Out of the Deccan's hills the Marathas rose from a rebel band to the dominant power of eighteenth-century India — the last great indigenous empire before the British.
§1Shivaji
Shivaji Bhonsle (1630–80) began at nineteen with the hill fort of Torna and an idea: swarajya — self-rule. He killed the Bijapuri general Afzal Khan in a famous embrace (1659), escaped Aurangzeb's court at Agra hidden in sweetmeat baskets (1666), sacked the Mughal port of Surat twice, and in 1674 crowned himself Chhatrapati at Raigad with full Vedic rite — the first Hindu coronation of an independent sovereign in the Deccan in centuries.
His government was a small perfect machine: the Ashtapradhan council of eight ministers led by the Peshwa; revenue fixed at two-fifths of produce; and, from territories beyond swarajya, the tribute of chauth (one-fourth) and sardeshmukhi (one-tenth). His navy commanded the Konkan coast, his forts the Sahyadris; his rule was remembered as just to peasants, tolerant in faith, and ruthless to enemies — the model to which all later Maratha politics looked back.
§2The Peshwas
After Shivaji, Aurangzeb's legions poured into the Deccan; the Marathas answered with a guerrilla war that bled the Mughals white. Real power then passed to the Brahmana Peshwas: Balaji Vishwanath won the farman of chauth and sardeshmukhi over the Deccan's six subahs; his son Baji Rao I (1720–40) — 'the Hindu cavalry general who never lost a battle' — carried Maratha arms to the gates of Delhi and made the Peshwa, not the Chhatrapati, the head of a confederacy stretching from the Cauvery to the Chambal.
Under Balaji Baji Rao the Marathas took the Punjab — and met catastrophe. At the Third Battle of Panipat (January 1761) Ahmad Shah Abdali destroyed the Maratha army, killing the Peshwa's son and a generation of Maratha leadership; the recovery under Mahadji Scindia and Nana Fadnavis was brilliant but could not survive the divisions among the confederate houses of Scindia, Holkar, Gaekwad and Bhonsle.
§3The End
Between 1775 and 1818 the East India Company fought three Anglo-Maratha wars. The First (1775–82) the Marathas survived at Salbai; the Second and Third broke them — defeated at Assaye and Argaon by Arthur Wellesley, the last Peshwa Baji Rao II surrendered in 1818 and was pensioned to Bithur. The Company annexed his domains; the Maratha dream of a padshahi in Delhi died, and Britain faced only the Sikhs between itself and unchallenged empire.
End of Chapter 16 · Volume II