Appearance
6.13 — The Marathas
In 1666 Shivaji went to Agra under a safe conduct to meet Aurangzeb, was placed among nobles of a rank he considered an insult, protested publicly, and was put under house arrest.
He escaped by having himself carried out of the compound in a basket of sweets, sent as an offering to holy men, and travelled about 1,200 kilometres back to the Deccan in disguise. Eight years later he was crowned king in his own right, and thirty years after that his state was the thing Aurangzeb could not defeat with the largest army in the world.
This chapter is about how a state built on hills and light cavalry beat an empire, and then how it lost.
The setting
The western Deccan is the Maratha country — the Sahyadri range, the Konkan coast below it, and the plateau above (Chapter 6.1). It is broken, defensible, and poor. Rainfall is unreliable outside the coastal strip, the soil is thin, and there is no delta.
It was ruled by the Deccan sultanates — Ahmadnagar and Bijapur (Chapter 6.10) — and its administrative and military class was substantially Marathi-speaking Hindu. Deshmukhs and deshpandes were hereditary local revenue officials; Maratha cavalry served the sultanates in large numbers. Shivaji's own father, Shahaji, was a commander in Bijapuri service.
So the Maratha state did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from people who already knew how the sultanates' administration and armies worked, in a landscape ideal for defence, at a moment when the sultanates were being ground down between each other and the Mughals.
Shivaji
Shivaji Bhonsle (born 1630, died 1680) began taking forts in the 1640s as a young man, in territory nominally Bijapuri, and built from there.
The forts are the foundation of the whole system. He captured, built or rebuilt a large number of hill forts across the Sahyadris and the Konkan — Rajgad, Raigad, Pratapgad, Sinhagad, Torna and dozens more. A hill fort in that terrain is extremely hard to take: approaches are narrow, artillery cannot easily be brought up, and a besieging army in dry country with no local surplus starves before the garrison does.
And he built a navy, which almost no Indian ruler did (Chapter 6.1). Coastal forts at Sindhudurg and Vijaydurg, and a fleet that fought the Siddis of Janjira, the Portuguese and later the English. The Maratha admiral Kanhoji Angre dominated the western coast in the early eighteenth century and took European ships regularly, and English and Portuguese records refer to him with considerable respect and no affection.
The military doctrine
Ganimi kava is the Marathi term, usually translated as guerrilla warfare, and it is more specific than that. It is a doctrine, and its elements are consistent.
Never fight a pitched battle against a larger force. The Mughal army was overwhelming in a set-piece engagement and Shivaji almost never gave it one.
Attack supply and communication instead. A Mughal army of a hundred thousand with camp followers needed enormous daily supply, moving on roads through country the Marathas knew. Cut the convoys and the army has to retreat without ever losing a battle.
Move fast and light. Maratha cavalry carried minimal baggage, lived off the country, and covered distances that Mughal commanders repeatedly found impossible to believe.
Take forts by surprise, escalade and bribery rather than by siege. Several of Shivaji's most celebrated captures were night assaults with small parties.
And retreat is not defeat. The Mughals could take any fort eventually; they could not hold all of them, and the Marathas retook them as soon as the army moved on.
Two episodes illustrate the method.
Pratapgad, 1659. The Bijapuri general Afzal Khan came with a large army to destroy him. Shivaji lured him into the hills, agreed to an unarmed meeting, and — by the Maratha account anticipating treachery, by the Bijapuri account committing it — killed him at the meeting with a concealed weapon while the Maratha army fell on the leaderless Bijapuri force. The event is disputed in its details and the outcome is not.
Surat, 1664 and 1670. Shivaji raided the Mughal empire's richest port twice and carried off enormous plunder. This was strategy, not banditry — it funded the state, humiliated the empire, and demonstrated that Mughal territory was not safe.
The state he built
This is the part usually underplayed and it matters more than the battles.
Coronation in 1674 at Raigad, as Chhatrapati. This was a deliberate and expensive assertion: it made him a sovereign king rather than a rebel noble, which changed the legal and diplomatic status of everything his state did. Brahmins were brought from Varanasi to perform it, since local objections to his caste standing had to be overcome.
A salaried army rather than a feudal one. Soldiers were paid in cash by the state, not granted land. This is the single most important administrative decision he made — it avoided the devolution problem that had destroyed every earlier Indian state (Chapter 6.8) and that was destroying the Mughal empire through the jagirdari crisis (Chapter 6.12).
No hereditary jagirs, for the same reason. Existing hereditary rights of deshmukhs were curtailed where he could.
The Ashta Pradhan, a council of eight ministers with defined portfolios — prime minister, finance, foreign affairs, war, justice, religious affairs, home, and record-keeping — appointed rather than hereditary.
Revenue assessed on measured land at a fixed share, with the state dealing directly with cultivators where possible.
And chauth and sardeshmukhi — the levies of one quarter and one tenth of revenue that the Marathas demanded from territories outside their direct control, in exchange for not raiding them. It is protection money, and it is also the mechanism by which the Maratha state extended its reach across India without administering it.
On religion
This deserves a plain statement because it is heavily used in modern argument.
Shivaji framed his state in Hindu terms — the coronation, the patronage of temples, the language of Hindavi Swarajya — and he fought Muslim-ruled states.
And his conduct toward Muslims as such is documented and does not fit a simple religious-war framing. He employed Muslim officers and soldiers, including in senior positions — his naval commander Daulat Khan and cavalry officer Siddi Hilal among them. His standing orders forbade harming mosques, Qur'ans, women and non-combatants during raids, and there are documented instances of his returning captured women unharmed, including relatives of enemy commanders. A letter attributed to him to Aurangzeb protesting the jizya argues on the grounds that Akbar's tolerance made the empire strong — its authenticity is debated by historians and the position it states is consistent with his other conduct.
And he fought Hindu powers too — Bijapur's Hindu commanders, the Mughals' Rajput generals, and rival Maratha families.
The accurate statement: a ruler building an independent Hindu-ruled state against Muslim-ruled empires, in a period when religion was one of several available languages of legitimacy, whose actual conduct toward populations was governed by policy rather than by creed. He is neither a secular figure in the modern sense nor a religious warrior in the modern sense, and forcing him into either costume distorts him.
After Shivaji
Sambhaji, his son, held out for nine years and was captured, tortured and executed by Aurangzeb in 1689 (Chapter 6.12). The intention was to end the resistance and it did the opposite — the killing removed any possibility of settlement and turned a dynastic conflict into a war of survival that the Marathas fought for the next eighteen years.
Rajaram and then Tarabai, Rajaram's widow, led that war. Tarabai's period of command deserves recognition — she directed the Maratha war effort for years from Panhala and by contemporary Mughal accounts was a formidable strategist, expanding raiding deep into Mughal territory while the empire's armies exhausted themselves.
Aurangzeb died in 1707 in the Deccan without having subdued them.
The Peshwas
Power then shifted from the Chhatrapati to the Peshwa, the prime minister, and the office became hereditary in the Bhat family of Chitpavan Brahmins from 1713.
Under Bajirao I (1720–1740) the Marathas expanded enormously. He is regarded as one of the finest cavalry commanders in Indian history, and his campaigns took Maratha power into Malwa, Gujarat and Bundelkhand, and in 1737 to the outskirts of Delhi itself. He fought over forty engagements and by most accounts lost none.
By the 1750s the Maratha confederacy dominated most of India, collecting chauth from Bengal to the south, with the Mughal emperor a protected figurehead. It was a confederacy rather than an empire: the Peshwa at Pune, with the Scindias at Gwalior, the Holkars at Indore, the Gaekwads at Baroda and the Bhonsles at Nagpur as largely autonomous chiefs. That structure is the weakness that matters.
Panipat, 1761
Ahmad Shah Abdali invaded from Afghanistan and the Marathas met him at Panipat on 14 January 1761.
They lost catastrophically. Estimates of Maratha dead on the day and in the pursuit run to tens of thousands, including a large part of the leadership and, because Maratha armies of this period travelled with families and pilgrims, very large numbers of non-combatants.
Why they lost, on the evidence:
They fought the wrong kind of battle. A set-piece engagement against superior cavalry and artillery is exactly what ganimi kava exists to avoid. The Maratha army of 1761 had become a conventional force with heavy artillery and a large baggage train, which is what success does to armies.
They were far from base and out of supply. The army was cut off from the south, was short of food for weeks before the battle, and the decision to fight was partly forced by starvation.
They had no local allies. Maratha chauth collection had made them resented across northern India, and the Rajputs, Jats and Awadh all stood aside or joined Abdali. A confederacy that funds itself by extracting from everyone has no friends when it needs them.
And the confederacy's structure meant divided command. Several chiefs disagreed with the strategy and the coordination was poor.
Abdali won and went home. He had no interest in ruling India. So the battle destroyed Maratha power in the north without putting anything in its place — and the vacuum was filled, over the following decades, by the East India Company.
Why the Marathas lost to the British
They recovered substantially after Panipat and were the strongest Indian power into the 1790s. Three Anglo-Maratha wars, between 1775 and 1818, ended with their annexation.
The reasons are Chapter 6.15's argument in miniature.
The confederacy could not act as one. The British negotiated separately with Scindia, Holkar, the Gaekwad and the Peshwa, and fought them one at a time. Every Anglo-Maratha war involved some Maratha chiefs sitting out or actively assisting the British.
They adopted European-style infantry and artillery — trained by European mercenaries — and thereby gave up their own advantage. A Maratha army of regular infantry in line was a target the British army was built to beat. The doctrine that had beaten Aurangzeb was abandoned in favour of fighting the British at their own game.
Finance. The Company could borrow against Bengal's revenue at low interest (Chapter 6.16). The Marathas could not borrow on comparable terms and their revenue base was less productive.
And discipline and supply. The Company's Indian sepoy infantry were paid regularly, drilled continuously and supplied systematically. Maratha armies were frequently in arrears, and mutinies over pay are documented repeatedly.
Where this shows up in your life
Shivaji is the central political symbol of Maharashtra and one of the most contested figures in Indian public life, claimed by every side of the state's politics.
The forts are still there, and climbing them is a mass activity in Maharashtra, which is a rare case of a historical military system being a living recreational tradition.
And the military lesson is studied seriously. Ganimi kava is taught as a case study in asymmetric warfare, and its principles — refuse the enemy's preferred battle, attack logistics, use terrain, keep the political base intact — are the same ones every successful insurgency since has rediscovered.
What the next page covers
While the Marathas fought in the Deccan, a religious community founded by a fifteenth-century teacher in Punjab was transformed by persecution into a military order and then into a kingdom that was the last Indian power the British had to defeat. Chapter 6.14 covers the Sikhs — Nanak's teaching, the ten Gurus, the martyrdoms, the founding of the Khalsa, the misls, and Ranjit Singh's kingdom, which modernised its army faster than any other Indian state and fell within a decade of his death.