhatvadi in 1624, the engagement that represented the zenith of Deccan resistance to Mughal expansion during this period, and from which he emerged with considerably enhanced military prestige.

Guerrilla Command in Practice

Where Maloji had absorbed the bargigiri doctrine as a subordinate commander, Shahaji practised it as a senior general. When Ambar died in 1626, and the Nizam Shahi state entered its terminal decline, when Lakhujirao was killed in 1629, when Mughal forces under Shah Jahan tightened the noose around Ahmadnagar, Shahaji operated with the full strategic toolkit that had been developed over the preceding generation. He moved fast, denied pitched battle, used fort networks as operational anchors, and repeatedly kept much larger Mughal forces from landing a decisive blow.

His position in these years was extraordinarily complex. He briefly entered Mughal service under Shah Jahan, a pragmatic calculation during a period when the Nizam Shahi state had effectively ceased to exist, before defecting to the Bijapur Sultanate in 1632 when the Mughals stripped him of his jagirs [25]. This was not opportunism for its own sake. Shahaji’s fundamental project, as historians including Sardesai have noted, was to preserve and expand the Bhosale territorial base regardless of which sultanate nominally employed him. He understood, perhaps better than anyone of his generation, that the political landscape of the Deccan was not stable, that sultanates rose and fell, and that a family’s survival depended on its own landed power and military capacity rather than the goodwill of any particular master.

The decision to join Bijapur proved correct. The Adil Shahs confirmed the Pune and Supe jagirs that had originally been Maloji’s. Then in 1638, following Bijapur’s military campaign against Kempe Gowda III’s territories in Karnataka, Shahaji received an additional jagir centred on Bangalore, a vast grant that made him one of the most powerful non-royal military lords in the entire peninsula [26]. He became Bijapur’s chief general in the Carnatic operations, overseeing the Sultanate’s expansion southward while keeping the Pune jagir intact for his family’s future use.

It is this grant of Bangalore that marks the outer limit of Shahaji’s own achievement. The Bhosale family, which had entered history as minor horsemen under the Jadhavs of Sindkhed sixty years earlier, now held jagirs stretching from the Pune plateau to the Carnatic. The family’s position had been won not through royal blood or court intrigue (though those arts had been deployed when necessary) but through decades of sustained military excellence in a specific mode of warfare that Malik Ambar had pioneered and that Maloji had absorbed and Shahaji had perfected.

The Son Waiting in Pune

Shahaji was always on the move. Campaigns in the Carnatic, negotiations with Bijapur, the perpetual vigilance of a man who had survived the collapse of one sultanate and the treachery of another: his life did not permit the kind of settled domestic existence that history sometimes projects onto Maratha leaders of this period. He left his wife Jijabai and their young son Shivaji at the Pune jagir, under the supervision of his trusted administrator Dadoji Konddev, while he pursued Bijapur’s wars in the south [27].

The world that Shivaji inherited at Pune was therefore already shaped, in deep structural ways, by three generations of the choices described in this post. The Pune jagir had been granted to Maloji for service to Ambar’s Nizam Shahi resistance. The bargigiri doctrine, the art of fighting in the Sahyadri ranges, of using forts as strategic nodes, of wearing down larger armies through mobility and terrain, had been the family’s métier for Maloji’s entire career and Shahaji’s entire life. Jijabai, Shivaji’s mother, was herself the daughter of a Deccan sardar’s world defined by contested loyalties, political violence, and the knowledge that alliances were always provisional.

The specific genius that Shivaji would later deploy against Bijapur and the Mughals, the audacious fort seizures, the lightning cavalry raids, the refusal to engage on the enemy’s terms, was not invented from nothing. It was inherited, sharpened, and then elevated to something new by a young man who had grown up watching it practised at the highest level by his father, who had learned it from a world shaped by an Ethiopian slave-turned-regent who had spent fifty years making the mountains of the Deccan unconquerable.

Conclusion: The Long Chain

It is conventional to begin the story of the Maratha military tradition with Shivaji. This is understandable. Shivaji is the figure who synthesised everything that came before into a coherent political project, who captured the imagination of his contemporaries and subsequent historians, who built a kingdom where there had been none. But it is also a distortion that flattens three generations of development into a single moment of apparent genius.

The guerrilla doctrine that made the Marathas formidable had a specific origin. Malik Ambar developed it in the crucible of resistance to Mughal expansion, drawing on his intimate knowledge of Deccani terrain, his Habshi and Maratha fighting forces, and a strategic insight, that a lighter, faster, dispersed force operating from fortified positions could neutralize the Mughal military-industrial machine, that was genuinely original to the late sixteenth century Deccan. Maloji Bhosale absorbed this doctrine as a trusted lieutenant in Ambar’s army, transformed a family of petty horsemen into a landed jagirdar clan in the process, and through the Pune grant created the territorial foundation on which everything subsequent was built. Shahaji brought the doctrine to its fullest pre-Shivaji expression, using it across three different employers over a forty-year career, and in doing so expanded the Bhosale position from a Deccan jagir to a peninsular military power.

Shivaji’s achievement was to add political vision to an inherited military instrument, to see that the tool forged over three generations of family history could be the basis not merely of jagirdar prosperity but of a sovereign Maratha state. That vision was his own. But the instrument had been built by others, beginning with a boy from Harar who crossed the Red Sea in chains and ended as the uncrowned ruler of the Deccan.

Notes & Sources

[1] Eaton, R. M. (2005). A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives. Cambridge University Press.

[2] Ali, O. H. (2016). Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean. Oxford University Press.

[3] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and His Times (6th ed.). M. C. Sarkar & Sons.

[4] Indpaedia. (2025). Malik Ambar. Retrieved from http://indpaedia.com/ind/index.php/Malik_Ambar

[5] Ali, O. H. (n.d.). Malik Ambar. Columbia University South Asia Institute Working Paper. Retrieved from https://sai.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/Ali%20-%20Malik%20Ambar.pdf

[6] Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Battle of Bhatvadi. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bhatvadi

[7] Parveen, S. (2020). African Power in Deccan Sultanate: Malik Ambar. The Indian Quest. Retrieved from http://www.theindianquest.com

[8] Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Jahangir Shooting the Head of Malik Ambar. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahangir_Shooting_the_Head_of_Malik_Ambar

[9] Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Maloji Bhosale. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maloji_Bhosale

[10] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and His Times (6th ed.). M. C. Sarkar & Sons. p. 24.

[11] Sardesai, G. S. (1957). New History of the Marathas: Shivaji and His Line (1600–1707). Phoenix Publications. p. 58.

[12] Kainikara, S. (2021). The Marathas Part 3: The Rise of the Bhonsle Clan. Retrieved from https://sanukay.wordpress.com

[13] Military History Fandom. (2025). Maloji Bhosale. Retrieved from https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Maloji_Bhosale

[14] Ibid.

[15] Gordon, S. (1993). The Marathas 1600–1818. Cambridge University Press. pp. 41–44.

[16] Military History Fandom. (2025). Maloji Bhosale.

[17] Kainikara, S. (2021). The Marathas Part 3: The Rise of the Bhonsle Clan.

[18] Sardesai, G. S. (1957). New History of the Marathas. Phoenix Publications.

[19] Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Lakhuji Jadhav. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakhuji_Jadhav

[20] Ibid.

[21] Maratha Chronicles. (2010). Shivaji’s Ancestors. Retrieved from http://marathachronicles.blogspot.com

[22] Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Lakhuji Jadhav.

[23] Sarkar, J. (1961). Shivaji and His Times (6th ed.). M. C. Sarkar & Sons. p. 31.

[24] Indianetzone. (2025). Shahaji. Retrieved from https://www.indianetzone.com/shahaji

[25] Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Shahaji. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahaji

[26] Ibid.

[27] Encyclopedia.com. (2025). Shivaji Bhonsle and Heirs. Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com

Foreign Officers and the Indian Military Market

The European mercenary in 18th-century India is a familiar enough figure in the scholarship. French officers like Benoît de Boigne and Pierre Cuillier-Perron trained and commanded the infantry of the Sindhia house after French imperial ambitions in the subcontinent collapsed with the definitive British victories in the Carnatic and Bengal. The Irish appear too, most notably George Thomas, who deserted the British Navy in Madras in 1782 and by the late 1790s had established a small independent territory in what is now Haryana, minting his own coins and maintaining his own artillery. He died in 1802 on a boat down the Ganges, having been defeated by a combined Sindhia-French force under Perron [1].

Americans occupy a much smaller place in this literature, which reflects both the scale of their presence and the nature of their legal position. The new republic had no East India Company, no territorial foothold, and no treaty rights in India. Its citizens who went there did so as individuals navigating systems built for other purposes.

Salem’s Merchants and the Problem of Access

The commercial traffic came first. After 1783, New England merchants who had previously operated within the British imperial trade network found themselves excluded from it. Salem, Massachusetts, which had outfitted more than fifty privateering vessels during the Revolution, moved quickly into long-distance open ocean trade [2]. Elias Hasket Derby sent his son Hasket to the Isle of France in 1787 aboard the Grand Turk; by 1788, Derby vessels had reached Bombay and were purchasing textiles [3]. A Derby ship was the first to fly the American flag in Calcutta harbour [4].

The legal basis for this trade was narrow. The East India Company held a monopoly on British trade with India. Americans were not British, which meant the Company could not formally exclude them under its charter, but it could and did make their position awkward. Access to Indian ports came partly through Dutch and Portuguese intermediaries, who had their own reasons to accommodate American traders against the British commercial monopoly [2]. When George Washington appointed Benjamin Joy of Newburyport as the first American consul to Calcutta in November 1792, the limits of this tolerance became clear. Joy arrived in April 1794. The Company refused to recognise his consular status and permitted him to remain only as a commercial agent “subject to the civil and criminal jurisdiction of this country.” He resigned and left by the end of 1795 [5].

William Gardner and the Margins of the British Army

Gardner’s background placed him in a different category. His father was a Loyalist officer who had served with the 16th Foot during its American deployment; after the Revolution, the family’s prospects in the new republic were nil. Gardner was commissioned as an ensign in 1783 at age thirteen, placed on half-pay when his regiment disbanded, brought back on full-pay into the 74th Highlanders for India service in 1789, transferred to the 52nd Foot, and made captain in the 30th by 1794, at which point he again exchanged to half-pay of a disbanded company [6]. The pattern is one of a man moving through the margins of the British military establishment, never quite securing a permanent footing.

At some point in the late 1790s he left British service and entered the employ of Jaswant Rao Holkar, the Indore chief then in open conflict with the Peshwa and the Sindhia house and moving toward confrontation with the East India Company. The Dictionary of National Biography, which had access to sources now lost, was candid about the limits of what could be established: Gardner “appeared afterwards as a military adventurer in the chaotic field of central Indian discord,” and various accounts of his transition circulated in his lifetime without any being definitively confirmed [6].

Holkar sent him on a mission to the princes of Cambay. Gardner married there, a Muslim princess whose family held Mughal imperial honours. He converted to Islam. On his return, Holkar dispatched him to negotiate with Lord Lake; when he came back he was accused of having betrayed information to the British, publicly insulted by Holkar, and responded by attempting to kill him. He failed and escaped. He was subsequently captured by Amir Khan, a Pindari commander, and tied to a cannon muzzle with the offer of his life if he agreed to fight against the British. He refused. He was not killed. He later escaped by jumping from a height estimated at fifty feet into a river, made his way to Lake’s camp in 1804 disguised as a grass-cutter, and re-entered British service [6].

He was asked to raise a regiment of irregular cavalry in 1809. Gardner’s Horse, now the 2nd Lancers of the Indian Army, traces its lineage to that commission.

Why the Military-for-Hire Market Existed

The demand for European military expertise in this period was structural. The dissolution of Mughal central authority had left a large number of successor states competing for territory and security. The Nizam of Hyderabad, the rulers of Mysore, the various Maratha chiefs, the Rohillas, and the Sikh confederacy in the northwest all maintained armies that incorporated varying proportions of European-trained officers and European tactical methods. The French had the largest presence among the mercenary officer class, partly because France had invested in Indian alliances for decades before its final reversal, and partly because the defeat of those alliances left many French officers stranded and available. But the market absorbed others. Nationality was less relevant than familiarity with European drill, artillery handling, and logistics [1].

Gardner fits this market. He had British infantry training, he had the social fluency to operate across the boundaries between European and Indian courts, and after his marriage and conversion, he had family connections into the Mughal aristocratic network. That last element was not incidental. The mercenary officers who lasted in Indian service were generally those who embedded themselves through marriage and religious conversion rather than remaining culturally separate. De Boigne married an Indian woman. Thomas did not, and his position was always more precarious.

Two Kinds of Americans in India

The commercial Americans and the military Americans had almost no overlap. The Salem and Boston merchants in Calcutta and Bombay were there for months at a time, operating within Company-tolerated frameworks, and returned home. The men who entered Indian military service came from a different situation: Loyalists, half-pay officers, deserters, men whose connection to European institutional life had been severed by the Revolution or by the chronic instability of the British army’s regimental system in this period.

The pattern continued into the early 19th century. Josiah Harlan, born in Pennsylvania in 1799, arrived in India in the 1820s, entered the service of Ranjit Singh’s Sikh court, and eventually crossed into Afghanistan with the intention of establishing himself as a ruler. In 1838, he proclaimed himself Prince of Ghor in the Hindu Kush before the British invasion of Afghanistan that year ended the arrangement [7]. Ben Macintyre’s 2004 biography established that Harlan was among the partial inspirations for Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” though the connection had long been suspected.

What the Record Shows

Gardner’s papers survive in fragments at the Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge. His letters to his aunt from 1815 onward are the primary source for his earlier years, written in retrospect. The record of his time with Holkar depends largely on British military and administrative documents and the Dictionary of National Biography entry assembled well after his death. The archival thinness is itself informative: Americans in this world left traces in other people’s records more often than in their own.

Gardner’s Horse remains on the Indian Army’s order of battle. The U.S. Consulate General in Kolkata dates its institutional history to Joy’s 1792 appointment [5].

Notes and Sources

[1] Bidwell, S. (1971). Swords for hire: European mercenaries in eighteenth century India. John Murray.

[2] Bean, S. S. (2001). Yankee India: American commercial and cultural encounters with India in the age of sail 1784–1860. Peabody Essex Museum.

[3] Kiddle. (n.d.). Elias Hasket Derby. Retrieved from https://kids.kiddle.co/Elias_Hasket_Derby

[4] EBSCO Research Starters. (n.d.). Elias Hasket Derby. Retrieved from https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/elias-hasket-derby

[5] U.S. Embassy & Consulates in India. (n.d.). U.S. Consulate General Kolkata: History. Retrieved from https://in.usembassy.gov/u-s-consulate-general-kolkata-history/

[6] Chichester, H. M. (1889). Gardner, William Linnæus. In Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900. Retrieved via Wikisource.

[7] MacIntyre, B. (2004). The man who would be king: The first American in Afghanistan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Military history, particularly of the Maratha period, tends to foreground the qualities that lend themselves to storytelling: courage, betrayal, charismatic commanders, and the providential hand of fate at places like Panipat or Kharda. What it consistently underplays is that major campaigns in this era were, at their core, financial operations as much as military ones. Armies of the scale routinely deployed by the Maratha Confederacy, the Mughal imperial system, and later the East India Company were not simply collections of fighting men. They were moving cities. And like any city, they required a continuous and sophisticated flow of capital to survive.

This post attempts to fill that gap. Building on our earlier discussion of Brahmendra Swami and the role of moneylending networks in the Peshwa darbar, we will examine how India’s indigenous banking world actually functioned: who the Seths and Shroffs were, how the Hundi system allowed money to travel across the subcontinent without a single coin changing hands, what the chaos of 18th century coinage meant in practice, and why no major power of the period Maratha, Mughal, or British could have sustained its military ambitions without access to India’s indigenous credit networks.

The Army Was a City

To appreciate the financial demands of 18th-century warfare, one must first understand what an Indian army of this period actually looked like. The Maratha force that operated under Peshwa direction was not a uniform national army in the modern sense. It was a layered confederation of military interests, each with its own terms of service and cost structure.

At its core sat the Huzurat cavalry, the Peshwa’s own elite mounted regiment, equipped with matchlocks and maintained on fixed salaries throughout the year [23]. These were the professionals: reliable, expensive, and relatively few in number compared to the total force. Around them were arrayed the Shiledar cavalry, soldiers who provided their own horses and equipment in exchange for higher pay, and the Bargir troopers, who received their mounts from the state [23]. Beyond these were the contingents furnished by the various Maratha chiefs, the Holkars, Scindias, Bhosales, and others who brought their own armies to the field under the loose authority of the Confederacy, each expecting their own share of whatever revenue or plunder the campaign generated.

Then came the Pindaris. These were irregular horsemen drawn from Muslim and Hindu backgrounds alike, attached informally to whichever Maratha chief would tolerate their presence, whose compensation was almost entirely the booty they could seize during operations [28]. They followed the Maratha bands from the late 17th century onward and by the 18th century numbered in the tens of thousands across the Confederacy as a whole [27]. They were unpaid in the formal sense; they were, in effect, a promise deferred in the form of plunder rights.

And beyond all of these combatants stretched the enormous and largely invisible non-combatant tail: the cooks, water carriers, surgeons, farriers, grain merchants, cattle herders, sutlers, and camp followers without whom no army of this period could feed itself or remain mobile for more than a few days. Contemporary European observers who accompanied or observed Maratha armies in the field were frequently astonished by the sheer scale of what they saw. An army of 50,000 fighting men might trail a non-combatant population of comparable or greater size behind it.

The daily cost of maintaining such a force in the field was staggering. Soldiers needed to be paid, particularly the salaried Huzurat troops, whose loyalty was directly contingent on regular wages. Grain, fodder, draught animals, and camp materiel had to be sourced, often from hostile or recently devastated territory. Artillery, increasingly important after the mid-18th-century reforms undertaken by Mahadaji Scindia and others with European assistance, required the continuous supply of powder, shot, and skilled gunners [29]. These were not costs that could be met from the treasury at Pune in any direct or immediate sense. The money had to travel, and in 18th-century India, there was a sophisticated and remarkably efficient system for making it do exactly that.

The World of the Seths: India’s Indigenous Banking System

To understand how Indian armies financed themselves, one must first understand the broader financial ecosystem within which they operated. Contrary to later colonial-era narratives that portrayed India as economically primitive, the subcontinent in the 18th century possessed one of the most sophisticated indigenous banking networks in the world. At its apex sat figures who could reasonably be compared to the great European banking houses of the same era.

The term “Seth” from the Sanskrit Shreshthis denoted a merchant of standing, but in the 18th century context, it had come to mean something more specific: a banker of significant capital who issued credit, accepted deposits, managed remittances, and often held quasi-official roles in state fiscal administration [35]. The most famous of these were the Jagat Seths of Murshidabad, a Jain Marwari family originally from Nagaur in Rajasthan, whose rise to prominence in Bengal’s financial world represents one of the most extraordinary stories of the period.

The family’s founder, Hiranand Shah, arrived in Patna in 1652 [13]. Over the following decades, the house established itself as indispensable to the Nawabs of Bengal, whose province was by the early 18th century the richest in the Mughal Empire, generating revenue that flowed in enormous quantities toward Delhi. Managing that flow required bankers of exceptional capability. The Jagat Seth family provided them. By the time of Fateh Chand, who received the hereditary title of “Jagat Seth” Banker of the World from Emperor Muhammad Shah in the 1720s, the family controlled coin minting in Bengal, set the interest rates for the provincial money market, and managed the transfer of Bengal’s annual tribute to the Mughal court in Delhi [13]. The EIC’s own official historian, Robert Orme, described Jagat Seth as the greatest banker and money-changer known in the world at the time [12]. The historian Ghulam Hussain Khan wrote that their wealth was such that describing it accurately risked sounding like a fabrication [13].

Their wealth was estimated at 14 crore rupees in the 1750s, a figure that places them in the company of the great European banking dynasties of the period, and which some modern analysts have translated into contemporary equivalents running into hundreds of billions of dollars [7]. Nawab Alivardi Khan’s rise to power in Bengal was, in significant part, a financial operation underwritten by the Jagat Seths [13]. The political consequences of the family’s now infamous decision to finance Robert Clive’s campaign against Siraj-ud-Daula in 1757 would reshape the history of the entire subcontinent for the next 200 or so years [32].

But the Jagat Seths, for all their fame, were not unique in kind only in scale. Across the subcontinent, a dense network of Seth and Mahajan banking houses operated in every major commercial and administrative centre. In Pune, the Peshwa darbar was surrounded by and dependent upon such houses. The Patwardhan banking firm, founded originally as a moneylending enterprise in Nasik in the early 18th century, eventually became the principal banker to the Peshwas, with branches in Nasik, Bombay, Aurangabad, and Bijapur [15]. The Haribhakti family established itself in Pune’s Ravivar Peth, won the confidence of Nana Fadnavis, and served as both bankers and potedars (state treasury officers) to the Gaekwad rulers of Baroda [16]. These were not peripheral figures in the history of the Maratha state; rather, they were very much structural components of it.

The Shroff and the Chaos of 18th Century Coinage

Before examining how money moved across the subcontinent, it is necessary to say something about what that money actually was because the reality of 18th-century Indian currency was considerably more chaotic than most accounts of the period acknowledge.

The Mughal rupee, as standardized by Sher Shah Suri and refined by Akbar, had been for most of the 16th and 17th centuries a remarkably reliable silver coin, minted at over 100 imperial facilities and held to consistent standards of weight and purity [46]. By the early 18th century, however, the collapse of Mughal central authority had destroyed this coherence. As regional successor states asserted independence, the Nizam in Hyderabad, the Nawabs in Bengal and Awadh, the Marathas across the Deccan and into Hindustan, each began striking their own coins, nominally in the emperor’s name but in practice according to local standards, local alloys, and local mint practices. The American Numismatic Association’s survey of the period notes that by the 18th century, there were over 300 regional variations of the rupee circulating simultaneously, with values determined by weight and the traditional markings that coin-handlers learned to recognize [41].

This created a professional opportunity and a moral obligation for the Shroff. The Shroff (derived from the Arabic sarraf) was a money-changer and banker whose core function was the assaying and valuation of coinage, determining the precise silver content of whatever coins were presented to him, and assigning them an exchange rate accordingly [5]. Every mint, the Mughal system required a Sarraf attached to it to verify the purity of bullion and finished coins [5]. In the broader market, Shroffs determined the batta, the discount applied to any coin that fell short of full standard weight or purity [40]. A Surat rupee trading in Pune might carry a discount of several percent relative to the local coin; a debased issue from a minor regional mint might carry a substantially higher one. The Shroff’s skill lay in knowing these rates intimately across dozens of coin types, and in the trust his assessments commanded among merchants and soldiers who had no way of independently verifying the silver content of the money in their hands.

For armies in the field, this created particular difficulties. Soldiers demanded payment in coin they would accept, and “acceptance” was not a simple binary. A Huzurat trooper paid in debased rupees of low local standing could legitimately argue he was being underpaid. The negotiation of batta rates, the sourcing of coin that would be accepted in the territories through which an army was to march, and the management of exchange differentials between the coins collected as revenue and those disbursed as wages, all of this sat in the domain of the Shroff, who was an essential and not always sufficiently acknowledged figure in the logistics of 18th century campaigns [6].

The British found the same problem intractable well into the 19th century. Even after the EIC began striking its own coinage in India, the batta system persisted, with Shroffs applying discounts to dated coins irrespective of their actual condition [40]. The Coinage Act of 1835, which finally introduced a uniform machine-struck silver rupee across British India, was designed explicitly to curtail Shroff-dominated assay practices and bring the chaos of regional coinage to an end [45].

The Hundi: Moving Money Without Moving Gold

If the Shroff managed the problem of what money was worth at a given place and time, the Hundi system solved a different but equally fundamental problem: how to move value across hundreds or thousands of miles of territory without the risk, cost, and delay of physically transporting bullion.

A Hundi was, in formal terms, an unconditional written order directing one party to pay a specified sum to a named recipient [3]. In practice, it functioned as a bill of exchange, a promissory note, and a remittance instrument simultaneously, depending on how it was structured and deployed. The system had roots stretching back to at least the 12th century in India, and by the Mughal period was sufficiently well-established that the imperial state itself used it routinely for major transfers: in 1599, the Mughal treasury sent three lakh rupees to its Deccan army via Hundi; Bengal’s annual revenue surplus running to over a crore of rupees was regularly remitted to Delhi through the Jagat Seth’s Hundi network rather than by physical coin convoy [5].

The mechanics were elegant. A merchant or state official in Pune who needed to make a payment in Delhi would approach a Seth or Shroff with whom he had credit standing. The banker would issue a Hundi, effectively a written instruction to his agent or correspondent in Delhi, directing that the named amount be paid out on presentation. The issuer would charge a fee or discount for this service, which varied with the urgency of the instrument, the creditworthiness of the parties, and the prevailing balance of trade between the two cities [4]. A “Darshani Hundi” was payable immediately on presentation; other types carried fixed maturity periods. The rate of discount on a Hundi between two cities reflected, in effect, the direction and volume of commercial flows between them: if more money was routinely flowing from Surat to Pune than in the reverse direction, Surat-drawn Hundis on Pune would carry a lower discount, and vice versa [6].

What made this system function was not legal enforcement. Hundis had no formal legal standing and were explicitly outside the framework of the Negotiable Instruments Act when that legislation was eventually introduced [1]. What made it function was reputation. The entire edifice rested on the absolute reliability of the Seth or Shroff who issued the instrument. A banker whose Hundis were dishonored was finished, not only financially but socially, within the tightly networked communities of Jain and Marwari merchants who dominated the indigenous banking world [4]. The socio-cultural norms of these communities, the emphasis on probity, and the catastrophic personal consequences of default substituted, remarkably effectively, for the formal institutional guarantees that European banking was simultaneously developing through chartered banks and legal instruments [4].

For the Maratha state, this system was not a luxury; it was an operational necessity. When Maratha armies pushed into Bengal, the Carnatic, or the upper Gangetic plain, they could not carry Pune’s treasury with them. Revenue collected in the form of chauth, the Maratha levy of one-quarter of territorial revenue collected from non-Maratha lands, and sardeshmukhi, an additional ten percent claimed as hereditary right, had to be converted into operational expenditure far from Pune [51]. The Hundi network allowed the Peshwa’s agents to raise cash against future revenue assignments at campaign destinations, with bankers discounting these instruments based on their assessment of the Maratha state’s ability to make good on them. The campaign and the credit line were, in this sense, two aspects of the same operation.

The Economics of Debt: Interest, Default, and the Peshwa’s Borrowing

The relationship between the Maratha state and its bankers was not one of simple service provision. It was a relationship structured by debt, and the terms of that debt had direct consequences for military capacity.

As we examined in the post on Brahmendra Swami, the Peshwa darbar was chronically dependent on borrowed capital to fund campaigns that were expected to generate their own revenue through chauth collection, tribute, and plunder, but which required substantial upfront expenditure before that revenue could be realized. The Peshwa’s revenue collectors, who advanced one-third to one-half of their expected collections to the state as prepayment, were themselves borrowers in the Pune money market, raising their capital from the same Seth and Shroff networks to make good on their obligations [15]. The system was, in other words, a chain of credit that ran from the battlefield all the way down to the Pune bazaar.

Interest rates in this environment were not trivial. The Maratha fiscal and financial system relied extensively on loans from wealthy merchants and bankers to fund large-scale military operations [53], and the rates at which such loans were extended reflected both the genuine risk of military campaigns and the structural leverage that major bankers held over cash-dependent states. Interest on secured commercial loans in this period typically ran in the range of twelve to twenty-four percent annually; rates on more speculative or unsecured advances to military operations could be substantially higher. The chronic indebtedness of many Maratha chiefs to their own bankers was not a personal failing; it was a structural feature of a military economy that had monetized its revenue demands but had not yet developed the institutional depth to smooth out the violent seasonality of campaign finance.

The Haribhakti house of Pune illustrates the model clearly. Beginning as local moneylenders, the family rose through their management of the Peshwa’s financial transactions to become integral members of the Mahajan Sangathan the collective of merchant-banking communities, and ultimately chief creditors of the Baroda state [16]. The rise of hundis as the Peshwas expanded their territory was precisely what enabled the Haribhaktis to extend their geographic reach alongside the Maratha political expansion, establishing branches wherever Maratha authority required a financial counterpart [16].

The political consequences of this debt dependence were significant. The Jagat Seth family of Bengal had demonstrated, in the most dramatic fashion available, what happened when a sovereign chose to abuse rather than cultivate his bankers. Siraj-ud-Daula’s demand for thirty million rupees from the Jagat Seth family, and his reported physical assault on their head, precipitated their decision to fund Clive’s campaign against him at Plassey in 1757 [32]. Alivardi Khan had previously come to power in Bengal through a military coup that the Jagat Seths had underwritten financially [13]. The lesson was not lost on observant contemporaries: in 18th-century India, the banker who controlled credit controlled politics, and sovereigns who forgot this did so at their peril.

The British and the Same System

It is worth pausing to note that the dynamics described above were not unique to the Maratha or Mughal systems. The East India Company, for all the mythological weight later given to its supposed institutional superiority over Indian polities, financed its early expansion in India through exactly the same indigenous credit networks.

The EIC’s victory at Plassey was achieved in significant part through the financial and conspiratorial assistance of the Jagat Seth family [7]. After the battle, Robert Clive oversaw the transfer of an enormous sum from the Bengal treasury to EIC accounts, a transfer that, as William Dalrymple has documented, owed as much to bankers, bribes, and forged contracts as it did to military superiority [36]. The Company’s subsequent ability to expand its territorial ambitions in the 1760s and 1770s depended heavily on its access to the credit markets of Bengal, where indigenous bankers initially found the Company a reliable and expanding customer for their financial services. The Jagat Seth family’s control over Bengal’s mint, denied to the Company by the Nawabs for decades, and specifically protected by the Seths themselves to preserve their own batta revenues from the discount trade in multiple coin types [34], illustrates the intimate link between monetary infrastructure and political power.

For the EIC, as for the Marathas, campaigns were financial operations before they were military ones. The difference, over time, was institutional: the Company eventually developed formal capital market access in London that its Indian rivals could not match, allowing it to borrow at lower rates and in greater volume than any indigenous power. But in the crucial decades of the mid-18th century, when the contest for the subcontinent was most genuinely open, the EIC was playing within the same financial system as its Indian counterparts, and it was winning in part because it understood that system well enough to exploit it.

The Balance Sheet of Empire

The Maratha Confederacy at its height controlled a territory that stretched from the Attock on the Indus to the Kaveri in the south, and from the Arabian Sea coast to Bengal. This was not achieved by Hindavi Swarajya sentiment alone. It was achieved because for several critical decades the Maratha political system generated enough revenue through chauth, sardeshmukhi, and direct territorial administration to service its debts, pay its armies, and maintain the credit standing that allowed it to raise fresh capital when campaigns demanded it [51]. The chauth alone, nominally twenty-five percent of territorial revenue collected from non-Maratha lands, represented an extraordinary fiscal extraction when applied across the whole of the Deccan and into Hindustan [50].

What ultimately undermined this system was not military defeat alone. The catastrophe at Panipat in 1761, where the flower of the Maratha army was destroyed by Ahmad Shah Abdali’s Afghan forces, was both a military and a financial crisis. The investment in that campaign, including the credit lines extended by Pune’s banking community against the expectation of a successful outcome, was simply wiped out. The revenue streams that had serviced the Confederacy’s debts were disrupted. The credit machine, which depended above all on the perception of Maratha military invincibility, stalled.

It recovered, under Mahadaji Scindia and Nana Fadnavis in the following decades. But it never fully regained the structural confidence it had enjoyed under Baji Rao I, when the Maratha name alone was sufficient security for a banker considering whether to advance a campaign loan against uncertain future revenue.

Concluding Thoughts: Bravery versus the Balance Sheet

None of this is to diminish the courage of the men who fought in these campaigns, or the genuine ideological commitment to Swarajya that animated the best of the Maratha leadership. What it is to say is that courage, without capital, cannot sustain an empire. The remarkable thing about the 18th-century Indian financial world is precisely how well-adapted it was to the demands that Indian warfare placed on it. The Hundi network allowed value to cross the subcontinent as fast as a messenger could ride. The Shroff community provided the price discovery mechanisms that made multi-currency, multi-mint military payroll manageable. The Seth banking houses provided the long-term credit relationships that converted future revenue expectations into present military capacity.

These were not primitive or pre-modern systems. They were solutions often elegant ones to the specific problems that 18th century Indian political geography and military economics created. The historian Irfan Habib has argued that by the early 18th century, India’s GDP accounted for approximately twenty-four percent of global output [4] a figure that sits alongside the sophisticated financial architecture described here as a reminder that the standard colonial narrative of Indian economic backwardness was, at best, a post-hoc justification for a political outcome that had financial as well as military origins.

The battles will always be remembered. The bankers who made them possible deserve their own place in the account.

Notes and Sources

Banglapedia. (2021). Hundi. National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh. https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Hundi

Bhattacharya, S. (1969). The East India Company and the economy of Bengal: From 1704 to 1740. Rupa & Co.

Dalrymple, W. (2019). The Anarchy: The East India Company, corporate violence, and the pillage of an empire. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Doogar, R. (n.d.). Jains in 18th- and 19th-century Murshidabad. University of Washington. http://faculty.washington.edu/doogar/Research/mbd.pdf

EduRev. (2025). The Maratha fiscal and financial system. https://edurev.in/t/375890/The-Maratha-Fiscal-and-Financial-System

Gokhale, A. (2020). Maratha cavalry. https://aneeshbooks.wordpress.com/essays-in-maratha-history/maratha-cavalry/

Habib, I. (1972). The system of bills of exchange (hundis) in the Mughal Empire. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 33rd Session, Muzaffarpur, 290–303.

Habib, I. (1964). Usury in medieval India. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 6(4), 393–419.

IAS Express. (n.d.). The Maratha fiscal and financial system. https://www.iasexpress.net/submodules/24-6-the-maratha-fiscal-and-financial-system/

Kulkarni, G. T. (1973). Banking in the 18th century: A case study of a Poona banker. Artha Vijnana: Journal of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, 15, 180–200.

Majumdar, A. (2025). The rise and fall of the Jagat Seths. https://ayanmajumdar.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-jagat-seths

Money.org. (2023). Money of the British East India Company. American Numismatic Association. https://www.money.org/money-museum/virtual-exhibits-moe-case11/

Richards, J. F. (1981). Mughal state finance and the premodern world economy. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23(2), 285–308.

Sharma, S. (2025). The Jagat Seths: The billionaire bankers who financed empires — and lost it all. NewsGram. https://www.newsgram.com/history/2025/10/08/jagat-seths-billionaire-bankers-financed-empires

Vajiramandravi. (2026). Chauth and Sardeshmukhi. https://vajiramandravi.com/upsc-exam/chauth-and-sardeshmukhi/

Wikipedia. (2026). Jagat Seth family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagat_Seth_family

Wikipedia. (2026). Maratha army. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Army

Wikipedia. (2026). Pindari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pindari

The popular memory of Naro Shankar, where it exists at all, is architectural. He built the Naroshankar temple at Panchavati in 1747, a structure so distinctive in its execution that architectural historians regard it as the founding example of the Revivalist style in early Peshwa-period sacred architecture. He built Malegaon Fort beginning in 1740, a project of such scale that it required craftsmen imported from Surat and Rajputana, and which took the better part of twenty-five years to complete. He strengthened Jhansi Fort during his long tenure in Bundelkhand so thoroughly that much of what stands on that promontory today reflects his work. These are not minor contributions. But the career that made them possible, and the manner in which that career ended, is less well remembered than the stone and plaster it left behind.

The Making of a Peshwa General

Naro Shankar enters the historical record as a soldier in the service of the Peshwas around the time of Bajirao I, who served as Peshwa from 1720 to 1740. Bajirao was the dominant military and political figure of his generation, the commander who extended Maratha power from the Deccan plateau into Malwa, Rajputana, and the approaches to Delhi, and who transformed the office of Peshwa from a ministerial appointment into the effective executive authority of the Maratha Confederacy. Like most of Bajirao’s commanders, Naro Shankar was not simply a military man in the narrow sense. The Peshwa system during this period operated by distributing administrative and revenue responsibilities to trusted sardars, who then governed territories, collected revenue on the state’s behalf, and raised troops from the proceeds. The distinction between general, administrator, and revenue farmer was, by design, not firmly drawn. [2]

What distinguished Naro Shankar was a combination of military competence and administrative range that made him useful across different kinds of assignments. He served in the Vasai campaign of 1739, conducted under Chimaji Appa, Bajirao I’s younger brother. Vasai, known to the Portuguese as Bassein, was their principal fortified settlement on the Konkan coast north of Bombay, and its reduction was one of the more demanding operations the Marathas undertook in this period. Siege warfare against a fortified European position required patience and logistical discipline that the Marathas, primarily a cavalry power, had to develop as the campaign progressed. Chimaji Appa prosecuted it over several months, and when the fort fell in May 1739, the Marathas removed the church bells from the Portuguese establishments at Vasai and distributed them among the sardars who had distinguished themselves. [1] [5] Naro Shankar received the bell from the church at Poinsur. The decision to carry it to Nashik and install it at the entrance of a temple he was constructing there was an act that required a certain confidence in one’s own standing. At this point in his career, that confidence was warranted.

By 1742, Naro Shankar had been assigned to the north. Nanasaheb Peshwa, who was Balaji Bajirao, the son and successor of Bajirao I, undertook one of his infrequent personal journeys into Bundelkhand that year to reassert Maratha authority over the principalities of that region. Bundelkhand, a plateau region lying between the Yamuna and Narmada rivers in what is today central India, had come under increasing Maratha influence from the late 1720s onward, partly through the relationship Bajirao I had cultivated with the Bundela chief Chhatrasal. After Chhatrasal’s death, the region’s smaller rulers required periodic pressure to maintain their revenue obligations to the Marathas. [4] Naro Shankar accompanied Nanasaheb north, and when the campaign restored order, he was left in command at Jhansi.

Jhansi, Malegaon, and the Architecture of Revenue

The Jhansi command was not a purely military posting. The fort occupied a strategic position in the central Bundelkhand plateau and served as the administrative centre of Maratha authority across a large area, with revenue streams flowing in from multiple districts and a resident Maratha military presence required to keep the local chiefs aligned with Pune. Managing it required someone capable of handling both the military and administrative dimensions of the role, and Naro Shankar held the position for the better part of fourteen years. [2]

During this long tenure in the north, he built. Malegaon Fort was begun in 1740, constructed on the north bank of the Mausam River in the Nashik district, with craftsmen brought from Surat and from Rajputana to execute the more skilled elements of the work. The fort’s double ramparts, nine bastions, and surrounding moat reflect the military architecture of the period, and it was serious enough that the East India Company had to besiege it formally in 1818 during the Third Anglo-Maratha War. The Naroshankar temple at Nashik was commissioned and completed in 1747. Contemporary accounts describe it as having cost 1.8 million rupees, a figure that is either a significant exaggeration or evidence that Naro Shankar had accumulated resources during his Bundelkhand tenure that went well beyond any reasonable reading of his official salary and allowances. The temple’s carved lacework, peacock friezes, and the Rajasthani and Gujarati architectural vocabulary of its craftsmen represent a level of expenditure that sits uneasily against the known fiscal constraints of Peshwa sardars in this period.

The question of how eighteenth-century Maratha commanders managed the gap between their official revenues and their actual expenditures is one that the historiography has not always addressed directly. The Peshwa administrative system assigned revenue rights to commanders in lieu of fixed salaries, which meant that the boundary between the state’s income and a sardar’s personal accumulation was structurally ambiguous. [2] What is recorded is that Naro Shankar was among those sardars who, when the time came to render accounts, found that ambiguity working against him.

In 1756, Naro Shankar was transferred from Jhansi to Malegaon. The transfer moved him from the most consequential Maratha administrative command in Bundelkhand to the supervision of an unfinished fort in the Nashik district. This was a diminishment, whatever language was used to describe it officially. The precise reasons are not documented in the sources currently available, but the timing is notable. By 1756, the broader Maratha strategic situation in the north was deteriorating. Ahmad Shah Abdali, the Afghan ruler, had invaded the Mughal heartland and installed Najib ud-Daulah as a power at Delhi, directly challenging the Maratha position in northern India that Nanasaheb Peshwa had built over the previous decade. [3] It was a moment that required experienced commanders of the highest calibre to remain in the north. Removing Naro Shankar from Jhansi at precisely this point suggests that his performance there had drawn unfavourable notice from Pune, though the exact nature of that notice remains, for the present, a matter of inference.

Panipat and Its Accounting

The Third Battle of Panipat, fought on 14 January 1761, was the most consequential military defeat in the history of the Maratha Confederacy. Sadashivrao Bhau, the commander of the Maratha army and cousin of the Peshwa, was killed. Vishwasrao, Nanasaheb Peshwa’s eldest son and heir apparent, was killed. The army that had established Maratha paramountcy across most of the subcontinent was effectively destroyed in a single engagement. The Afghan forces of Ahmad Shah Abdali, having starved the Maratha army through a months-long blockade at Panipat, shattered it in a battle that lasted less than a day. [3]

Naro Shankar was not present at Panipat in any fighting capacity. He was by this point an old man by the standards of the time, having been in Peshwa service since approximately 1706, which placed him in his mid-sixties at least. He had been present in the north in some capacity during the campaign period, including at Delhi, and it is here that the record becomes directly damaging to him. Among the commanders singled out in the aftermath for having abandoned their positions and retreated from Delhi in disorder were Malharrao Holkar, Naro Shankar, and the Pawar chiefs. [3] [4] The charge, as it applied to Naro Shankar specifically, went beyond ordinary battlefield failure. He had been entrusted with a portion of the Peshwa’s treasury funds in the north, and when those accounts were examined after the catastrophe, he was found to have managed them irresponsibly.

The precise nature of that irresponsibility is not documented with the specificity one would want. Whether it involved active misappropriation, the kind of casual commingling of official and personal funds that the revenue assignment system made structurally easy, or simply the abandonment of treasury assets during the panic of the retreat from Delhi, the sources do not say with clarity. [2] What they do record is the consequence: the Peshwas were “unhappy with him for some time,” a formulation that, in the political climate of 1761, carried considerably more weight than its mildness suggests.

Nanasaheb Peshwa, shattered by the loss of his son and cousin, died in June 1761, five months after the battle. He was succeeded by his second son Madhavrao I, who was seventeen years old at the time of his accession and who inherited an empire in acute financial and administrative disarray. Madhavrao would prove to be among the most capable of all the Peshwas, and the decade of his rule saw a genuine recovery of Maratha power after the Panipat disaster. [1] But in the immediate aftermath, with the treasury depleted and accounts in disorder after the collapse in the north, Naro Shankar’s management of the funds entrusted to him was among the items that required explanation.

A Partial Return

The story does not end entirely in disgrace. Naro Shankar’s long service and advanced age appear to have insulated him from the more severe consequences that might have followed for a younger man. By 1764, his name reappears in the sources in a functioning capacity. When Madhavrao I led a campaign into Karnataka against Hyder Ali of Mysore, one of the campaigns designed to restore Maratha revenues and prestige in the south after the Panipat losses, Naro Shankar is listed among the commanders who served in it. [1] This was a rehabilitation of sorts, though it should be understood as partial. There is no record of him being restored to anything resembling the authority he had held at Jhansi. The northern command, the revenue assignments in Bundelkhand, the access to Peshwa treasury funds, those were not returned.

He died around 1775, having lived long enough to watch Madhavrao I rebuild much of what Panipat had destroyed, and long enough to see the fort at Malegaon finally approach completion after thirty-five years of construction. Whether he was present at Malegaon in his final years, overseeing the work he had started in 1740, the sources do not say.

What Remains

The Naroshankar temple at Panchavati continues to function as a place of worship. Its architecture is well-documented by scholars of the Peshwa period. The bell from the Portuguese church at Poinsur still hangs at its entrance, still used as a flood gauge by locals when the Godavari rises in monsoon, its water level against the bell a traditional indicator of how severe the flooding will be. Malegaon Fort, having served its military purpose through 1818, is today partly maintained as a school, with the original ramparts and bastions still visible. Jhansi Fort, much of whose present form reflects Naro Shankar’s construction work in the 1740s and early 1750s, became the site of one of the most celebrated episodes of the 1857 uprising against the East India Company, when Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, defended it against a British siege.

These are not small legacies. The problem is that the buildings have tended to displace the man, and the man’s career raises questions that the buildings cannot answer. The Naroshankar temple cost what sources say was 1.8 million rupees at a time when the entire annual income of the Peshwa’s treasury was under chronic pressure. The treasury funds Naro Shankar held in the north after Panipat could not be fully accounted for when the reckoning came. The precise relationship between these two facts may never be established from the surviving documentation. But taking them together, alongside the 1756 transfer that removed him from Jhansi at a moment of strategic crisis rather than administrative convenience, suggests a career in which the norms of the Peshwa revenue system and the opportunities it created were used to a degree that ultimately could not be sustained. [2]

The eighteenth-century Maratha administrative system did not draw a sharp line between official revenues and personal accumulation. It could not, given that it paid its commanders in revenue rights rather than salaries. Naro Shankar operated within that system as most of his contemporaries did. The difference is that when Panipat created the conditions for an audit, his name was among those that did not survive it.

Citations & Notes

[1] G. S. Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. II: The Expansion of the Maratha Power 1707–1772 (Phoenix Publications, Bombay, 1948) — on the Vasai campaign, Chimaji Appa, the distribution of Portuguese church bells to Maratha sardars, and the reign of Madhavrao I.

[2] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818, New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge University Press, 1993) — on the Peshwa revenue assignment system, saranjam and inam grants, and the structural relationship between military command and revenue collection.

[3] Uday S. Kulkarni, Solstice at Panipat: 14 January 1761 (Mula Mutha Publishers, Pune, 2011) — on the Panipat campaign, the retreat from Delhi, and the aftermath for Maratha commanders including those held responsible for abandoning their positions.

[4] Aneesh Gokhale, “Marathas and Bundelkhand III: Govindpant Bundele and Panipat,” IndiaFacts (2017) — on Maratha operations in Bundelkhand in the lead-up to Panipat and the strategic importance of the region to the Peshwa’s northern position.

[5] Aneesh Gokhale, Battles of the Maratha Empire (Dnyanganga Prakashan, 2020) — on the Vasai campaign of 1739 and Chimaji Appa’s conduct of the siege.

“This wanton and certainly premeditated violence by a Muslim on a centre of Brahman orthodoxy,” Sardesai writes, “roused the whole of Maharashtra as if from a dream, and a cry for vengeance arose on all sides.” [1]

Most popular accounts of this episode treat it as a story about religious outrage converted into military purpose. That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The saint whose temple had been violated was not simply a spiritual figure. By 1727, he was also the single most important private creditor to the Maratha ruling class. When Bajirao I died on 28 April 1740 at the age of forty, he left behind a personal debt of fourteen and a half lakh rupees. Among his principal creditors was Brahmendra Swami. [2]

The saint who prayed for Bajirao’s victories had also been quietly financing them.

The Making of a Mendicant

He was born around 1649 in the village of Dudhewadi in Berar, the son of a Rigvedic Deshasth Brahmin named Mahadevbhat and his wife Umabai. His given name was Vishnu. His parents died when he was twelve. Around 1663 he made the journey to Kashi, took the vows of the fourth ashram, Sanyas, and emerged with the name by which history would know him: Brahmendra Swami. [3]

What followed was a decades-long pilgrimage across the subcontinent on foot, from the Himalayas to Rameshwaram, that served purposes well beyond the spiritual. A Brahmin ascetic who had been received at sacred sites from Bengal to the far south carried a kind of portable legitimacy, a network of associations that translated directly into influence once he settled in a region of political consequence. By the time Brahmendra Swami arrived on the banks of the Krishna River in Maharashtra, probably in the late 1670s or early 1680s, he was already a figure of some renown.

His connection with the family that would become the Peshwas appears to have begun through Balaji Vishvanath Bhat, the fifth Peshwa and the architect of Maratha political hegemony. Sardesai notes that Balaji, in the early years when he was still a relatively junior functionary near Chiplun, “was struck with the saint’s miraculous powers and paid devotion to him.” [1] There is also reason to believe that Brahmendra Swami’s “secret efforts were useful in Balaji Vishvanath joining Shahu’s side and later securing for him the office of the Peshwa.” [3] The possibility is worth taking seriously. The Swami had contacts across every faction of Maratha politics, access to Kanhoji Angre and the Konkan chiefs, and a long-standing relationship with the court at Satara. Influence of that kind, exercised discreetly, could bend a succession.

Chitpavan Brahmins and the Legitimacy Question

To understand why the Peshwas clung to Brahmendra Swami with such tenacity, one must first understand the particular social anxiety that attended their rise.

The Peshwas were Chitpavan Brahmins, also known as Konkanasthas, a community from the coastal strip of the Konkan whose Brahmin status was openly contested by the Deshasth Brahmin establishment of the Deccan plateau. The Deshasthas, an older and more established community that had served as priests, administrators, revenue officers, and scholars across the Deccan for centuries, refused in various social contexts to acknowledge the Chitpavans as full Brahmins. They would not dine with them as equals. The refusal was not merely a social slight. In a world where Brahmin status underpinned administrative legitimacy, religious authority, and claims to spiritual leadership, it was a political problem of the first order.

Brahmendra Swami was a Rigvedic Deshasth Brahmin. He was, in social terms, precisely the kind of figure whose recognition the Peshwas most needed and most struggled to obtain. When he accepted Balaji Vishvanath as a devoted follower, when he extended the same relationship to Bajirao I, Chimaji Appa, and eventually Nana Saheb, and when Chhatrapati Shahu himself held the Swami “in high esteem,” [4] the signal that was sent through Maratha political society was unmistakable. A Deshasth elder of nationwide reputation had endorsed the Chitpavan family’s fitness to lead.

This dynamic also explains why the Swami attracted the devotion of figures across caste and community lines, including Kanhoji Angre, whose Angria clan held the Konkan coast as their fiefdom. Angre was not Brahmin at all, yet he contributed to the Parashuram temple and maintained respectful relations with the Swami. The shrine had become a genuinely cross-community institution, and Brahmendra Swami’s authority within it was sufficient to validate whomever he chose to endorse.

The relationship was, from both sides, a transaction in legitimacy. The Peshwas brought political protection and financial patronage. The Swami supplied something the Peshwas could not generate internally: the unambiguous approval of a Deshasth religious authority whose credentials no one could question.

The Temple as a Clearinghouse for Credit

The Parashuram shrine at Chiplun is the key to understanding the Swami’s worldly power. It was his base, his treasury, and his instrument.

Sardesai describes its construction with precision: “The Swami built a large temple for Parashuram, which still stands on a high hill adjoining Chiplun, and collected funds for that purpose from most of the Maratha chiefs. He himself accompanied them for collecting alms in their military expeditions. The Angrias and even the Siddis held the Swami in high reverence and contributed money, lands and other gifts for the shrine he thus raised.” [1]

The political architecture of this arrangement was elegant. The shrine functioned as a neutral sacred site that all parties could participate in honoring. The Angrias, who controlled the Konkan coast and were in perpetual friction with the Peshwas over jurisdiction and revenue, nevertheless contributed. The Siddis of Janjira, whose Abyssinian Muslim rulers had been adversaries of the Marathas since the days of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, contributed as well. Making donations to the Parashuram temple was an act of piety that carried no immediate political cost and considerable social benefit. It also, from the Swami’s perspective, produced a steady revenue stream from across the political spectrum.

Two villages, Dorle and Mahalunge, were awarded to the temple as inam grants by Parashurampant Pratinidhi, who controlled much of the Konkan. Land producing income without revenue obligation. The Swami had, in effect, built a small but self-sustaining financial institution beneath the canopy of religious orthodoxy. His chief administrative officer, Chimnaji Krishna Bhagwat, managed the day-to-day operation. The temple’s annual income from alms alone ran to sixteen thousand rupees. [2] Having accumulated sufficient capital through these channels, Brahmendra Swami entered the business of moneylending. [3]

The grammar of eighteenth-century Indian political economy made this progression natural rather than contradictory. Temples across the subcontinent functioned as financial institutions. They held land, managed revenue, accepted deposits, and extended credit. A Brahmin ascetic with a temple endowment, a record of orthodox piety, and connections reaching from the Chhatrapati’s court to the Konkan admirals was precisely the kind of lender that Maratha commanders needed: someone whose social authority meant that defaulting on him carried consequences far beyond a legal dispute.

Advisor and Creditor to the Marathas

The correspondence that survives between Brahmendra Swami and the Maratha leadership is dense with this dual register of spiritual counsel and financial obligation. Balaji Vishvanath and Chimnaji Damodar “used to maintain regular correspondence with the Swami, and it also seems some monetary exchange also co-existed.” [3] After Balaji’s death, Bajirao maintained the relationship with equal intensity. His brother Chimaji Appa wrote to the Swami on 13 March 1740, providing full details of the Portuguese campaign and the siege of Bassein. On 14 January 1741, Nana Saheb wrote to “Brahm Swami” narrating in careful detail his recent diplomatic success against Nasir Jung. [4] These are letters from men accounting to a figure whose approval matters, reporting victories to someone with a stake in the outcome.

What Bajirao I’s own correspondence reveals is a man operating under unrelenting financial pressure. Consider this passage from a letter he sent to Chhatrapati Shahu during the Janjira campaign, cited by Sardesai directly from the Peshwa Daftar records:

“The Siddi is not an ordinary enemy: you know how often in the past, heroic attempts to humble him have failed. A tremendous effort is necessary if he is to be finally overcome. Without a complete naval blockade combined with carefully arranged operations by land, it is not possible to overcome him. This means enormous expenditure of money, which is not available. We need at least fifteen thousand expert footmen for an effort of this kind, working through a period of at least two years... We have already exhausted all our money and resources, so that unless you send us ample funds at once, we cannot make any movement.” [1]

This is Bajirao I. The general who had not lost a battle in twenty years, who would humiliate the Mughals at Delhi in 1737, whom Sir Richard Temple called a man “hardly to be surpassed as a rider and ever forward in action.” Writing to his sovereign that he is out of money and cannot march. This was not a temporary crisis. It was the structural condition under which the Maratha military machine operated throughout the Bajirao period. Revenue from chauth and sardeshmukhi arrived seasonally and without certainty. Campaigns had to be launched before the harvest, before the levies came in, before the accounts were settled. The gap between military ambition and available cash was always filled by borrowed money.

Brahmendra Swami was one of the men who filled that gap. When Bajirao died at Raverkhedi on the Narmada on 28 April 1740, his estate owed fourteen and a half lakh rupees. Raghunath Patwardhan was the largest single creditor. Brahmendra Swami was second. [2] The man who had blessed every campaign, whose spiritual sanction the Peshwas sought before every major undertaking, was also holding their debt.

The Elephant, the Temple, and a Holy War

The 1727 desecration of the Parashuram temple was a political gift, though the Marathas took several years to recognize it as such.

The strategic case for neutralizing the Siddi of Janjira was old. From his island fort off the Konkan coast, the Siddi commanded a naval base that the Marathas could not easily dislodge. He received support from the Portuguese at Goa and the British at Bombay, who had a shared interest in preventing Maratha dominance of the western littoral. Reducing the Siddi required a sustained combined naval and land operation of considerable expense, and it promised relatively modest territorial gains. What it lacked, before 1727, was a justification that could mobilize religious sentiment alongside military calculation.

Siddi Sat provided that justification. His attack on the shrine during the Shivaratri celebration, “desecrating the idols and plundering the property, subjecting innocent priests and Brahmins to unspeakable atrocities,” [1] turned a strategic objective into a moral imperative. The chief of Janjira apologized and restored what property remained. It made no difference. Brahmendra Swami “appealed pathetically to Shahu and the leading Maratha commanders, calling upon them to wage a relentless holy war against the Siddi of Janjira.” [1]

For several years, the campaign stalled. Bajirao was occupied with the Nizam, with Malwa, with the north. The Pratinidhi, whose co-operation was essential for any Konkan operation, was obstructive. It was only in 1732 that “both Shahu and the Swami became insistent on his punishing the Siddi for the unwarrantable crime he had committed.” [1]

The campaign that opened in May 1733 achieved partial success. Bajirao captured several strongholds by land and destroyed the Siddi’s naval strength in the creek of Rajpuri. But Janjira Island itself never fell. Sardesai’s account of why is instructive: Bajirao could not pay for the operation. The monsoon, the Pratinidhi’s obstructionism, the competing demands of campaigns in the north, and above all the chronic shortage of funds combined to prevent the decisive stroke. It was not until January 1745, a month before the Swami’s death, that Tulaji Angre finally captured the forts of Anjanvel and Govalkot near the Parashuram shrine. The Swami, Sardesai notes, could “finally see the original objective of the Janjira campaign fulfilled while he was still alive.” [2]

Eighteen years from desecration to partial satisfaction. The financial difficulty of sustained naval operations is inseparable from that timeline.

Waning Influence Post-Bajirao I

The intensity of the bond between Brahmendra Swami and the Peshwa family diminished notably after Bajirao’s death in 1740. Nana Saheb (Balaji Rao), who succeeded as Peshwa, “never established the close relationship that Swami and Bajirao had.” [2] Sadashivrao Bhau, the brilliant and headstrong general who would die at Panipat in 1761, was similarly distant from the old man.

The reasons were partly personal. The Swami’s chief administrator Chimnaji Krishna Bhagwat had died, and with him the operational competence that kept the Swami’s financial and administrative network functioning. The Swami himself was beyond ninety. He “mostly removed his mind from worldly affairs.” [2]

But there was also a structural explanation. By 1740, the Chitpavan Peshwas had consolidated their position sufficiently that the Deshasth legitimation the Swami had provided was less urgently needed. The Konkanastha community was by then firmly established in the administrative apparatus at Pune. A list from 1763 would show 67 per cent of clerks in the Peshwa administration being Konkanastha. The Chitpavans no longer needed a Deshasth elder’s blessing to govern. They had made themselves indispensable by other means.

The relationship had served its purpose for both parties. When the political calculus shifted, it attenuated naturally.

Death, and the Contested Verdict

Brahmendra Swami died on 26 July 1745, on the ninth day of the waxing moon fortnight of Shravan, having entered his annual meditation on the first day of that month. He died as he had lived, on schedule, by his own design, chanting the name of Ram. Chhatrapati Shahu rushed to witness the moment. [2]

The accounting continued after death. Before his final meditation, the Swami took promissory notes from Queen Saghunabai guaranteeing the welfare of his disciples and dependents. Obligations formalized in writing, to the end. The temple at Dhavadsi near Satara, which Shahu had granted as a replacement after the Chiplun desecration, was completed posthumously in 1758 at a cost of one lakh twenty thousand rupees from the Chhatrapati’s treasury. It endures today, run by the descendants of Jagannath Chimnaji Bhagwat. [2]

The debate about his legacy has never been fully resolved in Maharashtra. One school holds that he was to Bajirao what Samarth Ramdas Swami had been to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, a spiritual anchor and national inspiration for a period of extraordinary expansion. The opposing view is blunter: that Brahmendra Swami was “extremely selfish, a moneylender, an instigator, who would create unnecessary problems, and then curse others if something did not occur as per his thinking.” [2]

Both assessments impose a false choice. Brahmendra Swami was a man in whom the spiritual and the financial were so completely fused that separating them distorts the historical reality. The temple was genuine, and so were the loans. The blessings were sincere, and so were the promissory notes. He understood, as the Peshwas also understood, that in eighteenth-century India these were not different categories of activity. They were the same activity conducted through different instruments.

The Maratha ascendancy was built on cavalry speed, military genius, and Chhatrapati Shahu’s remarkable political patience. It was also built on credit, and that credit ran through men like Brahmendra Swami. Bajirao I could cover ground that exhausted professional armies because he had developed a system of mobile operations with no equal on the subcontinent. But he could not move without cash. The cash had a source. And one of those sources held his debt when he died.

That the hagiographic tradition finds this uncomfortable is understandable. That historians have largely ignored it is less forgivable.

Notes & Sources

[1] Govind Sakharam Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. II: The Expansion of the Maratha Power 1707-1772 (Bombay: Phoenix Publications, 1948), Chapter VI: “The Mughal Power Humbled [1732-1738],” pp. 135-139. Available: archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.57070

[2] NDHistories (drawing on D. B. Parasnis, Brahmendraswami Yanche Charitra, Bombay, and related Marathi scholarship): “Back-Story: Brahmendra Swami” and “Brahmendra Swami’s Significance,” ndhistories.wordpress.com, October 2023.

[3] NDHistories, “Back-Story: Brahmendra Swami,” citing Parasnis and Marathi primary sources on the Swami’s origins and the moneylending operation.

[4] Mariam-uz-Zamani, “Account of victory of Peshwa Bajirao over Nasir Jung, with allusions to Chimaji, Mastani and Brahmendra Swami,” citing primary Marathi letters from the Hingne Daftar and Peshwa Daftar correspondence, February 2017.

[5] D. B. Parasnis, Brahmendraswami Yanche Charitra (Bombay). The principal Marathi-language biography of the Swami, the original source for most financial figures cited through NDHistories. Held at the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal, Pune.

[6] C. A. Kincaid and D. B. Parasnis, A History of the Maratha People, Vol. III (London: Oxford University Press, 1925). Available: archive.org/details/historyofmaratha03kincuoft

[7] Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, Vol. I: 1739-1754 (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1964). Available: archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.43007

[8] Ashutosh Potnis, “A History of the Konkanastha-Deshastha Feud,” on the caste politics of the Peshwa period, ashutoshpotnis.wixsite.com/home.

The Maratha polity did not emerge from a vacuum of political possibility. It was built incrementally and opportunistically from within the administrative and military structures of the very states it would eventually supplant.

The Bhonsle family’s rise begins with Maloji Bhonsle (मालोजी भोसले), who entered the service of the Ahmednagar Sultanate in the late sixteenth century and was granted the jagirs of Pune and Supe by the Nizam Shah in recognition of his military service, the first territorial foothold of a family that would, within three generations, claim sovereignty over much of the subcontinent [1]. His son Shahaji (शहाजी भोसले, 1594–1664) navigated the fractured politics of the Deccan with considerable skill, serving Ahmednagar, the Mughals, and finally Bijapur across a career that mirrored the instability of the age. When Ahmednagar fell to the Mughals in 1636, and Shahaji entered Bijapur’s service, he was stationed in Bangalore, far from his Pune jagir [2]. The administration of that jagir, and the formation of the son who would inherit it, fell to Jijabai (जिजाबाई, 1598–1674).

Jijabai’s role in the founding of Swarajya is not adequately described as maternal influence. She was the effective political administrator of the Pune region through its most turbulent decades, managing revenue, adjudicating local disputes, and rebuilding what war and neglect had reduced to ruin [3]. It was in this environment a jagir in contested territory, governed by a woman of considerable political intelligence, with Shahaji absent and the surrounding sultanates in slow collapse that Chhatrapati Shivaji’s understanding of governance and sovereignty was formed. The concept of Hindavi Swarajya (हिंदवी स्वराज्य) or self-rule of the people of the Deccan was not Chhatrapati Shivaji’s alone. Its roots are traceable to the political conditions Jijabai navigated and the vision she transmitted.

Into this world came Samarth Ramdas (समर्थ रामदास, 1608–1681) Shaivite ascetic, author of the Dasbodh (दासबोध), and founder of the Samarth sect. The precise nature of his relationship with Chhatrapati Shivaji remains contested in the historiography; the formal guru-disciple framing draws heavily on bakhar sources composed after Chhatrapati Shivaji’s death [4]. What is documentable is Ramdas’s broader cultural program: his establishment of mathas and Hanuman temples across Maharashtra, his synthesis of bhakti devotion with an explicit call to martial self-organization, and his articulation in the Dasbodh and his correspondence of a vision of sovereign Hindu polity that provided ideological coherence to what Chhatrapati Shivaji was building in practice. Whether or not they met as guru and disciple, they were working toward a convergent vision [5].

Chhatrapati Shivaji and the Making of Swarajya (1647–1680)

Chhatrapati Shivaji Bhonsle (छत्रपती शिवाजी भोसले, 1630–1680) began his military career at sixteen with the capture of Torna fort from Bijapur in 1647 an act of opportunism that announced both his method and his ambition. Over the following three decades he would seize, construct, and consolidate a network of hill forts across the Sahyadri that formed the skeletal infrastructure of Swarajya: defensible positions from which a mobile, lightly-supplied force could strike and withdraw faster than any conventional army could respond [6].

The campaigns that followed established his reputation across the Deccan. The killing of the Bijapuri general Afzal Khan at Pratapgad in 1659 an encounter that has accrued considerable legend demonstrated his willingness to operate outside the conventions of Sultanate military culture. The sack of the Mughal port of Surat in 1664, and again in 1670, announced to the wider world that a new power was extracting tribute on its own terms. His escape from Mughal captivity in Agra in 1666 where Aurangzeb had effectively imprisoned him following the Treaty of Purandar passed into Maratha political memory as evidence of both his resourcefulness and the fundamental bad faith of Mughal diplomacy [7].

The coronation at Raigad on 6 June 1674 was the most consequential political act of his career, and deliberately so. Local Brahmin scholars in Maharashtra refused to officiate, citing Bhonsle claims to Kshatriya status as unverifiable. Chhatrapati Shivaji commissioned Gaga Bhatt (गागाभट्ट), a senior Vedic scholar from Varanasi, who traced the Bhonsle genealogy to the Sisodia Rajputs of Mewar and presided over a rajyabhisheka that had not been performed in the Deccan for centuries [8]. The political calculation was precise: Swarajya required not merely territory and army but sovereign legitimacy, and the coronation supplied it. The title Chhatrapati paramount sovereign transformed a de facto military chieftaincy into a recognized polity.

The administrative framework he built the Ashta Pradhan (अष्टप्रधान), an eight-minister council governing military, revenue, foreign affairs, and judicial functions gave Swarajya institutional depth beyond any single personality [9]. When Chhatrapati Shivaji died in April 1680, he left a sophisticated state - not spoils of war.

The Survival Years: Chhatrapati Sambhaji, Chhatrapati Rajaram, and Tarabai (1680–1707)

Chhatrapati Shivaji’s death in April 1680 precipitated an immediate succession crisis. His eldest son Chhatrapati Sambhaji (छत्रपती संभाजी, 1657–1689) prevailed over a briefly installed rival and assumed the throne inheriting both the Swarajya and the full weight of Aurangzeb’s descending military machine. Chhatrapati Sambhaji’s nine-year reign was fought almost entirely on the defensive, yet he denied Aurangzeb a decisive victory and provided shelter to the emperor’s own rebellious son, Muhammad Akbar a provocation that intensified Mughal pressure considerably [10].

Betrayed by his brother-in-law Ganoji Shirke in February 1689, Chhatrapati Sambhaji was captured, subjected to prolonged public torture his captors demanded conversion, which he refused and executed at Tulapur. Aurangzeb calculated the execution would break Maratha resistance. The calculation was wrong. Chhatrapati Sambhaji’s death hardened the confederacy’s resolve and stripped the conflict of whatever diplomatic ambiguity had remained [11].

Chhatrapati Rajaram (छत्रपती राजाराम, 1670–1700), Chhatrapati Shivaji’s younger son, was hastily crowned at Raigad in March 1689 and almost immediately forced south. Pursued by Mughal forces under Zulfikar Khan, he reached Gingee (जिंजी) fort in Tamil Nadu in November 1689 a fort Chhatrapati Shivaji had captured and fortified during his southern campaign of 1677. The subsequent siege lasted eight years, making it the longest single Mughal siege in recorded history, and consumed troops and treasury that Aurangzeb could not replace [12]. While Zulfikar Khan was pinned down at Gingee, Maratha commanders Santaji Ghorpade (संताजी घोरपडे) and Dhanaji Jadhav (धनाजी जाधव) operated freely across the Deccan, raiding Mughal supply lines and in March 1690 attacking the imperial encampment at Aurangabad sacking the tent in which Aurangzeb slept, though the emperor was elsewhere [13]. Gingee fell in January 1698, but Chhatrapati Rajaram had already escaped. The fort had served its purpose.

Chhatrapati Rajaram died in 1700. His widow Tarabai (ताराबाई, 1675–1761) assumed the regency for her infant son and prosecuted the war with a strategic clarity that matched anything the Mughal command had encountered. Under her direction, Maratha forces systematically recaptured Sahyadri forts that had fallen during the worst years of the war. By the time Aurangzeb died in Aurangabad in 1707, the territorial position the Marathas held was not substantially worse than what Chhatrapati Shivaji had left. The state had survived [14].

Chhatrapati Shahu and the Rise of the Peshwas (1707–1749)

Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 released two things simultaneously: the Maratha state from the full weight of imperial pressure, and Chhatrapati Sambhaji’s son Shahu (शाहू, 1682–1749) from eighteen years of Mughal captivity. His release was itself a calculated move Prince Azam Shah freed him hoping to fracture Maratha unity by creating a rival claimant to Tarabai’s regency. The calculation was partially correct. Shahu returned to Maharashtra and immediately challenged Tarabai, whose forces were defeated at the Battle of Khed in October 1707. Tarabai retreated to Kolhapur, establishing the rival Kolhapur line of the Bhonsle dynasty that persists as a historical legacy to this day [15].

Shahu’s consolidation of power owed as much to political management as to military force. The sardars who had grown powerful during the 27-year war needed inducement, not just command. The man who provided the necessary architecture was Balaji Vishvanath Bhat (बालाजी विश्वनाथ भट, 1662–1720) a Chitpavan Brahmin revenue official from the Konkan whose skill at winning over competing sardars earned him the Peshwaship in 1713 [16]. Balaji Vishvanath converted the office from an administrative position into a political one, secured Maratha rights to collect chauth and sardeshmukhi from six Deccan provinces through negotiation with the Mughals, and in 1719 traveled to Delhi where he helped install Farrukhsiyar’s successor securing in return the release of Chhatrapati Shahu’s mother Yesubai, still held captive since 1689 [17].

His son Bajirao I (बाजीराव पेशवे, 1700–1740), appointed Peshwa at nineteen on his father’s death, prosecuted the most aggressive expansion in Maratha history. Fighting forty-one engagements without a single recorded defeat, he drove Maratha power north across the Vindhyas, humiliated the Nizam at Palkhed in 1728 through encirclement rather than pitched battle, and in 1737 rode with fifty thousand cavalry to the gates of Delhi forcing the Mughal emperor to pay tribute and cede the right to collect chauth across the northern provinces [18]. Under his direction, Shaniwarwada in Pune became the effective administrative capital of the confederacy, a shift from Satara that would prove permanent.

Balaji Bajirao (बालाजी बाजीराव, known as Nanasaheb, 1721–1761) succeeded his father and presided over the empire’s territorial zenith the confederacy controlled roughly one-third of the subcontinent by 1760. Chhatrapati Shahu died in December 1749 having nominated an adopted successor; the Peshwa had by then so thoroughly controlled the administration that the Chhatrapati became a constitutional figurehead at Satara while Pune governed the empire [19].

Swarajya at its Zenith and The Third Battle of Panipat (1749–1761)

By 1749 the Maratha polity had structurally transformed. The five great houses Sindhia (Shinde) of Gwalior, Holkar of Indore, Bhonsle of Nagpur, Gaekwad of Baroda, and the Peshwa at Pune each controlled substantial autonomous territory, raised their own armies, and conducted independent foreign policy, while maintaining nominal subordination to the Peshwa and nominal loyalty to the Chhatrapati [20]. This was not instability masquerading as empire; it was a confederal structure in which the Peshwa functioned as a coordinating authority, extracting military contributions and diplomatic alignment from chiefs who were otherwise self-governing. The revenue terminology of the Peshwa’s own daftar was Persian inherited directly from Mughal administrative practice underlining the structural continuity beneath the political rupture [21].

The northern campaigns of the 1750s brought Maratha armies into Punjab, Rohilkhand, and the approaches to Attock. In 1758 Raghunathrao (राघोबा), younger brother of Nanasaheb Peshwa, crossed the Indus and raised the Zari Patka above the fort at Attock the furthest the saffron flag had flown. The north Indian Muslim powers, alarmed, appealed to Ahmad Shah Durrani of Afghanistan, who had already sacked Delhi twice. The result was the Third Battle of Panipat, fought on 14 January 1761 [22].

The Maratha force under Sadashivrao Bhau (सदाशिवराव भाऊ) was numerically formidable but strategically compromised: supply lines were overstretched, the Jat ruler Suraj Mal withdrew support before the battle, and over two hundred thousand non-combatant pilgrims accompanied the army, creating a logistical catastrophe. The battle itself was a rout. Sadashivrao Bhau, Vishwasrao Nanasaheb’s heir and much of the Maratha officer corps were killed. Conservative estimates place Maratha dead at sixty to seventy thousand combatants; the historian Shejwalkar, whose monograph remains the benchmark study, puts total losses including non-combatants at over one hundred thousand [23]. Nanasaheb Peshwa, receiving news of the defeat while crossing the Narmada with a relief force, returned to Pune and died within months, broken.

Panipat halted the Maratha expansion to the north never again to reach that same level. After 1761, Nanasaheb’s successor, Madhavrao Peshwa would lead a renewed Maratha effort into Hindustan alongside Shinde and Holkar re-establishing much of what was lost after the defeat to Abdali in years prior.

The Maratha Resurrection: Madhavrao I and Mahadji Shinde (1761–1794)

Madhavrao I (माधवराव पेशवे, 1745–1772) assumed the Peshwaship at sixteen in the immediate aftermath of Panipat. His decade in office fighting simultaneously against his uncle Raghunathrao’s interference, the Nizam, Hyder Ali of Mysore, and the structural debt left by the northern disaster produced a recovery of such speed and completeness that historians routinely assess it as the most consequential single reign in the confederacy’s history [24]. By 1771 Maratha armies were back in Delhi. Mahadji Shinde (महादजी शिंदे, 1730–1794) escorted the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II from British-held Allahabad back to his throne a restoration that was simultaneously a political annexation. The Zari Patka flew again over the Red Fort.

In 1784 Shah Alam II conferred upon Mahadji the title Vakil-ul-Mutlaq (وکیل المطلق) Regent Plenipotentiary of the Empire and Amir-ul-Umara, head of the imperial nobility [25]. The Mughal emperor, whose couplet to Mahadji read “having lost my kingdom and wealth, I am now in your hands, do as you wish,” was extracting imperial sanads on Maratha instruction, providing nominal Timurid legitimacy to territorial claims across the subcontinent. The Mughals had become the instrument through which the confederacy governed its relationships with other powers Rajput states, Rohilla chiefs, Sikh sardars of the Punjab all of whom paid tribute to Mahadji as the emperor’s regent [26].

Madhavrao I died of tuberculosis in November 1772, aged twenty-seven. James Grant Duff would later write that this death damaged the confederacy more than Panipat. The assessment holds.

The Last Peshwas and the Unraveling (1772–1818)

Madhavrao I’s death opened a succession crisis that the confederacy never fully closed. His brother Narayanrao (नारायणराव, 1755–1773) held the Peshwaship for nine months before being assassinated on 30 August 1773 in Shaniwarwada by Gardi mercenaries in the employ of his uncle Raghunathrao (राघोबा) and Raghunathrao’s wife Anandibai. Popular tradition holds that Anandibai altered a written order from dhara (धरा seize him) to mara (मारा kill him), changing a single Devanagari letter. Narayanrao ran to his uncle crying “Kaka, mala vachva” “Uncle, save me” and was cut down in front of him [27].

Chief Justice Ram Shastri Prabhune found both Raghunathrao and Anandibai guilty of murder. The sentence was never carried out. Raghunathrao seized the Peshwaship briefly before Nana Phadnavis (नाना फडणवीस, 1742–1800) organized the Barabhai Council of twelve sardars including Mahadji Shinde who installed Narayanrao’s posthumous son as Sawai Madhavrao II (सवाई माधवराव, 1774–1795) [28]. Raghunathrao, stripped of power, made the decision that would haunt the confederacy: he sought military assistance from the British East India Company. The resulting First Anglo-Maratha War (1775–1782) ended inconclusively with the Treaty of Salbai, but the precedent of a Maratha chief inviting British military intervention into internal succession disputes proved fatal in the longer term [29].

Sawai Madhavrao II ruled under the effective regency of Nana Phadnavis the figure a British contemporary called “the Maratha Machiavelli” whose factional genius kept the confederacy functioning through the 1780s and 1790s despite the competing ambitions of Mahadji Shinde, the Holkars, and a Peshwa court riddled with intrigue [30]. His death in 1795 without an heir triggered the final succession crisis. Nana Phadnavis and Daulat Rao Scindia installed Bajirao II (बाजीराव दुसरे, 1775–1851), son of Raghunathrao and Anandibai, as a puppet Peshwa in 1796 [31].

Bajirao II was temperamentally and politically unsuited to the moment. Facing Yashwantrao Holkar’s advance on Pune in 1802 he fled to the British at Bassein and signed the Treaty of Bassein accepting a British subsidiary alliance that placed Company troops in Maratha territory and effectively ended the confederacy’s sovereignty [32]. The Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803–1805) broke Sindhia and the Bhonsle of Nagpur. The Third (1817–1818) finished the rest. Bajirao II was defeated at Koregaon and Ashti, surrendered to General John Malcolm in June 1818, and was pensioned off to Bithur on the Ganges, where he lived until 1851 the last Peshwa, the office formally abolished, the confederacy dissolved [33].

What the “Confederacy” Was

The Maratha polity between 1674 and 1818 resists the categories colonial historiography imposed on it. It was neither the centralized empire the Mughals had been nor the anarchic collection of chieftains British administrators described when justifying intervention. It was a confederal system in which sovereignty was distributed across a Chhatrapati who provided dynastic legitimacy, a Peshwa who provided executive coordination, and regional chiefs who provided military and fiscal capacity in exchange for autonomy. The system was flexible enough to survive the death of its founder, the near-destruction of the 27-year war, and the catastrophe of Panipat. It fractured ultimately not from internal structural failure but from the sustained application of British military and diplomatic pressure against chiefs it was able to isolate and defeat sequentially.

The 144 years between Raigad and Bassein constitute one of the more consequential episodes in the political history of South Asia, and one of the least understood outside specialist scholarship. That is, in part, what this Substack exists to address.

Notes & Sources

[1] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 20–25 — on Maloji Bhonsle and the Ahmednagar jagirs.

[2] Wikipedia, “Shahaji” — cross-reference Gordon, pp. 25–30.

[3] A.R. Kulkarni, Maharashtra in the Age of Shivaji (R.J. Deshmukh, Pune, 1967), pp. 45–50 — on Jijabai’s administrative role at Pune.

[4] Jadunath Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times (Calcutta, 1919), pp. 30–35 — on the Ramdas relationship and its sources.

[5] S.G. Tulpule, Classical Marāṭhī Literature (Otto Harrassowitz, 1979) — on the Dasbodh as political and spiritual text.

[6] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 60–75 — on the fort capture campaigns.

[7] Jadunath Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times (Calcutta, 1919), pp. 180–210 — on Afzal Khan, Surat, and the Agra escape.

[8] Jadunath Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, pp. 280–295 — on the coronation, Gaga Bhatt, and the Kshatriya legitimacy problem.

[9] A.R. Kulkarni, Maharashtra in the Age of Shivaji (Pune, 1967), pp. 110–125 — on the Ashta Pradhan structure.

[10] Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. III (Calcutta, 1916), pp. 140–165 — on Chhatrapati Sambhaji’s reign.

[11] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 80–85 — on Chhatrapati Sambhaji’s execution.

[12] Wikipedia, “Siege of Jinji” — cross-reference Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. V.

[13] Wikipedia, “Deccan Wars” — on Santaji Ghorpade’s 1690 raid on Aurangzeb’s encampment; cross-reference Sarkar, Vol. V.

[14] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818, pp. 100–110 — on Tarabai’s regency and territorial recovery.

[15] Wikipedia, “Shahu I” — cross-reference G.S. Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. II (Bombay, 1946).

[16] G.S. Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. II (Bombay, 1946) — on Balaji Vishvanath’s appointment and the Peshwaship.

[17] G.S. Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. II — on the 1719 Delhi mission and the release of Yesubai.

[18] V.G. Dighe, Peshwa Bajirao I and Maratha Expansion (Karnatak Publishing House, Bombay, 1944) — on Bajirao I’s campaigns; cross-reference Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, pp. 125–140.

[19] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 150–160 — on Shahu’s death and the Peshwa’s administrative dominance.

[20] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818, pp. 160–175 — on the confederal structure of the five houses.

[21] Britannica, “India: The Marathas” — on Persian revenue terminology in Peshwa documents.

[22] T.S. Shejwalkar, Panipat: 1761 (Deccan College, Pune, 1946) — the benchmark secondary source on the Third Battle of Panipat.

[23] T.S. Shejwalkar, Panipat: 1761 — on casualty estimates.

[24] Wikipedia, “Madhavrao I” — cross-reference G.S. Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. III (Bombay, 1948).

[25] Wikipedia, “Mahadaji Shinde” — on the Vakil-ul-Mutlaq title of 1784; cross-reference William Dalrymple, The Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 180–195.

[26] William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (Bloomsbury, 2019) — on the Mughal emperor as Maratha instrument.

[27] Wikipedia, “Assassination of Narayan Rao” — cross-reference G.S. Sardesai, New History of the Marathas, Vol. III.

[28] Wikipedia, “Raghunath Rao” — on the Barabhai Council; cross-reference Sardesai, Vol. III.

[29] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818, pp. 185–195 — on the First Anglo-Maratha War and the Treaty of Salbai.

[30] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818, pp. 195–210 — on Nana Phadnavis and the late confederacy.

[31] Wikipedia, “Baji Rao II” — cross-reference Gordon, pp. 210–220.

[32] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818, pp. 215–220 — on the Treaty of Bassein and the subsidiary alliance.

[33] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818, pp. 220–230 — on the Third Anglo-Maratha War and the dissolution of the confederacy.

Maharashtra. The word breaks into its Sanskrit roots maha (महा), great, and rashtra (राष्ट्र), kingdom or domain, though its true origin is debated. Some scholars trace the toponym to the Maharathis, a people recorded in Ashokan inscriptions of the third century BCE; others to the Rashtrikas (राष्ट्रिक), an administrative designation in the same edicts, suggesting the name predates any single dynasty’s coinage [1]. The “Great Kingdom” reading may be the most intuitive and the most recent.

What the name encloses is not a uniform territory but a convergence of three ecologically distinct zones. The Konkan, a narrow, rain-saturated littoral between the Arabian Sea and the escarpment of the Western Ghats, was Maharashtra's oldest interface with the wider world. Roman ships docked regularly at ports such as Chaul and Sopara, trading wine, metals, and precious stones for grain, spices, and textiles [2]. The material evidence survives in two directions: a first-century bronze Poseidon unearthed at Kolhapur, and a terracotta Lakshmi recovered from Pompeii. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea names Pratishthana and Tagara as major Satavahana trade centers, with the pass at Nanaghat linking the Deccan capital directly to the coast [3].

Behind it rises the Sahyadri the basalt spine of the Western Ghats whose passes governed all movement between coast and interior. Beyond that escarpment lies the Deccan plateau: semi-arid, vast, its black cotton soil (regur) fertile but demanding, bearing little resemblance to the alluvial plains of the north. The hill forts that would define Maratha military strategy for centuries were not innovations imposed on this landscape they were expressions of it.

To trace Maratha identity to its earliest legible roots is to begin not with a king or a battle but with a language. Maharashtri Prakrit (महाराष्ट्री प्राकृत) the vernacular that evolved across the Deccan in the centuries around the common era was not merely a spoken tongue. It was the prestige literary language of classical Indian poetry, the medium of the Gaha Sattasai, an anthology of lyric verse compiled under the Satavahana king Hala in roughly the first century CE [4]. That a Deccan dynasty produced the era's most celebrated vernacular poetry tends to get lost beneath the weight of later empires. The continuity from Maharashtri Prakrit to medieval Marathi to the language spoken across Maharashtra today predates the Marathas as a political force by well over a millennium [5].

The Crucible: Devagiri and the Making of a Deccan Identity

The dynasty that most directly shaped medieval Maharashtrian identity was the Yadavas of Devagiri (देवगिरी), who ruled the northwestern Deccan from roughly the ninth century until their annexation by the Delhi Sultanate in 1317 [6]. Their capital a volcanic plug rising sharply from the plateau near modern Aurangabad was among the most formidable fortified sites in the subcontinent, its concentric moats and near-vertical approaches rendering it effectively impregnable under conventional assault [7].

The Yadavas’ most consequential achievement was administrative and literary. They were the first significant dynasty to make Marathi their official court language, departing from the Sanskrit-Kannada administrative tradition inherited from the Chalukyas and Rashtrakutas [8]. The minister Hemadri (हेमाद्री) formalized Marathi legal vocabulary, anchoring the vernacular to Sanskrit’s prestige register. Under Ramachandra (c. 1271–1312), the poet-saint Dnyaneshwar (ज्ञानेश्वर) composed the Dnyaneshwari a Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita running to over nine thousand couplets establishing Marathi as a vehicle for serious philosophical literature [9]. The Varkari devotional tradition, with its sant poets crossing caste lines, takes root in the same period. The Yadava court gave Marathi the institutional and literary foundations it would carry forward for centuries.

The dynasty’s end was a spectacular act of opportunism. In February 1296, Alauddin Khalji then governor of Kara under the Delhi Sultanate, not yet its sultan marched on Devagiri having concealed his movements behind false intelligence that he was heading to Chanderi [10]. The raid was a private enterprise: contemporary accounts including Ziauddin Barani’s Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi record that Devagiri’s plunder was intended to finance Alauddin’s usurpation of the Delhi throne from his own uncle Jalaluddin Khalji [11]. He returned north, lured Jalaluddin to a meeting at Kara, had him murdered, and proclaimed himself Sultan. The Deccan had underwritten northern politics as it would continue to do for centuries. Ramachandra survived as a tributary vassal; the Yadava kingdom did not long outlast him. By 1317 the last resistance was crushed and Devagiri annexed outright [12].

The Bahmani Sultanate, established in 1347 by a rebellion against the Tughlaqs, fragmented by the close of the fifteenth century into five successor states Ahmednagar, Bijapur, Golconda, Bidar, and Berar collectively the Deccan Sultanates [13]. The political geography of the Deccan was now irreversibly pluralist: multiple courts, multiple languages, Persian and Dakhni alongside Marathi and Kannada, a military labor market in which Maratha commanders and administrators served across sultanate lines without contradiction. The men who would form the officer class of the Maratha confederacy spent generations absorbing the administrative, military, and court cultures of these sultanates. The Bhonsle family, from which Chhatrapati Shivaji would emerge, would hold jagirs under Ahmednagar and Bijapur with a rich history of service, statecraft, and fluid feudal allegiances.

The Mughals and Aurangzeb’s 27-Year War

Aurangzeb (اورنگزیب) arrived in the Deccan in 1681 with the largest army the Mughal empire had yet fielded in the south. He would never return to Delhi. He died in Aurangabad in 1707, twenty-six years later, having personally directed a campaign that consumed the final chapter of his reign, the bulk of the imperial treasury, and the administrative coherence of the empire itself [14]. His court had effectively migrated south with him, leaving the north exposed to the Jat, Sikh, and Rajput revolts that would accelerate Mughal fragmentation after his death [15].

The proximate causes of the campaign were the annexation of Bijapur in 1686 and Golconda in 1687 a strategic miscalculation of the first order. In eliminating the Deccan Sultanates, Aurangzeb removed the buffer states that had for generations absorbed and contained Maratha expansion. The Marathas now shared a direct frontier with the Mughal empire, with no intermediary left to negotiate, pay off, or play against them [16].

The war that followed was not the kind Mughal armies were built to fight. Chhatrapati Sambhaji (छत्रपती संभाजी) and later Chhatrapati Rajaram (छत्रपती राजाराम) offered no set-piece battles, no capitals to besiege into submission, no court whose surrender would end the conflict. Forts changed hands repeatedly, often through bribery rather than assault. By 1704, after twenty-four years of continuous campaigning, Aurangzeb had captured Torna, Rajgad, and a handful of other forts largely by bribing Maratha commanders and had begun to acknowledge that attrition was not producing annexation [17]. His own generals counselled him to end the war as early as 1701; he refused [18].

Aurangzeb’s capture and brutal execution of Chhatrapati Sambhaji in 1689 preceded by horrific and prolonged public torture produced the opposite of its intended effect. The Maratha state reorganized under Chhatrapati Rajaram and, later, the regent Tarabai (ताराबाई), maintained its territorial base and continued fighting. The Maratha counter-offensive that followed eventually struck north across the Narmada into Bhopal, into Gujarat tightening around Mughal supply lines at the moment the imperial treasury was least able to sustain the pressure [19].

Aurangzeb died in 1707, having secured little of durable value after 27 years of fanatical conflict. Within decades, his successors collected revenues at the whim of Maratha negotiation, and Maratha armies were encamped outside the gates of Delhi itself. The Deccan wars weakened the Mughals beyond repair and began the gradual transfer of power in the Deccan and Hindustan into the hands of the Marathas. [20].

“Maratha” Identity and the Rise of Swarajya

The question of Maratha identity is inseparable from the question of how identities are made and unmade by political circumstance. “Maratha” has never referred to a single, bounded community. It has referred, at different moments, to a caste, a military class, a linguistic group, and a political coalition, with the boundaries between these categories shifting depending on who was doing the defining and when.

The 96 kuli Marathas (शहाण्णव कुळी मराठे) the clan system that forms the formal skeleton of Maratha caste identity present a case in point. The genealogies underpinning these clans were, in the scholarly consensus, largely constructed after Chhatrapati Shivaji’s rise to power, retrofitting a Kshatriya lineage onto families of predominantly Kunbi agrarian origin [21]. Historian Stewart Gordon notes that the three major lists purporting to enumerate the 96 clans, all compiled in the nineteenth century, are irreconcilable with one another [22]. The Kunbi (कुणबी) cultivators from whose ranks most of Chhatrapati Shivaji’s mavala infantry was drawn occupy a formally distinct but functionally overlapping category, the boundary between Maratha and Kunbi having been permeable enough that hypergamous marriage between the two was common practice [23]. British historian Jeremy Black describes the Maratha caste as “a coalescence of peasants, shepherds, ironworkers, and others as a result of serving in the military in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” a description that fits the historical record better than any claim to ancient Kshatriya descent [24].

The confederacy that emerged from the Deccan wars was administratively dependent on a class of Brahmin ministers the Peshwas (पेशवे) whose authority over state finances, correspondence, and diplomacy eventually eclipsed that of the Bhonsle Chhatrapatis themselves. Under the Chitpavan Brahmin Bhat family, beginning with Balaji Vishvanath and reaching its apogee under Bajirao I (r. 1720–1740), the Peshwa became the de facto executive of a subcontinent-spanning confederacy [25]. Crucially, much of the revenue terminology in Peshwa documents derives directly from Persian the administrative language of the Mughal state indicating a structural continuity between Mughal and Maratha governance that complicates any simple narrative of civilizational rupture [26].

The Maratha military also incorporated Deccani Muslim commanders and soldiers without systemic exclusion. Ibrahim Khan Gardi, the artillery commander at Panipat (1761), fought and died under the Maratha banner. Siddi Hilal served in Chhatrapati Shivaji’s naval forces. The confederacy was defined less by religion than by political allegiance and above all by the Deccan itself as a shared territorial and cultural inheritance [27].

Thoughts on Historical Sources

Writing Maratha history means navigating a fractured archive. The primary sources are heterogeneous in language, provenance, and bias, and no single tradition offers a complete or disinterested account.

The bakhars (बखर) Marathi-language vernacular chronicles commissioned by Maratha courts are the closest thing to an indigenous historical record, but they are explicitly panegyric in intent, composed to legitimize dynasties and lionize commanders rather than to document events with dispassion. The Sabhasad Bakhar, among the earliest and most cited, was written decades after Chhatrapati Shivaji’s death and reflects the political concerns of its moment of composition as much as the events it purports to describe [28].

Persian chronicles including Khafi Khan’s Muntakhab-ul-Lubab and the earlier Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi of Ziauddin Barani provide a counterweight, but one with its own distortions: Mughal court historians wrote within a framework that cast Maratha resistance as rebellion rather than statecraft [29]. Portuguese records from the Konkan coast offer a third angle, particularly useful for naval history and the Deccan Sultanate period, though their geographic focus is narrow [30].

British colonial accounts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries James Grant Duff’s History of the Mahrattas (1826) being the foundational text shaped Western historiography of the Marathas for over a century, and did so through the interpretive lens of a state engaged in dismantling the confederacy they were describing. Grant Duff is indispensable and must be read critically [31].

The most reliable modern scholarship works across these traditions rather than privileging any one of them. Richard Eaton’s A Social History of the Deccan and Stewart Gordon’s The Marathas 1600–1818 remain the essential starting points in English. In Marathi, the work of G.H. Khare and V.S. Kadam on the bakhars as a literary-historical genre offers correctives that anglophone scholarship has been slow to absorb.

Modern scholarship on Maratha history remains sparse with few historians examining true firsthand accounts. Hundreds of thousand of records remain unexamined, scrutinized or translated leaving a large corpus of Maratha history, records and nuance yet to be studied. This page aims to shed light on some of those narratives obscured by time and forgotten to us today.

Notes & Sources

[1] D.C. Sircar, Indian Epigraphy (Motilal Banarsidass, 1965) — on Ashokan references to the Rashtrikas and Maharathis.

[2] Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, trans. Lionel Casson (Princeton University Press, 1989) — on Konkan ports and Roman trade.

[3] Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, trans. Lionel Casson (Princeton University Press, 1989) — on Pratishthana, Tagara, and the Nanaghat pass.

[4] A.B. Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature (Oxford University Press, 1920) — on the Gaha Sattasai and Maharashtri Prakrit as a literary prestige language.

[5] Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (University of California Press, 2006), pp. 295–300 — on the continuity of Maharashtri Prakrit into medieval Marathi.

[6] A.R. Kulkarni & M.A. Nayeem, eds., History of Medieval Deccan (Hyderabad, 1973) — on the Yadava dynasty and its chronology.

[7] Phillip Wagoner, “Fortification and the Idea of the Deccan,” in David Gilmartin & Bruce Lawrence, eds., Beyond Turk and Hindu (University Press of Florida, 2000) — on Devagiri as a fortified site.

[8] Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (University of California Press, 2006), pp. 295–300 — on the Yadava departure from Sanskrit-Kannada administrative tradition.

[9] S.G. Tulpule, Classical Marāṭhī Literature (Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1979) — on the Dnyaneshwari and the Yadava literary program.

[10] Ziauddin Barani, Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, trans. and cited in Kishori Saran Lal, History of the Khaljis (Allahabad, 1950) — on Alauddin’s 1296 raid on Devagiri.

[11] Ziauddin Barani, Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi — on the raid as a privately motivated enterprise to finance Alauddin’s usurpation.

[12] Richard Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 30–35 — on the final annexation of Devagiri in 1317.

[13] Richard Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 60–80 — on the Bahmani Sultanate and its successor states.

[14] John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 218–225 — on Aurangzeb’s Deccan campaigns and their cost to the imperial administration.

[15] Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. V (M.C. Sarkar & Sons, Calcutta, 1924) — on the northward administrative vacuum created by Aurangzeb’s prolonged absence.

[16] Richard Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 180–185 — on the strategic consequences of annexing Bijapur and Golconda.

[17] Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. V — on the 1705 Maratha cross-Narmada offensive and the tightening of Mughal supply lines.

[18] Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. V — on Aurangzeb’s refusal to end the campaign despite counsel from senior generals.

[19] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 80–85 — on the execution of Chhatrapati Sambhaji and the Maratha reorganization under Chhatrapati Rajaram and Tarabai.

[20] John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 225–235 — on the post-Aurangzeb fragmentation and Maratha expansion into the vacuum.

[21] J.V. Ferreira, Totemism in India (Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 191 — on the spurious basis of Maratha Kshatriya genealogical claims.

[22] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 14 — on the irreconcilability of the three major 96-clan lists.

[23] Richard Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 210–215 — on the Maratha-Kunbi relationship and the permeability of the boundary between them.

[24] Jeremy Black, cited in “Maratha (caste),” Wikipedia — verify against Black, Rethinking Military History (Routledge, 2004).

[25] Britannica, “The Marathas” — on the Chitpavan Brahmin Bhat family and the rise of the hereditary Peshwas; cross-reference Gordon, The Marathas, pp. 150–160.

[26] Britannica, “India: The Marathas” — on Persian revenue terminology in Peshwa administrative documents.

[27] Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 90–95 — on the incorporation of Deccani Muslim commanders within Maratha military structures.

[28] A.R. Kulkarni, The Marathas (New Delhi, 1996) — on the bakhars as panegyric rather than documentary sources, and on the Sabhasad Bakhar specifically.

[29] Khafi Khan, Muntakhab-ul-Lubab, trans. S. Moinul Haq (Pakistan Historical Society, Karachi, 1975) — on Persian chronicle accounts of Maratha resistance.

[30] Panduronga Pissurlencar, Portuguese Records on Maratha History (Goa Historical Archive, 1975) — on Portuguese sources for the Konkan and Deccan Sultanate period.

[31] James Grant Duff, History of the Mahrattas (1826; repr. Associated Publishing House, New Delhi, 1971) — the foundational anglophone account; essential and tendentious in equal measure.