Balaji Vishwanath

Balaji Vishwanath was the first of the hereditary Peshwas, the ministers who governed the Maratha empire while its kings presided, and he got the office by negotiating rather than fighting. He was a Chitpavan Brahmin from the Konkan coast who began as a revenue clerk and rose through the administration during the long war against Aurangzeb, learning the one thing the Maratha state most needed: how to make money arrive. When Shahu returned from Mughal captivity in 1707 to a throne contested by Tarabai, Balaji brought over the commanders and the admiral Kanhoji Angre, whose fleet controlled the Konkan, and that is what settled the succession. Shahu made him Peshwa in 1713. His decisive act came in 1719, when he marched to Delhi with an army in support of the Sayyid brothers, the kingmakers of the collapsing Mughal court, and came home with imperial grants confirming Maratha rights to collect chauth and sardeshmukhi - a quarter and a tenth of the revenue - across the whole of the Deccan, and with Yesubai released after twenty-nine years as a hostage. Those grants turned raiding into a legal entitlement and financed the expansion of the next forty years. He died the following year, and his son Bajirao succeeded him, which is the moment the office became hereditary in fact. The Peshwa office remained in his family until the British deposed the last of them in 1818. His son Bajirao I is generally counted the greatest of the line and never lost a battle. Chauth and sardeshmukhi remained the fiscal basis of Maratha power for a century.

• Lived: 1662 CE – 1720 CE
• Nationality: Indian
• Roles: politician