Mughal Maratha Wars

10 Key excerpts on "Mughal Maratha Wars"

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  Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics

  The Bhadauria Rajputs and the Transition from Mughal to British India, 1600–1900

  • Tripurdaman Singh(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  65 Decline of the Mughals, Emergence of the Marathas the constitution and perception of its sovereignty, especially so with the emergence of the Maratha challenge. This chapter will consider the conceptual underpinnings of such sovereignty more thoroughly and will delineate the importance of the symbolic, ceremonial and performative constituents of Mughal sovereignty. We will notice how despite the decline of Mughal power in the locality and the advancement of Maratha arms, the idiom of Mughal sovereignty consistently held sway. By the time of Emperor Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the Bhadaurias had systemically recast their relations with the central power. From being a clan of bandits and robbers they had effectively become a part of the ruling elite, an entrenched part of the economic, military and administrative frameworks of the Mughal state and one of the pillars of the empire. At this stage, with the material and political benefits that had accrued after being part of the imperial governing class, the Bhadaurias were also one of the most powerful Rajput clans of northern India. 3 Thus their ‘state’, Bhadawar, became one of the more important Rajput entities in the intermediate level of the political field – a famous contemporary epic poem refers to it as the ‘Bhadawar power’. 4 Furthermore, repeated mention of them, as we shall see later in this chapter, in the context of court politics would also mean that they were playing a relatively important role in central politics. By this period, however, Mughal authority across the country was already facing a wide range of challenges. While regional contenders such as the Jats and the Sikhs proved to be a stern test for Mughal arms, it was the rise of Maratha power that proved to be the biggest threat of them all and changed the political terrain on which the intermediate power holders operated.

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  War, Culture and Society in Early Modern South Asia, 1740-1849

  • Kaushik Roy(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  5    The Maratha Confederacy

  Armies, economy and warfare

  Seventeenth-century Maharashtra was dominated by the high caste landlords (patel s and desais ). The marginal landlords sold their service to Bijapur and Golkunda kingdoms. During the second half of the seventeenth century, the Mughals intervened on a large scale in Deccan. Taking advantage of the tripolar struggle, one Maratha warlord, Shahji, became autonomous. His son Shivaji founded a kingdom in Maharashtra. His support base comprised low caste kunbi peasants. Towards the end of seventeenth century, the Mughals had absorbed Bijapur and Golkunda and turned against the Marathas. Aurangzeb, the last great Mughal, continued to fight Shivaji and his son Sambhaji until his death in 1707. After Aurangzeb’s death when the bulk of the Mughal Army left Deccan for north India, the Mughals released Sahu, Sambhaji’s son. Civil War broke out among the Marathas and finally Sahu emerged successful.

  1

  During the reign of Shivaji’s grandson Sahu (18 May 1682–1749, King from 1707 onwards), the Peshwa became the principal power centre in the Maratha Empire. The first Peshwa was Balaji Viswanath (17 November 1713–2 April 1720), who was succeeded by Baji Rao I; and he, in turn, was succeeded by Balaji Baji Rao. In 1749, Shivaji’s grandson Sahu died and then Balaji Baji Rao took full control.

  2

  Under the three successive Peshwa s, breakneck expansion of the Maratha power occurred in both central and north India. From the mid-eighteenth century, the Maratha polity started getting fractured and it became a confederacy. The Pune durbar under the Peshwa controlled the Swarajya (Maharashtra) and parts of Karnatak. The other independent power centres under the powerful sirdar s were Gaikwad at Baroda, Ranoji Sindia (the founder of Sindia appanage who died 1745) at Gwalior, Malhar Rao Holkar at Indore and Bhonsle at Nagpur. These Maratha sirdar s obeyed the de jure authority of the Peshwa . The centrifugal tendencies in the Maratha Confederacy increased after the Third Panipat as the Peshwa

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  India in the Persianate Age

  1000–1765

  • Richard M. Eaton(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Later that year the Persian warlord Nadir Shah marched through the Khyber Pass with 150,000 cavalry, defeated a much larger Mughal army and sacked a supine, defenceless Delhi. Like Timur more than three centuries earlier, he chose not to remain in India, returning to Iran with caravans laden with looted gold, silver and jewellery worth 1.5 million rupees, including the famed Koh-i-Noor, and, not least, Shah Jahan’s priceless Peacock Throne. With such celebrated symbols of imperial glory for ever stripped from Indian soil, the Marathas were suddenly awakened to the reality that the Mughals were not, in fact, their enemy. Rather, they now saw the house of Babur as the key symbol of Indian sovereignty, to be defended from foreign invaders at all costs. To this end, Baji Rao proposed that all the powers of north India join a confederation to protect India’s Timurid dynasty, making the Peshwa almost resemble a proto-nationalist figure. For several decades, a cornerstone of Maratha policy was to pose as the Mughals’ truest defenders, at least at the imperial level.

  At the grass-roots level, however, the Peshwa’s sardar s continued to chip away at Mughal sovereignty. In older provinces such as Malwa, Khandesh or Gujarat, independent bands of up to 5,000 light cavalry would raid and plunder the countryside, avoiding pitched battles with imperial armies.20 Mughal authorities in these provinces might still control major fortified urban centres, but they were no longer drawing revenue from their rural hinterlands. The transition from Mughal to Maratha authority between the 1730s and 1750s was therefore barely perceptible, not only because it occurred so gradually, but also because the Marathas continued to use Mughal administrative procedures and practices, mitigating a sense of a political rupture.21 Yet Maratha rule was patchy and irregular across much of central India in those decades, some regions being fully administered by the Peshwa’s men and others only thinly administered, and populated by recalcitrant zamindar s who managed to defy Maratha authority from behind walled strongholds.

  Under Baji Rao’s son Nana Saheb (r. 1740–61), Maratha conquests briefly encompassed almost all of north India. These included six devastating raids on Bengal between 1741 and 1751. But, by the late 1750s, the Marathas had become more than simply the guarantors of Mughal authority. As their strategic objective shifted from defending their mountainous homeland to plundering and then governing north India’s wide plains, they also adopted Mughal military culture. In the days of Shivaji, Maratha forces had consisted of small, mobile bands of swift cavalry and lightly armed infantry, appropriate for the sort of guerrilla warfare that Malik Ambar had pioneered in the Ahmadnagar sultanate’s final decades. By contrast, the great Maratha armies of the 1740s and 1750s, which numbered up to 40,000 mainly uniformed infantry, lumbered across the land like moving cities, moving no faster than the bullocks that dragged their long trains of baggage and heavy artillery. By mid-century, too, the Maratha ruling elite, owing to its prolonged exposure to north India’s ways, had acquired a taste for the refinements of Mughal culture. This in turn created a demand in urban Maharashtra for Kashmiri shawls, Bengali silks, ivory craft, metalwork in silver, copper and brass and so on, while administrators in the Maratha capital in Satara, and after 1750 in Pune, patronized north Indian styles of painting and music.22

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  War in the Eighteenth-Century World

  • Jeremy Black(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  However, underlining the difficulties of providing a simple guide to the consequences of individual battles, the Marathas were able to regain much of their position, even though they did not again mount a large raid on Lahore as they had done in 1758. A revival was brought about by Madhav Rao I, who became Peshwa ¯ in 1761. Maratha strength was shown in 1770 when the Jats were defeated at Bharatpur. 2 Also in 1772, and again demonstrating Maratha power in northern India, Madhav Rao and Mahadji Shinde (Sindhia), one of the Maratha leaders, restored the Mughal emperor, Alam II, to his throne in Delhi, but under Maratha protection. After the death of Madhav Rao I in 1772, however, there were serious succession disputes. The Marathas faced rivals, including Oudh in northern India, the Nizam of Hyderabad in the centre, and Mysore in the south. In 1761, the Nizam advanced on the Maratha capital of Pune (Poona), only to be defeated at Koregaon when his army was outmanoeuvred and attacked from front and rear by the more mobile Marathas. He was defeated anew at Urali (1762) and Rakshasbhuvan (1763), and surrendered territories as the price of peace. Mysore was under Maratha pressure in mid-century, which helped ensure that a Mysore general, Haidar Ali, became a central figure there. In 1761, he took over the rule of Mysore, before expanding its territories, which led to conflict with both the Marathas and Britain. Haidar was defeated by the Marathas in 1764 and at Chinkurali in 1771, but maintained control of Mysore. Religion played a role in local conflict. When Haidar Ali successfully invaded the vulnerable and fragmented Malabar coast in 1766, he allied with a local Muslim ruler, Ali, Rajah of Cannanore, and they displayed a harsh attitude to local sensitivities.

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  The Indian Ocean in the Making of Early Modern India

  • Pius Malekandathil(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  60

  Military Personnel: Immigrant Elite, Military Slaves, and Armed Peasants

  In this section, I shall briefly discuss a few issues regarding the world of military personnel of different polities of early modern South Asia by referring to two aspects of this world—the military labour market of north India on the one hand and immigrant politico-military elite and military slaves on the other.

  Dirk Kolff made a breakthrough in the historiography of early modern warfare by throwing light on the sector of military labour in the Indian subcontinent. For the first time, he argued that a great portion of the north Indian peasantry was in fact perpetually armed, and elaborated how this complicated the relationship between this peasantry and the empires of north India. During the off season of cultivation, these armed peasants would also hire out their services to different polities and serve in the infantry as foot-archers. In the late sixteenth century, several communities arose, mainly from the Middle Gangetic Basin, like Baksariyas and Purbiyas, who specialized in musketry and thus became much valued in the military labour market. By virtue of this community-based martial specialization, they were able to find employment in the armies of several polities of north India, including several Rajput states and the Sultanates of Gujarat and Malwa by the mid-sixteenth century. Once the Mughal Empire extended to Gujarat and Malwa, these groups were inducted into the Mughal army. The complex relationship between the armed peasantry and the revenue-collecting state has also been addressed by Iqtidar Alam Khan. By the late seventeenth century, there were several social communities in north India who specialized in foot-musketry, like the Bahelias and Bhadurias, among others. He also points out that during the reign of Aurangzeb, the Baksariyas were the largest social group serving in the Mughal army as foot-musketeers as well as foot-archers.61

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  Britannica Guide to India

  • Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

    (Publisher)

  Ahmad Shah sacked Lahore and, even though a Delhi army compelled him to retreat, his repeated invasions eventually devastated the Empire. 78 INDIA Within the next 11 years after Muhammad Shah's death in April 1748, four princes ascended the Mughal throne. The period saw a fierce struggle between the Marathas and the Afghans for control over Delhi and northern India. The final battle, in which the forces of Ahmad Shah Durrani routed the Marathas, was fought near Panipat on January 14 1761. This defeat shattered the Maratha dream of controlling the Mughal court and thereby dominating the whole of the Empire. Durrani did not, however, found a new kingdom in India. The Afghans could not even retain the Punjab, where a regional confederation was emerging again under the Sikhs. With Shah ( Alam II away in Bihar, the throne in Delhi remained vacant from 1759 to 1771. During most of this period, the Afghan Najib al-Dawlah was in charge of the dwindling Empire, which was now effectively a regional king- dom of Delhi. The rise of the regional states The decline of Mughal central authority witnessed a resur- gence of regional identity that promoted both political and economic decentralization, and prepared the way for the future dominance of British imperial power. The single most important power to emerge was the Maratha confederacy. Initially deriving from the western Deccan, the Marathas were a peasant warrior group that rose to prominence during the rule in that region of the sultans of Bijapur and Ahmadnagar. In the reign of Shahu (1708-49), the Citpavan Brahman peshwa (chief minister) virtually came to control central authority in the Maratha state. By the close of his reign, they had developed sophisticated networks of trade, banking, and finance throughout their territories and had access to the INDIA 79

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  A History of India

  • Peter Robb(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  By 1785 the Marathas, under Mahadji Shinde (Sindhia), again had control, with a new Mughal emperor, Shah Alam, who had been crowned as a fugitive in Bihar in 1759. He was blinded by the Rohillas when they temporarily recaptured Delhi in 1788. Though shortly after- wards restored to the throne, he and Delhi remained under the domination of Mahadji and (after Mahadji’s death in 1794) Daulat Rao Shinde, until 1803 when the British armies reached Delhi. After 1803, the emperor, and his successors, Akbar II and Bahadur Shah II, remained pensioners of the British East India Company. In the preceding fifty years, the Mughals had themselves become just another struggling regional power, one less successful than most. MUGHAL RULE The Mughal state was geared for war, and succeeded while it won its battles. It controlled territory partly through its network of strongholds, from its fortified capitals in Agra, Delhi or Lahore, which defined its heartlands, to the converted and expanded forts of Rajasthan and the Deccan. The emperors’ will was frequently enforced in battle. Hundreds of army scouts were an important source of information. But the empire’s administrative structure too was defined by and directed at war. Local military checkpoints or thanas kept order. Directly appointed imperial military and civil commanders (faujdars) controlled the cavalry and infantry, or the administration, in each region. The peasantry in turn were often armed, able to provide supporters for regional powers, and liable to rebellion on their own account: continual pacification was required of the rulers. MUGHALS AND MARATHAS 93 Humayun brought with him some 51 nobles (amirs), more than half of them Turkish or Uzbek (and Sunni), and most of the remainder Persian (and Shi‘a). Akbar appointed over three times as many, including many Hindus and some Indian Muslims. By 1595 there were some 1800 nobles and equivalent chiefs and offi- cials.

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  Life of the Marquess Wellesley

  • Col. G. B. Malleson(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Normanby Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER VII. — THE MARÁTHÁ WARS. — 1802-1805. The Maráthá, Empire—Its consolidation by Mádhají Sindhiá—his death and its consequences—The treaty of Bassein—Discontent of Dáolat Ráo Sindhiá—Lord Wellesley’s military preparations—Restoration of the Peshwá by General Wellesley—Evasions of Sindhiá and the Bhonslá.—Lord Wellesley’s plan of campaign—Assaye, Argaum, and Láswárí—The Maráthás sue for peace—Inaction of Holkar—He now resolves on war—Monson’s retreat—It is avenged by General Lake—Holkar’s surrender. THE Maráthá Empire, if I may so term the five States ruled by Maráthá chiefs, with the Peshwá as their nominal head, which, at the period of which I am writing, dominated Western, Central, and North-Western India, founded in the middle of the seventeenth century by Sívájí; tending to decay under his son, Sambají; restored by the efforts of Mulhárjí Holkar and Ránojí Sindhiá; had been humbled to the dust by the complete defeat its armies sustained on the fatal field of Pánípat, at the hands of the ruler of Kábul, Ahmad Sháh Abdálí, January the 6 th, 1761. There fled, however, from that field, sorely wounded, a member of the house of Sindhiá, Mádhájí by name, who, recognised shortly afterwards as the head of that house, devoted all his intellectual power, which was extraordinary, and his energies, which were untiring, to restore to his race the influence and the position which it had lost He succeeded. In 1771, he entered Dehlí—the titular Emperor, Shah Alain, in his train—as a conqueror. In 1778, he had his first contest with the English, a contest in which not only had the Maráthás all the advantage in the field, but they forced upon their enemy the shameful and humiliating Treaty of Wárgaum (January 14 th, 1779). Warren Hastings, however, who then guided the fortunes of British India, was not the man to allow such a disgrace to pass unavenged

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  Events That Formed the Modern World

  From the European Renaissance through the War on Terror [5 volumes]

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  zamindars , the local notables who remitted the land revenue, countered by leading their peasants in revolt. Now, by eroding the loyalty to the emperor that many non-Muslims had felt during the previous century, Aurangzeb’s religious policy may have begun to bear fruit. This destroyed what had been a major psychological barrier to rebellion, even under great provocation.

  The 88-year-old Aurangzeb died in 1707 and was succeeded by his eldest surviving son Bahadur Shah. Despite the Maratha war and the local rebellions, the Mughal Empire remained powerful, and the new emperor tried to restore order. Aurangzeb had enrolled Sambhaji’s son Shahu as a mansabdar and brought up the Maratha prince as a loyal Mughal noble; and Bahadur Shah now sought to bring the Marathas to heel by allowing Shahu to return to his homeland and take up his father’s throne. He also made peace with the Sikhs, whose guru Gobind Singh entered the imperial court. But Bahadur Shah was already 63 years old when he came to the throne, and he did not have the strength or the time to rejuvenate the empire. The Sikhs rebelled again after Gobind Singh was assassinated by a servant, and Bahadur Shah’s death in 1712 touched off power struggles among princes and courtiers and a new Maratha rising under Shahu’s prime minister. All this combined to destroy the empire that had been weakened by the war in the south. By 1750, Mughal power was a thing of the past. A member of the imperial dynasty still lived in Delhi, but India was divided among rival mansabdars who had established themselves as virtually independent regional rulers, Maratha insurgents, and

  Afghan invaders. The merchants of the English East India Company were about to take advantage of this political realignment by launching a process of expansion that ended a century later with the entire subcontinent under British control.

  Ultimately, the Mughal emperors’ quest for glory helped to destroy them. But it also gave the world some of its most beautiful buildings and paintings, fine prose and poetry in Persian and Hindi, and the bases of Indian classical music and dance. The military victories of Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb made the Mughal Empire one of the great powers of Asia in the seventeenth century. This in turn made India stable and wealthy. Its flourishing export trade attracted the foreign merchants who first clothed much of Europe with Indian textiles and then replaced the Mughals as the rulers of India. It has been suggested that the unification of India under the Mughals prepared its people for a modern subcontinental administration transcending local differences. Be that as it may, when the British left in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first leader of the new India and descendant of a family of Hindu mansabdars

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  Negotiating Mughal Law

  A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires

  • Nandini Chatterjee(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  But unlike an 1 Jadunath Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), pp. 55–6. 2 For Mughal–Bijapur relations in the early sixteenth century, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Deccan Frontier and Mughal Expansion, ca. 1600, Contemporary Perspectives’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 47: 3 (2004), pp. 357–89; this based to a great extent on the account of a Mughal noble sent to the Bijapuri court in 1603, which has been published as Chander Shekhar, Waqāiʿ Asad Beg (Delhi: National Mission for Manuscripts and Dilli Kitab Ghar, 2017). More broadly on Bijapur, see Richard Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700: Social Role of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Eaton’ s theory that Bijapur and its Sufi complex were co-constituted in a ‘shatter zone’ has been resoundingly critiqued in Ernst, Eternal Garden, esp. pp. 99–105. Ernst has discussed the Sufi complex of Khuldabad, near Aurangabad, which is indisputably within a Marathi cultural zone and not on any frontier. He has also pointed out that few of the Sufi saints related to the Khuldabad complex were ‘militant’ pioneers in any sense of the word. 191 earlier generation of similarly vanquished Rajput kings, Shivaji could not be turned into a Mughal mansabdār, whether due to structural shortage of inducements to offer, cultural clash, or entrenched court politics. Instead, there was a famous falling-out in court, leading to his imprisonment, then daring escape. 3 Thus began a half-century-long battle of mutual aggression between the Mughals and the Marathas, punctuated by efforts at co-option, which eventually led to the creation of the Maratha empire, the most impor- tant ‘successor state’ of eighteenth century India, save, perhaps the state of the East India Company. 4 The rise of the Maratha empire coincided with a change in the dynamics of military and political recruitments in South Asia.

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