Ranoji Shinde

Ranoji Shinde began as a servant carrying the Peshwa's slippers and founded a dynasty that ended up governing much of northern India. The story Maratha tradition tells is that Bajirao I found him asleep outside a doorway with the slippers held carefully in his lap rather than dropped on the ground, took it as a sign of a man who would look after what he was given, and put him in the army. Whether or not the detail is true, the shape of it is: he rose by service in a state that promoted on service. He fought through the Maratha expansion northwards in the 1720s, and when Malwa was taken from the Mughals he was made responsible for a large share of it, holding the revenue rights jointly with the Holkars. He established himself at Ujjain, which became the family's seat before Gwalior did. What he held was a share of somebody else's taxes. The Marathas claimed chauth, a quarter of the Mughal land revenue of a province, in exchange for not raiding it and for defending it; a commander granted those rights collected them himself and kept an army on the proceeds. It was an efficient way to project power across northern India without a treasury, and it made the collector into a ruler by degrees. The arrangement he was part of is what made the Maratha confederacy work and eventually what broke it: the Peshwa granted territory and its revenues to commanders who governed as near-independent princes, which raised armies quickly and produced houses whose interests were their own. He died at Shujalpur in 1745. His legitimate sons Jayappa and Dattaji led the house after him and both were killed in the wars against the Afghans, and it was his illegitimate son Mahadaji - left for dead at Panipat in 1761 and permanently lamed - who rebuilt the family's power until he was effectively regent of the Mughal empire. The dynasty ruled Gwalior until 1947.

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