Maratha Confederacy

The Indian power that broke the Mughal empire and then lost to the British. Shivaji was crowned Chhatrapati at Raigad in 1674, giving a sovereign form to two decades of hill-fort warfare against Bijapur and the Mughals, and building a state on light cavalry, forts and a revenue system that taxed rather than plundered. Aurangzeb spent the last twenty-six years of his life in the Deccan trying to destroy it, captured and executed Shivaji's son Sambhaji in 1689, and failed: the Marathas fought as a distributed insurgency with no capital to lose, and the campaign broke the Mughal treasury and army instead. After 1713 real power passed from the Chhatrapati to his prime minister, the Peshwa, and the office became hereditary in the Bhat family. Under Bajirao I the Marathas took Malwa and Gujarat and raided the outskirts of Delhi; by the 1750s they collected tribute across most of India and the Mughal emperor survived at their sufferance. The defeat at Panipat in 1761 by an Afghan coalition killed tens of thousands in a day and ended the ambition of a single Maratha empire. What followed was a confederacy in the literal sense - Scindia, Holkar, Gaekwad and Bhonsle houses with their own armies and their own foreign policies, nominally under the Peshwa at Pune. The British fought them in three wars and took them apart house by house. The Peshwa's office was abolished in 1818. The confederacy is the reason the East India Company needed an army rather than a garrison. Its light cavalry could move faster than any European force in India and lived off the country, and the chauth - a quarter of the revenue, taken as the price of not being raided - was a fiscal instrument as much as a threat. Maratha rule also carried a religious charge: Shivaji's coronation was staged as the restoration of Hindu kingship after four centuries of Muslim sovereignty in the Deccan, and the Peshwas were Chitpavan Brahmins governing a state founded by a Maratha king. That tension between the throne at Satara and the office at Pune ran through the whole eighteenth century and was one reason the confederacy could not combine against the British.

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